The  birth  of  the  Gospel  in  the  Chukchi  language

“The Gospel of Luke has been translated into the Chukchi language. The translation team includes experts and native speakers from the indigenous people group. Their purpose is to make sure that the translation is clear and intelligible to readers, and what is even more important, that the proper meaning, power, and spirit is conveyed by the text.”

These words were spoken on the local TV newsbroadcast in Anadyr, the capital of Chukotka. But these simple words of a short TV report do not give us the full picture of what strenuous creative efforts and what intellectual agony the task demanded. It does not show how many months and years first the translation and then the revision of a relatively small text of the Gospel of Luke actually required.

“We were fortunate to visit the very spot where several thousand years ago Abraham may have stood looking at the place that God chose for him to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac,” one of the participants of the study tour to Israel exclaimed emotionally. The trip was specially organized for IBT’s Bible translators from the Caucasus by the Jerusalem Center for Bible Translators. Each of these translators already had serious experience in Bible translation work. Some of them had translated quite a few books of the Bible, to say nothing of the annual training seminars, workshops, and tons of literature they read… All of that was an important school indeed. But only a school, whereas the study trip to Israel was described by one of the participants as “a university for Bible translators!”

In Altai historical epics, we frequently come across the following plot: people who have been enslaved and are being driven into a foreign land hang a cradle with a baby on a tree branch in the hope that someone will find and raise their child. Does this sound similar to a well-known story from the Bible?

At the Institute for Bible Translation we are always reflecting upon the importance of translating the Bible into people’s “heart language”. But what do we usually think of when we speak about one’s heart language? The first idea that comes to mind is that this is the language that a person speaks in his or her daily life, the language that is the easiest and most natural one for conveying meaning to other people. It is interesting that the more we talk with representatives of different people groups and cultures who are working with IBT in Bible translation or Scripture engagement, the more this seemingly obvious picture becomes blurred and loses its defined contours. Surprisingly so! It seems more likely that the concept of “heart language” goes beyond the language itself and involves the whole cultural worldview and the layer of deepest emotions and childhood or even genetic memories...

In this newsletter we would like to share with you a fascinating story, which truly happened in one of our Muslim projects. We will not name this people group explicitly, so that the lives of our protagonists would not be endangered. Right now we have two translators in this project, let us call them Eve and Joseph (not their real names). But it was not always like this. Many years ago Eve was the only translator. She devoted 15 years of her life to Bible translation, though she is not a Christian. There are no known Christians among the representatives of her people group. Not even a single one. Like the majority of her kinspeople, she is from a Muslim background. She is a journalist and a good specialist in her mother tongue.

Probably any nation or people group, or at least the majority of them, have their heroic epics, but only a few of them can claim that their national epic is rooted in Biblical history. One of those few is the Kyrgyz people. An IBT Kyrgyz translator shares what he finds in common between the Kyrgyz epic story and the Bible. “The Kyrgyz epic is the largest in the world and we have much pride in it. It is called “Manas”. I’ve come to the conclusion that some storylines in Manas can be traced back to Bible plots. For example...

When the Apostle Paul came to preach about Jesus and the resurrection in Athens, he was brought to the Areopagus, since “all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new” (Acts 17:21). By preaching in the Areopagus, Paul humbly implemented the idea of approaching people where they actually are, not where we as Christians would like them to be. People who are just seeking to hear something new are not necessarily seeking God, and there may in fact be just a few in a crowd who are truly ready to hear God. Nonetheless, Paul was not afraid of speaking in vain. He was simply doing the Lord’s work, and it was up to the Lord to do all the rest. There is no doubt that Paul was the most successful missionary among the Apostles.This principle of reaching people where they are was the foundation of the IBT seminar on Scripture Engagement in summer 2015...

If we take a look at the history of the Bashkir or Bashkort people (a Turkic people numbering over 1 million native speakers of the language, mostly in central Russia), we can see that what the Bashkirs themselves think about their roots is sometimes contradictory, with a mix of facts and legends. Some Bashkirs are convinced that the first mention of them as a people is found in the records of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who called their ancestors Argippeans, that is, “people who live at the foot of the mountains”. Others are more cautious and say that the ethnonym “Bashkort” first appeared only in Arab-Persian chronicles in the Middle Ages...

One of the most recent IBT publications is the Gospel of John in Nenets together with an audio recording. The story of this publication is a striking example of how life in Christ inspires the establishment of links with people who may feel alienated due to their different cultural background, language or social position. Such relationships are, after all, the first fruits of the coming of God's Kingdom, where human barriers are irrelevant...

When the members of the Yakut team came to the IBT Moscow office for the audio recording of Psalms, it was not at all an easy task for them. Our translator Sargylana suffered from problems with her voice, while the well-known Yakut poet Mikhail Dyachkovsky, who lives in Moscow, came to the IBT office to do the audio recording with a broken arm. Still, together they managed to do excellent work, and the Psalms were audio recorded in two versions...