Posted on 03/30/2016 10:18:36 PM PDT by UnwashedPeasant
Most likely due to the languages being obscure, as the article mentions. It’s hard to imagine there would be many such languages in the Middle East these days, but perhaps there are still some pockets of people there with no Bible in their own language, and even no written language to this point. Or maybe due to the need for so much secrecy, the report that this happened in the Middle East ended up being wrong.
Thanks for your comments. I couldn’t help but think it would be so much safer for those involved to just fly those native-language speakers to another country, the USA or England perhaps, and do the translation there. Wouldn’t that be possible?
I’m not sure. It seems that typically missionaries doing this sort of translation work today are going to very remote areas of the earth, to work with people that don’t have much contact with the modern world. I’ve read several books on missionaries doing this work in remote areas of Colombia and Papua New Guinea. (Both missionaries to Colombia were kidnapped in separate incidents (I believe by FARC), and one, Chet Bitterman, was killed. The book about him is called “Called to Die” and goes into detail on his training in linguistics.) I also heard a missionary couple to a similarly remote Indonesian island speak at a church once. The husband spoke of first going to the remote area by helicopter, the only means of getting there, and staying near the helicopter when it landed in the jungle, not being sure at first if the native people he saw would be friendly or not. Once he believed they were, the helicopter left him and he stayed for a visit of a couple of weeks, if I recall correctly. He and his family eventually lived there with the native people.
All in all, the missionaries doing translation work in these cases had linguistics and basic survival training, and the native peoples had no written languages. To go about learning the languages and putting them in written form, you have to think it would be necessary to live among the people, given how complex language and culture are. Typically, too, it seems the missionaries start schools, and overall, their arrival with the Gospel, and also the modern world (missionaries often act as “doctors” to the native peoples), profoundly affects the native community. The missionary living with them will be able to learn from experience, observe things, and have some understanding of what’s going on, and how to properly understand the language and culture so the Bible can be properly translated. Taking a few people out of that community and bringing them to America, or England, would seem to be disruptive to native communities, and taking people away from the native community also doesn’t sound like a good way to do something so complex as studying one of these languages and translating back and forth with English or another major language.
As I said, I was wondering if perhaps these murders didn’t take place in the Middle East, but in one of these much more remote locations. But there are many minor languages throughout the Middle East. I was just reading this article from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East#Languages
It says there are many smaller Iranian and Turkish languages. Perhaps the missionaries were doing that sort of work. I wonder if typically the people in these communities speak only these “smaller” languages, or if they also have learned more major languages in use in their countries. Going by what’s been reported, it sounds likely that the missionaries weren’t working with the most remote groups (since there were Muslims close by to act as they did), and they might not have been Western missionaries, either, but natives to the country. If that’s the case, they likely worked best staying right with the native people.
Here’s Wycliffe’s web page on where they work. They don’t specifically mention the Middle East:
https://www.wycliffe.org/about/where
And I just found this from the CBN web site:
Bruce Smith, president of the organization, told Fox News that the work simply cannot be done in the relative safety of the U.S.
“The simple answer is that the Church prefers to do translation where the people are,” Smith told Fox News in a statement.
“Even when tragedy strikes, as in this case, the testimony of Christ is loud and clear,” Smith said. “Yes, there is a tremendous cost. But as Tertullian, an early Church father, said – the blood of martyrs are the seeds of the church.”
Thanks again for your explanation. I’m sure it is very tedious work for someone to learn all the details of a new language in a remote place. God surely has to be with them to help.
I still don’t understand the reason for Smith’s statement: “...that the work simply cannot be done in the relative safety of the U.S.” He really doesn’t explain why it cannot be done, just that the “Church prefers” to do it on location.
Truthfully, it seems more complicated to send someone in there for years to learn the language and culture instead of picking out two or three bright native speakers, taking them to the US or England, and teaching them English. Then have them work on the translation...all done in safety of a Western country. Well, those are my thoughts anyway. Jesus said some would be martyred, but He most likely wouldn’t mind using a safer route if possible and in God’s will. Even the Apostle Paul avoided death several times by escaping with help from friends.
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