Not long ago I posted on Facebook, asking for prayer as we were translating the Epistle of Jude, since it is a hard book to understand. A friend of mine astutely asked what is was that made it hard.

I answered that there are several factors: 1) Jude uses a lot of rare words that don’t occur in very many other places so it is more difficult to know what they mean; 2) his writing is compact and dense and when we translate for non-believers or new believers, we need to unpack these things (especially the genitives [“of” phrases]); 3) he uses a lot of metaphors and sometimes those can’t be meaningfully translated literally, so we either have to switch them to similes or somehow make clear what kind of comparison is being made; 4) Jude assumes his readers have a lot of Old Testament background knowledge and even knowledge of an apocryphal book, 1 Enoch, and a story from the Assumption of Moses, which most Roma won’t have; and finally, 5) there are a few tricky spots where the Greek manuscripts do not agree and it is hard to know which words were original.

Of necessity, this slows down our translation progress since it takes longer to translate and edit difficult verses. As an example, last Thursday morning when I was consulting with the Chergash language team, it took us an hour and a half to edit 17 verses of Jude, but under an hour to edit 30 verses of 1 John.

John uses simple language; 1 John is the book you often learn to read first in Greek class. Translating 1 John goes pretty quickly compared to Jude.

Thank you for your continued prayers. In our work to translate the rest of the New Testament in three of the Roma languages (Arli, Gurbet and Chergash), I have finished my work on Matthew, Titus, Philemon and Jude and we are now translating 1-3 John, with Mark and Acts to follow.