What is your heart language?
Tamil? Mandarin? Swahili? Bahasa Indonesian? Portuguese? Spanish? English? Korean? Thai? Tagalog?
The Year 4s started our term off with a week of studying the lives of Tyndale, Newton and Wycliffe. We looked at when they were born, why they were famous, where and how they died and much more. This was a great way for us to gain appreciation for the reason behind the names of our Houses. We quickly realised the importance of Tyndale and Wycliffe’s work in translating the Bible into the common English language, at a time when the Catholic Church required all religious assemblies to take place in Latin, a language no one understood. We discovered that they literally gave their lives for you and I to be able to read and meditate on the Word of God in our own language.
We also hosted Mr Brian Geytenbeek to come in and speak to the students as well. He is the 91 year old grandfather of some of our students at Rehoboth. He is still working on translating dictionaries and sections of the Bible into the language. Mr Geytenbeek has spent many years of his life, along with his late wife, working on Bible Translation amongst indigenous communities. They started in New South Wales and then went to Darwin for a number of years before settling near Port Hedland to work on the Nyangumarta language. We were inspired by a modern day translator, which led us to ask more questions about the current state of Bible translation in the world.
The students were then given the homework task of finding out the history behind the Bible in their family’s first language. The following day, we began compiling a list.
| Student | Language | Year of Translation | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amelia | Dutch | 1526 | Translated from German |
| Amelia | Malaysian | 1824 | (Grandma's family) |
| Luke | Afrikaans | 1933 | S J duToit (Translator) |
| Winston | South Korea | 1911 | First portions 1884 |
| Jacob | Chinese | 1822 | |
| Ceana and Shaun | Tamil | 1728 | |
| Elsa, Izaara and Joseph | Malayalam (Indian) | Unsure | Phillipose Rambun |
| Isabella | Tagalog | 1905 | |
| Daniel | Amharic | 1808-1818 | |
| Mr Taylor | Portuguese (Brazilian) | 1628 | Not published until 1748 |
This exercise gave us an even greater appreciation for the men and women in Church History who have worked laboriously to translate the scriptures into our first language.
This led one of our students, Luke van Vuuren, to create a whole presentation about the Bibles in his home. He brought in his first children’s Bible that he received as a child. It was his mum’s Bible that she received when she was baptised. His dad’s bible, with a bookmark in the Book of Corinthians, where his dad was up to. Then he shared his dad’s love of proclaiming scriptures, his mum’s love of singing hymns in Afrikaans and his interview with his grandparents about their love of the Bible, their most treasured possession that they brought over from South Africa.
When Shaun studied about the translation into Tamil, he came across a quote from 1808 where the speakers of the Tamil language in India cried out to the missionaries… “We don’t want bread or water, we want the Word of God!”
Now as we read the Bible as a class, we think a lot more about the value of the Bible and the faithful efforts of many, so that we may read and understand the gospel in our heart language.
So what about you? What is your language? When was the Bible translated into your heart language?
Please email our class at peter.taylor@rehoboth.wa.edu.au to tell us about the Bible in your language. We would love to keep learning and adding to our list.
Soli Deo Gloria.
Wycliffe Bible Translators: Good News in Anyone’s Language – Wycliffe Australia
