Literal Bible ≠ more accurate Bible

Eddie Arthur has just blogged referring to four bullet points on Bible translation from The Proclamation Trust blog.  Eddie’s blog is entitled Moo on Translation.

• it is important to read theology out of the text rather than the temptation to read it into the text
• all translations have to think about meaning – you can’t simply translate words. A literal Bible is not, by definition, a more accurate Bible
• translation is important because translation is a form of communication; therefore you always have to be asking for whom you are translating (all preachers should be thinking this way)
• the general and steep decline in the ability to read and comprehend has huge implications for Christianity given that it is based on the interpretation of a book. Churches have not really begun to grapple with this sea-change

I took my title from the second bullet point because that is a point of view that I find very frustrating. As it says above:  you can’t simply translate words! That is, or should be, pretty obvious when we are translating God’s Word into languages with a very different culture from the English speaking world.

But perhaps even more worrying is the assertion of a general and steep decline in the ability to read and understand the Bible in the West.

Eddie suggests that Wycliffe Bible Translators (and others working cross-culturally) may have much to offer to the church in this regard:

The only point which I think needs comment is the final one. Moo is dead right to highlight the way in which we can no longer assume that people (in the western world) are fluent readers, able to handle a text as complex as the Bible. It is also true that Churches in the West have not really begun to get to grips with this issue. However, those of us working in Bible translation and church-planting around the world have been wrestling with this issue for many years and there is a huge body of experience and literature that the western church could tap into. I fear, however, that Churches in Europe and North-America would prefer to reinvent the wheel, rather than build on the experience of others.

 

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Derry: now that’s what I call culture!

THE four largest Christian churches are uniting for a special evangelical initiative that will see a copy of Luke’s Gospel delivered to every home in Londonderry during UK City of Culture 2013.

The leaders of the four main Churches will be launching the free gift for all in Foyleside Shopping Centre on Monday, January 21 2013.

Bishop Ken Good (Church of Ireland Bishop of Derry and Raphoe), Monsignor Eamonn Martin (Catholic Diocesan Administrator for Derry diocese), Rev Robert Buick (Moderator of the local Presbytery) and Rev Peter Murray (leader of the Methodist Church in the district) will join together with choirs and perfomers from local schools to launch A Free Gift for All.

A spokesperson for the initiative said: “The christian message is something that crosses divides and is good news for every person. Not only do we want to celebrate this special year in our city we also do so as a recognition of the common christian heritage of our city.”

The project involves the four churches joining together to distribute a special copy of Luke’s Gospel to every household in the city.

This joint initiative is a contribution from the churches to mark the 2013 UK City of Culture in the city. It is also a sign of a common commitment to the good news of the Christian message.

The public launch of A Free Gift for All will see choirs from schools across the community perform at this unique event. Pupils from the different communities, in some instances, will join to walk together to the event. There will also be performance art to mark the event.

Published on Tuesday 15 January 2013  in Londonderry Sentinel

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Don’t read the Bible this year…

Did you make a New Year resolution to read the Bible more in 2013? If you did, how’s it going? If you didn’t, why not give it a go.

Wycliffe UK Blog linked to a post on five ways not to read the Bible and then added a sixth..

Don’t read the Bible as if it was written only for the UK

At Wycliffe, we talk a lot about the fact that the Bible is God’s message to the whole world, not just a select few, and that everyone should have the opportunity to see and hear the words of God. This perspective can give us fresh understanding of the Bible: we begin to realise that the Bible doesn’t mean only what we think it means in the UK! The insights that one community and culture get from God’s word may be completely different – and of the same value – as another’s. Finding out how other cultures read the Bible could help us see the Bible in a completely new way.

Read the rest of the Wycliffe UK blog post

Wycliffe has resources to help you read the Bible with new perspectives from around the world:

• Bible studies for small groups and individuals: Choose your words carefully and The whole Story in five acts
• Activities for church and small groups: Get the word out and the Idea bank
• Talks and lectures: Understanding the Scriptures

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Bending the rules

Olympic badminton bending the rules

Jesus condemned the Pharisees for bending the rules.

 ⁹ And he said to them: “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! ¹⁰For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.’ ¹¹But you say that if a man says to his father or mother: ‘Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban’ (that is, a gift devoted to God), ¹²then you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother. ¹³Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that.    Mark 7:9-13

What might he have said to the Chinese, Koreans and Indonesian badminton players who played to lose last night to gain a draw advantage; who broke the spirit of the Olympic games for personal ambition; who cheated the spectators who had paid good money to watch their favourite sport and deserved better. Hey, before I get carried away, Jesus loves cheating badminton players as much as he loves me. Forgive them, Lord.

Read more at SU WordLive about bending the rules 

and about the badminton

I’m with Gail on this one.

“If badminton wants to save face they should disqualify the two pairs and reinstate the pairs that came third in the group.” Gail Emms, British 2004 Olympics silver medallist

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God speaks Aghem… and he hears prayers in Aghem too!

In the video below, you can listen to an Aghem man from the NW of Cameroon saying The Lord’s Prayer in his heart language.

When I visited NW Cameroon in January 2003, we arrived in Bamenda as a translation workshop for a number of languages was reaching it’s conclusion. My party had the privilege during the closing ceremony to pray for the language teams involved: one was Oku the project we were there to visit. Another one was Aghem.

The Oku team is currently typesetting their New Testament. Today I received an Aghem project update in which team leader Alfred Kum shares this story about family time reading God’s Word…

I have been holding evening devotions with my family every week and we were always reading from an English version of the Bible and sharing what the passage was saying. My family member would give their contributions. However, my little boy, Amih Teddy, a pupil in primary one, is always quiet or sleeping during devotions.

One day I decided that as we will be using the gospel of Luke as our devotional book we will read from an English version and then read from the Aghem version. Amih was able to give his contribution from the passage read and he did this in the mother tongue because he understood it as it was read in the mother tongue. After the devotions, he pleaded that we should always be reading from the Aghem version of Luke’s gospel.

That must have been such an encouragement to Alfred as a father. Please pray for Alfred and the Aghem team as they continue with New Testament translation and also with Aghem literacy classes.

Both Oku and Aghem are In Focus Projects supported through Wycliffe Bible Translators UK. You can read more about In Focus projects on the Wycliffe website here.

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I’m agreeing with the National Secular Society on this one!

Having just a few hours previously posted Has William Tyndale had the recognition he deserves?, I am indebted to colleague David Gilchrist for his link to a Guardian report entitled…

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins the arch-atheist backs Michael Gove’s free Bible plan

Author of The God Delusion says providing free Bibles to state schools is justified by its impact on the English language

I was intrigued but, reading on, I discovered what he was backing -  Michael Gove‘s plan to send free King James Bibles to every state school.

As Dawkins reveals in today’s Observer, support for the Bible plan is justified on the grounds of literary merit and he lists a range of biblical phrases which any cultivated English speaker will instantly recognise. These include “salt of the Earth”, “through a glass darkly”, and “no peace for the wicked”. Dawkins states: “A native speaker of English who has not read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.

Much as I would love everyone in the UK and Ireland to read the Bible regularly and have their lives changed by so doing, I can’t help being both cynical and disappointed.

Cynical, along with others, that…

The education secretary’s plan to send a King James Bible to every school is a tactic to keep us worrying about small change while billions are wasted elsewhere

… or something like that – see here

Disappointed, that we are back to the ‘missing the point of what the Bible is all about’ – as seen and heard so much during the 2011 4ooth anniversary of the King James Bible and in Dawkins’ utterings.  The Bible is not just a work of literary merit. It is God’s message in which he reveals himself to his created world and created peoples – and as a member of Wycliffe Bible Translators, I believe passionately that God wants that message to be understood by everyone in the language they understand best. I humbly suggest that very few if anyone’s heart language today is early 17th century English; and certainly not the language of 21st century school children in English state schools!

And disappointed again that the martyred William Tyndale continues to be ignored as the KJB is worshipped on the altar of secular literary merit.

Which brings me to why I am agreeing with the National Secular Society who say in the Guardian article that it is a waste of £375,000.

If that money is available, Mr Gove, please send it on to Wycliffe Bible Translators UK and we will put it to much more productive use on behalf of the 2,000 plus languages with no Bible whatsoever.

And to Mr Dawkins, my hope is that he will read the Bible in whatever version, so that he no longer sees everything “through a glass darkly” but comes to know the God who created him and everything else in the universe.

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Isaac loved bush meat!

“the kind of tasty food I like”

Did you ever wonder what it was all about? Isaac on his death bed called his first born son Esau and asked him to go hunting and make him a last meal of “the kind of tasty food I like”.

Isaac said, “I am now an old man and don’t know the day of my death. Now then, get your weapons—your quiver and bow—and go out to the open country to hunt some wild game for me. Prepare me the kind of tasty food I like and bring it to me to eat, so that I may give you my blessing before I die.”   [Genesis 27:2-4]

It’s the introduction to a tale of lies and deceit that meant that Isaac gave his blessing to Jacob rather than to Esau. Esau was cheated. Isaac was conned. Jacob told a whole series of verbal and acted lies. Rebekah orchestrated it all.

But “God overrules, not by turning evil into good, but by ensuring that his will prevails, not only through the way his people act but sometimes in spite of it. Indeed, we could argue that this is a major theme of the Old Testament”.  SU WordLive comment by John Harris

This is one of those Bad Boy Bible Stories that David Lingamish Ker writes about in his first published book The Bible Wasn’t Written to You – see here. I’ve recently been reading the Kindle edition. It’s based on a series of blogs and confronts many of our cosy ideas of what the Bible is all about… as does John Harris’ SU WordLive comment.

What I particularly like is the idea of looking at the Bible as a series of stories that God caused to be be recorded, written down – and of course translated! Not so that we should emulate all the wrong things that the heroes of the Bible did and said, but that we should learn from them. It’s the same with Jesus’ parables. They are great stories that teach truth, but we are not meant to take the actions of the characters within them as advice for living as Christians: the shrewd manager is just one example that springs to mind.

To finish… Isaac’s love of fresh hunted meat was not just a personal whim or an ancient version of The Great British Menu. The love for bush meat is alive and well and I enjoyed some just a few weeks ago in Ivory Coast.

The photo at the top shows friends Ambroise and Didier stopping to buy freshly cooked bush meat on the road from Daloa to Abidjan!

If you want a close up of the bush meat – just ask

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Henry VIII 6 May 1536… or ’39 or ’41

I read and heard a couple of times yesterday that the 6 May was the anniversary of the day that Henry VIII ordered English language Bibles to be placed in every church.

The Great Bible of 1539 was the first authorized English Bible.

The caption with the photo above says 1539; the quotation below says 1536.

On this day in 1536 King Henry VIII ordered English-language Bibles to be placed in every church. Thank God for the Bibles that you have in your church and home.  

I do thank God for the Bibles that I have at home in English (and other languages) but it wasn’t 1536 and it may have been 1541, but it was probably 1539.

1536 was the year when William Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake on the orders of Henry VIII on the charge of having translated the Bible into English. His dying words were:

Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.

Three years later Tyndale’s dying prayer was answered – with an awful lot of men called Thomas involved in helping the king to his decision!

But Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer did persuade Henry VIII to allow the publication in England of a vernacular Bible. This project came to fruition in Matthew’s Bible of 1537 (a version combining Tyndale’s New Testament with Miles Coverdale’s Old Testament, revised, annotated, and edited by John Rogers (who worked under the assumed name of Thomas Matthew.)

In 1539, it was revised and reissued as the Great Bible, In May 1541, a Royal Proclamation ordered every parish to comply Cromwell’s instructions and have a copy  for public use before Ash Wednesday, 1541.

I find it sadly ironic that the Great Bible (not to mention the King James Bible) relied very heavily of the martyred Tyndale’s work and that King Henry’s motivation for a Bible in English was probably much more about power and politics than about faith.

Oh, by the way, I was rejoicing yesterday morning as we reported back to our church about our visit to the dedication of the Kouya New Testament on 21 March 2012 in Ivory Coast.

Reading from the Kouya New Testament

This translation needed no authorisation from any king or political power, but was the result of many years of dedicated hard work by many people under the guidance and the grace of God.

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The Passion of Christ

How do you respond to scenes of extreme violence?

The opening words as I read SU WordLive this morning. “How do you respond to scenes of extreme violence?” It is a very sober treatment of the passage in Mark 15:16-20 when the Roman soldiers torture Jesus cruelly and viciously before he was taken off to be crucified. It’s worth a look and a read and some meditation…

John Grayston comments…

Roman flogging was so vicious that victims sometimes died. The pain was intense, the blood loss considerable. Jesus would have been a pitiable figure by this point. The rough mockery of the soldiers simply adds to that. How could such a figure be a king?

But back to the opening question: How do you respond to scenes of extreme violence?

Recently I walked out of a film for the first time in my life. It was an Argentinian thriller and there was some excellent camera work, but the violence became just too much for me. I like a good thriller, but this was descending into violence and horror – and I’d had enough.

How will I cope tonight? My church is showing The Passion of Christ as part of our Easter week programme. Quite rightly the announcements last Sunday pointed out that this movie is very graphic in content; strictly over 18s only.

I saw Mel Gibson’s film in the cinema when it first came out. It’s a tough watch. The violence is probably worse than that in the Argentinian thriller – but there is a difference! It is what happened when Jesus Christ, the Son of God willingly submitted himself to the injustice and cruelty of both Jewish and Roman authorities and died so that my sins could be forgiven. Jesus suffered this awful pain and violence and death for me.

It is a real part of the Easter story. I will rejoice on Easter Sunday as we celebrate Christ’s resurrection. This evening I want to remember what it cost him in human pain. I want to see my own life situation in perspective. I want to say, thank you Jesus, for what you have done for me,

I want to remember that this lies at the core of why I work with Wycliffe Bible Translators; why as I approach retirement age, I am still passionate to do what I can to resource the translation of the Bible into heart languages so that speakers of over 2,000 languages can read or hear the story of God’s love for them in the language that they understand best. So that they can acknowledge Jesus Christ as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

To end, another quote form SU WordLive this morning:

The story we are to see here is the story of the Creator and King of the universe establishing his reign through sacrifice, not the exercise of power. Jesus’ story has been of true greatness, revealed through humble service and sacrificial giving. Seen like this, the figure of Jesus is not one for ridicule but for worship. Here we see ‘love vast as the ocean’ (William Rees, 1802–83) which will, if we understand it correctly, leave us awed and overwhelmed. Throughout the passion story we are on the holiest of ground, gazing into the face of a mystery deeper than we can ever understand.    John Grayston

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Kouya New Testament Dedication 21 March 2012

The Kouya New Testaments arrive at the dedication spot beside Dema church

I’m just back from a 7 day trip to Côte d’Ivoire to attend the dedication of the Kouya New Testament.

It was a great trip! Pretty exhausted after so much travelling in such a short time. I’m looking through the photos and plan to write a few blogs on the trip – thought I’d post the photo that shows the NTs arriving at the dedication site…

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