The accusation: “Western missions agencies Wycliffe, Frontiers and SIL
are producing Bibles that remove Father,
Son and Son of God because these
terms are offensive to Muslims.” This has also morphed into a new accusation:
“Bible translators are replacing God the Father with ‘allah’.”
The truth: Those words are not removed. In certain contexts,
certain familial terms in Arabic may implicitly mean that God the Father had
sex with Mary, and Jesus the Son was the offspring of intercourse. That
‘implicit information’ is not there in the Greek and Hebrew words, so care must
be used to choose the right Arabic words that don’t imply that God and Mary had
sexual intercourse. A translation that implies that they did would be an
inaccurate translation. Wycliffe and SIL are 100% committed to orthodox
Christianity, belief in the Trinity, belief in God the Father and Jesus His
Son, and are always fully committed to translating those words
accurately into whatever languages with which they are working. Regarding the
use of the word ‘allah’, ‘allah’ is simply the Arabic word that means ‘god’.
It is an Arabic word, not an Islamic word. Almost any religion in Arabic is
going to use the word ‘allah’ for ‘god’, not just Islam, just as in English
many religions use the word ‘god’.
Bible translators have to make
decisions all the time on how best to translate words, phrases, and whole
discourses, and these decisions are usually made in consultation with the
community and a number of experts and consultants, not in isolation. These
decisions range from types of boats, to names of God, from how a language can
talk about loaves of bread, to the bread of life; and the processes for
making these decisions are generally the same. Concerned Christians pick up
on some of these themes, and unfortunately the discussion moves to the
character of the translators, rather than a discussion about translation
methodology.
The repercussion of this is that
some in the Christian community are questioning whether or not to continue
supporting Wycliffe missionaries. One of our friends commented on our Facebook
discussion that her family “lives in a Muslim
country where the word for ‘god’ or God is also Allah. A supporting church many
years ago saw this and actually retracted their support, sending us a tract
about how ‘Allah has no son.’” Regardless,
our friend was able to explain to the people of their village who ‘Allah’ (God)
really is, the creator God who sent his Son to die for them.
But now language communities
that are waiting to hear God’s Word in their own language for the first time
will have to wait even longer, as missionaries and projects struggle to
maintain necessary support levels for their work. It is also heartbreaking that
it is fellow Christians, and not the secular world, who are sensationalising
this issue, rather than giving Bible translators the benefit of the doubt and
opportunity to explain their decisions. One such website that is posting article after article on
this topic is dailyjot.com. I decided to
write an email to the author of the site, and I’ve reproduced the email below
for you to read.
Hi Bill,
A friend pointed me to your site to get my opinion about
your articles on the growing controversy surrounding some of Wycliffe’s Bible
translations. I myself am a Wycliffe translator, working in East Africa, so I’m
familiar with the type of issues surrounding translation, although not
the specific issues regarding translating in a Middle Eastern context.
So here are a few of my thoughts on the matter.
This situation reminds me a bit of C.S. Lewis’ The Lion,
the Witch, & the Wardrobe, where Peter and Susan are confused by Lucy’s
comments about there being a world inside the wardrobe, and the Professor’s
response to them is something like, Is Lucy known for being a liar? Since she’s
not, perhaps give her the benefit of the doubt, based on her character until
you find out more about it.
Translation is one of those issues that is incredibly
complex, and yet touches something that is very close to all of us – language.
It must consider socio-linguistic issues, as well as purely linguistic ones.
The translator must be able to differentiate style, focus, register,
collocation, impact, genre, figures of speech, idioms,
and various other parts of discourse of both the source language and target
language – parts of discourse in which most language-speakers are
subconsciously competent, but of which are consciously unaware.
Wycliffe, as an organisation of people translating the Bible
into languages in need, has been doing so for some 70 years, and as you said, “The reputation of Wycliffe up until now has not been in question
(The Daily Jot: Wycliffe response raises more questions about the name of
God).”
Based on such a character reference, I
would hope that the Christian community’s first response to a controversy
surrounding Wycliffe’s translation methods would be one of patience and grace,
giving the 70-year old organisation the benefit of the doubt. Does Lucy often
lie? Does she often make up stories that aren’t true? And in this case, are
Wycliffe translators prone to manipulating translations? Do Wycliffe
translators often try to appease other religions at the expense of the gospel
of the only true God, Yahweh? Are they a
wicked, degenerate people, trying to subvert the glory of God and replace the
gospel with a false, hell-bound gospel? Or perhaps could there be another
explanation?
Based on what I know of most Wycliffe
translators, they are generally people who have seen the desperation of the
Great Commission, and have given up their way of life and chance to ‘get ahead’
so that less fortunate people can come to know Jesus, and how He wants to save
them from their own sins.
If it sounds incredibly strange that such
people would replace Yahweh with the god of Islam, or any other religion, then
perhaps there’s more to it. But instead of giving Wycliffe translators the
benefit of the doubt and engaging in reasonable, inquisitive discussions to
understand more about the issues, people are up in arms, crying foul, and
implying that Bible translators have “succumbed to the religion of the
antichrist.”
Other than this being inflammatory and
unhelpful, the sad repercussion is that many of Wycliffe’s supporters are
hearing incomplete and uniformed fragments of the issues, and having second
thoughts about where they want to put their support. Ultimately this means that
people all over the world who are still waiting for God’s Word in their
language, will have to wait longer.
