Big Mac Bible

  

I enjoy writing. If you watched me writing for just a couple of hours, you might walk away with a fairly accurate idea of what my average word per minute speed is, but it's just as likely you would be wrong. If I were researching and scribbling ideas, you would see me at one speed. If you saw me fleshing out ideas, I would be much faster. If you saw me editing and laughing at all the mistakes I made in my draft, you would see me at a different speed. If the cat patted my arm while I was typing (like right now), I would stop and pet his cute furry head for a moment and get distracted.

Wycliffe Associates talks all the time about how fast their MAST process is, as if this were the only important way to measure their success. Many times, when I was still taking part in the Wycliffe Associates Banquet Tours, I would hear the WA host boasting about their goal of translating 31 verses per day. Bruce Smith, the president of WA, said in a newsletter of a translation project completing 34 verses per day. There is no mention in that newsletter of the Bible translation in question being accurate or clear, only finished.

Not only is 31 verses per day - or any similar arbitrary number - inaccurate as an overall average, the entire process of reducing Bible translation to a single number is, frankly, an absurd oversimplification. If you judged how long it would take to build a six-story building by how fast you could lay bricks on the first floor, you would be simply wrong. The time it would take would increase - in other words, the number of bricks you could lay in one day would decrease - because you would need to build increasingly tall scaffolding, and you would have to haul bricks and mortar ever higher the further up you went. Bible translation is much the same, and the number of 31 verses per day is a wildly inaccurate number, not based in the reality of actual, and accurate, Bible translation.

One of our editors for this series, Andrew, is neither a Bible translator nor a Christian, but he said the following regarding this issue:

"It strikes me as almost sacrilegious to see the translation of God’s holy Word as a logistical problem, one might even be tempted to say ‘chore’, to be overcome. Translators are not shoveling dirt. They handle God’s Word, His very substance in the hearts of men, and they ought to owe its translation the utmost reverence and respect."

I couldn't agree more. If he can see how flawed the process is, imagine how it must seem from those who have actually completed a Bible translation. I happen to be one of them, and with this book I am raising the alarm, but many other translators I know have similar concerns.

Bad translations - and bad interpretations of existing translations - can lead to dangerous, explosive situations. Let me just go over that point again. Even an existing, accepted translation can lead to cults and unhealthy splinter groups such as the Jehovah's Witnesses - about 8.5 million members worldwide - and the Mormons - 14.8 million members worldwide. This is no small thing, and these organizations rose up out of 19th-century America, beyond a doubt one of the most highly Christianized times and places in the 2000-year history of Christianity. If cults can arise in such an environment, and from previously accepted and respected versions of the Bible, imagine how easy it will be for similar distortions, false prophets and cults to rise from a people far from a Christian support structure, likely a group already marginalized and struggling for survival, and desperate for hope and salvation. What happens then if you hand them a Bible translation in their heart language which has major translation or contextual errors or omissions throughout?

Wycliffe Bible Translators has been inviting people to the Banquet of Heaven for many decades now. Their thorough, meticulous work in translation is the linguistic equivalent of a sumptuous banquet of wholesome and healthy food. But you can't provide such wonderful food in a rush. It simply isn't possible to hurry the process of baking homemade bread, of hand-cutting and mixing ingredients for a veggie lasagna, of preparing a roast or a turkey just so. You can't cut corners when making a soufflé!

Wycliffe Associates is doing just this, though. They are, to use a rather blunt but clear comparison, offering these people-groups the translation equivalent of a Big Mac, fries and a Coke. If the only food of the Spirit these people have access to is junk food of the Spirit, that diet will make them sick and weak, and that is the perfect breeding ground for the disease of cults. They need the wholesome, strengthening food offered by an accurate, meaningful, nuanced translation of God's Love Letter, not a Big Mac Bible.