In Romans chapter 9, the Apostle Paul writes of his attachment to his people by ancestry and human identity.
With Christ as my witness, I speak with utter truthfulness. My conscience and the Holy Spirit confirm it. My heart is filled with bitter sorrow and unending grief for my people, my Jewish brothers and sisters. I would be willing to be forever cursed—cut off from Christ!—if that would save them. They are the people of Israel, chosen to be God’s adopted children. God revealed his glory to them. He made covenants with them and gave them his law. He gave them the privilege of worshiping him and receiving his wonderful promises. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are their ancestors, and Christ himself was an Israelite as far as his human nature is concerned.
From these verses it is clear that the Apostle loves his people. He calls them “my people”. Paul sees God’s action in the trajectory of his people though history. While this is especially true of the people of Israel, it is true to a lesser degree for all peoples. In Acts 17, Paul makes this exact case.
From one man he created all the peoples throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries.
Authors such as Mensa Otabil have made this case for their peoples – that God has a role and place for them in history.
Then we find all peoples and languages and nations mentioned several times in the book of Revelation. Apparently we take our ethnic identity into heaven. I conclude that our ethnicity is an important part of our human identity. It is not what matters most. It certainly shouldn’t be used to denigrate others. Nor should it come before our unity in Christ. But it seems that it isn’t insignificant.
Because I worked in translating the Bible into the smaller languages of Africa, I often dealt with issues of cultural identity. A people’s language is a big part of their identity. If their language starts disappearing, they feel that their identity is threatened. When we start translating the Bible, it is often seen as enhancing their identity and giving it added prestige.
A women’s choir sings in their language
But there’s a pull in the opposite direction too. People who speak minority African languages also usually want to be part of something larger – to have a recognized place in the world.
They are pulled in opposite directions. On the one hand they value their local identity and are happy to see that enhanced. On the other hand, they want to be part of their country and even the world. They’re riding a strange centrifuge that pulls them outward and inward at the same time.
Giving them the Bible in their language satisfies the pull outward toward the world because it connects them to Christians around the world making them part of something much larger than themselves. At the same time it satisfies the pull inward toward their local identity.
I worked in a cross-cultural environment for decades. Even though I never fully understood the cultures I was working in, I still had to decide how to act and what to do. I discovered that working across cultures is an exercise in making decisions without enough information.
By nature, I want to gather all the information and then make a decision. So I found not knowing to be very difficult. It stretched me. It was only later in life that I realized that I never have all the information. I might think that I know all the I need to know, but that’s really never the case.
That’s why I found much of the response to covid to be very frustrating. Here was a brand new virus yet some were claiming that the science about it was settled; that there was one clear, even unquestionable, response which embodied “the science”. Maybe people opt for that pseudo-certainty because they find it troubling to admit that we don’t have all the answers. It’s easier to just pretend we have certainty and feel comforted.
I lived and worked for decades with significant amounts of good information unavailable to me behind the screen of another culture, so I might be more tolerant of ambiguity than most. In any case, I actually found certainty about Covid to be the opposite of assuring. It was disturbing.
We’re living in a time when some people prefer a scowering pad approach to history. In this approach, a notable historic person is scrubbed from history if they are found to have a flaw.
The Bible, on the other hand, doesn’t scour it’s heros from its pages for their flaws, and all of the Bible’s important figures had big flaws, except Jesus. Take David, for example. God shines a bright light on his sins, highlighting them and even letting their disastrous consequences play out in public while recording all that in detail. The David we read of in the Bible is not a children’s Sunday School version stripped of faults and made age-appropriate.
God’s approach to the sins of its heros is the opposite of the scouring pad; it’s the spotlight. It seems to me that shining a spotlight on the sins and struggles of Bible heros is what makes reading about them compelling.
Ghanaian woman reading New Testament. Photo: Rodney Ballard for Wycliffe GA
This was a a great bit of technology for Bible translators in the 1960s and 70s. It’s a typeball for and IBM Selectric typewriter. Typical typewriters had lots of little arms each with a slug containing the shape of a letter of the alphabet. To get the special letters we needed, we had to have special slugs made then unsolder the standard slugs and replace them with specially made slugs. The typewriter could then only be used for that language.
The Selectric made this easier. We could have a typeball made with any characters we could design and it just clicked on place. By clicking a different typeball in place, the same typewriter could serve many languages. IBM even made a typeball for dance moves.
Source IBM
Technology has moved well beyond the Selectric. But there’s a constant – technology companies continue to make things that help Bible translation and make it easier and cheaper for people who speak small languages to print and read things in their languages.
For a number of years I wrote this blog every week. The ideas for it came from my experiences in Africa. In 2018 I returned to the US. I soon found myself writing less. The stimulus was gone. Then I began building a small house for our retirement. That left me with no energy to write. .
I recently started writing again; stimulated by events, notes made long ago, and communication with African friends. I have no idea how long I will continue to write nor how frequently. That will depend on whether I have anything on my mind. I value all of you, my readers. If there’s a hiatus it will not be because of you, but because of me
In my last post, I wrote about how we know if we’re making progress in Bible translation? We know by counting. languages – languages with a translation versus those without. That’s a good measure, but is it good enough?
We translate the Bible to help people, not merely to have Bibles on shelves. We could try to measure how many people read those translations. But takes a lot more effort, time and money. We could go a step further and try to measure the impact the translations have on people’s lives. But how on earth would we do that?!
This issue is not unique to translation. A church might measure it’s success by how many people attend, or how much money they give. But a church is about helping people, especially helping them come to Christ and then lead godly lives. How would we measure the latter?! It turns out that measuring progress in what matters most is very difficult.
I’m partial to focus groups – small groups of people who know their churches or communities who gather testimonies and facts in order to assess progress. It’s not perfect, but at least it’s doable. The other trick is to always remember that counting languages (or church attendance), while helpful, is not measuring what really counts.
How do we know if we’re making progress in Bible translation? Translation agencies have answered that question by counting. languages – languages with a translation versus those without. If the number with a translation increases, we’re making progress. In fact, I just presented those numbers in detail using jars of M&Ms, each M&M representing one language.
The jar on the far left has 736 M&Ms – the number of languages with the whole Bible. The next (going right) has 1658 – the number of languages with only the New Testament. Then 1264 language with at least one book of the Bible. Next, 1320 languages with translation work started but none yet published and finally 1268 with no part of the Bible published. These are impressive numbers. 3,589 languages have some or all of the Bible (the first three jars), compared to 1268 with nothing.
We can also track how these numbers change from year to year. From 2022 to 2023 the number of languages with some published Scripture increased by 69 and the number still needing translation work decreased by over 400.
There’s an old controversy about language. It revolves around whether all languages are capable of expressing complex ideas. Some contend that all are and others take the position that only some are. In other words, some people think that some languages are primative and others are sophisticated. C. S. Lewis noted that “sincerely pious people in the sixteenth century shuddered at the idea of turning the time honored Latin of the Vulgate into our common and (as they thought) ‘barbarous’ English. “
At that time, the most widely used Bible translation of the day was the Latin Vulgate. Some people had become so used to hearing the Bible read in Latin that when they heard it in a lesser language, such as English, the Bible sounded crude and lightweight to them. And English was indeed a lesser language in that day. Latin was the language of education and literature. Consequently, Latin had a more words including words for advanced concepts. English did not. This points to a problem – important languages fade into obscurity and lesser languages become important. How could that happen if some were inherently superior or inferior?
Also, God chose to give us his Word in two unimportant, unsophisticated languages – Hebrew and Koine Greek. Hebrew was a language of little importance with no scientific or litterary tradition. Koine Greek was the everyday language of the streets. It is notable that the apostles did not write the New Testament in classical Greek, a language with lots of literature, science and philosophy.
Then we have the events recorded in Acts 2 where people from all over heard in their own languages, many of them unsophisticated languages of ordinary people.
Even today this controversy is alive here and there. For example, in Jamaica some oppose the translation of the Bible into Patois, the most widely spoken language there. For example, the BBC quotes Jamaican Bishop Alvin Bailey “I don’t think the Patois words can effectively communicate what the English words have communicated.” “Even those (Patois) words that we would want to use to fully explain what was in the original, are words that are vulgar.” I take the position of those who, in the 14th century, first translated the Bible into English in spite of those who then said about English what Bishop Bailey is now saying about Patois. Here’s what Henry Knighton, a 14th century chronicler, wrote about translating the Bible into English. “Christ gave His Gospel to the clergy…but this master John Wycliffe translated the Gospel from Latin into the English…common to all and more open to the laity and even to women…and so the pearl of the Gospel is thrown before swine and trodden under foot…the jewel of the clergy has been turned into the jest of the laity…and has become common.”
Our neighbors in 1979 in Niangoloko was a burkinabe couple, Paul and Mariana Hema. Every morning, Paul would sit outside his house and read the Bible in Bambara. Paul had gone to primary school for a few years plus a missionary had taught him to read. One morning I found Mariama reading the same Bible. I was syorised as she had no schooling at all. So I asked her how she learned to read.
She said that she used to watch her husband reading the Bible and wanted to do so herself. So she told him to teach her to read. He responded that he was not a teacher and didn’t know how. She insisted. So he had her sit down beside him while he read outloud and followed under the words with his finger. And that’s how she learned to read.
That’s not a recommended method for teaching reading, but most any method will eventually work if the teacher and student have enough motivation. Teaching adults to read is heavily dependent on their desire to learn. Without desire, even the best reading method will fail. With enough desire and time, almost any method will eventually succeed. I’ve been in places where people wanted to read the Bible so much that they would suffer hardship to learn to read.
In some places, adults have learned to read by singing in church and looking at the words printed on a hymnbook or songbook. In fact, printing a hymnbook can be the cheapest literacy method in some places.
Heart Language 