Third World Experiencing Bible Shortage

Bible translators printed 25 million copies of Scripture in African and Asian languages last year but said that it was still not enough to keep up with the explosive growth of Christianity in the developing world.

In Africa, some converts are buying the Bible on the black market, according to John Dendor-Samuel, who spent 22 years in Africa helping to translate the Bible into African tongues. The Christian population there is growing by “leaps and bounds,” the World Council of Churches reported.

“At least in one case, I know a person who paid the equivalent of 40 British pounds (about $55) for a copy of the Bible,” said Dendor-Samuel, vice president of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Dallas.

One of Several Groups

The institute is one of several church organizations in the United States dedicated to translating the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek texts into other languages.

The institute has 2,000 linguists and 3,500 supporting personnel who work on translating the Bible into 200 African languages, Dendor-Samuel said.

John Erickson of the United Bible Societies, an umbrella organization of 100 Bible societies around the world, said his group supplied 7.7 million Bibles, both full texts and separate New Testaments, last year to Christians in countries from Papua New Guinea and Indonesia to India.

The biggest challenge may come in China, where authorities have recently permitted the publication of Bibles and other Christian literature for the first time since the communist takeover in 1949.

“We could have printed and distributed twice as many Bibles worldwide last year, if we had sufficient resources--more money and manpower,” Erickson said. “We spent $26 million (from the) 1984 budget, but we needed another $7 million just to carry out all specific programs.”

The Bible societies face financial difficulties partly because churches and Bible groups in many developing countries cannot pay for the Bibles, “even though they are offered at highly subsidized prices,” Erickson said.

The United Bible Societies donated millions of Bibles last year in half a dozen African countries, he pointed out. Each Bible costs $3 to $4 to print and distribute.

In Africa, the financial difficulty is compounded by translating the Bible into languages that do not have alphabets.

“The translators have to go into a tribal village in Africa and live there with the natives four or five years before starting to devise phonetic signs and establishing grammatical rules,” Dendor-Samuel said. “Only then can we think about translating the Bible into that language.”

“Even if there was a written language, translating the Bible is not an easy task because of cultural differences and difficulties in finding corresponding words or ideas to convey the meaning of the Scripture,” said John Lindskoog of Wycliffe Bible Translators in Huntington Beach, Calif.

For example, Lindskoog said, a phrase like “take Jesus into your heart” might have to be translated into “receive Jesus in your liver” for an African tribe.

Translators often encounter similar difficulties with native Indians in South America, the aborigines of Australia and the people in Papua New Guinea, Lindskoog said.

Wycliffe’s research shows 5,445 languages in use around the world. So far, translators have prepared Bibles in 235 languages and work is proceeding in 750 languages, Lindskoog said.

“We have a long way to go to complete our work, making the world’s best-selling book accessible to all people,” Lindskoog said.