Global Hermeneutics? - International Voices in Biblical Studies ...

The Global Context and Its Consequences for
Old Testament Translation
ALOO MOJOLA
INTRODUCTION
The first translation of the Bible in any language is always a momentous
experience. It gives people a sense of God finally speaking in their own language,
the language of their heart and mind. It makes the Scriptures available and
accessible and makes it possible for people to hear the God of Abraham and of our
Lord Jesus Christ speak to them in their own mother tongues and through the prism
of their own cultures and traditions.
In the Western world the process of translation, production and distribution of
the Scriptures in the native languages of Europe is usually taken for granted. It is
easily forgotten that it was the sacrifices of Bible translators such as Jerome,
Wycliffe, Tyndale, Martin Luther and others that lay at the root of the
transformation of the church, especially in the movement that has come to be
referred to as the Protestant Reformation and the Christian revivals that were
associated with it. The new translations that resulted in the various national and
ethnic languages of Europe encapsulated the new Protestant spirit and defended the
right and need of every people to understand the Scriptures in their own language.
Translation democratised access to the Christian Scriptures and broke the
monopoly of the priest and the missionary. It opened the way for fresh
interpretations of the Holy Scriptures by individuals and communities that
challenged the status quo. It contributed to the development of a new hermeneutic
with its own dynamics.
It is common knowledge that the Judeo-Christian Holy Scriptures were
originally written in the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek tongues. Without the work of
translators the Holy Scriptures would be virtually a closed book for the majority of
those who accept them and receive them as the authoritative and inspired Word of
God. No wonder translation has always been at the cutting edge of the Christian
mission. Translation created and opened the possibilities for cross-cultural and
cross-religious communication and dialogue to take place. Translation made it
possible for the Gospel to cross new frontiers and open new mission fields.
Some have interpreted this as an aspect of the incarnation, a process that is
facilitated when the Gospel is allowed to use the local idiom, or understood through
the thought forms of the local culture, or seen through the prism or eyes of the
vernacular. This process is sometimes referred to as the inculturation or the
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