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.
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
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.”
When I first took an assignment in Ghana in 2011, Mary Steele had already been here for almost 50 years.
She came to Ghana from Ireland to do Bible translation way back in the 1960s. She went to live among the Konkomba people in northern Ghana. In a video made a few years ago, Mary said that her first years were very difficult because none of he Konkomba were interested in what she was doing. That was on top of the fact that the Konkomba lived in a semi-arid area known for high temperatures with bad roads, no electricity, and no running water. Mary lived simply among the Konkomba and she persevered.
Eventually, the Konkomba began to see the usefulness of literacy in their language. The trickle slowly became a torrent. It renewed their sense of identity and pride in being Konkomba. It helped their children succeed in school. Many thousands of Konkomba adults learned to read even though they had never been in school.
Then came the translation. At first, it too was not well received. But over time more and more read the translated Scriptures and found them compelling. It took decades, but eventually they were reading their Bible avidly. A religious renewal ensued. Whereas there were very few Christians and churches when Mary arrived in the Konkomba area, there are now hundreds of churches and hundreds of thousands of Christians. Today, a third of the more than 1,000,000 Konkomba profess Christianity. The Konkomba have moved from being a people untouched by the Gospel to one that embraces, or at least respects, Christianity. That has resulted in a reduction in drunkenness and other ills. People moved out of poverty. The status of women was raised. So, like literacy, Mary’s translation work was eventually widely and enthusiastically received. Even though that took many decades.
In fact, Mary became a Konkomba hero. Everyone knew her. Konkomba chiefs and politicians praised her and granted her favors. The president of Ghana conferred on her a national award as did the Queen of England.
When Mary died in 2017, the Konkomba held one of their largest funerals ever. It made the national news. Chiefs and politicians attended.
What started humbly with an unmarried Irish woman braving difficult conditions and profound indifference to study a language, do literacy and translate the Bible became a big deal. It took decades of small, imperceptible changes, none of them dramatic. But now the Bible, Jesus and the God of the Bible are a living part of Konkomba culture.
Here is another illustration Jesus used: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed planted in a field.It is the smallest of all seeds, but it becomes the largest of garden plants; it grows into a tree, and birds come and make nests in its branches.” – Matthew 13:31-32
I recently started watching The Dust Bowl, a PBS documentary about the drought and subsequent dust storms that drove farmers out of the midwest in the 1930s. The documentary starts with descriptions of the dustbowl by people who lived through it. Here are some things they said:
Let me tell you how it was. I don’t care who describes that to ya, nobody can tell it any worse than what it was. There ain’t no one exaggerates that. There ain’t no way for it to be exaggerated. It was that bad.
It was just unbelievable. It’d blister your face. It would put your eyes out. Well, I, I guess I can’t describe it. It was just, it was just constant, just that steady blow of dirt.
You can try to get out of it, but it follows you, follows you, follows you. You can’t escape it. Looking back on it, it carried with it a feeling of, I don’t know the word exactly, of, of being unreal but almost being um … evil.
As these quotes show, when people see things beyond normal experience, they give up on straightforward description and resort to comparison, metaphor, figurative and even moral language. The dusty wind is given moral purpose by calling it evil.
In the same way, when the Old Testament prophets were allowed to see real future events, they also found that normal descriptive language failed them; so they resorted to the kind of figurative language we call apocalyptic. Like this.
As for the appearance of the wheels and their construction: their appearance was like the gleaming of beryl. And the four had the same likeness, their appearance and construction being as it were a wheel within a wheel. When they went, they went in any of their four directions without turning as they went. And their rims were tall and awesome, and the rims of all four were full of eyes all around. (Ezekiel 1:16-18 ESV)
Artist’s rendering of Ezekiel’s vision
The prophets are not being deliberately obscur. Nor were they engaged in wild fantasizing. They were just expressing as best they could events they saw in visions that were beyond their words.
A few years back, I was talking to a pastor in Ghana about his vision for the Presbyterian churches in his area. Later, as I looked at the notes I had made of our time together, I noticed that his desires were both universal and local.
He wanted worship services in local languages and Bible studies using the Bibles in those languages. He knew that many people in the area considered church foreign. He knew that using local languages would erode that perception. In short, he wanted the churches to be considered part of the local communities. This part of his vision was local.
But he also wanted the believers who gathered in the churches to feel that they are part of something bigger than their community. He wanted them to feel connected to other Presbyterians in Ghana and beyond and to believers around the world. This part of his vision was global.
During this time I read an article about Brexit – the UK leaving the European Union. Most voters in the UK voted to leave the EU because they wanted something more local. Others voted against because they want to be part of something larger. I see this local versus global tension in many places.
The Christians in smaller languages value the Bible in their languages for a variety of reasons, including that it gives a local expression of the faith they share with others worldwide. The Bible in their language affirms both the ethnic and linguistic identity God gave them and their belonging to God’s people worldwide. Most other things turn the local-global issue into a tension or even a fight, but not the Bible in one’s language. I remember a village chief holding high the first copy of the New Testament in his language and practically shouting “We are now part of the people of God!” He never said that if the Bible in English.
After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” – Revelation 7:9-10
When Christianity first came to Africa, it was often opposed.
The widespread acceptance of Christianity we find in Africa today can hide the fact that early on there was lots of hostility and resistance toward Christianity. One source of opposition was traditional authorities – chiefs and kings. Chiefs and kings are usually closely associated with traditional religion, so some conflict between them and missionaries was inevitable.
Over time, many chiefs and kings in Africa became more open to Christianity. But they were often attracted to translations of the Bible in their languages even before they were interested in Christianity. There are several reasons for this: – Virtually all of the languages were unwritten and missionaries were the first to write them. Because this elevated the status of the language, Chiefs – custodians of the culture and language – found it interesting. They found themselves promoting this aspect of missionary endeavor. – When missionaries engaged in literacy, it gave people a practical skill that elevated them. Many Chiefs promoted and gave their blessing. – Chiefs often see the development of an alphabet and literacy as valuable development efforts that help their people cope with “modern” life.
In my experience, nowadays chiefs are almost always supportive of translation. With a little effort, many will even raise money for translation and literacy including giving from their own pockets, or they will encourage their people to read the translation.
Heart Language 