This week, I came across an article celebrating that for the first time ever, the New Testament had been fully translated into a language; for the first time ever, a people would be able to read the New Testament in their native language. In 2026.
It was only in 1875 that Christian missionaries first encountered the Notsi (pronounced NO-chee) speakers of Papua New Guinea’s Island Region, one of the 838 spoken languages of that nation. When more concerted efforts to share the gospel of Jesus with them began in 1911, they used Kuanua as a kind of common language between them. Kuanua is the language of the Tolai people, with which the missionaries had a longer connection. And in a way, it became a kind of “church language” for the Notsi people.
While some Notsi tribes adopted Kuanua as their own language when they adopted Christianity, others only used it for parts of the church services. For many, this meant they could sing hymns in Kuanua but not understand the scripture read to them in that language or the preaching spoken in it.
In the 1980’s, a pair of Wycliffe Bible translators developed a writing system for the Notsi language that used the Roman alphabet. But even now that a bible was possible, the villagers did not see the point. They had English bibles and bibles in Tok Pisin, a kind of English pidgin sometimes spoken in the area. They may not understand those languages very well, but they had also been told their whole lives their language wasn’t a real language because it wasn’t widely recognized and that their culture wasn’t important.
As the translation missionaries employed the Christian Notsi in the translation work, they began to see for themselves value in a native-language bible. They can now understand sermons, sing, and pray in their own native language — they did not pray in their native language before!
One translator remarked: “Before, my language was just talking to people orally. But now I can see that my language has so much value that we even have to worry about the spelling, like in English, and we have to write it correctly.”
Those who spent much of the last year studying the history of the bible and translation with me on Sunday mornings may find some parallels here to pieces of those stories. I notice resonance between the way this translation has standardized Notsi and the way the King James Version did the same for English. I sense familiarity between the disconnected languages of worship and life here and in the spark that prompted translations of the bible from Latin to English… or earlier, from Greek to Latin… or earlier, from Hebrew to Greek. I also feel common vibrations between the way these Christians found their faith rekindled when encountering the scriptures in their native language and the way that their (and our) forbears in history did the same.
The Spirit continues to move in and among us, closing the gap between us and the God who loves us so.
Thanks be to God.
Pastor Michael