When Karen Roach first heard the Bible in Jamaican Patois, an English-based creole she grew up speaking, she couldn’t help but laugh.
“The reason why you laugh is, one, due to the best way it’s said and, two, since it touches your heart—it jogs my memory of home,” Roach said. She felt like a light-weight on a dimmer switch had been slid to its highest setting.
Roach, who works for Wycliffe Bible Translators in London, grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in St. Ann, Jamaica, where she attended schools that stressed speaking English. Like most Jamaicans, Roach spoke Patois (also referred to as Jamaican) at home and was taught “what you do within the yard, you don’t do abroad.” So when she first heard of a Bible translation for Patois, she dismissed it, arguing that Patois wasn’t an actual language but a slang utilized by locals.
But after watching the Jesus film dubbed in Patois last 12 months, she found herself moved. While on a visit to Jamaica in December 2022, she got her hands on a Jamaican New Testament—which she struggled to read since it uses a unique alphabet—and an audio Bible to take heed to. “I’ve been to Bible college, done a level in theology, but there have been certain things that Jesus said which [weren’t] clear in English,” Roach said. “But after I heard it in Patois, I assumed, Wow, that is interesting.”
Over within the Philippines, Jorge de Ramos also heard laughter after he asked someone to read from the Taglish translation of the Bible at a Christmas party. (Taglish is a mixed language combining Tagalog and English.) “It’s something not irreverent, but it surely really departed from the very, very formal-sounding reading of Scripture,” said De Ramos, pastor of Capitol City Baptist Church in Quezon City.
While Taglish is heard on the streets of Metro Manila, the Bible is predominantly read in either Tagalog or English. Many pastors found it disrespectful to make use of such a colloquial language as Taglish to specific the Word of God, and initially De Ramos also struggled to interrupt away from deeply ingrained ideas that the languages must not be mixed.
But “it’s either me insisting on being a purist or adapting to the best way the audience would love to listen to it,” he said. Today, he preaches from the pulpit in Taglish and uses the Taglish translation in Scripture readings.
Despite the vast historical and cultural differences between Patois and Taglish, each challenged the establishment around which translations must be utilized in the church. They faced a flurry of backlash, including claims that the translations were irreverent, when the Bible Society of the West Indies released the Jamaican New Testament in 2012 and the Philippine Bible Society released the New Testament Pinoy Version in 2018.
Though these two translations have now gained greater acceptance, big questions remain. What is the “correct” language to make use of for a Bible, and who gets to attract that line? Even in languages deemed acceptable, are there words too vulgar to be utilized in the Bible? Are there times when a new edition strays too removed from the unique text?
Various forms of those questions have been fiercely debated by Christians throughout church history, they usually carry great spiritual importance. Translations can change how people view God, whom they think God’s Word is for, and whether or not they even pick up a Bible in the primary place. Oftentimes, culture, history, class, and other biases color how we view the acceptability of a certain language. Yet perhaps what’s most vital is whether or not God’s Word speaks to listeners in a way that changes their lives.
Long before Christians debated whether to translate the Bible into Jamaican Patois, they were debating whether to translate it into English. The Latin Vulgate Bible (which was translated in A.D. 405) was the usual in Western Christianity for greater than 1,000 years, with the result that only the religious elites had access to the Word of God.
In the late 14th century, Oxford professor John Wycliffe and his colleagues translated the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into the vernacular English of his day because “it helpeth Christian men to review the Gospel in that tongue wherein they know best Christ’s sentence.”
The church considered the interpretation a heresy, and King Richard II banned Wycliffe’s teachings in 1382. Wycliffe’s actions were considered so atrocious that, 40 years after his death, officials dug up his bones and burned them.
A century later, William Tyndale had an analogous vision to bring the Scriptures to the common people, creating the primary English Bible translated from the unique Hebrew and Greek. He managed to translate the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament before he was arrested and executed for heresy under King Henry VIII. Later, though, Henry VIII converted to Protestantism, created the Church of England, and permitted the English translation of the Bible.
Today, there are an estimated 900 English translations and paraphrases of the Bible (including incomplete translations). This includes formal equivalence Bibles that seek to stay closely to the words and grammar of the unique text (comparable to the King James Version) in addition to dynamic equivalent versions that try to speak the thought of the unique text (just like the New Living Translation).
Then there are paraphrases, like The Message and the Living Bible, that are “concerned concerning the accuracy in translating thoughts, to specific something the best way the creator would in the event that they had been writing in English,” Kenneth N. Taylor, the creator of the Living Bible, explained to CT in 1979.
This implies that while paraphrases are more readable, additionally they introduce the adapter’s own theological leanings and commentary into the text, causing consternation amongst some Christians. After Taylor finished the Living Bible—a project he began to assist his children understand Bible readings during family devotions—he struggled to search out a publisher willing to tackle his manuscript. He decided to start out his own publishing company, aptly named Tyndale House Publishers. The Living Bible became a bestseller when it was published in 1971 and went on to sell 40 million copies.
Some paraphrases make much more direct changes to the text, comparable to adding modern slang, anachronisms, and familiar names for people and places to match the knowledge of readers. Freddy Boswell, former executive director of the Bible translation group SIL International, called these paraphrases “adaptive retellings.”
They use various local dialects, comparable to in The Aussie Bible (“The angel said to her, ‘G’day Mary. You are a fairly special sheila. God has his eye on you.’ ”). They also include Clarence Jordan’s Cotton Patch Gospel from the Nineteen Sixties, “a contemporary translation with a Southern accent, fervent, earthy, wealthy in humor,” in accordance with his publisher. It modernizes the names of individuals and locations (to US cities within the South) and changes the Jews and Gentiles to “whites and Negros,” with Jesus dying by lynching.
Jordan claimed his goal was to reframe the events of the Scripture so “plain folks” within the South could higher understand them. “[Translations] have left us stranded in some faraway land within the long-distance past,” Jordan said. “We must have it are available in our tongue and our time. We wish to be participants in the religion, not merely spectators.”
Confusion may result if a version isn’t explicitly clear that it will not be an “accurate translation,” Boswell writes, but he sees the aim of adaptive retellings as “introducing readers and hearers to the ‘broad strokes message’ of the Good News. It is a bridge to further reading, learning, and growth.”
Speakers of most languages don’t have the posh to select from a whole bunch of Bible translations. Translation groups are working to make the Bible accessible to everyone on this planet, but with limited funds and resources, they should determine which languages to deal with.
With the evolving nature of language and the massive variety of multilingual populations, this may get tricky. Peter Brassington, a digital Scripture engagement consultant with SIL, said the major query is “Can people understand [the Bible] if we don’t translate it?”
Translators also think through questions like “Is it a language that may still be utilized in the subsequent generation? How bilingual or multilingual is that this people group? How do people view the language?” And they dig deeper to determine why a certain language could also be looked down on, Brassington said. “Is it simply because we’ve been telling you that for the previous couple of generations and also you believed us eventually? Or is it that, yes, you may have decided there are different functions, different places where you ought to use the language?”
Image: Illustration by Sergey Isakov
This is usually the case with pidgins (languages formed to speak between two different languages), creoles (pidgins spoken as a primary language), mixed languages (languages that arise inside a bilingual population), and native languages that get brushed off by one other major regional language.
In Jamaica, the thought of making a Patois Bible translation was unthinkable for a lot of when Faith Linton, a board member of the Bible Society of the West Indies, first suggested it within the late Nineteen Sixties. The language—a mixture of English with West African, Taíno (a Caribbean language), Irish, Spanish, and other influences—developed so that individuals who were enslaved and brought over from Africa to work on the island’s sugar plantations could communicate with their masters. After the emancipation of Jamaica’s enslaved people in 1838, they sought to advance socially by speaking English.
Once Jamaica gained independence in 1962, Jamaicans felt it essential to “prove to Britain that we were in a position to manage, and one among the ways wherein we could prove that … is to talk English,” said Bertram Gayle, an Anglican priest in Kingston and a translator for the Jamaican New Testament. Also, there existed “negative attitudes that were … inculcated in our people toward the Jamaican language, the language of the slaves, the enslaved people, or anything African.”
So while Patois remains to be spoken in the house and informal settings by greater than 4 million people around the globe, English is Jamaica’s official language and is utilized in schools, the federal government, and the church.
“English is the aspirational language,” said Ruth Smith-Sutherland, executive director of Wycliffe Bible Translators Caribbean. “That’s what they wish to hear in church.” But this implies many individuals are unable to completely understand what they hear on Sunday mornings or read of their KJV Bibles.
Linton continued to push for a Patois version, and translation work finally began in 1993 as attitudes toward the language softened. When Gayle began working on the Jamaican New Testament in 2008, he was told that it had been 60 percent accomplished. Yet he found the fabric of such poor quality that the translators decided to start out from scratch.
They faced several other challenges. Jamaican remains to be primarily a spoken language, so few people could read the Jamaican alphabet utilized in the interpretation. When the team finished the New Testament three years later, the group Faith Comes By Hearing helped them produce an audio Bible. Gayle noted that more people take heed to the interpretation than read it.
The project also faced pushback from Jamaicans who considered translating the Bible into “broken English” a waste of time. Jamaican prime minister Bruce Golding said in 2008 that the interpretation “signifies an admission to failure” of Jamaicans to properly teach English.
The Jamaica Gleaner printed letters to the editor complaining concerning the translation. “I imagined a Sunday or Saturday morning where there may be pure laughter, while the Word of God is being read!” wrote Christine Ade-Gold. “The pastor and congregation would go home feeling belly pains from laughter, with nothing spiritual gained. This will not be only disrespectful to God, but additionally a mockery of God.” Others felt that Patois lacked the vocabulary to mine the deep spiritual truths within the Bible.
“So we proved them incorrect,” Gayle said. “Any language can communicate anything; if something pops up in a specific culture, people find ways of identifying it and referring to it.”
The translation team used phrases to elucidate concepts not utilized in Jamaican. For instance, the manger where Jesus was born became “the box that the animals eat out of.” They also used the fundamental word structures in Jamaican to create easy-to-understand recent expressions.
In the last decade because the Jamaican New Testament’s publication, more Jamaicans are seeing Patois as a language to take pride in. Smith-Sutherland noted that the international popularity of reggae music and native writers like Louise Bennett-Coverley contributed to this alteration. “Thanks to our artists, they’ve torn down this barrier,” Smith-Sutherland said. “So it’s not in our churches that that happened. It happened in our dance halls.”
Today, the Patois translation is utilized in some churches (including all the island’s Methodist churches), heard on the radio, and skim on special occasions comparable to Pentecost or Jamaican emancipation and independence celebrations. The Bible Society of the West Indies has sold 10,000 copies of the Jamaican New Testament, and an app with the audio Bible has been downloaded 50,000 times. While most Anglican churches use only English of their services, Gayle works to include Patois into sermons and Scripture reading at his church.
Ironically, he’s found that churches that use English more heavily of their worship services—which are inclined to have congregants from a better socioeconomic class—are more accepting of the Jamaican Bible than rural churches that use more Jamaican. His theory is that because those in rural areas view English as their path to social mobility, they hold tightly to reading Scripture in that aspirational language. But the more English-speaking churches don’t have anything to lose when it comes to upward mobility by utilizing the Jamaican Bible.
While Patois is tied to Jamaica’s history of enslavement, over within the Philippines, Taglish is a recent development birthed out of American colonialism and growing pride within the national language, Filipino (a dialect of Tagalog). Unlike Jamaican, Taglish will not be a creole or pidgin but a mixed language, as speakers of Taglish speak each English and Tagalog.
The Philippines is home to greater than 120 languages, with Filipino spoken most generally. (Filipino and Tagalog can be used interchangeably in this text.) Spain’s 300-year rule of the country resulted in Spanish words also being sprinkled into the vernacular, in addition to Spanish surnames and a Spanish-based creole.
During the 50 years of US colonialism within the Philippines, Americans arrange a public school system and imported American culture, democracy, and the English language. Even after the Philippines gained independence in 1946, English was the language utilized in the federal government, media, and education.
But as people began protesting after former president Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972, “the language of the expression for freedom was Filipino,” said Anicia Del Corro, translation consultant for the Philippine Bible Society (PBS). The use of Tagalog grew, although the educated class was still trained in English.
Thus the 2 languages began to combine, creating Taglish. Del Corro noticed the language taking off across the turn of the millennium, bolstered by texting and the web, which tore down the barrier between how language was spoken and the way it was written. It became especially distinguished in Metro Manila, a region made up of 16 cities and 13 million people.
Beginning in 2007, PBS began holding workshops to coach translators for the Taglish Bible translation (formally called the Pinoy Version). Researching this recent language, convincing the PBS board to greenlight the project, and translating the New Testament from its original Greek took 11 years. The entire Bible with the Old Testament was accomplished in June 2023.
Since the New Testament Pinoy Version was first released on the 2018 Manila International Book Fair, Christians (who make up no less than 90 percent of the country’s population) have debated the interpretation endlessly on social media, through blogs, and in person. At an open-mic session hosted by PBS soon after the version’s launch, attendees decried that the Taglish words utilized in the Bible were fitter for “the ‘tambays’ within the ‘kanto’ [bystanders in the streets] quite than … serious readers of God’s Holy Word,” in accordance with Rei Lemuel Crizaldo, a author and theologian who attended the event.
A fresh wave of critiques appeared after a Catholic bookstore posted an internet ad for the interpretation in 2020. “Very liberal word decisions can result in the text not being taken seriously,” wrote one commenter. Others said the Bible lost its “richness and contextual meaning” when translated into Taglish.
Yet the Pinoy Version also had its supporters, including Catholic bishop Broderick Pabillo, a vital figure within the heavily Catholic country. He defended the interpretation in an article, saying, “We cannot say the Pinoy version is disrespectful of the word of God as we cannot say that our Taglish is disrespectful.” He sees a necessity for young people in Metro Manila to get occupied with the Bible and “feel that the Bible speaks to them … of their day-to-day language.”
The New Testament Pinoy Version’s sales numbers confirmed that need: Within the primary 12 months, PBS sold 100,000 copies, essentially the most it has ever sold for a recent translation. To date, PBS has distributed greater than 500,000 New Testaments and 72,000 copies of the finished Bible.
The 68-year-old Pabillo says that in the course of the liturgy, he sticks with traditional Bible translations, but in talks or Bible studies, he uses the Pinoy Version. At first, his parishioners were surprised. But after he explained how the interpretation was done and began using it recurrently, they got here to simply accept it and now find the Bible easier to grasp, he says.
Image: Illustration by Sergey Isakov
Crizaldo, who can also be the theological commission coordinator of the World Evangelical Alliance, was surprised to see the backlash against the interpretation. He thought the growing acceptance of Taglish in literature, including his own books, would have softened people’s stances against the language. “Young people loved it,” he recalled. “But it was the pastors who vehemently reacted that it disrespects the Word of God since the young individuals are laughing while reading it.”
Crizaldo found that the Pinoy Version translated not only the words but additionally the emotions within the culture. “It’s not only chatting with the mind, but it surely’s attempting to capture the force of the emotions,” he said. “And I believe that’s the explanation why it connects so well with people, especially the younger people.”
Language will be divided into low-register (common or strange) and high-register (former or proper). This categorization needed to be considered by translators of each the Taglish and Patois New Testaments. When Del Corro first met together with her young team of translators, she stressed that the Bible wouldn’t include vulgar or tabloid language or vocabulary connected to a specific subsection of society (comparable to Swardspeak, a Taglish slang used inside the LGBT community).
Over in Jamaica, Smith-Sutherland noted the care translators took to make sure the Patois Bible could be appropriate in church settings. She said a few of the younger translators wanted to incorporate more street talk so the Bible could appeal to “a person on the road who ain’t reading no Bible.”
“I sympathize with that, and I’ll go halfway down the road with them,” Smith-Sutherland said. “But I pull them back after I say what we would like is something that can also be liturgical that will be read on a Sunday morning. So that’s the form of tightrope we walk.”
This too will not be a recent debate. Words that may make many a Christian blush are present in the unique Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible, said Andy Warren-Rothlin, global translation advisor at United Bible Societies. Most of those words seek advice from body parts, excrement, or sex. In the ninth century, Masoretic scribes put a note within the margin by several words including shagal (“to ravish” or “rape”) and hărā’îm (“excrement”), urging people to swap them out for euphemisms when reading the Bible aloud within the synagogue,
Warren-Rothlin noted.
English translations up to now century have also cleaned up words that Wycliffe had no problem using. A taunt from an Assyrian military figure toward Israelites in Isaiah 36:12 went from insulting them as men who “eat their turds, and drink the p— off their feet” to individuals who “eat their very own excrement and drink their very own urine” within the NIV.
“Our modern evangelical ideas concerning the use of language are rather more uptight than the unique biblical text itself,” Warren-Rothlin said. “The perspective [we’re] seeing it from is itself odd in the attitude of history.”
He noted that the prophets used very strong language when speaking concerning the ways Israel had strayed from God, and “famously Paul uses this word skubalon, which some people think meant something like s—” in Philippians 3:8 when comparing his former accomplishments to knowing Christ.
Warren-Rothlin believes the influence of the King James Version made Western evangelicals feel the Bible must be communicated in high-register language and “sound a bit posh.” As they went out as missionaries and Bible translators, they spread that concept to Christian communities they began, he noted.
While parts of the Bible just like the Psalms belong in an elevated language, he said, other parts just like the Gospels must be written in a traditional narrative register, and parts of Paul’s letters have “a really clearly low-register, very idiomatic spoken form of language.” Novels often have characters speaking in numerous registers to depict their place in society, “so why shouldn’t our Bible translations have that very same form of diversity?” Warren-Rothlin asked.
One creative translation Warren-Rothlin loves (“It does really wacky sorts of things, and yet it engages people”) is the German Volxbibel. It falls under the category of adaptive retelling; not only does it use low-register “street” language, but it surely also changes the Bible to incorporate anachronistic technology—Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a motorcycle and provides Peter the “PIN code” to the dominion.
Martin Dreyer, founding father of the youth outreach ministry Jesus Freaks, decided to put in writing the Volxbibel after realizing that the young people he worked with at a youth center in Cologne were completely unfamiliar with religious terms. When he asked them what they thought sin meant, one young man said a sinful weekend meant going partying and meeting girls. After telling them, “Jesus died on your sins,” Dreyer recalled them asking, “Why? He shouldn’t have done that for the fun times I had.”
So Dreyer, who himself got here from a punk-rock background, took the German Luther and Elberfelder Bibles and began to rewrite the scriptural text using words and concepts that the young people he worked with could grasp. The result was the Volxbibel, which Dreyer self-funded and published in 2005, with a canopy modeled after a pack of cigarettes and a warning that “reading can have radical unwanted effects.” It’s currently in its eighth edition (recent editions are created because the language changes).
Controversy erupted even before it was published. Hundreds of Christians signed petitions calling for its publisher, R. Brockhaus Verlag, to drop the book. The publishing house founded a separate subsidiary for the Volxbibel to avoid harming the remainder of its publications. Christliche Bücherstuben GmbH, a Christian bookstore chain related to the Brethren movement, doesn’t sell the Volxbibel since it believes the book speaks “obscenely and improperly” of God.
In an article, Michael Freitag of AEJ, an umbrella organization for Protestant youth in Germany, called the Volxbibel “a fairly scary and embarrassing elaboration—linguistically, theologically, and spiritually,” claiming that it tarnishes the Bible with “tasteless alternative of words,” misrepresents Jesus, and adds commentary into the Bible quite than allowing God’s Word to talk for itself.
At the peak of the protest, Dreyer said, he received about 600 messages a day concerning the Volxbibel. At one point, an elderly man interrupted his sermon at his church, stomped as much as the stage, and “gave me over to Satan.”
In defense of the profanities laced throughout the text (for example, as an alternative of sin, Dreyer uses a German phrase meaning “doing s— stuff”), Dreyer pointed to the unique language of the Bible. He noted that when Martin Luther translated Philippians 3:8 into German, he used the German word kot (“dung”), which was later modified to a word meaning “filth.”
In later versions of the Volxbibel, Dreyer decided to take out nearly all of the profanities after receiving a note from a mother who said her daughter had called her dinner “s—” after reading the word within the Volxbibel. The one instance where he kept it was the verse in Philippians.
Dreyer modernized the stories within the Bible to suit its Twenty first-century readers.In the Volxbibel, parables are given modern equivalents, with the parable of the sower replaced with recent software (the seed) being planted in several types of hardware (the soil). Jesus is born in a parking lot, his Dad gave him the “joystick for this world,” and Christians are called to be like a refrigerator for this world (since in Jesus’ time, salt had a preservative function).
“I said to the critics, ‘Are we here to save lots of the language or save people?’ ” Dreyer said. “When just one person is reached through this crazy Bible version, in the event that they are suddenly occupied with this belief, finding hope, and beginning to get involved with God, the entire work is value it.”
And the interpretation has had that effect, Dreyer said. Many people send him encouraging emails and letters, including a woman who said she was a part of the goth scene and didn’t see any reason to maintain living. When a suicide attempt left her within the hospital, a nurse gave her the Volxbibel, which she read cover to cover. Afterward she prayed and located a church. “Her whole life is now stuffed with light and hope,” Dreyer said.
To keep its language current, Dreyer pasted the Volxbibel right into a Google document where anyone could make suggestions for edits, making a crowdsourced Bible. Dreyer and his team undergo the suggestions to find out which they plan to maintain, and before the subsequent edition is published, two or three Bible scholars comb through the text to ensure it’s faithful enough to the unique. This too caused consternation amongst Christians, because skilled Bible translators weren’t involved.
The media buzz around this controversial Bible caused the book to hit No. 19 on the secular bestseller list in Germany. In total, the Volxbibel has sold 350,000 copies. It’s opened up doors that Dreyer never imagined, including opportunities to talk in schools and at rock festivals.
Dreyer believes that the Volxbibel is approach to introduce people to the Word of God and that as they grow of their faith and wish to know God more, they will pick up more traditional Bible translations.
“It’s definitely a low-level bridge for nonreligious people to get into the message of the Bible,” Dreyer explained. “I believe my calling is to get people out of this nonbelieving area over this bridge to the church and realm of belief. It’s an [evangelistic] flier for individuals who won’t read some other fliers.”
Many Bible translators see the roles that several types of retellings, paraphrases, and translations can play to make God’s Word as clear and approachable to as many individuals as possible. Like with the Patois or Taglish translations, having a Bible within the language that one lives and thinks in could make a profound spiritual difference.
“My own personal belief is that Bible translation in [one’s] natural language … results in quicker transformation than for those who proceed to inform people to read the Bible within the language that really they aren’t competent in,” said Marlon Winedt, a worldwide translation advisor with United Bible Societies and a consultant for the Jamaican Old Testament. “It doesn’t speak to them in the identical way their mother tongue speaks to them.”
Warren-Rothlin noted that although in his skilled life he may be very strict about translation accuracy, he also enjoys seeing the creative ways Christians are reaching nonbelievers. At the top of the day, his ultimate goal is to get people to interact with Jesus.
“I’m not going to be picky about every detail about whether it’s true to the source text. What I care about is that individuals engage with it, read it, watch or take heed to it, they usually get to know Jesus,” he said. “If you’ve done that, I’m glad.”
Angela Lu Fulton is CT’s Southeast Asia editor.
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