Working for the Word - a Bible translation podcast

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

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

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

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

ChatGPT is considered by some to be the biggest technological revolution since the iPhone. In this episode we take it for a spin to see what it knows about Bible translation and test the limits of its expertise regarding more challenging biblical studies. 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. workingfortheword.com | my books | twitter | music | Hebrew | academic articles | facebook | contact | download all episodes for offline

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

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

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

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