Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Well, hi, everyone. My name's Stephen. I feel a bit more like Johnny Farnham coming back so soon after a couple of weeks ago, my final tour.
[00:00:11] Not so final.
[00:00:14] So, yeah, today we're going to be talking about translation in the series that you have been hearing about, hopefully. And you know what I'm talking about. It's called Our Big Big Story and it's come out of Saddleback Chur Baptist Church in America with Rick Warren, and It's heading towards 20, 33 and 2,000 years after Jesus rose from the dead. There's four local Baptist churches, including this one, and the pastors are going around and I got dobbed in to come here, so it's great to be back. And let's pray before we start.
[00:01:01] Heavenly Father, we just thank you that you're alive, you're powerful, you've got a plan, you know what you're doing, and you're our God.
[00:01:13] We put our trust in you. Today. Speak to us through your word in the name of Jesus. Amen.
[00:01:22] So the topic is called Untranslated. It's about the translation of the Bible.
[00:01:28] And I love translation. I was a translator, I studied, I did a Masters of Translation in Japan.
[00:01:37] I was an interpreter and I taught translation of Japanese literature into English for a while, which is very interesting.
[00:01:47] But early on in my time in Japan, I learned about the importance of translation. I had a friend over there, an Australian friend, who went on to speak very good Japanese. But at the beginning of his time there, when people asked him what he wanted to be, he would say, I want to be a Bengoshi.
[00:02:03] And Bengoshi is what he wanted to be.
[00:02:07] Bengoshi. He wanted to be a bengoshi, but that's a lawyer. But he kind of mixed up the words and instead of that, he would say, I want to be a benjo.
[00:02:17] Now, when he told people in English he wanted to be a lawyer, he would have people cooing and in awe of him. But in Japanese, they would go silent and change the subject.
[00:02:30] And two years later, after being in Japan, someone said, you are aware that a benjo is a toilet.
[00:02:40] And the Japanese are so polite. For two years, nobody told him he was saying he wanted to be a toilet.
[00:02:48] So I learned a lesson from that.
[00:02:51] Don't expect the Japanese to correct you.
[00:02:54] Learn to correct yourself.
[00:02:58] Okay? So translation is important.
[00:03:01] And so today we're going to look at three different things about translation.
[00:03:05] It's been a part of Christianity from the very beginning.
[00:03:09] Secondly, the Bible is probably the hardest book in the world. To translate and I'll talk about why that is so. And the third thing is, how are we going with Bible translation in the world?
[00:03:23] So right from the beginning of Christianity, translation was happening and we read about it in acts, in Acts 2, there, 50 days after Jesus rose from the dead on Pentecost, it was called the feast of Shavuot or the feast of harvest.
[00:03:43] And something miraculous happened that day. The Holy Spirit came upon them and they began to speak in other tongues, other languages, as the Spirit enabled them.
[00:03:54] Now this is different to what's talked about in 1 Corinthians 12 to 14, where there's the ability to speak in other languages but they can't be understood unless there's a gift of interpretation given.
[00:04:09] Because what happened here was there were God fearing Jews from every nation under heaven in Jerusalem and each one heard their own languages being spoken to them because they were spread out. The Jews were spread out across the Roman Empire and speaking the languages of the areas. And they said, how come Galileans are able to speak in our native languages?
[00:04:33] Galileans didn't even speak properly Aramaic. They had their own version of it.
[00:04:40] How come we hear them in our own language, we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues. So what happened here was there was a miraculous, a linguistic miracle, an ability to speak in other languages.
[00:04:55] And they weren't just talking about what they had for breakfast, they were talking about the glories of God, the wonders of God.
[00:05:04] And on that day it's like God has given them the ability to interpret.
[00:05:13] And so what happened that day was it was the reversal of the Tower of Babel. The day one language had become many. And if you remember the story of Babel, they built a tower and they spoke in one language and God confused their languages and they dispersed across the face of the world like God had originally commanded them.
[00:05:33] But at Pentecost, many languages could be spoken miraculously and the result was God's wonders were declared to all.
[00:05:44] So there was a reversal that happened. And as a linguist I would have loved to been there that day and recorded people and got in some neuro linguist friends because I'm not a neuro linguist. Getting the neuro linguists to find out what is going on here, I think we would have discovered that it was a miracle.
[00:06:04] So most of us know that story from Acts 2, but the whole New Testament itself is a fruit of translation and this isn't as widely known.
[00:06:20] So the New Testament itself, because the Jews who were following Jesus predominantly spoke a language called Galilean Aramaic. As I mentioned, Aramaic was the language of Babylon.
[00:06:38] And every time Jesus is quoted verbatim, he's speaking Aramaic.
[00:06:45] So Abba we know Daddy.
[00:06:48] Abba, that's not a Hebrew word, it's an Aramaic word.
[00:06:52] Talitha kum to the little girl means little girl rise up. Ephaftha be opened. So Jesus was speaking Aramaic.
[00:07:01] Raka. Don't call somebody raka.
[00:07:05] Empty headed person, worthless.
[00:07:09] And there are other, actually there are other parts.
[00:07:12] Maranatha, you might have heard Lord come Golgotha. They're Aramaic words as well.
[00:07:19] But the New Testament isn't written in Aramaic. It's written in a language called Koine Greek. And why is that? Well, I believe that it's because they understood what God was doing in Acts 2.
[00:07:32] He was saying this has got to go to the whole world. Aramaic was spoken from Babylon around to Israel, but Koine Greek was spoken over the whole Roman Empire because the Romans had taken over the Greek empire that Alexander the Great had forged.
[00:07:53] So the New Testament is the fruit of translation as well as a miraculous thing that happened.
[00:08:02] But the Bible isn't an easy book to translate for a lot of reasons.
[00:08:10] And that is why that's what I'm going to talk about now for a while.
[00:08:16] Because in the first 500 years after the New Testament was written down, the Bible wasn't translated into a lot of languages.
[00:08:28] And you might wonder why that was the case. And it's because basically there are a lot of reasons, but it's hard to do. The Christians were being persecuted. Christian literature sometimes was being burnt, they were being hunted down. Different times.
[00:08:46] Christianity was also exploding.
[00:08:49] Not all of the Christians could read. They were slaves.
[00:08:55] And you need a spelling system to translate, to write something down. And a lot of languages were not written down until recently.
[00:09:05] And so these are the things that we kind of forget when we look at the history of Bible translation. But after 500 years you did have, you had the Koine Greek, you had Latin, Syriac, Coptic, which is in Egypt, Slavonic and Gothic.
[00:09:25] So the Bible is a hard book to translate.
[00:09:28] And so what I'm going to do is I got an idea from Wes Huff. I don't know if you know Wes huffpol, but Blackburn told me about him and I got onto him. He's an apologist, also a bit of a sportsman. He was miraculously healed by God and he's now very, very high profile.
[00:09:46] He's been on Steve Bartlett's podcast and was it Joe Rogan?
[00:09:54] And he's an apologist and what he does is he explains Christianity to people who don't know anything about it. But one thing he did was he compared the Bible with the Quran. And it's a really fascinating thing to think about. And it's not a criticism, it's just a comparison because when you put things up against each other you often see things about the nature of each.
[00:10:18] So that's what we're going to look at.
[00:10:21] What is the Quran? The Quran is the holy book of the second largest religion in the world.
[00:10:29] And the Bible is the holy book of the largest religion in the world.
[00:10:33] So how are they different?
[00:10:36] First thing is the Quran is one book.
[00:10:41] It was written by one person, Muhammad. He actually didn't write it, he spoke it and it was written down and he was a merchant.
[00:10:51] Originally it's written in one language, Quraysh Arabic, which is Meccan Arabic.
[00:10:59] It's written in one geographical area, the Arabian Peninsula.
[00:11:05] It's written in one period of time, the early 600s.
[00:11:10] And it tells us a lot about the Arabian Peninsula at that time, the six hundreds.
[00:11:17] Now it's not easy to translate either because it's written in what's now called Classical Arabic.
[00:11:26] But when you put this and you compare it with the Bible, you realize how different they are to each other.
[00:11:33] The Bible is made up of two parts, two sections as we know. This is kind of the Old Testament which is the Jewish scriptures and the New Testament which is the Christian scriptures. And Christians have adopted the Jewish scriptures. In fact, we are kind of reformed Judaism.
[00:11:53] And then it's a collection of many books. So the two sections are really collections. You've got 39 books in the Old Testament, 27 books in the New Testament.
[00:12:05] So it's a collection of books. The Quran is one book with many chapters. The Bible is many books with many chapters.
[00:12:16] The Quran is written by one, but the Bible is written by about 40 authors depending on how you divide it up.
[00:12:24] And the interesting thing about these authors is their backgrounds.
[00:12:30] So look at, here's a list of some of the occupations of the people who wrote the Bible.
[00:12:38] Moses was an adopted son of an Egyptian princess who became a shepherd in the wilderness.
[00:12:47] So it was a fall from grace there. But then he became the leader of a group of slaves who escaped from Egypt. Joshua was a military commander, Amos was a shepherd and horticulturist. David was a shepherd who became king and wrote 150, well, probably 75 songs actually.
[00:13:10] There was Isaiah, who seems to be a professional prophet, a king, high ranking government official, administrator and advisor to the Babylonian king, that's a mouthful. That's Daniel, priest and scribe and a cupbearer for the Persian king was a highly trusted position because you could kill the king and he would taste what the, the king was going to drink. Nehemiah was his name. In the New Testament too, we're probably more familiar with fishermen, tax collectors, physicians, Pharisees.
[00:13:49] Paul was a Pharisee before he was a Christian.
[00:13:54] So it's totally different. You see what I'm saying? You've got such variety in the Bible. You look at it and you go this is not a simple book.
[00:14:06] When you think of it from a translation perspective now it gets even more complicated. So I'm going to take you on this journey with me.
[00:14:15] So we know the Bible's not written in one language. It's written in Hebrew, it's got some Aramaic in it in Ezra and Daniel and Koine Greek in the New Testament, Koine is common Greek. So it's like street Greek. It's not classical Greek.
[00:14:34] But it gets more complicated. Even the Hebrew linguists have said there's three kinds of Hebrew. Classical, late biblical and transitional Hebrew.
[00:14:46] And then even the Greek isn't simple. The book of Luke is beautiful. Greek, educated Greek.
[00:14:54] Paul's Greek is rabbinically influenced. It sounds Jewish and it's classically informed. But Mark and the writer of Revelation don't sound like native speakers. So Revelation is in very rough Greek. It's almost like somebody who wasn't a native speaker of Greek was seeing some miraculous things and trying to write it down as he saw it, which is consistent with what the book says it was.
[00:15:22] And Mark's a bit rough. Like you can hear that Aramaic in it, that it's almost like somebody who said this message is so important. I'm going to give it to you in a language that's not my native language because it's so important.
[00:15:37] So when you start studying more and more into the background of the Bible, it's really not straightforward.
[00:15:49] And then there's the age of the Bible. The Quran is 1400 years old. The youngest parts of the Bible are 2000 years old. The oldest parts, they don't.
[00:15:59] It's hard to tell because scrolls fall apart over time. So you've got scrolls get translated and they get passed on and passed on.
[00:16:11] But they know that the ancientness of the Bible, I get excited by it because the language, the linguistics of it shows you how ancient it is. For example, the first 11 chapters of Genesis, if you look at the ages of the patriarchs and the Matriarchs there, they're all divisible by 60.
[00:16:35] Now, maths is not my strength, so don't ask me too much more about that. But they're all divisible by 60, which means it's a certain kind of numeral system that was used by the Babylonians and before by the Sumerians, and then after that, from chapter 12, you have a decimal system like ours.
[00:16:59] And that is totally consistent with what it says that Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldeans. The Chaldeans used that kind of numeral system.
[00:17:11] So if you don't think about it, you just read it and you go, oh, yeah.
[00:17:14] But actually, there's these things that are. They're almost hidden to us. But when you study them, you find out this is an ancient text that was passed down, and when it was being written down, it already was ancient, and it shows the signs of that ancientness.
[00:17:34] I could go on a lot about that, but I won't.
[00:17:38] And the Bible was written in at least three separate places.
[00:17:43] Parts of it show signs. It was written coming out of Egypt, because actually, Moses describes parts of Israel and he says it looked just like it was green and verdant, like Egypt.
[00:17:58] So you could tell, you know, he hadn't grown up in Canaan.
[00:18:03] Parts of it were written in the Middle east and parts of it in the New Testament written in Europe.
[00:18:13] And just to finish this long, arduous section off, the Bible is many genres.
[00:18:22] So as a translator, you look at this and you go, how on earth can you translate this? Because every genre needs to be treated differently. You think about how different a song is to a letter or a history, a narrative description of ritual practices, like in Levites, Leviticus, you've got law and prophecy. Each one has different language used in it. And so when you're translating, you have to think about that.
[00:18:55] So if you just looked at how complicated the Bible is, which is what you would expect of an ancient book, you wouldn't expect it to be simplistic.
[00:19:06] You would think, no wonder people weren't translating the Bible, because it's really not that easy.
[00:19:15] Now, I did manage the translation of a Bible. I didn't translate it, but I managed the translation of the New Testament into Khongsha, which is the language spoken in the jungles of Myanmar, Burma.
[00:19:31] And I just thought it'd be fun to give some examples from there. When you're translating into a language, you have to make up words that don't exist.
[00:19:42] You're taking the language that was basically of Israel Kind of very hot, dry desert like place and taking it to the jungles of Southeast Asia. How are you going to translate words like desert, wilderness? Jesus went into the desert. There's no such thing as a sand desert.
[00:20:03] So the people got together and they said, what are we going to do for a desert? And they came up with this. The sand jungle, the sand wilderness.
[00:20:14] The e galee is what they call it.
[00:20:17] And they don't have snow, so your sins can't be as white as snow.
[00:20:23] So they said, what are we going to do? We have frost. So your sins are as white as frost.
[00:20:29] And it makes sense. It's kind of. They expand the word. Now, English has had parts of the the Bible translated since 700 AD.
[00:20:39] Anglo Saxon. There was translation of parts of the New Testament.
[00:20:44] The whole Bible wasn't till much later. But our whole language has been influenced by the Bible so much so it's invisible to us. We can say things like old and gray. When I'm old and gray, that's straight from the Psalms, that's David's Hebrew, or, you know, turn the other cheek, that's Jesus. Non Christians will use those biblical terms all the time. And our grammar was influenced too. So English actually has.
[00:21:14] Is more Hebrew than it originally was. For example, when you say birds of the air, that's a Hebrew way of saying it, that our ancestors didn't speak like that until the Bible was translated.
[00:21:29] So it's kind of invisible to us. But it wasn't to these guys. They had to sit down and said, what do we do about willows? What's a willow?
[00:21:37] And so they just made a phrase. The trees that grow by the rivers, or hyrax is a little animal that's in the rocks of Israel.
[00:21:48] And they just used badger for that because that's as close as you're going to get.
[00:21:55] And they don't have bread.
[00:21:57] They make. They pound rice cakes. So don't take bread. For the journey was pounded rice cakes and sandals are flip flops, which is traditional footwear in Burma.
[00:22:15] Heaven's an interesting one. Heaven and hell are Anglo Saxon words. And hell actually isn't the best word for translating.
[00:22:25] In Greek, you've got several words for help and that's worth studying.
[00:22:33] But for heaven, they use their traditional terms as sun village and sky village. So after you die, you go to the sky village and the name of God. They have a creator God, and they decided to use his name.
[00:22:48] Okay, so how are we doing with Bible translation?
[00:22:53] Over the last 2,000 years, things have changed a lot. And we're probably now in the most exciting time for Bible translation in the history of the world.
[00:23:03] There is more happening now in the last 50 to 70 years than ever before. There are more translations.
[00:23:11] There's a massive acceleration.
[00:23:14] If Jesus is coming again, he's coming soon because it's going very well.
[00:23:22] And so, according to Wycliffe Bible Translators in the uk, they're one of the biggest organizations, sil, Wycliffe, they say new translations are being released at the rate of almost one every three days. Every three days, a new translation of the Bible is being printed off in a new language because all of these projects are coming to fruition.
[00:23:51] And on average, one new language translation project is beginning every day.
[00:23:57] So there's 7,397 languages in the world, depending how you count them.
[00:24:04] But the whole Bible is already in 696.
[00:24:09] But the New Testament is in 1824, and there's 1509 languages with portions of Scripture already in it.
[00:24:22] And this is a nice graph that they had. And you can see that starts at 1800, the 1800s, there weren't a lot of Bibles translated into different languages.
[00:24:34] And then 2020 is almost near the end there. You can see the acceleration of what's happening.
[00:24:43] So it depends, you know, will Jesus come back when every language has all of the Bible, or will Jesus come back when everybody's heard? I don't know, but we're getting closer.
[00:24:55] In fact, they say almost everyone now can read a Bible, just not in their own language.
[00:25:03] So a lot of people, most of the world is multilingual and there'll be a language, a major world language that they can speak and so they can read the Bible. But the push is to get the Bible into every language that is a viable language.
[00:25:19] Viable means, you know, there are languages in Australia especially, where there's 20 speakers left and they're all over 80 and no young people speak it. So they're not going to translate the Bible into that because it's not really viable.
[00:25:38] So the work is not over yet.
[00:25:42] But technically, one in five people is still waiting for the Bible in their language. That means 80% of the world can read the Bible in a language that they can speak. And that is a lot better than 500 years ago. It is really, really coming along. So really, where the whole thing of this, our big, big story is, let's push, let's push and let's get it done, because we're riding a massive wave of the Gospel getting out to the world now. The Christian numbers are 2.5 billion people say they have trusted in Jesus.
[00:26:22] Whether they have or not is not for me to judge. But that is a lot better than 500 people who saw Jesus after he rose from the dead.
[00:26:31] That is billions of people more. So we're riding a massive wave and the work is getting done. And so the question is, what can we do to speed it up?
[00:26:42] Get the Lord back here.
[00:26:47] Obviously, my friends in Myanmar work with. They were trained by or still work with Wycliffe and sil, and they are the largest Bible organization that I'm aware of. And they also. They take the longest to translate a Bible because you can't just translate the Bible. You've got to teach people how to write their language.
[00:27:09] Otherwise they can get the Bible and put it on a shelf and bow down and worship it. That has been known to happen. You want to make sure that doesn't. That's not the point of the Bible. You need to read it. So you have to teach people. So SIL will teach people. They'll develop a spelling system and teach people how to read and write as well as translating the Bible. And it takes a long time, 10, 20 years, maybe even longer at times.
[00:27:36] So if you want to support them, go and check them out.
[00:27:44] Also, the Baptist churches in Tasmania are interested in supporting another Bible translation in Myanmar. And so I've been on the phone to my friends there and asking them, do they know of any groups that are not being helped at the moment? And it was surprising because they said, well, this group is getting helped by this group and this tribe is getting helped by that group. And. And this tribe is getting. There is a lot going on now with Bible translations, a mad rush.
[00:28:15] And they said, but there are a few languages here that haven't been picked up by everyone.
[00:28:20] And so we're actually praying. There's two groups and we're in the last stages of determining which one is viable.
[00:28:28] And so if you could pray for us, that would be fantastic.
[00:28:35] So I've talked a lot about. It's kind of. I understand. It's a bit like a lecture, a translation lecture gets me excited. I hope it is exciting for you.
[00:28:46] But as we know, the Bible is there to transform lives. That's the purpose of the Bible.
[00:28:55] You know, what is the Bible? Some people say it's a love letter. I don't like that because if you open up parts of the Bible, you'll be a bit shocked if you're expecting a love letter.
[00:29:09] I think it's more like the history of God reaching out to people to restore them in relationship to him. It's what God is doing and how people have responded to that.
[00:29:23] The Jews say, there's only one hero in the Bible and that is God.
[00:29:29] Because I don't know if you've read the Bible, but nobody. It's not like a book that's trying to say, look at all these wonderful holy people.
[00:29:38] It's like a book saying, yeah, he was really good, but Jesus, he really stuffed up in this way.
[00:29:42] And it doesn't hide people's failings.
[00:29:47] But the purpose of the Bible is to be transformed. So I would encourage you to go and experiment. Don't just get into one way of reading the Bible and stick with it.
[00:29:59] Ask yourself, is this helping me transform my life or not? One thing that I discovered is memorizing the Bible.
[00:30:09] If you choose the right parts, you ask God, what part should I memorize? And then you try to memorize it.
[00:30:18] That can be really transforming.
[00:30:20] Now, I'm not a great memorizer, but when I go over something over and over and over and over again, it does affect me. And I've found some fantastic parts of psalms that really transform your heart.
[00:30:37] And there's some really wonderful things in the Psalms, because that's prayer, or in the Gospels, because we can be familiar with what Jesus. Jesus said. You can be familiar with it, but not really know what to do about it. So when you memorize it or you go over it, I find the Holy Spirit will start to speak to you.
[00:30:57] So I encourage you, if you're not already doing that, to experiment with it. You can get songs of the Psalms and listen to the Psalms over and over again.
[00:31:07] And God starts to do something. And there's a reason for that. The Word of God is powerful. And when we get it into our lives, it's better, I've found, than my own worries, ruminations, fears, doubts, questions.
[00:31:23] And when I get the Word of God in there, that starts to percolate through me. It's very transformative.
[00:31:32] So today we've talked about how translation is something that's been on God's heart from the very beginning, that the Bible is not an easy book to translate. So pray for Bible translators, because they need a lot of your help.
[00:31:49] That we're in an age, you could call it the age of Bible Translation. There's so many going on at the moment, and that we can all play a part by praying for Bible translations, supporting them, or going deeper in our own experience of God's Word.
[00:32:08] So let's pray.
[00:32:13] Father. God I thank you that we're at this period of time. We're not at the beginning.
[00:32:19] Think of those 500 who saw Jesus risen from the dead and the world, the godless world around them. At the time, the task was enormous.
[00:32:30] But now, where, 2,000 years later, 2.5 billion people later, thousands of parts of scripture translated.
[00:32:40] We're in an exciting time, Father, and I pray that you would help us hear your Word and discern what part it is that we play.
[00:32:50] We are riding a wave, an exciting wave that's getting closer and closer to your return.
[00:32:57] Give us your wisdom and discernment to know what our part is, and I pray youy would bless all of us in our reading of youf Word. You'd lead us to sections that yout want us to be transformed by, and help us to take that into our minds and into our hearts. Because we know without yout Spirit, you know, it's just not going to be the same.
[00:33:20] Thank youk for your precious Word. Thank youk for your ancient dealings with humanity, that you have a plan and you haven't forsaken any of us, that your Word is going out to the whole world.
[00:33:35] Lord, speed up the work that you're doing so that you may come again and rule over us. Because, Jesus, we just say, you are the Lord, and we thank you for everything you've done for us. It's in your name we pray. Amen.
