Ever heard of the 1979 film "Jesus," also sometimes referred to as the Jesus film? Well, it's been seen six billion times, and is available in many languages. Many many languages - they're charging ahead, looking forward to their thousandth language. You can watch it in hundreds of language online.I learned about the film from Philip Jenkins' The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South, a book I'll be using as a complicating coda to next semester's course on the religious right in America (to break free from the secular/religious and American-centered approach the topic seems to invite, but also to show the parochialism of these approaches). Jenkins' argument, in a nutshell, is that the Bible is read differently in the two-thirds world than in the historic centers of Christianity, and, even more significantly, that different passages and books and stories and proverbs are most prized. (The Old Testament is more real to believers in the South because the world it describes, hopelessly foreign to modern Europeans and Americans, resonates powerfully with the lived experiences of many Africans, Asians and Latin Americans.) And once the Bible is translated (and Jenkins notes that much depends on the sequence in which they're translated) it becomes the property of those whose language it is in; they see it not as coming from Europe, the US or wherever, but directly from God.
Jesus may look like an American from the 1970s, but he talks like one of you: in Aari, Aceh, Rabinal Achi, Acholi, Adangme, Adi, Adygey, Afar, Afrikaans, Aja-Gbe, Akha, Aklanon, Alaba, Albanian, Kosovar Albanian, Alur, Amharic, Amoy, Guerrero Amuzgo, Oaxaca Amuzgo, Anuak, Anyin, Apinaye, Chadian Spoken Arabic, Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, Hassaniya Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Modern, Standard (Egyptian) Arabic, Moroccan Spoken Arabic, North African Arabic, Sudanese Spoken Arabic, Aringa, Eastern Armenian, Western Armenian, Assamese, Assyrian, Ateso, Atitlan Mixe, Aukaans, Avar, Awadhi, Central Aymara, Nahuatl Guerrero Aztec ... and that's just the languages starting with A.
As Jenkins puts it, the Anglo-American captivity of the church is over. Should I not be sharing this good news, these thousand new things that God is doing, with students? In fact I'm putting it side by side with some material on the youth-oriented "emerging church" in the USA, which has left the fundamentalists behind and is reimagining Evangelical religion in conversation with our culture, scientific, secularized, sexually liberated and all. Translation continues!
