Scripture Engagement

Bibliography Barnwell, K. (2002) Bible Translation: An Introductory Course in Translation Principles. 4th edn. Dallas: SIL International. Dye, W. (2009) ‘The Eight Conditions of Scripture Engagement’, 26(2). Available at: http://www.ijfm.org/PDFs_IJFM/26_2_PDFs/89-98_Eight%20Conditions.pdf (Accessed: 2 May 2018). Gutt, E.-A. (2000) Translation and Relevance - Cognition and Context. Manchester: St Jerome. Hill, H. et al. (2011) Bible Translation Basics. Dallas: SIL International. Hill, H. and Hill, M. (2008) Translation the Bible into Action. Carlisle: Piquant Press. Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson (1995) Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Wilt, T. (ed.) (2003) Bible Translation - Frames of Reference. Manchester: St Jerome. Useful Links Websites you may like to look at for further information: Bible Gateway https://www.biblegateway.com/ Bible Society (UK) https://www.biblesociety.org.uk/ SIL https://www.si...

The decision to move to a more open model of work wasn’t just taken for pragmatic reasons. Missions in general have been realising that we need to move away from colonial approaches, where the foreigners are in control, and away from post-colonial approaches, where the foreigners feel guilty that they are even involved in the work. In these days of globalisation, we can all be involved without anyone feeling guilty or misused in any way. Post-colonial approaches have affected many areas of academic study, including translation. We now realise that languages can be used to adversely influence people (colonialism), and that translators are more than linguists, they are cross-cultural intermediaries (post-colonial approaches and globalisation). For instance, if an interpreter hears something that they consider might be insulting to those they are interpreting for, they might modify what they say and tone it down a bit to make it more acceptable. On top of that we know that the cultures w...

The major push that occurred in the 19 th century resulted in mission work and Bible translation beginning in many fairly major languages, but it was not until the 20 th century that smaller groups and minority languages were considered a need. It has only been in the last one hundred years ago that phrases like ‘every tribe, every nation, every language’ were used to call workers and others into mission work and partnership in it. Cameron Townsend, the founder of Wycliffe Bible Translators, actually began in the 1930s by starting a training programme called ‘The Summer Institute of Linguistics’, to equip those already studying linguistics at university to analyse an unwritten language from first principles. The early recruits went to Mexico, where they researched and analysed the indigenous languages such as Nahuatl and Mixtec. They lived in villages, worked with ‘language informants’, as they were then known, and produced phonology write-ups, grammars, dictionaries, primers ...

During the 17 th and 18 th centuries some Bible translation was carried out in non-European languages, but the main movement forward was in the 19 th century. William Carey, of the Baptist Missionary Society, and known as the father of modern missions, began translation work in Hindi and Urdu, and later this was completed by Henry Martyn, the complete Bible being published in 1843. Henry Martyn was a prolific translator, working with local colleagues, and translating the Bible into several languages: Hindi/Urdu, Persian (Farsi), and Judaeo-Persian. Urdu is an artificial language based on Hindi grammar with many Persian and some Turkic loan words. It was needed by the Moghul hordes from Central Asia who invaded Northern India and built and empire resulting in edifices such as the Taj Mahal. [1] Martyn passed away [2] aged only thirty-one. It’s extraordinary to think that he achieved more before the age of thirty than most of us do in a lifetime. There were many other translat...

There were other translations carried out during the Reformation period. The Bible was translated into Slovene during the 16 th century, and into Turkish during the 17 th century, albeit by a Polish convert to Islam who called himself Ali Bey after his conversion. [1] The result of all this translation activity – and I haven’t covered all languages translated in the reformation period – was that as Christians started to spread around the world as the result of persecution or to trade they took Bibles with them, and began churches, albeit in their language. So, the gospel began to reach parts of the world outside Europe such as North America, where many Puritans, both Reformed and Anabaptist, planted churches. This paved the way for the modern missions movement, which has tended to focus on Bible distribution, for very important reasons. Church planters and bible translators are often either the same people, or very closely related to one another i.e. working in close partnersh...

The reformation really got going when Erasmus began a new translation of the Bible into Latin, based on Hebrew and Greek. He decided to produce a ‘definitive’ Greek text, now known as the Textus Receptus or ‘Received Text’. When Luther saw this, he said to himself, ‘If it’s ok to produce a fresh translation of the Bible into Latin, why not go the whole hog and translate one from Greek (and Hebrew) into German?’ And so the reformation begun. Within a few years Bibles were being translated into a number of European languages. William Tyndale, another Oxford linguist and theologian, began an English version of the New Testament, again working from Greek manuscripts, and within a century this was reworked by a committee commissioned by King James 1 st into what we now know as ‘The Authorised Version’ or ‘The King James Version’, also using Coverdale’s edition of the Bible that included the Old Testament. [1] Many of these translators were, or became, leaders in the reformation, an...

Some of you may be surprised to learn that the King James Version of the Bible wasn’t the first Bible translation. Apart from the translation of the Old Testament into Greek, mentioned above, there are many other versions of the Bible: The Samaritan Pentateuch – this contains the first five books of the Old Testament. The Samaritans only took these books as part of their canon. They also had Damascus as their capital and worship-centres in Dan and Bethel for many years, and were considered a sect by Jews. The Samaritan Pentateuch is not a translation, as such, but an important text, in that it duplicates the ‘Torah’ – the teaching part of the Hebrew Bible. The Dead Sea Scrolls – also not a translation, but an important collection of Hebrew texts, dating back to the 1 st century BC. The scrolls were found in a cave in Qumran, so are sometimes known by that epithet. They were remarkably well preserved, given the fact they had been lying there for about twenty centuries before ...

In the fourth century BC a king called Ptolemy the 2 nd decided it would be a good idea to get the Hebrew Bible translated into Greek. He, as the story goes, appointed seventy translators who were told to sit in separate booths and work alone, and at the end of the process all seventy miraculously produced identical translations of the Hebrew Bible. What a way to check for accuracy! [1] This translation became known as the Septuagint , and is one of the most reliable texts of the Old Testament we have, along with the Masoretic Text (10 th century AD), and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1 st century BC). Sometimes the Dead Sea Scrolls line up with the Septuagint rather than the Masoretic text, showing that the Septuagint represents an earlier and more reliable Hebrew text than the Masoretic text, despite the latter’s authority in the Judeo-Christian world. The main reason to be thankful for this translation, is that it is the main text alluded to by the writers of the New Testament. By ...

People sometimes ask me when the work of Bible translation will be finished. I know why they’re asking. They want Jesus to come back. They want to know if they’ll still be alive when he does. The problem is that there always has been and always will be Bible translation going on. It isn’t the kind of task you start today, finish sometime next month, and then tick the box and move on. As cultures develop and communities change there is often a need for a new translation. Not only that, previous translations may seem to be out-of-date and irrelevant, or simply not very good. [1] Another question I get asked is why Bible translation takes so long? Why can’t we, in the age of advanced computers and globalisation, speed the process up? The problem is that computers aren’t human, and can’t produce a translation good enough for use by humans. Having said that humans are, after all, only human, and tend to make mistakes, albeit smaller ones than computers. When thinking about Bible translat...