A language with 55,000 speakers just got a new New Testament. It took 89 years.
About 55,000 people live on the eighteen islands of the Faroes, out in the North Atlantic between Scotland and Iceland. Until now they have read the New Testament in one of two translations, both in use since 1948. One belongs to the Lutheran national church and the other to the free churches, and which one sat on your shelf told people something about you.
The Faroese Bible Society has now finished a new one, the first fresh Faroese translation of the New Testament since 1937. Hans Jacob Joensen, a former Lutheran bishop of the islands, led the work, and he built an ecumenical working group around it on purpose, pulling in people from the national church and from the free churches. The manuscript then went out to theologians, advisers and proofreaders.
Jenis av Rana, quoted in the announcement, said the aim was a translation that "all Christians in the Faroe Islands can come together around." It is also pitched at young readers, which is the same reasoning behind our own daily devotional in three Indian languages. It ships with footnotes, a glossary and colour maps. United Bible Societies said the text keeps "liturgical customs and vocabulary rooted in the islands' rich tradition."
This is the first of three stages. The Psalms come next, then an authorised complete Bible.
Five hundred years earlier, in English
The Faroese text lands in the same year English speakers are marking 500 years since William Tyndale produced the first printed New Testament in English. Wycliffe's people had copied one out by hand back in the 1380s. Tyndale's was the one a press could multiply, which is exactly why it frightened people. He had to do it abroad, at Worms in 1526, because doing it in England would have got him killed. It got him killed anyway, ten years later.
Around three thousand copies came off that press. Church authorities in England bought them up and burned them. Three are known to survive.
One of them is on show. St Paul's Cathedral in London is running an exhibition called A dangerous calling until February 2027, with the first edition itself viewable on the Treasures tour. The British Library displayed its own 1526 copy earlier this year, sitting next to Anne Boleyn's 1534 edition and Henry VIII's Great Bible.
Nobody is going to burn a Faroese New Testament, and that is the whole distance between 1526 and now. What has not changed is the arithmetic. Somebody looked at 55,000 speakers, a number you could fit inside a football stadium, and decided they were worth years of work in their own language. William Carey made the same calculation about Bengali, and it took him the rest of his life.
Sources
- First Faroese New Testament translation launched since 1937, Christian Daily International
- The Power of the Printed Word: Tyndale's New Testament 1526-2026, The British Library
- A dangerous calling: 500 years of William Tyndale's New Testament, St Paul's Cathedral
5Talents
Written by the 5Talents editorial desk.