Working for the Word - a Bible translation podcast

The Solid Rock Hebrew Bible represents a significant step forward in the ongoing effort to recover the most accurate possible form of the biblical text. Unlike many standard editions in circulation today—which are largely based on a single medieval manuscript—this volume offers an eclectic Hebrew text informed by the insights of modern textual criticism. The goal: to move closer to the original wording of the Scriptures as they were first composed.

This edition moves beyond the limitations of diplomatic editions—texts that follow a single manuscript while relegating alternative readings to the margins. Instead, the Solid Rock Hebrew Bible integrates thousands of textual decisions directly into the text, reflecting the editor’s judgment regarding the most probable original forms.

That said, this is not a critical edition in the traditional sense. Readers will not find an exhaustive apparatus detailing the textual variants or the evidence behind each decision. Rather, this is a curated edition, transparently offered as the editor’s best effort, subject to revision and open to critique. It is a scholarly but accessible resource that welcomes engagement from others in the field.

Another notable feature is the adoption of the Tiberian vocalization system—commonly used in medieval manuscripts—while also making reasoned deviations where warranted by linguistic, exegetical, or historical considerations. The divine name, for instance, is presented as יַהְוֶה (Yahweh) throughout, except in Chronicles, reflecting both historical pronunciation and sensitivity to textual tradition.

Importantly, this edition is also open-access. It’s freely available in electronic format and released under a Creative Commons license, making it a valuable tool for students, teachers, pastors, and scholars around the world, regardless of institutional access or financial means.

Download the SRHB and view the notes.

Explore other projects from Stephen.

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What if Mother Teresa or Billy Graham lived and worked — and nobody knew their names? What if one of the church’s most influential missionaries went almost unnoticed?
Meet Katharine (Katy) Barnwell. Within Bible translation, she’s a legend. Outside of Bible translation, few have heard of her. But not even Billy Graham holds a candle to what God did through Katy.
From hiding as a child from Nazi bombing raids, fleeing civil wars, and remaining calm under terrorist attacks and armed gunmen, to utterly revolutionizing every field she touched, Barnwell’s life proves there is no need to treat the missionary hall of fame as if its ranks are closed. On the contrary, her kingdom labor reveals that God is still in the business of raising up contemporary “greats” who are willing to face danger, go the distance, lift up God’s Word in unprecedented ways, and see the lost turn to Christ in droves. 
In fact, there may be no “great” in all of church history who matches Barnwell’s level of influence. 
All around the world, hundreds of millions of new believers read and hear Scripture in their own language because of Barnwell’s work, books, and language training. By some estimates, about 3,000 completed or in-process Bible translations swim directly downstream of her work. Since she rebuilt The Jesus Film Project’s methods, more than 300 million viewers around the world have become followers of Jesus. 
Author Jordan Monson joins us in this episode to talk about his new book on Barnwell's life. You can get your copy here.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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ScriptureForge.org

ScriptureForge Demo video.

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Read the article.⁠

One of the common misconceptions about the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible is that it is a universally public domain work—something many tout as a feature of its superiority to modern copyrighted translations. But most don’t realize that it is still under a special perpetual copyright of the Crown in the United Kingdom.

Unlike the KJV, some modern translations such as the ⁠Berean Standard Bible⁠ are public domain worldwide. So while it’s important for a Bible translation to be in the public domain, there are modern translations that fulfill that better than the KJV does.

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠sellingjesus.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠thedoreanprinciple.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠copy.church

But before that discussion, I want to frame it with an excellent article by Andy Crouch entitled “A Redemptive Thesis for Artificial Intelligence.”

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Global Bible Tools Intro

How to Self-Publish a Free Book That Is Truly Freely Given

Video version of the psalm at the end of the episode

The Dark Side of Copyright

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It’s an incredible time to be alive, especially getting to watch the advances of AI in various fields. While I realize that there’s probably a sizeable percentage of this audience that thinks AI is the opposite of progress, I want to introduce you to a tool that you might find useful. It’s called NotebookLM by Google, and it’s free for you to start using today. You can create notebooks and fill them with source material of all kinds: links, videos, PDFs, pasted text, and other docs. The AI will then digest all the material and you’ll be able to interact with it in a chat, ask questions about it, ask it to summarize things, etc. But the most magical and impressive thing about it is that you can ask it to generate an audio conversation, podcast-style, about the material. A man and a woman will have a down to earth, natural sounding discussion about the content, and you can listen to it and learn some of the main points of what you didn’t have time to read. Perhaps there’s a 100-page thesis you don’t have time to read. Drop it into NotebookLM, and then listen to a 15 minute conversation about it while you wash the dishes or go for a run. If you haven’t heard a demo of this, prepare yourself for a level of realism that you’ve never encountered before. While it’s not perfect, and many of you may never use it and think it’s gimmicky, for a nascent technology, it’s an incredible demonstration of what possibilities the future might hold. Keep in mind that this is the worst this tech will ever get. What you’re about to hear is a series of conversations I generated based on source material from my research on the Reina Valera Spanish Bible translation. This was a fun experiment for me during my paternity leave after the birth of our new baby boy.

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I co-wrote this article with Conley Owens for sellingJesus.org. It was originally published on the Selling Jesus podcast.

"For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God’s word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ" (2 Cor. 2:17, ESV).

This highly technical discussion is not an easy listen, and it's recommended that you complement it with the visuals in the written version of the article. That said, the primary source of interest in this verse is the word translated by the ESV as “peddlers” (καπηλεύοντες, from καπηλεύω). Commentators and translations divide over recognizing this word as indicating an adulteration or commercialization of the gospel. Furthermore, they differ on whether or not this word necessarily implies a motive of profit. Thus, as we will see below, some translations add “for profit” to the verse because they believe it to be implicit information from the context that needs to be made explicit to the reader, even though the words “for profit” are not found in the Greek.

This matters because there are those who would argue that 2 Corinthians 2:17 does not confront the commercialization of Bible translations, but rather speaks merely of those who make too much profit from selling them. Or they claim that this verse has nothing to do with selling, but rather with "corrupting" God's Word. Is there really a loophole here for Bible publishers who claim ownership of God's Word, lock it down from being spread freely, and enrich themselves in the process? Can this verse be translated in such a way as to help them avoid Paul's condemnation, or does it simply mean: "we are not commercializing God’s Word like so many others"?

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Here's the full text of the article. It's free to read, modify, copy, share, or translate.

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The other day I ran across a fascinating article written by a Cambridge PhD student who memorized the entire book of Job in Hebrew as part of her dissertation research. The article was entitled Learning to love: The surprising joy of memorising Job, and after reading it I knew I wanted to learn more about the process and the insights she gleaned from the experience. So I reached out to her and she kindly agreed to grace us with a nerdy chat on Job.

Ellie Wiener particularly takes joy in studying and communicating how the theological themes and imagery of the Old Testament create the context in which the gospel proclaimed in Jesus Christ is both intelligible and breathtakingly beautiful. 

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Drew Maust is a translation consultant and one of the editors of the SIL Journal of Translation. He kindly agreed to read and share a recent article of his on this podcast. A big thanks to Drew for taking the time to record his insights for us to learn from!

Despite the objective advantages of the metric system—such as its simplicity and global adoption—Americans are reluctant to abandon their traditional units due to cultural identity and convenience. This resistance to change is similar to the reception of advances in biblical studies, which often struggle to be accepted by the broader public. Translators face the challenge of balancing tradition with modern scholarship, as changes in Bible translations can be contentious. An example of this is the translation of the term "leprosy" from Hebrew and Greek texts. Historically translated as "leprosy," modern scholars argue that the biblical term refers to a variety of skin diseases, not specifically Hansen's disease. However, translations often retain the traditional term due to familiarity and acceptance by readers. This highlights the complex nature of translation, which must consider accuracy, clarity, naturalness, and acceptability. Translators strive to create versions that resonate with their audience while maintaining scholarly integrity, illustrating the intricate balance between source fidelity and target audience preferences.

Read the article.

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In this episode we have the pleasure of talking to biblical scholar Dr. Drew Longacre. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham and has recently been a researcher at Cambridge Digital Bible Research on the Psalms: Layer by Layer project, which we did an episode on in the past. From 2016–2021, he was the postdoctoral researcher on the a project called “The Hands that Wrote the Bible: Digital Palaeography and Scribal Culture of the Dead Sea Scrolls”, where he applied the latest advances in radiocarbon dating and digital paleography to the study of the Dead Sea Psalm scrolls. Longacre and Brent Strawn from Duke Divinity School have received an NEH Scholarly Editions grant to complete an eclectic critical edition of Psalms 1–50 for the Hebrew Bible: a Critical Edition series from 2024–2026. A little about this critical edition of the Hebrew Psalter: the project aims to provide the world with the first truly critical edition of the Book of Psalms. It plans to use the full range of the Dead Sea Scrolls, incorporate important Greek papyri, and take advantage of recent methodological advances in textual criticism.

The project website.

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Video Bible Dictionary

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This single episode is not meant to convince you to invest in Bitcoin, but rather to encourage you to explore it with an open mind, especially from a biblical point of view. For that, I've compiled a curated doc of recommendations for those who are interested in learning more.

Read the doc.

The anecdotes about Wences at the beginning are from Digital Gold.

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⁠⁠Read the book⁠⁠⁠⁠.

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The previous episodes in this series considered God’s desire for us to use his name, how the pronunciation was lost, and how the New Testament writers handled the matter. It remains, finally, to consider how it has been handled by translators since the Reformation. In that time there have been various departures from Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, which rendered the divine name as Dominus (“Lord/Master”), while others have maintained the tradition, which goes back to the Septuagint.

Read the article⁠⁠.

⁠⁠Read the book⁠⁠⁠.

Read about Sacred Name Translations.

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Read the article⁠.

⁠Read the book⁠⁠.

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Two key things prevent us from knowing: (1) Hebrew was written without vowels for many centuries, so we’re left with only four consonants: YHWH, and (2) people started avoiding the pronunciation of God’s name long before Hebrew began to be written with vowels. And when the Hebrew Bible was finally written with vowels, artificial vowels were inserted into the spelling of God’s name in order to keep people from pronouncing it! So, in this article we’ll try to understand why—why did the Israelites go from swearing by Yahweh’s name, using it in prayer, song, and greetings to forbidding its use altogether?

Read the article.

Read the book⁠.

Audio clip credit: Tyrant Contra God.

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A few years ago I did a series on the pronunciation and translation of the divine name here on this podcast. It was a long series that eventually turned into a book.

Now, a while back the Text and Canon Institute asked me to do a four-part series on the divine name for their website, which forced me to significantly condense the highlights of the book into smaller, less technical articles. So as a service to anyone who may not have the time to read them, or who may not have the time to listen to the longer technical series, I’ve recorded these articles, and this will be the first. Even if you end up disagreeing with my conclusions, I guarantee that most people will learn a few new and surprising things.

Growing up, I understood that the name of God was “the Lord.” As I got older, I began to understand that when I saw the Lord in all caps, that meant that it was God’s special, divine name that he revealed to Moses. This seemed strange and confusing to me—adding a level of complexity to understanding a Bible that was already difficult enough for a teenager to understand. I don’t remember when it was that I first heard the name Yahweh pronounced, but when I went to seminary, I quickly realized that it was an accepted pronunciation and spelling for God’s name, especially in academic circles.

So how did we get to this point where nearly every English Bible uses “the Lord” (a title) in place of his personal name? Can we know how God’s name was originally pronounced? Shouldn’t we avoid using God’s name out of reverence for the sacred? Why didn’t the New Testament authors use God’s name? How do Bible translators decide whether they should render something like Yahweh or the Lord? These are all important questions that we will try to answer throughout this series. But first, we need to answer a foundational question: What is God’s revealed desire regarding the use and preservation of his name?

Read the article.

Read the book.

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Back in 2021 I had Dave Brunn on this podcast to talk about his amazing book One Bible, Many Versions. If you haven’t heard parts 1 and 2 of that interview, I highly recommend going back to listen when you finish this episode. Dave recently published an article titled Gender in Bible Translation: A Crucial Issue Still Mired in Misunderstanding. It would be an understatement to say that this is an important article for the Church, particularly English-speaking evangelicals. So when I saw his article I immediately reached out to him, and he very kindly agreed to record a reading of it for the listeners of this podcast. It’s an honor to feature him and his work again here.

Dave Brunn is a missionary, translator and educator. He and his wife Nancy spent over twenty years in Papua New Guinea where they served the Lamogai people through church planting, literacy training and Bible translation. Currently, the Brunns reside in Camdenton, MO, where Dave serves as a translation instructor and an International Bible Translation Consultant. He and Nancy have helped hundreds of students in the US, Canada and Australia prepare for missionary service among remote people groups across the globe. 

Music credit: Liborio Conti, no-copyright-music.com ⁠⁠workingfortheword.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠my books⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ music⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Hebrew ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠| ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠academic

This is the second in a two part series that aims to introduce you to the work of Dr. Reinier de Blois and honor some of the incredible labor of love he has poured out for the sake of the Bible translation community and movement. Specifically, I want to highlight his work in Hebrew lexicography as he nears the end of a project that has spanned over two decades; and that is the creation of a new ⁠semantic dictionary of biblical Hebrew⁠. Learn more about Dr. Reinier de Blois in the previous episode.

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This is the first in a two part series that aims to introduce you to the work of Dr. Reinier de Blois and honor some of the incredible labor of love he has poured out for the sake of the Bible translation community and movement. Specifically, I want to highlight his work in Hebrew lexicography as he nears the end of a project that has spanned over two decades; and that is the creation of a new semantic dictionary of biblical Hebrew, which is available under an open creative commons license. This can be found over at marble.bible. Back in 2000 he wrote a paper outlining some of his vision for the new dictionary, and I think it would be valuable for us to work through some of it together.

Dr. Reinier de Blois is from the Netherlands and is currently the coordinator of ICAP for the United Bible Societies. ICAP stands for The Institute for Computer Assisted Publishing, which is a global initiative of the United Bible Societies which provides technology support and training for the scripture translation and publishing community. The ICAP team has extensive experience in text archiving and data conversion, and a long history of working closely with national Bible Societies and partner agencies. The knowledge and expertise accrued in this area serves as a foundation for the ongoing development of the Digital Bible Library. So currently he is in charge of the development of Bible publishing software, including implementation and training. Dr. de Blois is also a translation consultant and has served on projects in Nigeria, Guinea, and Tanzania. He teaches at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, and has published a number of things that you can see listed on his CV over at Academia.edu. 

Explore the Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew.

Read the full paper.

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I want to introduce you to an initiative called Global Bible Tools, which aims to provide the global Church with access to the same advanced biblical language tools that the West enjoys. This includes lexicons, grammars, and text critical information. In this podcast we'll discuss the importance of these tools for serious study of the Bible and Bible translation, and propose a way to make them more accessible to the majority world.

Contact me at andrewdcase@gmail.com.

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This is a paper presented at the Evangelical Theological Society in 1996 by Dr. Maurice Robinson. Dr. Robinson is a professor of New Testament and Greek, with expertise in NT textual criticism.

Links:

How the Jesus Trade Harms the World (video documentary)

How the Jesus Trade Harms the World (audio only)

Against Intellectual Monopoly

Books and articles about copyright on SellingJesus.org

Music: "Hidden Beauty" by Liborio Conti, https://www.no-copyright-music.com

"For the people by the people." That is the slogan of The Word for the World, which is a Bible translation org that we’re going to be learning about in this episode. They exist to equip language groups for mother tongue translation and literacy development. Since 1981, they have been working towards this goal through translation, training, literacy, and partnerships with like-minded organizations. Their prayer is that every person will know that God loves them and speaks their language! Our guest today is Joel Brown, who very kindly agreed to introduce us to his mission and help us understand more about it. You can reach out to Joel at jbrown@twftw.org

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As I said in the last episode, I’ve been working on the Selling Jesus project, which is now well underway with a ton of content. Please check out the website sellingJesus.org and you’ll find enough reading material to keep you busy all Christmas vacation. Also, it would mean the world to me if you would help boost the views of the first Selling Jesus video on YouTube, which is on the homepage of sellingJesus.org, and share it around. I’ll be releasing the next long video in the series soon, so make sure you’re subscribed to the YouTube channel. Selling Jesus is also a podcast, so if you’d rather listen to the articles on the website, you can do that on the podcast. There’s already a lot of content on there, and we post more every week.

In this episode I’m highlighting the ministry of Pioneer Bible Translators, and I’m joined by Tim MacSaveny who was kind enough to share the ins and outs of his organization. My hope is that this will be helpful for those who don’t know much about PBT and want to find out more, especially those who are trying to navigate the differences between all the BT orgs and decide who to join. Tim is married to Erin, they have four kids, and they’ve served with PBT since 2008. Currently they live in Louisville, KY.

Tim and Erin facilitate Bible translation for two projects in two different countries. The first is a people group living in southeastern Tanzania. Tim travels to Tanzania three times a year to meet face-to-face with the translation team, while working remotely throughout the year.

The second project involves a diaspora group who have experienced significant tribal and political attacks in their home area of eastern Congo. Many of them now live in the US. This project is currently being hosted at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, where the MacSavenys now live.

Tim and Erin, along with their children Rose, Everett, Julian, and Lucy, have served with Pioneer Bible Translators since 2008. 

tim.macsaveny@pbti.org

Visit https://pioneerbible.org/ to find out more.

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Please visit sellingJesus.org and also help spread this video far and wide.

Book mentioned: God and Mammon by Noll

Song at the end with lyrics and subtitles

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Authors/ contributors are needed for two Translation Resources projects currently underway - Bamboo TN (Translator's Notes) and KTOT (Key Terms of the Old Testament). If you are interested in working part-time with either of these projects, email Brian Migliazza for further information. Contact Phil King: phil_king@sil.org

Contact Brian Migliazza: brian_migliazza@sil.org

News from Jerusalem about John Mark's lawsuits by Don Lowe.

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This episode is going to be a little different and more informal. My wife, Bethany, and I had a really great conversation the other day about interlinears and their different uses for second language acquisition, as well as the subject of reader's bibles. So we decided to record a second version of it to share, because we hope there are some helpful things we can add to people's thinking about these things and the general discussion of second language acquisition. If I said anything valuable in this episode, it probably came from my wise and brilliant wife in our first conversation! And for those of you who are unfamiliar with our Hebrew learning channel, you can learn more at freehebrew.online.

This video explains a little more about the BART Bible app that provides a free Hebrew Reader's Bible reading experience, but better, without having to look down at footnotes.

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In this episode we continue our conversation with Dr. Alan Bunning, Executive Director for the Center for New Testament Restoration.

Check out the project overview.

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When people think about starting a translation of the NT, they usually need to decide which Greek text they’re going to use as a source text. Unlike OT translation where everyone defaults to the MT, there are more than one NT source texts to choose from, like the UBS, the Nestle-Aland, the Byzantine text, the Textus-Receptus and others. And some of the modern, popular ones are locked down by copyright. So over the course of the next two episodes I want to introduce you to someone who is innovating in this field, and trying to serve the Church with a transparent critical Greek text that everyone can use without any hindrance.

Alan Bunning received his education in New Testament Greek from the Kensington Theological Academy under the tutelage of Dr. David R. Dilling, and received his D.Litt. degree for his work done in textual criticism. Alan’s primary background is in computer science and after working in the industry for many years, he became a college professor working as an Assistant Professor in Computer Information Systems at Ivy Tech Community College and then was a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at Purdue University. Alan retired from Purdue University in 2020 and now devotes himself to working full time as the Executive Director for the Center for New Testament Restoration.

Make sure to read the project overview, especially section 2.2.

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Back in 2021 an article entitled Just How Broken Is the Bible Translation Industry? came out on MinistryWatch. People keep asking me what I think about it. I've waited a long time to let the organizations critiqued in the article have a chance to speak for themselves and respond to the article, but they never did. This episode is my summary and thoughts on the article, and an encouragement to the leaders of the big BT orgs to set the record straight and clarify any misunderstandings that might exist. 

The MAP forum post and responses mentioned.

illumiNations

A note written by me on the forum:

Regarding raising a child: it's a good point, and most people would say that raising children well doesn't cost millions of dollars. In fact, if you introduce too much money into raising a child, you'll probably ruin your child. I wonder if that's the concern in this article. If I went around to churches telling them that I needed to raise 10 million dollars to raise my kid well, I would only raise eyebrows. I think that may be the message coming across to many like the author: that Bible translation is no longer just hard; now it's exorbitantly expensive. I think military spending may be a good analogy here. I learned yesterday that if one toilet gets clogged on the new US aircraft carriers, it costs $400,000 to unclog it. So the question is: should it really cost that much? We all know that BT has a high cost in energy, time, stress, trauma, etc., and that should be expected. But our orgs usually require us to de-emphasize those costs and give a chipper façade to donors. All the donors see is the marketing and begging for high dollar amounts, without understanding where it's going. So it's no wonder people might start to suspect that it's being thrown at ridiculously expensive ways to "unclog toilets."  Is Bible translation spending money for the sake of spending money in some areas? Are they raising money for job security because they don't know what else they would do? As long as donors are ignored and not given clear answers to these questions, we remain suspect and a target to more articles like this one.  In my experience, the big orgs ignore these kinds of articles and leave everyone with question marks, instead of humbly and clearly responding with wisdom and detailed honesty.  I can only pray that leaders take this seriously and actually respond publicly instead of hiding behind silence. I would genuinely welcome any leader to come on my podcast "Working for the Word" and respond to this article.

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Raised in the jungles of Venezuela by missionary parents in a vibrant Christian home, Tabitha Price is well-acquainted with the challenges of Christian ministry. Tabitha married her high school sweetheart, Joel, and together they attended New Tribes Bible college in preparation for missionary service. After that, she earned a bachelor degree from Southwest Bible College and Seminary and spent eight years teaching at international mission schools first in Venezuela and later in Florida. She is a graduate of Louisiana Baptist Theological Seminary (Master’s in Ministry), and has completed a doctorate in Executive Leadership.

Tabitha has served with Wycliffe Associates since 2009 in a variety of ministries. She was privileged to be part of the first MAST translation event and has since taught translation principals and theory to hundreds of translators in countries all over the world. Today Tabitha serves as the Vice President of Translation Services leading teams who are training our partners in church owned Bible translation.

Tabitha and her husband Joel have three children, Marshall, Jaden and Roman. They call Central Florida home.

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workingfortheword.com | my books | twitter | music | Hebrew | academic articles | facebook | contact | download all episodes for offline

Now that we’ve learned more about internalization from Katie Frost, it’s time to talk about a new tool that recently came out for actually doing oral Bible translation projects. It’s called Audio Project Manager, and it’s a free program that anyone can download and start working with right away. Nathan Payne is going to walk us through what the software does and how it can be leveraged for oral projects. 

I’ve worked with Render for a while now and it still has a lot of drawbacks. One of the biggest ones is that it’s not freely available, and you have to jump through a ton of hoops to get access to it. The interface has a lot of annoying quirks, especially for consultants, and it has very little flexibility. This is where Audio Project Manager comes in to give people a better option with much more flexibility and freedom.

Nathan Payne who is going to help us understand the software, was born in Peru to missionary Bible translators who worked in the jungle with the Asheninka people. He met his wife, Katy, in high school, and attended Texas A&M university where he studied chemical engineering. He and his wife later studied linguistics after feeling called to Bible translation. After some fieldwork, he moved into a training and consulting role for storying projects. A few years later he became the SIL Americas Area Storying and Orality Coordinator. And in 2020 became the SIL Oral Translation Services coordinator, giving direction to the organization’s involvement in Storying, OBT and other oral strategies. He currently serves as director of the Oral English Bible Translation (Spoken English Bible) and Oral Exegetical Tools project.

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As Oral Bible Translation continues to grow in popularity and influence, it’s helpful to keep learning more about its core component: internalization. So I’ve asked one of the few experts in the world on this subject to join me and walk us through what internalization is, how it works, and more. Her name is Katie Frost, and she was actually my teacher a long time ago for a workshop on oral drafting that I attended in Dallas. Katie is an Ethnoarts consultant with SIL, and a professor at Dallas International University. Her experience in both ethnoarts and linguistics/translation led to co-founding the Psalms: Layer by Layer project as part of pursuing how these disciplines intersect in biblical Hebrew poetry. She’s done fieldwork in the Netherlands and the Middle East, and is married to Josh who also serves in Bible translation. And they have a baby girl.

See Katie’s presentations and handouts on Non-Narrative Internalization and Preparing for and Facilitating Internalization.

Kris Toler's thesis on internalization can be downloaded here.

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The Archive: https://brandfolder.com/portals/thearchive

https://tools.bible/

https://bibletranslationcompetencies.org/

https://www.sebts.edu/news-and-events/headlines/2022/12/announcing-the-new-caskey-center-for-biblical-text-and-translation/

Journal of Translation

KTOT: https://paratext.org/download/download-paratext-extras/

Psalm 136 in Hebrew: https://youtu.be/C8ZIJ2fmnMw

More news at MAP.

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No English translation of the Bible has had more influence on the world than the King James Version. But have you read its preface? A lot of people haven’t because for years it has usually been left out of printings of the KJV. Our guest in this episode, Josh Barzon, wants to make sure more people listen to what these legendary translators had to say, so he’s written a book called The Forgotten Preface which aims to shed more light on this overlooked historical document. What did these men actually believe about inspiration, preservation, and translation?

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We continue and conclude the interview with Jon, the creator of copy.church. 

Before we get into the rest of the interview I want to make a few comments. As I have more conversations with people around the world about the issue of freely giving gospel ministry and the stance that I hold that ministry should be supported, not sold, I’ve run into a few common threads. The first is that people–even world-class intelligent scholars, have no biblical arguments for disagreeing with me. Everyone has pragmatic or emotional arguments, but so far no one has any biblical arguments. And this, I suspect, is perhaps because there are none. We’re letting our thinking about selling ministry be driven by the world rather than Scripture.

Second, when people hear me talk about these things, many seem unable to listen to what I’m saying. They assume that what I’m saying is that all people who engage in ministry should never receive money and should be dying of poverty. So let me say again: I believe gospel ministry should be supported, not sold. It’s a very simple distinction that for some reason people often refuse to hear, and then assume something totally irrelevant to the discussion.

Third, I’d like to suggest that it’s not a very serious argument to simply dismiss the example of Jesus and Paul as irrelevant and non-prescriptive to the believers today. This is another thing I’ve run into. If you want to say that Jesus’ command to freely give in Matthew 10 has zero implications for present day ministry, you have to give some serious reasons for why that’s a serious hermeneutic. And if you are still convinced that Jesus and Paul’s examples have no bearing on your life and the church today, I’d encourage you to at least figure out where in Scripture we find guardrails for money and ministry. If there are no guardrails in the Bible regarding these things, then we have no answer to the prosperity preachers. It’s important to be able to show why it’s unbiblical to sell prayers for people or charge money for admission to a church worship service. Obviously there are no direct commands in Scripture regarding these things, so you would have to base these convictions off biblical principles. I would strongly suggest that it would be pretty sad and disgraceful if we as the Church end up with no way to scripturally condemn the selling of prayers or the selling of baptism, for example. If we can’t condemn such basic abuses, then we are not actually paying attention to the very fabric and spirit of God’s Word. Yet this is precisely where everyone I have talked to so far who disagrees with a biblical prohibition of selling ministry ends up. That is, they are unable to tell me from Scripture why it’s not ok to charge someone money for a baptism.

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We’ve talked about copyright on this podcast already, but we still haven’t taken a meticulous look at the way mainstream Bible translations are licensed, what the specific limitations are, and how different translations compare to each other in this area. This episode will be a real eye-opener for many of you, so make sure you’re sitting down. We’re going to be talking to the creator of a website called copy.church, which seeks to point people to the simple truth that it’s wrong to limit access to the Word of God. He’s been thinking about and studying these things for years, and I think what he has to say is extremely important. 

Jon is the founder of Gracious Tech, a mission-focused app development ministry. He first got interested in missions while travelling in South-East Asia and realizing the dire need for the gospel there. He promptly committed his life to mission work and completed an MDiv in preparation. While he initially thought he'd be putting his IT skills to the side, he soon realized how advantageous it would be to have apps for sharing the Gospel and aiding mission work.

During his first term of mission overseas, he worked on an app for sharing Bible stories using plain Scripture. It was almost finished when he realized the licenses of almost all Bible translations don't permit sharing plain scripture, and instead must be accompanied by other commentary. Not knowing much about copyright or how to go about seeking permission, the project was put on hold for many years.

Jon later founded Gracious Tech and now commits most of his time to developing apps for mission. He currently lives in Sydney, Australia with his wife and two young daughters.

Please consider helping spread Jon's website copy.church.

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Many people ask me what they might need to become a BT consultant. In this podcast we'll walk through all the details of what you'll be need to measure up to if you want to serve the BT movement in this way. Here's a public listing of these competencies: https://bibletranslationcompetencies.org/consultant-competencies/

workingfortheword.com | my books | twitter | music | Hebrew | academic articles | facebook | contact | download all episodes for offline

workingfortheword.com | my books | twitter | music | Hebrew | academic articles | facebook | contact | download all episodes for offline

workingfortheword.com | my books | twitter | music | Hebrew | academic articles | facebook | contact | download all episodes for offline

workingfortheword.com | my books | twitter | music | Hebrew | academic articles | facebook | contact | download all episodes for offline

First, on my website workingfortheword.com I’ve added a resource page for people interested in finding out more about translation or who want to grow as a consultant in training, etc. It’s still a work in progress, and I’m sure some of you will have recommendations of things that would be helpful to add to it, including things I’ve mentioned in the past on this podcast and forgot to include. If you do, feel free to email me at workingfortheword@gmail.com. And if you’ve been following this podcast for a while, you’ll know that I’m especially interested in free, open access resources. What I’m doing with this page is providing a curated list of things I personally have read and recommend for your professional development or if you just have a casual interest in BT.  Obviously there are many more works on BT out there, and many more tools, but I personally don’t find all of them useful or helpful. So go ahead and check it out and see if there’s anything on there that looks interesting. I hope it can serve the BT movement.

Links mentioned:

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the meaning of everything

Internalization: A Key Ingredient in Achieving Naturalness in an Oral Translation

My series in Spanish on the textual criticism of the Old Testament

freehebrew.online

freegreek.online

Interview on the Bible in India

Bible Translation Training and Development Community of Practice

Quality in Translation Exploratory Symposium

Multilingual Assessment Tool

November News on MAP

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workingfortheword.com | my books | twitter | music | Hebrew | academic articles | facebook | contact | download all episodes for offline

My parents played a big part in inspiring Mark and Gloria Zook to go into Bible translation. This is the Ee-taow story about their ministry in PNG.

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