Theology in the Mother Tongue: Oral Bible Translation and Embodied Faith (Fausto Liriano) Ep. #216

Dru (00:00)
Can you have a Bible if it’s not ever written down? In this episode, I’m talk to Dr. Fausto Liriano, and he is a Bible translator. He’s a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, and he works on moving the Bible into indigenous languages through oral performance only. So it’s not ever written down. They just work with indigenous speakers in Guatemala and in the Philippines and other places.

in order to correctly ⁓ match what the Hebrew text and the New Testament Greek text are doing in those local indigenous languages. And then they are memorized, internalized and performed. He’s got lots of fascinating things to say about what the Bible is and how it functions in Central and South America and beyond and and about the oral features of the Bible, which we’ve talked about before on this podcast. Stay tuned.

Dru (00:52)
in your impression, what do people misunderstand about Latin American theology or just the idea that there is a Latin American theology apart from a North American theology?

Fausto Liriano (01:03)
Mm-hmm.

That’s a good question right there. I don’t think that we have a Latin American theology. That’s… Yeah, we have a lot of influence from North American and the North, as it is called, theology. And I don’t think that’s good because our reality is totally different than the reality and concerns.

Dru (01:11)
Good. I was hoping you were going to correct me on that.

Fausto Liriano (01:32)
that people have in the United States or in the North. I think it was with you that I was talking a few months ago about this whole integration of races and people from different backgrounds, black people and white people and indigenous people getting together into the same celebration like for the United States.

And people do whole books about that and they include that in their theology, but that’s not our reality ⁓ here. People just ⁓ worship together. That’s just one example of ⁓ the concerns that people have in the North that we don’t have ⁓ in the South. And at the same time, that’s a bit of a problem because even though

in the church community, people get together, it’s not the same reality outside. It’s like indigenous people get treated badly in all levels. in my context in Dominican Republic, in some places if you’re black or ⁓ mixed, some of a white and black person, you’re mistreated or you’re sidelined in some ways. If you can say that in…

So even though in the church it’s not the same reality outside, the reality is different, which is a beautiful picture of the kingdom of God inside of the church, but ⁓ I think we need to address that reality outside.

Dru (03:13)
It reminds me of ⁓ Paul’s letter to Philemon. It’s like, you can’t worship with Philemon on Saturday as your brother and then make him your slave Monday through Friday, right? It has to flow outside of the worship area of worship. So ⁓ you said there’s not a Latin American theology. ⁓ How would you cluster it or what would be the groups you would create to define

Like is there central, is it locational or is it ethnic? ⁓ I mean, cause Mexican is an ethnicity and a whole dialect of Spanish and another, and of course, even within Mexico, have the North is very different from the South, the East very different from the West. So how do you break up ⁓ theology in Central and South America?

Fausto Liriano (04:04)
Well, if we had a theology in Central, in Latin America in general, we would need a theology for different contexts. It’s like the Caribbean, we think in a different way, so the people of the South. Or you have Argentinian, my wife is from Argentina, they think in a more European way, but they have a touch of Latin ⁓ America. So if you talk about theology in our region,

Dru (04:16)
Mm.

Fausto Liriano (04:32)
we’ll be talking about different approach to theology. But I think there’s something that we should address that in Latin America, the Bible or the church is not touching, which is corruption. And I listened to someone in a podcast or an interview, it was an Italian ⁓ scholar of politics. He says the problem with Latin America is that besides that, Latin America is

Dru (04:35)
Right.

Hmm.

Fausto Liriano (05:02)
multiple realities is that when you’re talking Middle East or when you’re talking Asia, you’re talking about one issue or two issues. But when you’re talking Latin America, you’re talking about several issues and you don’t know where to start. And I think that something that is really, ⁓ I think the worst thing in our context is that corruption goes all the way through the,

Dru (05:15)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Fausto Liriano (05:30)
big stages in politics all the way down to the strata of our ⁓ society. And we don’t have a theology that address that. You have, for example, people are really, really just, I grew up Pentecostal and I say that we were ⁓ far right Pentecostals. There’s women sitting in one side, men sitting in the other side, dressing codes and all that. But you have to be straight.

Dru (05:33)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Fausto Liriano (06:00)
with the way you clothe yourself, but you can cross a red line, or you can cheat the ⁓ tax. ⁓ You don’t pay your tax, and that’s okay, because you’re a son of God. So we lack a theology for that, for discipleship, I would say, in our context. I don’t know if it makes sense.

Dru (06:12)
interesting.

Yeah, no,

that’s very interesting. In fact, I was talking to ⁓ a woman I used to work with who was a missionary to Kazakhstan. ⁓ we were just talking about, and I just said, hey, did you guys have a theology of bribery? when you would, in what situations you might be willing to bribe and what situations you wouldn’t be willing to bribe? And did you have a theological? And they said, yeah, actually it was one in the first year they were there because there’s bribery. If I remember correctly, she said, there’s kind of bribery everywhere you go.

every government office with the police officer, know, so, so you kind of had to have a system in place of when, when you would be willing to do that or not. ⁓ because it was a pressing issue, but I, you know, I worked in Columbia a lot and that was one of the areas and in some cases it still is where everybody in the government judges are afraid, you know, in the nineties judges are going to be murdered for any decision they make. So they were

hoods, they’re anonymous judges and police officers go to anonymous, but then that allows for more anonymous violence and ⁓ then it spins cycles to the point where you’re not sure if the president themself is part of the corruption cycle or not. ⁓ If you were to say, you say you don’t have a theology of it, where would you start a theology of that?

Fausto Liriano (07:40)
Well, that’s big question. I don’t know if that is easy. ⁓ So we don’t have a starting point because we have never developed a theology for ourselves. There was the liberation theology in the 60s and 70s and 80s. there are some sort of… ⁓

Dru (07:41)
Sorry, easy question.

Fausto Liriano (08:05)
some parts in Latin America where the liberation theology is present, but that never got into the church. So it was like an elite group of people, scholars, actually that get into ⁓ integral mission. And I was part of that. I believe in the liberation theology in some ways. I don’t know if you can talk me as a heretic or something.

Dru (08:12)
Hmm, only with the scholars. Okay.

Fausto Liriano (08:35)
But I believe in the part that says that the Bible, ⁓ the word of God, minister to the whole person, spirit, heart, mind, body. And I will start there, like the whole person, because there’s so much concern in the body, in the external, in our context, that people forget what is inside.

Dru (08:46)
Mm-hmm.

Fausto Liriano (09:05)
and how the body at the same time have a role in eternity in some ways. And at the same time, how people divide in spirit and the internal person from the external person. are ⁓ one person in the community of faith and another person ⁓ outside. The second thing I will do is I will get rid of any

⁓ And that’s probably crazy, but I would get rid of any ⁓ theology from outside. I will start with our own reflection in the Word of God. ⁓ Because in some ways, and that doesn’t have anything to do with liberation theology, in some ways, part of the influence we have ⁓ from theology have some traces of oppression on it.

So even missionaries doing Bible translation, which is what I do, they move into the communities, they learn the language, but they keep a distance between themselves and their families and the community they serve to. And they didn’t allow the indigenous people to translate the Bible. That was way past, back probably 40, 50 years ago, not now.

Dru (10:21)
Yeah.

Fausto Liriano (10:34)
they didn’t allow the people that knew the language to translate the Bible. So they keep them in some ways, in a good way, in a kind way, oppressed. It’s like, we are the people that know you don’t know anything. And they came with their, not just with their knowledge, but with their theology in some ways. And something that is really, really funny is that in the North, people change in the way they do liturgy and the way they

Dru (10:43)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Fausto Liriano (11:02)
They see the external person as Christians, but we have those traces of oppression in ⁓ our context. And I don’t want to sound, how you say that in English when you want to sound more poor than you are. Yeah, I don’t want to victimize ourself, but the reality ⁓ is out there.

Dru (11:18)
Right. Like you’re a victim here or something.

Fausto Liriano (11:30)
⁓ something from the liberation theologies that never get into the church. ⁓ It was always something of a minority or it was something discussed in academic circles and a few churches adopted part of the liberation theology in some ways. If we can talk about liberation theology as one ⁓ big entity instead of different

Dru (11:35)
Hmm.

Fausto Liriano (12:00)
different point of views. So we need to start from zero in our context and reflex. It’s like, what is a theology for the whole person?

Dru (12:27)
starting at zero then is already starting from a position of having to in some way react to the history of translation, the history of theology coming into the, and that, I mean, this is a classic problem in missiology is like, how do you go, how do you go and not, you know, bring good gifts to the people that you’re going to and not at the same time leave them with bad, you know.

just tell them, here’s the way we do it, so that’s the way you should do it. ⁓ It’s a very tricky, it sounds easy to do, but it’s a very tricky thing to do. You, however, ⁓ in our prior conversations I picked up, you seem to have a value for indigenous voices, ⁓ that the people who live there themselves are the ones who actually should be involved in working out what scripture means. Now, for a lot of people, that’s gonna sound really scary.

⁓ for good and not good reasons, right? It’s like, what do mean? You’re gonna just let the locals determine theology? And then you and I have to point out to people, well, that’s kind of how it’s always gone. The locals always do eventually figure out their own theologies, right? ⁓ So why do you believe so strongly in that, that the locals actually have the right? Is that a biblical belief or is that just kind of a conviction you have?

Fausto Liriano (13:32)
Mm-hmm. Why not?

It’s both. I think it’s a biblical belief and it’s a conviction that I have. If you study the history of the church, you see how the first church, the Iglesia Primitiva, as we call it in Spanish, it adapted to ⁓ different contexts. And in some ways, hitting that part from…

Dru (14:05)
Right.

Fausto Liriano (14:19)
you know, lot of the eviction of a community of faith, you are impeding them to adopt some practices that are ancient that they can actually put in place in their country, in their communities in some ways. You wanna say something?

Dru (14:40)
Yeah, maybe you could give a quick example of something that you’ve seen in Central or South America where it’s a very clear, it’s a practice that comes from the North and is not helpful, or maybe it’s distracting for them helping build their own theology.

Fausto Liriano (14:55)
Okay, for example, in translation, if I can give an example from Bible translation, it’s really difficult to translate poetry because all poetry and all ⁓ artistic expression, it was taken out from the indigenous community because it was pagan. So we have to go way, way back.

Dru (15:18)
Mmm. ⁓

Fausto Liriano (15:24)
to and even to people that are practicing some pagan ⁓ practices, ⁓ sorry to be redundant in that, to locate, okay, this is the poetry that you have. This is the way you sang. This is the way you used to do art. And we can recover that to do a poetic Bible.

Dru (15:30)
in.

Hmm.

Fausto Liriano (15:51)
Bible translation, which is in some cases surprisingly close to Biblical Hebrew poetry. So it was imposed from outside like, no, no, no, no, your poetry is pagan. You have to eliminate any trace of poetry and you have to sing ⁓ our hymns or our ⁓ songs, worship songs from outside. people have these…

Dru (15:59)
Hmm.

Fausto Liriano (16:20)
They don’t like their art. They don’t feel it’s art. I remember ⁓ this poem by an Uruguayan poet that says, it’s called Denadius, the nobodies. And it says, they don’t have art, they have handicraft. They don’t have a language, they have a dialect. ⁓

Dru (16:24)
Hmm.

Right.

Hmm.

Fausto Liriano (16:46)
So you have to tell, it’s not a dialect, it’s your language. You have to appropriate to that. You have art. So you have to recover that as an expression of art and connect that to Bible translation, even for theology, even for liturgies. It’s really, really difficult and it’s part of the theology that was imposed on us from outside.

Dru (17:10)
Yeah, that, ⁓ I’ve written on this a little bit, that move where we talk about progress and progressivism, it usually also carries with it, well, those are primitive people in primitive ways, and these are the new and better ways. It always kind of puts a moral angle on it. ⁓ Where ⁓ not only art and language, but I would guess that… ⁓

Fausto Liriano (17:17)
Mm-hmm.

Dru (17:35)
the indigenous people don’t even, they’re not even viewed as people who have their own conceptual world or their way of conceptualizing the world around them or that their way is the wrong way and the modern Western European scientific way is the right way.

Fausto Liriano (17:49)
It usually is a third wind. Their way is not the way. I think that Bible translation now is doing ⁓ a favor because the whole concept of doing translation and the whole concept of approaching culture of the people and rescue some of their language and art and ways to do poetry or think.

⁓ and get that into translation is helping them to actually see themselves as person that want to put that into place in their church community and learn their ancient ways.

Dru (18:32)
Yeah, and you’re doing some very profound work in this sector of translation, ⁓ which when we talked about this, everything you said about this was absolutely fascinating. And I read a few articles that you had written on orality, and we’ve talked about orality on this podcast before. ⁓ But maybe you could explain for our listeners what you’re doing in Guatemala with ⁓ the oral scripture and what was the problem that you were seeking to solve and then how are you solving it?

Fausto Liriano (18:45)
Thank you.

Okay, so, Oral Bible translation has been into place for over 30 years in some ways, nobody believed it was an authentic way of translating the Bible, especially because this conception of, you know, it’s primitive. It’s not the way people should talk. Yeah. ⁓

Dru (19:22)
And unstable, right?

Fausto Liriano (19:30)
So the last, I say eight, nine years, there’s more interest, especially the last five years, there has been more interest in Bible, in oral Bible translation because I think at first it was practical. you, there’s, the number says that just 700 plus languages have the whole Bible. And 1,300,

plus languages of the New Testament. That’s around 30 % of the whole ⁓ amount of languages that we have in the world, 7,000 plus languages in the world. And most of those languages are primarily oral cultures, or are from primarily oral cultures. And that represented a problem.

Dru (20:21)
Hmm.

Fausto Liriano (20:28)
or that represent a problem if you want to do written translation because you have to first send an expert on literacy. And they have to create an alphabet. They have to create the orthography. They have to create a grammar. They have to teach people how to read and how to write. And they have to, huh?

Dru (20:48)
their own language.

Their own, they have to teach them how to read and write their own language, right? That’s been oral up to this point, yeah.

Fausto Liriano (20:52)
their own language.

And that takes around 10 to 15 years, at least in the past. So before you start to translate the Bible, you have to do a process that takes 10 to 15 years. And then you need to translate the Bible. That takes around 10, 15, or 20 years, depending on funding and availability of the people. In that process,

Dru (20:59)
My goodness.

Fausto Liriano (21:20)
some of the cultures were reluctant to adopt a written ⁓ approach to Bible translation. So at first it were the biblical agencies that says we need written translation, but people are refusing. What can we do? Okay, let’s focus on the people that ⁓ want written translation, but then you still have that problem in the… ⁓

Dru (21:24)
Mm-hmm.

Fausto Liriano (21:49)
and the other side. So ⁓ five years or six years ago, I started working in that approach of oral Bible translation.

I would say without knowing. Yeah, it was really dark in some ways. ⁓ we came with some conception from the system we use in written Bible translation. And I say the first two years for me were… ⁓

Dru (22:01)
You walked into it, huh?

Yeah.

Fausto Liriano (22:27)
⁓ or a school in the ways that I need to get deeper into orality, but at the same time, I need to get deeper into orality in the Hebrew Bible and orality for the first, for the Christians in the first ⁓ century. Something that I learned is that orality in the Hebrew Bible is really, really close or in some ways the same that orality in this.

in this culture. this was, this make Bible translation easier ⁓ in some ways. For at first the goal was to start oral Bible translation with the written Bible translation in mind. So let’s do three, four or five years of oral Bible translation and then we can move to written Bible translation. And we find out that

Dru (23:20)
Mm.

Fausto Liriano (23:23)
Some of these cultures, they don’t want a written Bible translation because orality is part of what they do. Orality is the way that they pass from one generation to the other generation, from father to son, their tradition and their culture.

Dru (23:42)
Can I ask, ⁓ in the same way that, you know, modern Western people, whatever that means, ⁓ we tend to think like, unless it’s written out in a document, then it’s not real, you know, like, we didn’t have this conversation unless you send me an email kind of thing. You have the opposite mentality there, like, yeah, we can have this written text, but really, if you want to make it legitimate, ⁓ it needs to be orally transmitted between generations. Is that the feel you get from it?

Fausto Liriano (23:56)
Mm-hmm.

yes. So in most cases, people respect the oral more than the written because there’s a whole dynamic around orality that we thought it was primitive, but this culture kept in some ways. And what is fascinating is that ⁓ some people know how to speak Spanish.

Dru (24:12)
Okay.

Okay.

Fausto Liriano (24:40)
or Ilocano in the case of the Philippines where I work too. And their indigenous language, even though Spanish is a second language, so they know how to interact between the Terraci and Spanish in some ways is not purely Terraci and their orality and their oral culture. So that’s something they really, they really, really respect. So.

When I, so at first we use a written translation as a media to translate to their language. mean, it’s what you do in the indigenous translation. So for our audience, what we do is like, because it has been difficult until now. Some people are experimenting with that to teach Hebrew and Greek and Aramaic to.

some indigenous people, what we do is that we use English or Dutch in the case of Turinami or ⁓ Spanish in the case of our context in some countries of Latin America. So they translate from a translation. And then, you know, the consultant, that’s my role, comes to the community and we check bears, vipers, the translation and…

Dru (25:38)
Interesting

Fausto Liriano (26:05)
we check that it doesn’t go further from Hebrew or Greek. In some cases, for example, talking about idioms, ⁓ the written translation either don’t translate the idioms or it translate the idiom without having in mind that the indigenous language have the same idiom that you have in the Hebrew Bible.

Dru (26:29)
yeah, so there’s actually like a more, I don’t want to say primal, there’s a closer conceptual and linguistic connection between the indigenous language and ancient Hebrew. But they’re going over from Spanish, they’re going up to Spanish, up to Spanish, they’re going over to Spanish and then from Spanish over to the indigenous language, which confuses it.

Fausto Liriano (26:40)
Yes, because there are oral cultures. ⁓

Exactly.

Yeah, so these indigenous languages have the same ambiguities that you see in language in the Hebrew Bible. You’re an ⁓ Old Testament scholar, you know that sometimes people want to get rid of ambiguity and it’s there, there’s nothing you can do about that. And they are like, yes, it’s like that. What is the answer of A or B? Yes.

Dru (27:01)
Yeah.

Yeah, it’s very difficult. Yeah.

You

Yes, A

and B.

Fausto Liriano (27:16)
But you have to define that. No, no, no, no,

no. It is what it is. So there was a direct relation between Hebrew and even Greek in these languages. And that was a big discovery because in that way we can go straight from though we have to do a translation to Spanish or Dutch or.

or Ilocana, but respecting the oral features of the Hebrew Bible, for example.

Dru (27:47)
Do you feel like as you’ve worked on this project, you have learned yourself more about the orality of the Hebrew Bible from these indigenous people?

Fausto Liriano (27:57)
yeah,

that makes me explore the oral features of the Hebrew Bible. At first, when I started reading Hebrew, was like, this is, I remember reading Genesis chapter one, and I was like, this is purely oral. There’s no way this was conceived to be read. ⁓

Dru (28:13)
yeah.

Fausto Liriano (28:20)
So I have to get deep, and at the same time, we were talking about theology and the way people are affected from the theologies imposed from outside. And it was really sad that for these people that were, that are ⁓ from oral cultures, that we have to teach them the oral features of Hebrew or Greek for them to validate.

Dru (28:48)
Hmm.

Fausto Liriano (28:49)
Orality. So that’s something that I discovered. they because they are involved into the written translation of the Bible, even though they don’t understand everything, I have to get deeper into Orality in the Bible to let them know this is how the Bible spreads concepts. This is how the Bible communicate. This redundancy that you have for you to memorize something. ⁓

Dru (29:09)
Mmm.

Fausto Liriano (29:19)
story or to chant something in your community, see, we have that read on the seed too ⁓ in the Hebrew Bible. So I have to get deeper into the oral features of the Hebrew Bible to validate their orality.

Dru (29:26)
Hmm.

Did you ⁓ find that they could see things in the Hebrew that you could not, or at least the oral features of the Hebrew? Or were they asking questions you hadn’t thought of before?

Fausto Liriano (29:47)
They don’t really ask questions, so we discover things.

Dru (29:51)
as you

figure out how to translate it. Yeah, we should also point out. Yeah, I’m sorry. I had a delay there. ⁓ We should also point out what you’re doing with this translation because people might think that you’re translating it into a text that you’re going to hand them. But maybe you could explain what is the translation.

Fausto Liriano (29:56)
We did cover things together. Sorry, go ahead.

Okay, so oral Bible translation is translation for orality. In our case, and I work in Guatemala, Mexico, and the Philippines, the translation is for memorization and performance. And this is something that I learned too, sorry, is that in our case, we think that when you go to certain age, you lose your capacity to memorize.

Dru (30:42)
Hmm.

Fausto Liriano (30:44)
And what we have found out is that we have translators that are 65 years old or 70 years old, and they have four hours of Bible in their mind. So it’s that they keep memorizing the biblical text. Actually, there’s some biological and physical ⁓ things that impede you to memorize at some point in your life, or it’s not a specific.

Dru (30:54)
Wow.

Fausto Liriano (31:13)
they’re not specifically age-related. So I learned that people from all sorts of people, young people, old people, educated people, and non-educated people, they can memorize a big chunk ⁓ of the Bible. So what we do is that we work in workshops. We meet for two weeks. The first week is for appropriation or internalization.

Dru (31:15)
Hmm.

Fausto Liriano (31:42)
of the text and recording of the translation. So in the morning we do from Monday through Friday, in the morning we do an internalization process that is an exegetical process led ⁓ by questions. It’s oral, we don’t have any written devices around, we don’t have computers or tablets or cell phones. Even we don’t need…

We don’t even use Bibles. ⁓ so there’s a facilitator that lead the exegetical process. And I say 60 % of the exegetical process is discovery. So he or she lead the internalization process by questions. Saying, ⁓ what are the characters? What religious feature do you see in the?

Dru (32:13)
Wow.

Okay.

Fausto Liriano (32:39)
⁓ in the passage. ⁓ What is the social context or the geographical context? What politics issues do you see that are in place in the passage? So that goes for around four or five hours. In the meantime, the facilitators tell the story and then ask questions from.

Dru (32:41)
Okay.

Fausto Liriano (33:08)
for 30 minutes or one hour, then tell the story again, and so on. So in one morning, they have listened to the passage around four or five times. So in some ways, they don’t just internalize the exegetical features of the passages, they just, at the same time, have some memory of the text. And we don’t just use the… ⁓

one type of memory, we actually use different type of memory. So we want them to embody the text before they translate. We want them to appropriate, to get an appropriation of the text. So in the afternoon of that first week, we do translation and the translation is done orally. So they listen to the text and then they record the text.

It’s not a professional recording, we don’t want that. It’s just a recording for them to memorize. And then they start to memorize the passage. And Saturday, at the middle of the worship, they are by themselves discussing the translation, even ⁓ for the whole day, they say, okay, listen to the passage. Do everybody in our community talks like that? Is there a pronunciation that is different than?

Dru (34:10)
Right. ⁓

Fausto Liriano (34:37)
other communities that speak the same languages because with indigenous language it’s really interesting that they change pronunciation ⁓ from one community to other even divided for a short distance. Communities that are one kilometer. wow.

Dru (34:49)
Yeah, same like Scotland. Same in Scotland. They’re very different Scottish depending

on which county you’re in.

Fausto Liriano (34:57)
Yeah, so it’s like that. And then the second week, we check the passage and they do memorization and performance. After that, they just go to the communities, tell the passages and teach the passages to other people. So in Guatemala, we have translated 20 chapters from the Old Testament and a whole book from the Old Testament too, and we’re finishing Mark. Actually, this week,

they’re working in the last part ⁓ of Mark. Thinking like from March next year, we’re gonna start translating the rest of the New Testament, which leave us with new question. Would they be able to translate and memorize the whole Bibles? Because that’s something we need to.

to keep in account, but something we want to do is that we’ve been working in Guatemala specifically for six years. We want to do a professional recording ⁓ of the translation, which I think is gonna be way better than a recording of something you read. So even though it will be a recording and maybe it will be distributed, it have a different flavor than ⁓

Dru (36:09)
Hmm. Yeah, yeah, Matic performance, right?

Fausto Liriano (36:21)
written translation that you read. And I think we are in this point in our time when we have to think, because we have different medias and different means of transmission, especially the Word of God, if we’re going to let people listen to the Word of God in our languages, because these are features. You have this ⁓ weekly reading of the Hebrew Bible.

But in our language, when we translate to publish in a book, there are some features that we add to the translation. We get rid of redundancy. We don’t want to repeat the same word. We use different words for the same concept because in written,

Dru (36:57)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Fausto Liriano (37:12)
Media is not okay to be redundant or to repeat the same word. It’s not classy, you know. So aesthetic, as my little girl says. But in oral language, you have to recover that. And we have to think in translating for orality in English. And there’s something happening that’s ⁓ an oral Bible translation for English speakers in Spanish too.

Dru (37:16)
Right.

Yeah.

Yeah. Right.

Fausto Liriano (37:41)
And instead of reading from a written text, let people perform and record those performances so we can listen to vivid translation of the Bible.

Dru (37:52)
Yeah, it just ⁓ reminds me that when I read scripture in class, I always keep the repetition, the flow. I just ignore, I open the Bible so I have something to flow from, but I ignore the text and I actually just read what it actually says in the Hebrew so that students can hear what’s going on ⁓ and hear that repetition. I get the sense that a lot of people, when they hear about oral,

cultures and oral traditions, they think of that as, ⁓ I don’t know what the word would be, fluffy, imprecise, know, it’s kind of like theater or something. People are just performing, but it’s not as meaningful or whatever. And I think after hearing you describe the process of getting to an oral performance that you can repeat with some accuracy, it sounds like the exact opposite of

fluffy or unstable. actually sounds, I’m thinking, okay, a person, how long of a piece of scripture are they gonna perform it in a given time?

Fausto Liriano (38:58)
⁓ It depends. The services, the ⁓ church services in indigenous communities are really long. So they love to talk, they love to sing. ⁓ So depending, it’s for evangelism, they probably would tell a passage that is three or five minutes. But if they’re at church, several passages for people. then they actually teach people to…

Dru (39:07)
yeah, okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Fausto Liriano (39:27)
perform the same passage. It’s the way they ⁓ transmitted the text. And something that I find out, too, is that these people are fearful of the word of God. So they don’t want to fail in their performance. They really respect the text. And for them, it’s really important not to fail in saying the passage.

Dru (39:46)
Hmm.

Fausto Liriano (39:57)
verbatim, as you say in English. Did I say that right? ⁓ So that’s always a concern. ⁓ Authorship or is the text fixed in some ways, fidelity? And I think those things are related to control. We’re control maniac in our culture.

Dru (39:59)
Wow. Yeah, verbatim, yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Fausto Liriano (40:24)
to the indigenous people in oral culture are more relaxed in some ways, but they have this fear that I’m learning the word of God and translating the word of God. I want to be careful on doing this. And after a few months or years of translating the Bible, I’m really surprised that sometimes I’m just, you know, just pass through something that needed to be changed because it’s…

Dru (40:37)
Hmm.

Fausto Liriano (40:52)
is not consistent with the word of God and they come back and say, hey Fausto, we need to change this. We notice when we say that, that this is not consistent with what we talk in the internalization process. So they’re paying attention to that and they’re fearful to the word of God and they respect the text.

Dru (41:04)
Wow.

So like a very short way of saying what you do is you translate the Bible for Indigenous people, but as you’re laying out what all goes into this is you’re dealing with the history of colonialism, ⁓ the North and Northern theology that kind of always makes its way down to wherever missionary movements are, linguistic issues, both moving into the colonialist language and then moving out of the colonialist language, ⁓ rituals, ⁓ you know, the

primitive religion of the people there. ⁓ Why can’t you just listen to what they say or just translate it over and listen? I mean, I can imagine some people saying, you translate the Bible. Okay, so you like, speak in one ear and then you write it down or something like that. But you’re actually like at the nexus, at the meeting point of almost everything in history in this locale.

Fausto Liriano (41:58)
Yeah

Yeah, you know, we have a canonical problem too, is that the way people canonize Bible translation in English is the King James and Spanish is Reyna Valera. And yes, so in most of the cases, these people don’t understand the whole Bible in this Spaniard way of speaking Spanish.

Dru (42:27)
Right. Portuguese is a blessing.

Fausto Liriano (42:44)
Something that we need to get free is that we cannot canonize, I don’t know if I say that right in English, we cannot canonize a Bible translation. And that’s something people are learning through this ⁓ process. So something that happened at the beginning of this process of oral Bible translation is that people come with their theological conception into the text.

Dru (42:50)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Fausto Liriano (43:12)
And they learn how not to do that, how to keep a distance between their learned theological approach, right or wrong, and the work that they are doing in translation. And I think that’s the first step for them to respect their language and the features of their languages. We don’t have to say that’s reina valera. We have to say it as we…

Dru (43:24)
Mm-hmm.

Fausto Liriano (43:41)
as we talk. So I think that’s the big problem, ⁓ the big problem right there, canonization of a specific translation that when you go to personal preferences, it’s fine. If you prefer the King James or you prefer the Reyna Ballera or the New Living Translation or whatever, it’s okay. But you cannot say this is ⁓ the translation.

And that’s a big problem right there when we’re doing this kind of translation.

Dru (44:14)
⁓ A final note, one thing we haven’t said at all is ⁓ why translate at all? Why not just make them learn Spanish well enough and colloquially enough that they can read it for themselves?

Fausto Liriano (44:29)
That’s a good question right there. And the first thing that people assume is that because they’re living in Guatemala or Mexico, they speak Spanish. And they don’t know that monolinguism, is people just speaking their indigenous language is actually big, especially in Mexico. It’s not just Americans, yes.

Dru (44:51)
It’s not just Americans. It’s not just Americans who can only speak one language. Yeah.

Fausto Liriano (44:57)
So even though when they’re speaking Spanish, and I say that with all due respect to my indigenous brothers and sisters, you notice that sometimes they tell you they don’t understand. They’re actually thinking in their language and translating at the same, yes, or I do sometimes in English. So I think there’s something, there’s a special connection that you get.

Dru (45:11)
Right, translated it over. Yeah, yeah. Like I do with Spanish.

Fausto Liriano (45:27)
when the word of God is translated to the language of the heart. It’s like for me, I don’t pray in English. It’s not dogmatism, it’s that I can’t. I feel like a robot when I pray, when I have to, when I’m forced to pray in English. So when I’m in a meeting, I say, I prefer to pray in Spanish. Are you okay with that?

Dru (45:33)
Hmm.

Great.

Fausto Liriano (45:55)
And I feel more connected with God in that direction. The same happened when people read the Bible from or listen the Bible in their language. And that is the reason I’m doing Bible translation. Like, ⁓ was 15 years ago, 14 years ago, I was in this meeting where we were learning ⁓ about translation and linguistics and sociolinguistics and Hebrew and Greek.

And someone brought a video, they projected a video of ⁓ Bible dedication in Ecuador. So people were celebrating, people were dancing, people were crying. And I remember ⁓ watching two of these guys say with the Bible in his hand, I didn’t know that God speaks in my language. I didn’t know that God can speak straight to my ears. He was crying. And…

Dru (46:46)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Fausto Liriano (46:54)
You know, I started to cry from, you know, this is a podcast for academic, but I have to say what I have to say for scholars. Yeah, I started to cry for hours. And that was the moment I realized that I needed to be involved in Bible translation. So there’s a huge difference when people are listening to the Bible.

Dru (47:02)
No, we have normal people, non-nerds that listen to this as well.

Fausto Liriano (47:24)
anything in their language than listening to through the mediation of another language. It’s not the same, especially because people don’t know this, but you embody your language.

You know, I can tell you who is Dominican by just watching their faith. It’s like, he’s Dominican. I remember being in Argentina, deep South with my wife 20 years ago, 15 years ago, something like that. And I said, those people are Dominicans, for what’s sake. How do you know? They don’t even look Dominican. They are. So you embody your language in some ways. You learn to conceptualize everything.

and you actually appropriate that with your body too. So even though you learn to listen and to interpret what you listen and maybe get some significance from meaning from that, it’s not the same because you have embodied language in a different way.

Dru (48:27)
Hmm.

So true. Well, Dr. Fausto Liriano, thank you so much for your wisdom. I hope we can hear more about this at some point. I want to hear updates. And ⁓ I hope to come witness this at some point and get to go down to Guatemala and actually see this in real life. We thank you for your time.

Fausto Liriano (48:45)
Of course you are invited.

Thank you.