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What Does Bible Translation Achieve?

In a return to form, Lingamish has just posted a rather uncomfortable piece that everyone interested in minority language Bible translation should read.

’ve been fuming for days about Queen Victoria. It’s not her exactly but the chain of events that should have led to a different Victorian England but didn’t. You see, Tyndale got his wish and every ploughboy understood the Bible better than the bishop. Soon England was flooded with the Bible in everyone’s heart language. But then my model of Bible translation goes all wobbly. Instead of a culture transformed by the presence of God’s Word turning bad people into good we see societal trends, urbanization, human self-interest and downright evil holding sway for another two centuries and beyond. We let Jane Austen tell the story when we should be listening to Charles Dickens. 200 years after the King James Bible was published, children were working in coal mines, and slaves were being beaten in the empire where the sun never set. Read More.

David raises some excellent questions in his post and I’ll be returning to some of them over the next couple of weeks. One initial response to David is to suggest that we need to back away from the managerial missiology that says everything can be measured in purely human terms (see the article I discuss here).

Watch this space for more thoughts about Lingamish’s thought provoking article.

3 replies on “What Does Bible Translation Achieve?”

Thanks for the plug. I’m thinking out loud on that one and look forward to hearing your thoughts on the subject.

P.S. Congrats on Dave’s graduation.

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