Pioneer Bible Translators

Finishing Luke's Writings So, we’ve had a rollercoaster of a time these past few months. Erin and the kids had to take an unplanned medical trip to the US. I flew back with them to help with all the kids during the travel, stayed one night in the US, then turned right around and flew to Tanzania again! It was more than 40 hours in the air in the span of 4 days, and after that I spent two months away from the family, getting time-sensitive work done in Tanzania. During those two months, I kept myself very busy, because we had a big challenge and milestone arriving: the consultation of the book of Acts. Luke and Acts are a two-part series written by Luke, who wrote more words of the New Testament than anyone else. We were trying something new with this consultation. We did our exegetical check as normal, but then the two consultants pored over the text line by line from their base in the US, writing notes for my team and me to work on. We met together again to make changes and sent our replies back for another pass. Finally, at the face-to-face consultation time, we only for one week instead of three (like we did with Luke) to deal with any issues that were too thorny for text communication. We had the benefit of our consultants having worked in the this part of Africa in the past and understanding Swahili and the unique features of Bantu languages. Because of this, their questions were very insightful, and it we were able to cover a lot of ground in a short period of time. When the consultants arrived in Tanzania, we had already wrestled with every verse, and the cleanup that week went really well. In the end, we all felt that the text of Acts was very polished and that we had considered most of the tough issues. The consultation helped us understand some challenges in Luke that we hadn’t fully grasped and to make some clearer word choices on terms like ‘Gentile’, ‘Synagogue’, and ‘Sanhedrin’. Now I’m back in the US with my family until September. Read on below to find out what is in store for the next chapter of our ministry with Pioneer Bible Translators.- Tim MacSaveneyPioneer Bible Translatorshttps://pioneerbible.org/give/TimAndErinMacSaveny