Author Archives: Eddie

Words….

Posted on by
Reply

Consider, therefore, the implications of these facts for speakers of other tongues – for speakers of languages that have only recently emerged from predominantly oral to written cultures, for speakers of “dying” languages  and for speakers of languages and dialects restricted to local use. The very scope of English makes it a ready instrument of empire. It bears within it the imperial history of Britain and America, which includes a highly developed discourse of justification for colonialism and domination (consider terms like “errand in the wilderness,” “new world,” “virgin land,” “manifest destiny,” “advancement” and “progress”) that can’t be eradicated simply by legislation or policy, but need to be addressed at the level of language itself – the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the euphemisms in which we cloak our greed, the biases that favor th point of view of the privileged…

 

Learning a language also sensitises us to the various filters through which history and culture come to us. That England is not God’s native language is an important piece of news that a few people haven’t quite registered yet. The church would do well to deliver the news in any number of ways…

From Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies (p.19 & p.180)

Again-Rising

Posted on by
Reply

I don’t like stealing blog posts in their entirety. but in the case of the Beaker Folk of Husbourne Crawley, I’m willing to make an exception.

This morning’s ramblings on language were actually caused by the reading Hnaef chose this morning for Pouring-out of Beakers.

Now we often have Bible reading in languages other than modern English. Gives us that feeling Peter Gabriel must get when playing authentic World Music with authentic worldlings. You know, I often feel really envious of people who don’t speak English. It must be great, always having the Bible sound so exotic like that.

But as you may know, Hnaef is an expert in Old English and other archaic Germanic tongues. And today, though he was reading from something comprehensible and in a form of Modern English, the Bible from which he was reading 1 Corinthians 15 was Wycliffe’s version.

It’s the chapter in which Paul lists the witnesses to the resurrection. Except Wycliffe didn’t say “resurrection”, did he? Wycliffe and his mates translated it into English as  “again-rising”. (I think it’s written ” ayenrisyng”, but Hnaef was kind).

Hit me right between the eyes, did that. That the concept of Jesus’s again-rising has hidden itself behind a Latin word all my life has kind of made it a technical term. I believe in the Resurrection, but that use of Latin kind of distances it a bit. Makes it a subject of study, rather than the earthy,  English “again-rising”. That suddenly roots it in my world – in the everyday English in which I express the things that matter most, because they’re closest to me.

And if that one unexpected compound word hit me like that, then imagine the shock that a whole Bible in English must have given its readers. The whole lot – originally written in the everyday languages of its world – rendered into the language that English people dug while speaking, asked for their dinner in, haggled over the price of a coat in, expressed their love in – swore in. What a shock – and what a discovery. The Word becomes flesh, and lives among us, and we can hear the Word’s earthly story in our own words.

When Wycliffe receives his own again-rising, it will be from the clay and lime of the Swift – not from the marble of Rome nor even the dust of Jerusalem. And he’ll find that people all over the world have heard God speaking to them in their own language, too. That’s the thing about having good ideas. They catch on

Books I’ve Read: Gentlemen and Players

Posted on by
Reply

 I’ve never read anything by Joanne Harris before, but looking round our local lending library, I came across Gentlemen & Players and thought it might be worth a look. There are a lot of interesting, amusing and engaging scenes in the book, but overall, the story which is set in a small private school failed to grip. I suspect that those who like Joanne Harris’ writing have already read this book. For my part, I won’t be digging out any more of her books in the near future.

Then again, this book does get a very positive review on Amazon, so others may well enjoy it. If you are looking for something to put on your Kindle it is available in this format too.

A Few Personal Thoughts

Posted on by
Reply

Sue consulting Nigeria

 

This is the monthly note that I wrote to Wycliffe Bible Translators staff around the world this month:

By the time you read this, Sue should be in Madagascar and I’ll be at home with the dog. I always enjoy the first few days of Sue’s trips. I quite enjoy my own company and it’s nice to be on my own for a while. However, that soon starts to wear thin and it doesn’t take long till I start to count the days till Sue gets back. I think that the dog starts counting from day one.

To be honest, it’s a bit of a hassle when Sue is away; not only do I miss her, but it just makes my already complicated life just a little bit more complex. However, I wouldn’t ever want to suggest that she shouldn’t head off to help lead these workshops. I’m proud of what Sue does and delighted that she has her own ministry doing things that I am not qualified to do.

However, there is another reason that I’m glad Sue is going to Madagascar. Her involvement in translation consultancy helps to remind me why we are doing what we are doing. In a life filled with email, budgets, policies and stuff, it is easy to lose sight of our main goal. I’m very grateful that Sue helps to keep me focused on the needs of people who don’t have the Scriptures and the work that has to be done to bring the vision of mother tongue Scriptures to reality in a given language.

The picture is a bit of a cheat; it’s from Nigeria, not Madagascar, but it’s too good not to use again.

The Perfect Translation

Posted on by
Reply

If you ever feel like starting an online argument; just ask people what their favourite version of the Bible is. People get really excited about this one and start chucking terms like paraphrase and dynamic equivalence around like hand grenades. Some people love to argue about Bible translations!

Can I let you into a secret? Almost all of the English translations are really good. The NIV, ESV, NLT and a host of other three letter acronyms are all worth reading. They have their strengths and weaknesses and some are more suitable in some situations than others; but they are all good translations. Oh, did I mention that I’m a Bible translator?

To be frank, I don’t care which translation of the Bible you read as long as you read it. Far better to read a version of the Bible that isn’t perfect than to have the world’s greatest translation sitting on your shelves unopened. Get into the Word and don’t get paranoid about finding the perfect translation.

Meanwhile, as English speakers get all heated up about which translation they should read, there are about 210,000,000 people who don’t have a single word of the Bible in their language. That’s right, while we have shelves of versions to choose from, there are about 2,000 languages without a verse of Scripture.

This is the opening for a post I wrote for the GOD52 blog. Read the whole thing here.

Living in the Western World

Posted on by
Reply

The chances of conservative evangelical western Christians denying the resurrection are fairly slim… but the chances of that same group of people being seduced by the dominant values of the culture are fairly high.

Hamo rarely posts on his blog these days, but what he does post is well worth reading. Today’s piece is a disturbing challenge to western lifestyles which he sees as being seduced by an unholy trinity of career, home ownership and family.

I think that Hamo has hit the nail on the head here: I recognise the symptoms in my own life and in the wider church as we try to engage people in worldwide mission.

Just a couple of thoughts:

  • What should the balance be between ensuring that people have sound doctrine and helping them to live sound lives? How do we make these overlap in our context?
  • Does our addiction to the values of our culture make it very difficult for us to live risky lives?

Now go and read the whole of Hamo’s post.

Asking the Hard Questions

Posted on by
Reply

I believe that it is without question that rich people have an obligation to share what they have with those who are not as well off as them. The haves should be generous towards the have-nots. This is as true of nations as it is of individuals.

However…

This doesn’t mean that all forms of generosity are wise, helpful or appropriate.

“Give a person a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”. So runs a popular traditional adage about economic development.

But poor fishing communities don’t need us to teach them how to fish. They may have much to teach us about more sustainable fishing practices. We are not the ones denuding their lakes and oceans, or polluting them with our refuse. And what if they are unable to fish, not because they lack the skills, but because the fishing rights to their rivers and lakes have been sold by their governments to foreign corporations and governments as a way of servicing the nation’s external debt?

This quote comes from a very thoughtful blog post by Vinoth Ramachandra which goes on to question one of the most popular forms of helping the developing world: child sponsorship.

The individualistic approach to poverty is most evident in organizations that promote child sponsorship programs. Whenever I visit friends in the US or Europe I often notice pictures of African or Asian children pasted on their fridge doors. They pray for these children, whom they have never met but know by name, and support them monthly through a non-governmental organization. I am impressed by their concern for children in the Two-Thirds World. (Rarely, however, do I see pictures of impoverished children from their own cities!). At the same time I share my reservations with them and also try to give them a bigger picture of what hinders the development of poor communities.

Whether you agree or disagree with Ramachandra, he is doing us a great service by asking hard questions about the way we go about our ‘generosity’. It isn’t comfortable, but it is vital that we think through issues like this.

Two years ago, in a post called Is Aid Defensible?, I wrote:

However, there are huge questions about the value of government aid and even such sacred cows as fairtrade goods and celebrity campaignsare not without their problems.

That earlier post linked to a number of good articles and books if you want to explore this issue further.

Books I’ve Read: Caedmon’s Song

Posted on by
Reply


When you have read all of Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks novels, the next logical step is to read Caedmon’s Song. This is a fairly hard hitting story which uses the thriller genre to explore some difficult issues. Like many of the Banks books, it has two intertwining threads which are slowly drawn together as the book progresses. If the narrative is a little more transparent than some of Robinson’s other work, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, if you are looking for a “whodunnit”, this isn’t the book to read.

It isn’t Robinson’s best book by a long way, but it is a gripping, well put together thriller and well worth a read (just read the others first). It is available on  Kindle if you prefer your books in electronic format.

You’re Not Singing Any More….

Posted on by
Reply

I grew up attending a smallish Church where music was provided by a somewhat out of tune piano – but boy could we sing. There was something really inspiring about being in a group of thirty or forty people all singing loud enough to raise the roof. These days, I travel from church to church and though worship and music is much more professional these days than it was in my youth, I rarely encounter a Church where the congregation sing with gusto like we used to.

I sometimes wonder whether I’m imagining things. Is this just a case of me getting older and jaundiced? A recent blog post from the US seems to confirm that I’m not on my own.

To be sure, there are many churches that have congregations singing with enthusiasm, but generally speaking, our people do not sing like their parents and grandparents did. And even worse, the leaders of those churches don’t seem to know it.

The post which is written by a musician goes on to give some thoughtful reasons why people no longer seem to sing the way they did in an earlier generation. One of these is the rhythm of the music:

Often newer songs have rhythms that don’t lend themselves to congregational singing and rather than struggle, the worshipper will just quit. They may love the song – they just can’t sing it – especially if they barely know it. As they become more and more familiar with a song, they can handle harder rhythms. But we often don’t give them a chance before moving on to a new song.

The rest of the post is helpful and well worth a read. However there is one issue that the piece doesn’t bring up and that is the lyrics to much contemporary worship music. It’s not just the ‘Jesus is my Girlfriend’ type lyrics that I’ve moaned about in previous posts. A lot of contemporary worship music has lyrics that are banal, incomprehensible or theologically dubious. It’s hard to really get into singing a song when you haven’t a clue what it is supposed to mean.

Luther and Wesley believed that people learned theology from the songs they sung in Church. Which is one reason that they wrote such profound and Bible-soaked songs. Given the content of much current worship music, perhaps it is just as well that people aren’t singing very much any more!

Disclaimer: I know that there are some churches which really sing well and I know that there are some excellent modern worship songs and songwriters. However, I don’t believe that these specific examples change the general point of this post.

Books I Have Read: Inspiration and Incarnation

Posted on by
Reply

If truth be told, I wasn’t planning to read this book, but on balance, I’m glad I did. Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament by Peter Enns looks at three big questions related to the Old Testament.

There is a lot of similarity between some Old Testament stories and contemporary stories; for example the Genesis story of the flood bears a lot of resemblance to the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic. Does this mean that the Old Testament is no more inspired or sacred than related texts?

There are times when the Old Testament seems to disagree with itself. Some of the Proverbs are contradictory and at times the details of stories in Chronicles differ from the same stories in Samuel and Kings. What does this mean for our understanding of the nature of the Old Testament?

The New Testament sometimes quotes the Old Testament in ways that the original authors could never have envisaged. What does this have to say about the way in which we interpret Scripture?

I’ve seen treatments of these questions before, but to be honest, most of them just tend to explain the questions away which might feel comforting, but it is far from satisfactory.

Enns takes the questions very seriously and certainly doesn’t try to explain them away. He sees challenges like these as helping us to really understand the nature of the Bible as a book with both divine and human origins. It is the human side of the equation that means leads to the issues that Enns is dealing with. It is not that Scripture is flawed, but that it reflects the cultural contexts out of which it arises. A longish chapter is devoted to each of the questions and Enns demonstrates how the issues that we find difficult about the Bible actually arrive naturally out of the cultural milieu out of which it arises. It is good stuff.

If you have questions about the Old Testament or are interested in the nature and inspiration of Scripture, you could do far worse. This isn’t the easiest book to read; it takes a bit of concentration, but it is well worth the work involved.

For those who are interested there is a Kindle Edition.

Books I Have Read: One Bible, Many Versions

Posted on by
Reply

Right, let’s not mess around; this is a good book, a very good book. If you have any interest in Bible translation or in English versions of the Bible, then you must read it. There is no reason not to. Is that clear enough?

One Bible, Many Versions: Are All Translations Created Equal? is different to most other books about English Bible versions in two key ways. The first is that it doesn’t base its opinions on translation theory or what the publishers of the various translations say about their work; it is grounded in solid analysis of what the translations actually say and do. There is a wealth of tables and information to illustrate the sorts of decisions that different translations have made. The second great feature of this book is that it is written by an experienced Bible translator; Dave Brunn worked in Papua New Guinea as a translator with New Tribes Mission. His experience in a language very different to English allows him to analyse the current discussion about English versions from an objective approach not available to many.

I have my own theory on why there is often disagreement among English speaking Christians about Bible translations. I believe it is in part due to the fact that most of us live in monolingual societies. The majority of native English speakers have never learned a second living language to full fluency. And of those who have, most learned another Indo-European language - which of course, would be related in some ways to English. Many English speakers base their view of New Testament translation entirely on translating from Greek into its Indo-European relative, English I believe this narrow perspective is a major reason for many of the disagreements that exist regarding English translation. (p.145)

Ouch! But, it is hard to disagree with this.

The book deals head on with some of the shibboleths of Bible translation pundits. For example those who advocate more literal translations often insist that their should be lexical concordance – that is a Greek or Hebrew word should always be translated by the same English word. Brunn doesn’t spend a lot of time looking at the theory of this; he just examines what different translations actually do. For example, the King James Version,which is often regarded as very literal, translates the Greek word logos in 24 different fashions (p.74). Perhaps lexical concordance isn’t all that its proponents would have us believe.

Word for word. When Bible scholars describe an English Bible Version as a word-for-word translation, they know among themselves that they do not mean that each word in English corresponds to a word in the original. But to the average reader, the term “word for “word could imply that translation is an exact science, almost like mathematical encryption. By now, it should be clear that there is no such thing as a consistently word for word translation in English. (p.129)

Perhaps someone should tell the marketing department of one major Christian publisher!

The book also looks in some considerable detail at the way things such as idioms are translated across different English translations. It is fascinating to note that so called dynamic translations such as the NIV often preserve more of the original form of the original language than formal translations such as the ESV.

One Bible, Many Versions: Are All Translations Created Equal? very helpfully points out that it is impossible to place translations at points on a scale from literal to dynamic. Each translation occupies a range on the scale; in some places they are more dynamic, in others they are more literal. For the most parts, the ranges of the main translations overlap. The ESV is generally more literal than the NLT but there are places where the opposite is true.

The book concludes with a series of helpful statements that more or less sum up where we are at the moment regarding translations into English. Here is a selection

  • Every version translates thought for thought rather than word for word in many contexts.
  • Every version gives priority to meaning over form.
  • Every version translates some Hebrew or Greek words many different ways.
  • Every version paraphrases in some contexts.
  • Every version uses interpretation when translating ambiguities.
  • Every version replaces some masculine forms with gender-neutral forms.

Different English versions have a lot more in common than many people (especially marketing departments) would have you believe.

If I haven’t made it clear yet, let me do so. One Bible, Many Versions: Are All Translations Created Equal? is an excellent book. It is well researched, thorough, non-partisan and reliable. Anyone who wants to pontificate on the value or otherwise of different English versions will have to interact with this book. Or to put it another way; if you haven’t read One Bible, Many Versions then you should refrain from saying to much about English translations until you do.

This may well be the best book I read this year.

Meanwhile, back in the outside world, there are still over 300 million people without a single translation of the Bible in their own language.