Kouya Chronicle

On my Google home page, I have a search for any blogs which mention Bible Translation, I also have a similar thing running on twitter. This means that I get regular updates on what people are saying about Bible translation across the Internet. I’ve not done a scientific survey, but my guess is that the Bible translation traffic breaks down more or less as follows.

• Discussions of the translation methodologies of English versions – 30%
• Comparisons of the various English translations – 35%
• Discussion of the LOLCat Bible – 25%
• Translation into minority languages that don’t yet have the Scriptures – 10%

As I say, this is not scientific, but it can’t be far wrong. I could break it up further and point out that much (perhaps the majority) of what passes for discussion of translation methodologies is ill informed and shows a clear lack of understanding of the subject.

It may surprise you that the statistic (guess) which bothers me least here is the one for the LOLcat Bible. Yes, it trivialises the Bible and I would rather not do that, but essentially these people are just having fun and not trying to make a Christian point. Basically, they have too much time on their hands, but they are mostly harmless.

What really bothers me is that so much Christian energy is devoted to discussion of the Bible in English when we still have two thousand languages spoken by two hundred million people without a word of Scripture (full statistics here).

Yes, I know that this is my field of ministry and interest,but it frustrates me that people can’t see that while we argue about the finer points of the ESV and NLT, so many people don’t have any Scripture. We are like rich people arguing about the finer points of different caviars when there are people starving outside our houses. I don’t say that people should stop talking about English Bibles. But if serious Christian writers would just append a few lines about the need for translation worldwide to their posts about English (or LOLcat for that matter) it would make so much difference.

If you don’t know where to start – take a look at the Wycliffe UK page or find the appropriate page for your nationality here. The need for people around the world to have access to the Scriptures is a serious one and should concern every Christian but sadly, judging by web traffic, it doesn’t seem to be.

It’s a shame.

Rant over – normal service will be resumed soon.

The Independant reports an interesting survey which was carried out on behalf of the Centre for Biclical Literacy at St. John’s Durham.

The public is widely ignorant of the stories and people who provide the basis of Christianity, a survey has found, despite 75 per cent of respondents owning a copy of the Bible.

The National Biblical Literacy Survey found that as few as 10 per cent of people understood the main characters in the Bible and their relevance.

Figures such as Abraham and Joseph were a source of puzzlement and it was rare to find anyone who could name the Ten Commandments.

Many stories considered to be central to the Christian message were a mystery to most. As few as 7 per cent of respondents knew the story of Whitsun and only 15 per cent were familiar with the stories associated with Advent.

From a cultural point of view, it is surprising that so few people have an understanding of one of the basic texts which underlies so much of our literature, art and society.  On a missional note, the temptation is to say that the church needs to get back to simply explaining and promoting the message of the Bible so that people can once again learn the stories which have slipped out of folk memory.  But if you think that way, it is worth reading down to some of the comments on the article. Here is one example:

The modern bible is a fraud put together by medieval clerical bigots. They ruthlessly removed the books of the so-called “apocrypha” (their term) because they didn’t like the content. Christianity is simply a system of moral blackmail to hold the population in check, to work them into the grave for the profit of the landowners… and tell them that “God” wants all this and their “riches will be in heaven”.

And there is much more of the same sort of thing. Of course commentators on a blog (even this one) are a self-selecting group and can’t be held to be fully representative of the population. However, I do believe that they are indicative of a slice of the opinion-formers in our society. What this article and the response indicates is that Britain is not so much apathetic to the Bible, but it is becoming increasingly hostile to it. You can see this in the immediate hostile response to Pmphilips plea for serious debate. I’ve commented on the growing antipathy to Christianity here and here.

A missional approach to life in Britain must take on board this growing hostility to the faith.

If you missed the link above, the Indy article is here.

I thoroughly enjoyed this post from Church Ethos blog:

Evangelicals are fond of metrics. I don’t think the Church Growth Movement started this, but they took it to new levels, looking for ways to measure things that contribute to increased attendance. As a software engineer, I can certainly appreciate this. But I also know a couple of things from my engineering experience:

• Whatever you measure will be deemed “important,” even if there are other things that are more important.
• People will “game the system” to improve the numbers, even if it doesn’t have any true benefit…

…Number of invitations from non-ChristiansThat is, instead of the number of times you’ve invited them to something, how many times have they invited you? Parties, concerts, movies, game nights, sporting events… This is a measure of your social acceptance by any group you are trying to reach. (Another variation to include is the number of times they’ve asked you for a personal favor.)

This reminds me of something that Hamo wrote a year ago and which I blogged on here.

The Daily Telegraph has another of the ‘decline of Christian Britain’ articles which seem to be a part of its stock in trade. The interesting thing is that the current article is written by the assistant bishop of Newcastle.

If recent trends are any guide, many Church of England parishes will have been cheered by higher attendances at Easter services. The last published statistics for 2006/7 show rises of 7 and 5 per cent in church going at Christmas and Easter.

But these figures are just about the only signs of hope for the church and certainly not the first green shoots of a revival. Other statistics make for gloomy reading.

Annual decline in Sunday attendance is running at around 1 per cent. At this rate it is hard to see the church surviving for more than 30 years though few of its leaders are prepared to face that possibility.

In the short term we are likely to see more closures of buildings as the church battles to meet a big pension bill, pay clergy, and maintain a large bureaucracy.

To its credit, the church has been successful at getting members to give, but larger donations cannot offset the fall in numbers. At present the church is struggling to maintain 16,200 buildings, many of them old and listed with 4,200 listed Grade I.

If decline continues, Christian Research has estimated that in five years’ time church closures will accelerate from their present rate of 30 a year to 200 a year as dwindling congregations find the cost of keeping them open too great. (Read more)

The article goes on to make some interesting points about the way in which the Church of England can adapt to these changes. However, there is a basic problem with the article in that it only talks about the established Church.  I’m not sure that the concept of  ‘a Christian country’ is a helpful one to start with, but there are many expressions of the Christian faith in the UK apart from Anglicanism. This is highlighted by the fact that the article is headlined Britain but it only talks about the Church of England.

Brian makes the case for reading Greek and Hebrew superbly in this post:

The Scriptures exist as the story in which we are to find ourselves as individuals and as community. In the missional reality of our day, there is no room for superficial engagement with the Bible. I fully understand that it is unrealistic for every one to learn Greek and Hebrew, but is it unrealistic for our teachers and preachers to gain some substantive facility in it?…

…The Western world does not suffer from the absence of information rather the challenge facing readers of the Bible is information overload. Moreover the recent proliferation of competing English translations has heightened the challenge for readers. What the world needs is not a dispenser of information-google and other search engines serve this role well. The world needs interpreters of this information. In terms of exegesis, the study of Greek and Hebrew is the baseline for assessing an interpretation of Scripture…

Read the whole post.

The latest Wycliffe UK Magazine is out now. You can download it free here (pdf 1.5 MB)

I wrote the introduction to the magazine…

The God Story through deaf hands

Stories show our emotions, our commitments and our passions in a way that simple facts never can.

This is why God has given us the Bible in the way that he has. It isn’t a theological text book, or a list of rules and regulations, though it contains both theology and rules. It is first and foremost a story: a story of how God loves his creation and how through the cross he is reconciling mankind to himself.

It is our huge privilege in Wycliffe to retell the Bible story in other languages through translation and to see people grasp the reality of the message for themselves. God’s message of love, translated into languages and lives.

This edition of Words for Life is about telling the story.  We hope that it encourages you as you see how your prayers, gifts and support have all played a part in Bible translation projects around the world. We also hope that, as part of all this, you will have a greater vision of your place in God’s eternal story.

Eddie Arthur
Executive Director

If you would like to recieve Words for Life on a regular basis, you can sign up here to do so (it’s free).

There is an interesting discussion at Duke Divinity on the way in which confidence in organised religion has fallen in the US over the years. The big question is how do we react to this?

HT Mark Sayers.

Dan Wallace has posted a fascinating piece on the idea that modern translations of the Bible are the result of a new age conspiracy.

So, is there a conspiracy today? My answer may surprise the reader: yes, I believe there is. But the conspiracy has not produced these modern translations. Rather, I believe that there is a conspiracy to cause division among believers, to deflect our focus from the gospel to petty issues, to elevate an anti-intellectual spirit that does not honor the mind which God has created, and to uphold as the only Holy Bible a translation that, as lucid as it was in its day, four hundred years later makes the gospel seem antiquated and difficult to understand. It takes little thought to see who is behind such a conspiracy. (Read more)

HT Lingamish.

It seems that there is also a consiparcy to stop English speaking Christians concentrating on the 200 million people who have no word of Scripture in their languages.

This is a presentation I recently gave at a Wycliffe UK supporters’ day. It looks at the challenges faced by an organisation that wants to promote the Bible in contemporary British society. If you don’t want to watch the slides, you can download the mp3 file. The whole thing lasts a little over thirty minutes.

According to today’s Telegraph

Nearly two thirds of teenagers don’t believe in God, according to a study by Penguin books.

It also emerged six out of ten 10 children (59 per cent) believe that religion “has a negative influence on the world”.

The survey also shows that half of teenagers have never prayed and 16 per cent have never been to church.

This hardly comes as a surprise given other surveys which have come out in the past (for example, this one). All the same, I’d like to make a few comments…

As always, I’d want to take this with a pinch of salt. I just don’t believe that fifty percent of people have never prayed. They may not have said formal prayers or prayed in Church, but I’m willing to bet that a large proportion have called out to some divinity or power to help them at times of stress. Of course it isn’t cool to admit that.

The issue about religion being harmful is one that Christians do need to be responding to. It’s amazing how after fifty years of Hitler, Stalin Pol Pot and Kim Jong Il, wars are blamed on religious people. Yes, Christians are not blameless, but next to the atheists of the last fifty or sixty years we come out pretty good – yet we are losing the argument in the public square.

Lastly, (and to steal from NT Wright) I wonder which God these teenagers don’t believe in. I suspect that they don’t believe in some old man in the sky with a beard who is looking down waiting to disapprove of things. Well, I don’t believe in a God like that either. The tragedy is that these people have not had the opportunity to believe or disbelieve in the true Biblical God. It’s not so much a case of not believing in God, it’s never having heard about him that is the problem.

Ben has tagged me with a meme about books which have influenced how I read the Bible:

Name 5 books or scholars that had the most immediate and lasting influence on how you read the Bible. [Ken Brown has collected responses.]

The New International Version of the Bible. I grew up using the AV. It wasn’t till I adopted the NIV that I began to realise that much of what I thought was serious Bible Study, was simply translating Elizabethan English into my own vernacular. Reading the NIV opened my eyes to the concept that the Bible was intended to be understood. These days I read the New Living Translation in my devotions, but it was the NIV that changed my life.

Fee and Stuart’s little book How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth is another life changer. It first brought home to me concepts such as reading the text in context, looking at the genre of the Biblical text and so on. It all seems rather basic today, but these were new concepts to me at the time. I don’t think a better entry level guide to Bible study has been written.

The New Testament and the People of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God v. 1 (I am reading the rest – slowly) by NT. Wright is a stunning book which opened my eyes to the Jewish context of the Gospels. Like Ben, I’m also very impressed by Wright’s paper on the authority of Scripture.

Some serious Bible Blogger or other will probably laugh at me for mentioning Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith by Rob Bell. However, this book forced me to take a very hard look at my views of Scripture and to re-evaluate how I was choosing to interprate it. I’ve read more scholarly books which said similar things, but which left me in my ivory tower. Rob Bell made me rethink things in the real world.

The Kouya New Testament. Having worked so long on the Kouya translation, whenever I look at a New Testament passage, I find myself wondering what we did in Kouya. Just this morning in Church I found myself wondering about the translation of John 1:1-18 during the reading.

Zeebrugge: Eleven VCs Before Breakfast (Cassell Military Paperbacks). If you enjoy military history, this is a good little read. It describes British attempts to block the U Boat pens in Bruges during the first world war. I didn’t actually know there were any U Boat pens in Bruges, so the book was all new to me. I got my copy for a couple of pounds on the ‘remainder’ shelf in a book shop in Belfast – at that price you really can’t argue with it.

Put Joe Kapolyo’s The Human Condition: Christian Perspectives Through African Eyes (Global Christian Library) onto your list of ‘must buy’ books. It gives an excellent introduction to a Biblical understanding of what it means to be human and is worth getting for that alone. However, the real strength of the book is that Joe starts from an African perspective which is critically examined in the light of Scripture. This brings to light some questions which just wouldn’t come to the surface if he had started with a Western world view. This book gives an excllent illustration of why we need Christians from all round the world contributing to our theological formation.  Too many people view this sort of question by trying to ‘correct’ African views by comparing them unfavourably to Western scholarship. The truth is that both Western and African (and Asian…) viewpoints need to be examined in the light of Scripture. Both have something to contribute, but neither is better than the other.

Dead Aid: Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa. I’ve already talked about Dambissa Moyo and her views on aid here. Having finally read her book, I have to say that I found it fascinating.  The blurb on the back says:

In this provocative and compelling book, Dambissa Moyo argues that the most important challenge we face today is to destroy the myth that Aid actually works. In the modern globalized economy, simply handing out more money, however well intentioned, will not help the poorest nations achieve sutainable long-term growth.

Personally, I think she makes her case very well. There is a desperate need for those who are involved in funding Christian ministries around the world to engage with what Dambissa is saying. I don’t see any sign of that engagement yet.