Wycliffe UK blog

Niffer Davey has been working as a translation consultant with a group of languages in Nigeria for the past five years. These languages have all been simultaneously translating the gospel of Luke – in each it’s the first book of the Bible to be translated.

But the translation has not just been a matter of words on a page; the Bible is being translated into the hearts of those involved in the translation, as Niffer (left) explains:

“Even though these men were chosen as translators by their communities, they always struggled to believe that they themselves could ever actually understand the Bible. They believed that it was too difficult, too spiritually complex and too mysterious.

But their spiritual lives have been changed by understanding that God wants to communicate with them! One of the team has decided they want to go to seminary, and learn to understand the Bible more. Another now regularly preaches in his mother tongue and holds Bible studies after church, as a way to engage more deeply with the text. The translators run twice-weekly literacy classes and are committed to doing the translation work and to engaging their community for no salary whatsoever!

Plenty of challenges remain, including engaging the whole community with what they have learnt.  But the changes that have already happened have been beyond all of our dreams!”

The project Niffer is involved with is called First Gospel. It supports a language community as they develop the gospel of Luke and the Jesus Film, as well as recorded Scripture and literacy resources, for the first time in their language. You can support projects like this through First Gospel.

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Tags: Bible translation, First Gospel

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 15th, 2011 at 12:00 am and is filed under Africa, People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.