The Bible is Preserved in Japanese

It's actually いさぎよし, and according to my trusty Classical Japanese-Modern Japanese dictionary, it means きよらか in modern Japanese. If you must, you can look that up here: Jisho.org: Japanese Dictionary. But come on man, get with the program and learn classical Japanese. All other languages are inferior. The Japanese are God's chosen people.

 

A German Bible would be okay to preach from if it were a German Motoyaku. (However, I have no evidence that Luther knew Japanese.) Otherwise, the preacher must have the Motoyaku on the pulpit there, so his message will have power.

No, at that point the church would desperately need someone who could teach them classical Japanese. Otherwise, there's no way they could get the true Word of God. I suppose someone could translate from the Motoyaku into German. Hey, wait, we have two German ladies working on our M.A. in Bible Translation in our seminary. (This is actually true.) I could teach them classical Japanese easy, and they could do that translation and be a great spiritual help to their country. After all, the Germans are in far greater need of a German Motoyaku, than some ignorant, worthless tribe in South America, Papua New Guinea, or Indonesia need a Bible in their own language.

 

Thank you for the kind words.

 

Always good to hear of good missionaries. To be serious for a brief moment, PNG has a great need for Bible translators. I know of a people group of about 3000 there with five villages, and most of the people are believers already, but they lack a Bible.

Maybe someone reading this named John could catch the burden!

 

Now, as to the question of original language inspiration, I have read that the Motoyaku was translated from the KJV with reference to the Greek and German Bibles. If that is so, then would not the authority for the Motyaku rest in the original language, the English KJV? What a ridiculous assertion. If the Motoyaku is inspired and inerrant, then that is where the authority rests, not in the original language. For that matter, someone show me the original manuscripts of the KJV. The translators in their various "companies" must have handwritten various manuscripts as they worked. So where are those manuscripts? They must not exist! So it is foolish to say that the authority rests in the original of the Motoyaku, the KJV.

In fact the Motoyaku corrects the KJV. Let me show you how that works. In Acts 1:11, the KJV says, "This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven." However, the Motoyaku says, またきたらん。Notice the ん morpheme there. (A morpheme is a small sound with meaning, like =ed or -ing in English.) This morpheme signals possibility or doubt, as in "Jesus may come." Consider the exchatalogical implications!!! They are amazing!

Someone may object that in any translation, authority rests in the original language document, called the source document in translation theory. So the Hebrew and Greek Bibles should take precedence over the English, and then the English should take precedence over the Japanese Bible. Not so! A wonderful postmodern scholar, a fantastic philosopher from the fabled land of France, so powerful in war, with the name Jacques Derrida, teaches us differently, His philosophy of deconstructionism tells us that there is no truth (which we disagree with), but that we must tear everything down that we thought was true, and rebuild. Therefore in his translation theory, the target text (the Motoyaku in this case) takes precedence over the original languages. Awesome! So our translation is authoritative over the original KJV!!

 

Praise the Lord! Glad to hear that.

 

So, maybe I should change my ministry and make Motoyaku Onlyism the complete focus of my ministry. All those years in Japan seeking to win Japanese souls to Christ and disciple them, train Japanese preachers in the Word of God, and plant churches now seem a distant memory. Should I instead have spent all of my time on the Bible version issue? Tell me what you think. Surely the cause of Christ would have been better served by standing up for the true Bible rather than doing all that evangelism, don't you think?

I have sometimes said, "The Bible is a sword, so it does not need defending. You fight with a sword, you don't defend it." Was I wrong to say that? Tell me what you think.

 

Wow, that's heavy, as we used to say in the 1960's.

 

Okay, I'm done here. For the lurker:
1. I believe that the original mss are inspired of God, and copies are inspired to the exact extent that they represent the originals. (This is a very important nuance.)
2. I led a team to translate the NT into Japanese from the TR, the "Lifeline Japanese NT." Probably 3 ministries are going to pass out portions at the Tokyo Olympics next year.
3. The Motoyaku NT is actually a poor translation and was soon eclipsed.
4. Translations cannot be inerrant. They rely on a human element that depends on God's providence and the leading of the Holy Spirit. They are not miraculous. A miracle would be necessary for a translation to be inerrant, and I've never heard of that happening, though I've read dozens of books on translation.

 

Yesterday I got an email from a young person asking about the Japanese New Testament translated by Nathan Brown, a very interesting Baptist missionary, with a Japanese named Kawakatsu. The young person heard that it was from the TR, but I was able to tell him it was not, just as the Motoyaku was not. Interestingly enough, you can actually buy a reprint of this very rare translation on Amazon. The only Japanese NT from a TR (Stephanus) was by Pastor Nagai, the Nagai Yaku. But it was in very difficult classical Japanese like the Motoyaku.

The cover of Brown's translation says, "From the Oldest Existing Greek Manuscripts." Thus, our new Japanese NT translation is the very first in modern, colloquial Japanese from a TR (Scrivener). I find it a delicious irony that when I gave a bad review on the book telling us how to translate by H. D. Williams of the Dean Burgon Society, he told people they shouldn't trust our translation. But that means that a DBS stalwart recommended that people ministering in Japan use a version from critical texts. As they say nowadays, "Haters gonna hate."