Copy-Pasting Bilingual Bible verses en masse: Slaying a Time Waster

 Increasingly, we will find ourselves doing Bible studies, preparing ppt slides etc in different languages.

This eats up precious word ministry time, and typically the re-formatting needed after you've pasted the verse onto your page or slide is an additional time-chomper.

This is the best approach I've found so far:

(I can now produce a nicely-formatted doc like this in about 25 mins which is amazing and so much quicker than it was in the years BC (Before Chat GPT)

So, you have to give ChatGPT very clear instructions:

Using a free account on Bible.com, and then by using this bilingual online Bible platform, https://www.bible.com/en-GB/bible/113/PSA.100.NIVUK?parallel=503 please create a table for me with Sorani Kurdish (KSS) verses on the left and English (NIVUK) verses on the right:
AI should be able to paste the Sorani Kurdish verses into a table.

Ephesians 5: 25-28 

Galatians 6: 15-16 

Galatians 3: 27-28 

Matthew 27: 50-51 

Mark 7: 18-23 

1 Timothy 2: 5 

 Acts 20: 7 

1 Timothy 5: 17-18 

James 5: 16 

1 Corinthians 11: 23-29 

Revelation 21: 1-4

Strangely, this didn't work. But it did do half the grunt work following my earlier instructions:

Using this bilingual online Bible platform, https://www.bible.com/en-GB/bible/113/PSA.100.NIVUK?parallel=503 please create a table for me with English NIVUK verses on the left, and Sorani Kurdish verses on the right: Ephesians 5: 25-28 Galatians 6: 15-16 Galatians 3: 27-28 Matthew 27: 50-51 Mark 7: 18-23 1 Timothy 2: 5 Acts 20: 7 1 Timothy 5: 17-18 James 5: 16 1 Corinthians 11: 23-29 Revelation 21: 1-4

I was then able to copy-paste the nice table AI created for me and then I got Chat GPT to produce a list of links that would navigate me straight to the verses I was looking for.

By creating a free account on Bible.com, you can access parallel translations, including Sorani Kurdish alongside English. This feature allows you to view the verses side by side.​ Please give me links to verses which will allow me to copy-paste verse in the Sorani Kurdish (KSS) translation: Ephesians 5: 25-28 Galatians 6: 15-16 Galatians 3: 27-28 Matthew 27: 50-51 Mark 7: 18-23 1 Timothy 2: 5 Acts 20: 7 1 Timothy 5: 17-18 James 5: 16 1 Corinthians 11: 23-29 Revelation 21: 1-4

Then I put the data into a Google Doc, landscape, font size 14 for Kurdish and 12 for English. It's best to click on the Text Direction icon

then the Kurdish will display RTL. Landscape is best.

My finished product on Google Docs is here.

NB My spaces are odd, I admit. Mark 7: 18-23
But bear in mind that if you're using Arabic script, which goes RTL but LTR for numerals, that crucial space can get the chapter then the verse displaying correctly.

The Challenge of Ramadan

"I will be satisfied as with the richest of foods" Psalm 63:5

Dear Friends,

The month of fasting for many Muslim neighbours begins the evening of Friday 28th February. How can we speak kindly and saltily to our Muslim neighbours who will be fasting this month?

Of course, Jesus speaks against the abuse of fasting in Matthew 6 and this is a very powerful word to share with our friends who choose to fast. But there is a deeper issue: Westerners have been so conditioned to live for comfort that the idea of no food between sunset and sundown sounds almost outrageous. Job's comment (23:12) that he treasured God's word more than his daily bread needs to challenge us and recalibrate our appetites.

All this convinces me that the church in the West needs preachers who stand, as it were, in Ideological Istanbul: meaning that we need to understand both East and West and show how both cultures have strengths but also serious blindspots.

Our Western mindset means that we can be weirded out by our neighbours who do fast, which is such a strange instinct, given the positive view the Bible takes of fasting (rightly practised). We have been conditioned to think these people are not likely to want to hear about Jesus. My experience in recent years is that Muslims are now coming to the light of Christ in significant numbers. The challenge for us is: will we expect them to embrace all our Western norms or will we accept them as partners in Christ from whom we can actually learn a lot?

Philip Jenkins suggests that Ramadan had its origins in the season of Lent observed by the Eastern Christians. This explanation is contested, but nonetheless it is a reminder that Western Christians in today's age have moved a long way from their heritage, in which fasting definitely had a place.

What I highly recommend is having Psalm 63 written out, or on your phone. When you ask a shopkeeper if they're fasting during Ramadan, say that you have a short poem that you love to read during Ramadan. Read out to them Ps 63:1-5 (or the whole Psalm if there are no other customers!)

1 You, God, are my God,
    earnestly I seek you;
I thirst for you,
    my whole being longs for you,
in a dry and parched land
    where there is no water.

2 I have seen you in the sanctuary
    and beheld your power and your glory.
3 Because your love is better than life,
    my lips will glorify you.
4 I will praise you as long as I live,
    and in your name I will lift up my hands.
5 I will be satisfied as with the richest of foods;
    with singing lips my mouth will praise you.

As a follow-up, offer to ping it to them on Whatsapp in Urdu/Kurdish/Turkish or whatever is their mother tongue.
If you have time to explain, you can say in David's time the sanctuary was a tent containing the Ark of the Covenant. But when David's great descendant came, he was himself that sanctuary, the meeting place between God and Man. "I have seen you in Christ Jesus
and beheld your power and your glory"

Don't be afraid to pray out loud for your shopkeeper and his family:
"O Great God who made the Heavens and the Earth and all that is within them, I pray for Abdul-Rahman and his precious family. As they struggle to work in the shop and at home and study at school with no food to keep them going, I pray that they will be satisfied with you as with the richest of foods; would they celebrate all that you have done in history especially in sending 'Isa al Mesih'; would it be true of them that as the Holy Zebur says 'with singing lips their mouths will praise you.'
Amen.

Muslims do not sing in the mosque. They recite Arabic phrases in a mournful, submissive tone. But for believers in Christ singing is the fitting response to what God has done: we break forth in song because we have a great Saviour who left heaven for this broken world, to teach us a better way but also to open a way for us, through the curtain into the very presence of God, through giving his life as a sacrifice for us: "with singing lips my mouth will praise you."

Amen!

May the Lord make his face shine upon you this Ramadan,

Jeremy

PS I was saddened to enquire a while ago and find that there are virtually no booklets and no tracts addressing the big issue raised by Ramadan. Apart from Piper's A Hunger for God, the church does not publish or preach much about fasting. Neither does there seem to be a booklet we can give to our Muslim friends who face a very challenging month. But please comment and recommend any resources that may have more recently emerged.

Bible Gapfill exercises

Gapfill: a new way to sharpen your Bible-reading times!

Why not print off this NIV Titus text which has 50 gaps for you to fill in. I've also made one with more challenging gapfills, suitable for seminary-level students.

Often we concentrate better when our mind is 'active' rather than just us passively reading and 'ticking off the box'.

 And sometimes we learn most when we spot the difference between our imagined list of virtues and the actual ones God that breathed out: eg 'I wouldn't have guessed that being disciplined would be a necessary qualification for church leadership.' Or someone else will say after guessing wrongly: 'wow, I forgot to include hospitality as an absolute must for eldership; that's a reminder that God prizes a warm, welcoming spirit more than programme-orientated Westerners like me usually do'.

I made this exercise while preparing a sermon on Titus. It was a great way for me to get into the text. I thought about words which our congregation might be prone to overlook and blanked them out to push them to focus their attention on them!

Feel free to comment below if there are particular ways you benefited from this exercise.

Archaic hymns: Speaking in Tongues for the Reformed?

I've started with that provocative heading because I do think there's a key passage to direct our attention to. It's the section of 1 Corinthians dealing with speaking in incomprehensible tongues. And I think there's an irony that some Reformed churches fall into the same error as those wilder charismatic churches which practise glossolalia without interpretation, something Paul speaks against (1 Cor 14vv13,19)

The Corinthians clearly thought these utterances were a mark of higher spirituality, but Paul challenges their thinking. Unless there is interpretation, "you will be speaking into the air" (v9)

I have had concerns about this for years, but have felt prompted to blog on this subject because of a sizeable group of Iranians who've been coming to church. I want to take one line of a hymn as an example:

Many of us are familiar with the line in the classic Be Thou My Vision: ‘Nought be all else to me save that thou art’. If you asked your average churchgoer to explain what they're singing there, I think they'd struggle. In fact, I still don't know what exactly that line is saying!

Praise! is a hymnbook which has breathed new life into old hymns by modernising the language. They have rendered a valuable service to the church, especially since a quarter of century on from their revision work, British churches comprise far more non-native English speakers than before.

Imagine you're an Iranian with elementary English and you're glad that you have worked out some key words like 'holy', 'forgiveness', 'save' and 'Saviour'. Church is becoming more heart-warming to you. But then you're expected to understand that 'save' has this archaic meaning of 'except': 'Nought be all else to me save that thou art'.

Compare the modern Praise! version:

Lord, be my vision, supreme in my heart,

bid every rival give way and depart:

you my best thought in the day or the night,

waking or sleeping, your presence my light.

which is surely more understandable and therefore edifying in an intercultural church than

Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;

Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art;

Thou my best Thought, by day or by night,

Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.

Some older folks might be put out, especially if they have the older lyrics memorised. (I think service leaders can encourage them to retain those old versions in their minds, and cherish them-- and value the opportunity to sing these modernised words as a fresh perspective on the much-loved version we may have grown up singing, so that we can continue to sing them at home with renewed thoughtfulness and understanding.)

In this case, people are not actually holding to the original version, unless we sing the Gaelic original! But even when the argument is that we shouldn't 'tamper' with the original version, I would argue that we should seek to use what will most build up the body of Christ. And in the body of Christ, the stronger should serve the weaker, following the pattern of the great Son of Man who gave his life for others. There is something worrying if clinging to tradition leads us to sing something which Iranians, Ukrainians and many others will simply not grasp. 

On the Praise! website- search their dashboard to check out their versions- in Crown Him with Many Crowns they sensibly replace 'ineffably sublime' with 'in majesty sublime'. This small change brings us closer to understanding what we're singing. 

By way of conclusion, let's use Paul's plumb-line and hold up the words we use in church against it: "I will pray with the spirit, and I will also pray with my understanding" 1 Cor 14:15

Extra Notes:

a) I don't think thees and thous are the biggest problem. They can be explained. And so I wouldn't make a big deal about replacing the thees in And Can it Be. It is of course a wisdom call in the few cases where 'thee' leaves us with a rhyme and 'you' does not. You're then balancing better rhyme with clearer English 

b) Careful readers of Paul will see that archaic words don't contravene Paul's instructions if there is interpretation. In line with this principle, some churches put glosses for complex words in the margins. This is a way to raise the bar of people's understanding, rather than having to dumb everything down -an approach which witholds from the church the richer words of some quite complex hymns. But I think placing glosses in the margin is a poor substitute for singing in good, modern English- since it is the sung words and not the marginalia which gets embedded in our memories.

Starting Conversations with Muslim Shopkeepers

Some notes from a seminar in Glasgow (mp3 here):

'Where are you from?' is often an alienating question, because for one thing it can be a hard question to answer, and it can sound xenophobic. (I remember the guy I asked that question to at a petrol station kiosk and he replied 'Well, I used to live in Belgium, and I'm a Kurd who grew up in Syria and now I live in the UK')
Other approaches we discussed in this seminar include:

1. A better intro question might be 'We're terrible at learning other languages in Britain. What other languages do you speak?' Or make an educated guess- 'Do you speak some Urdu or Arabic?' [this already marks you out from xenophobes. People who hate Asians, for example, probably don't know their main language is called Urdu- his ethnographic knowledge barely stretches further than the abbreviated form of 'Pakistani'...]
   
2. Note whether they sell alcohol & pork. This will give an indication of how serious their Islam is. If they sell bacon sandwiches, we can point out we agree that all foods are clean, and as Jesus said the real issue is what comes out of our hearts.
3. Take an interest in their spices and ethnic food products. "I'd love to be able to cook a better curry!"...sometimes the wife would love to have a woman visit and learn from them how to cook.
4. Ask them to show you their favourite Kurdish/ Punjabi/ Turkish singer on YouTube.
5. If they're a parent, talking about bad influences at school is a good topic to bring up. Many Muslims are alarmed at what the LGBT lobby try to foist on young children, and they will respect you if you say you are very unhappy about how marriage is undermined in many schools and that the Bible does not support homosexual practice and transgender ideology. 
   
   
   

Can Kurds Understand Eachother Across Dialects?

Yes, and No...

I've just got back from Scotland and I had two very different experiences of the Kurmanji-Sorani divide. I had supper with a family from Erbil who speak Sorani and we had no problems talking in each other's dialects and understanding eachother.

Then I sat next to an Iranian Kurd in church who also speaks Sorani and he really struggled to understand basic things I was saying to him. He presumably has had little or no contact with Kurmanji speakers, whereas Sorani speakers from Erbil are so close to the Kurmanji territory (ie north-west of the Greater Zab river) that many of them can understand Kurmanji quite well. When I read out Psalm 67 with this family in Kurmanji, they seemed to follow it fine and gladly got out their phone to video the reading, evidently feeling this was very much 'their language' being spoken.

If you mention to Kurds the botched attempt to create a Kurdish Esperanto called 'Sormanji', they will likely be amused. It was always just a pipe-dream. Linguists sometimes point out that Sorani and Kurmanji are actually different languages, not just dialects. This is technically true, but there is so much overlap in terms of vocabulary that it does often feel like they are dialects rather than languages.

The Behdini spoken by about a quarter of the five million in Iraqi Kurdistan is a sub-dialect of Kurmanji, and it's generally closer to Sorani than the Kurmanji spoken by Kurds in Syria or Turkey.

Other realities worth noting are that often people who speak Behdini understand Sorani quite well, but the Sorani speakers don't understand Behdini so well. It's like Portuguese people understanding Spanish because it's the more widely-spoken language. And then there's the diaspora factor, where Kurds might be working together in barber shops and spending hours hearing the other dialect/language being spoken. Kurdish TV has also improved the mutual comprehension of different Kurdish groups: Rudaw and Kurdistan 24, for example, both switch unannounced between Sorani and Kurmanji broadcasting, so you end up hearing both.

And then there's the obvious issue of script. Turkish Kurds will almost certainly not be able to read the Arabic script, but in a spoken form it may well make quite good sense. Iraqi Kurds in theory should be able to copy with Kurdish written in Latin script, but in practice they often turn away from wirtten text and just find it too difficult. (They themselves likely write in 'Lazy Latînî' in text messages, but that doesn't mean they can happily read a poem or newspaper article in Latin script)

If you're wanting to share Scripture, remember that Psalm 23 or John 3:16 will quite likely make sense across dialects, but don't expect them to sit through an exposition of Romans if it's not in their dialect! 

Praying for the Asylum Crisis

Friends, 

We shd pray for our Prime Minister & the Home Office: "By the end of 2023, the Prime Minister has pledged to clear the backlog of 92,601 so-called 'legacy' cases which had been in the system as of the end of June last year." (Independent Newspaper) 

The costs are eye-watering: "Home Office spending on asylum in the year to June rose by £1.85billion, up from £2.12billion in 2021/22." (GB News) The asylum crisis is costing Britain £4 billion a year* [comparative annual UK figures: prisons £.5 billion, schools cost £106 billion]. As Christians, we should not be angry so much at footing this bill as taxpayers, but because able-bodied young people are left in limbo and unable to properly contribute to society, so that sparse public funds will not be able to go to those really in need of welfare.

"Lord, please would these precious people, made in your image, all 175,457 people waiting for an initial decision on their asylum claims, become productive members of UK society, or where their claims are judged spurious be speedily removed, so that they can help contribute to the welfare of their country of origin rather than being left in limbo, unable to do paid work and often left anxious and depressed. Help us as churches to help them integrate and learn English; and may we be enriched and challenged by the many beautiful things in their cultures, so that our churches more and more resemble the 'house of prayer for all nations' which our Lord Jesus died to create. And may many who observe the kindness of UK churches be pointed to the Lord Jesus' wonderful grace and become followers of Jesus. Amen"

Your brother in Christ,

Jeremy

* I assume this includes all costs, not least the hotel accommodation, but the GB News article doesn't clarify.