‎Archbishop Desmond Tutu ended his public career this week at 79 years old. Steve Gumaer sent me this quote
"There's nothing more radical, nothing more revolutionary, nothing more subversive against injustice and oppression than the Bible. If you want to keep people subjugated, the last thing you place in their hands is a Bible."
Archbishop Tutu, September 2008.
Yes yes yes. But – are we helping people to interpret it, or are we reinforcing their fears that they are unable to do so? Have been hosting a discussion on this via my blog and the UK Biblefresh website.
See: naked Bible scholars: http://bit.ly/bIWR5y
and: Never mind the fish: http://bit.ly/bWEaG8
And we need to give them the Bible in a language they understand…
How many English translations are there? Speakers of 2,000 languages still don’t have a single word of Scripture.
The Afrikaans people in South Africa during the apartheid years have been portrayed as unjust and oppressive. Yet many contributed to and were involved in getting mother tongue Bibles into the hands of all South Africans.
I grew up in Kuruman, a town that was established in the centre of South Africa. This was where Robert Moffat, in 1857, completed the first translation of the Bible in 1500 years into an African language. Soon after translations into the other languages began to follow.