24 books of the New Testament done!

 

This is so exciting! We have finished the final checks on 24 books of the New Testament. That means there are only 3 books left, and those are all in various stages of drafting, checking, and double-checking. We have also translated Ruth and Jonah from the Old Testament. We make audio recordings of the translated Scriptures and put them on solar-powered players. We have a phone app that contains the written text and the audio recordings. We translated the Jesus film and a gospel comic book for kids. And we have translated various literacy materials to help people learn how to read and write in Jita.

Please pray for us as we continue to translate God's Word for the Jita people.

"So what's it like to work from far away?"

Here's a little video of Magesa, Neema, and I checking the book of 1 Corinthians in the Jita language. We thank God for a very productive check. We had our share of challenges, of course: power outages, unreliable internet, neighbors coming over to say hi, roosters (you'd be surprised how loud roosters are on Zoom!) Sadly, Magesa missed one day of checking because his relative was very sick in the hospital. But by the grace of God we checked 9 chapters. Please keep praying for us as we translate God's Word into the Jita language.

Stumbling blocks and Old Testament quotations

Today we started the second round of checks on the book of 1 Corinthians in the Jita language. It is such a joy to work with Magesa and Neema to make God's Word accurate, clear, and natural for the Jita people. We spent some time discussing 1 Corinthians 1:19 where Paul quotes Isaiah 29:14 about the foolishness of thinking we are smarter than God. Then we looked at 1 Corinthians 1:23 about how the message of Christ crucified is a stumbling block to Jews. We discussed the meaning of the phrase, we looked at other passages where the same idea is communicated, and we found the best phrase in Jita to capture the meaning. Then we discussed lots of others issues like spelling, grammar, key terms, consistency, footnotes, etc.

Please pray for us as we continue checking 1 Corinthians!