When I
was a small child and into my teens, I remember curling up with captivating
books that told stories of far-off places, with descriptive, enticing, moving
language that got my heart and my head thrumming, because understanding came to
me through emotion. At the same time, my beautiful sister would be curled up
with a fat volume of the Encyclopedia, and her heart would be just as
enraptured as mine. My husband is this way too! I have been told tales of how
he'd be found taking toys apart, piece by piece, and not out of
destructiveness, like a mother might assume, but because they were his favorite toys and he needed to understand
them…
For some of my dearest friends, passion comes not from simply feeling something deeply, but from understanding how it works, or from
"knowing the facts” and the history. That kind of passion gets
renewed by playing, by learning and doing, tinkering or
studying. For that reason, today I wanted to post this interactive timeline
about Bible translation! The sheer breadth of this task---how long it’s
been going on, and how much is left to be done---blow me away. But it is also
comforting to see how far it has come already, and how we now live in a society
that cannot remember a time when we were the culture that had no access to the Word in our tongue.
One day
it will be that way for them all. Amen.
"You
say it is heresy to speak of the Holy Scriptures in English. You call me a
heretic because I have translated the Bible into the common tongue of the
people. Do you know whom you blaspheme? Did not the Holy Ghost give the Word of
God at first in the mother-tongue of the nations to whom it was
addressed?”
-(John Wycliffe, quoted by David Fountain in John Wycliffe: The Dawn of the
Reformation, pp. 45-47)
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