Washington Post: Found Through Translation (HT: Denis Hancock)
Most Christians search for the meaning of the New Testament. But for Alpheaus Zobule, the quest wasn't remotely metaphorical.
Growing up on a South Pacific island where life stops twice daily for church, he knew Christianity — or thought he did. Yet he hadn't read the Bible; few people on his wave-whipped island had. They speak an oral language, Lungga, making them largely reliant on Methodist missionaries and lightly trained preachers to translate their faith.
Until recently, that is. Driven to make the Bible available to the 5,000-plus people who live on Ranonga in the Solomon Islands, the 37-year-old son of subsistence farmers came to the United States, earned master's degrees in linguistics and theology and spent six years figuring out how to write down Lungga — all so he could translate the New Testament.
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Said Zobule: "In school, we'd be punished for speaking our own language. We had to speak English. It builds a thought in us that our languages were not good; it affected our identity. When people got this translation, they said: 'You mean our language is important? You mean we are important?' "
When the translated text was launched on Ranonga, Zobule recalled a pastor saying: "Now God has arrived in our culture."
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