Keith Kingsley: This translation of the entire Bible is a milestone, figuratively and literally. My observations come from 14 years in Argentina, through reading and from conversations with Willi [Horst]. A culture doesn’t move from being oral to literate in one generation. Literacy has both positive and negative impacts, depending on your perspective. Older people had lots of Scripture in their minds. We observed that being lost in our time in the Chaco. On the other hand, young people don’t have to memorize; books place the material right there in front of them and preserve it for them. This changes the consciousness of a person. It makes people more analytical, a positive quality in Western culture. They stand back from the immediacy of a situation and become reflective, which removes one from living in a world that is peopled with spiritual reality. Orality conditions people to live in a context of immediacy. The world is whole, and perception is intuitive in an oral culture. I regret losing the oral reality and the immediacy of spiritual reality that comes with it, even as I rejoice in the preservation of a language that the translated Scriptures helps to ensure.
Also with the printed Bible [as a concrete item instead of internal knowledge], it can become a totem, or a fetish, especially for those who don’t read. Rather than its content, the physical book itself becomes a power object. Some people will burn a page from the Bible and breathe in the “sacred smoke” for healing. It seems strange to me, but I don’t want to minimize it.
One has to ask, has new media reduced literacy in North America? Are we post-literate? Is post-literacy different from orality?
Gretchen Kingsley: Oral tradition is diminished with literacy. Going to school removes youth from Toba culture and language. It’s not the printing of the Bible that did this. It was already in process. With older people dying, that culture is being lost. Bible stories and portions of Scripture, printed more than 40 years ago, marked the first appearance of the Qom language in written form. The new, completed Qom Bible is a significant step in getting the language solidified in a written form. We believe it is going to help the young people maintain interest in their own language. Hopefully, not just in reading it, but speaking it. In our 14 years among the Qom, we could see the language slowly disappearing, because of school and television and other language forms. So this is a way to preserve the beauty of their God-given culture.
We would often tell our Qom friends that Western culture brings bad elements into your culture and good elements. The Bible helps us to discern the bad and the good, so we can live more faithfully.
Some of my best Qom women friends were able to read in Spanish and had learned to read their New Testaments in Qom as well. I would say that they were the strongest women in their communities. This is not completely true because I know some really strong elderly women who never read anything at all. But, these women who can read in their own language are part of the new generation of leaders in the church, the traditional women leaders. This helps them understand their importance as women and as preservers of their God-given culture.
I was also remembering, when we would lead Bible studies, we would always work at reading together the text in Qom, and trying to memorize in Qom as well. There would be some, even including pastors who would say, “No, we can’t read in our language. We can only read the Bible in Spanish.” During the last year we were there in a Bible study, we suggested, “We are all going to read the Lord’s Prayer in Qom together at the same time.” A pastor whom we knew to be resistant to trying to read in his language, started reading along, and exclaimed, “I can read my language!” The next time we went to his church, we heard him read from the Qom Bible. That was so exciting! I can imagine that this will happen in many places.
Byrdalene Horst: I knew a number of people who learned texts by memory in Spanish from a missionary. They were able to learn to read then. I don’t see that kind of memorization any more, the way that the early Christians did. They were the ones that brought the gospel and started meeting together with their families and friends. This was the basis for the churches that formed then.
I heard the testimonies of a number of people, who in a dream were given the revelation that they should read a Bible text. One man didn’t know what The Bible was. He went to people who knew the Bible and said, “Can you show me what this means?” They found the text and read it to him. He memorized the text. He gradually figured out what the words were. A number of people have learned to read in this way.
Having the whole Bible brings esteem, especially since this translation was done by a team of Qom translators making the decisions themselves. They were at the computer keyboard. They would compare different versions in Spanish, and then what was already in the previously translated Qom Bible. They would talk about how each word was best expressed in their language – that’s why it took 13 years to get this done. They were doing it themselves with the counsel and coordination of Luis Acosta and Richard Friesen, but neither of these men was in the room all the time with the translators. [Richard Friesen was working with this translation when he died in Formosa, Argentina, in 2010.]
It was challenging for the Qom translators, but also really exciting. So this translation is really their work; that’s part of the pride of this text.
