The Ark

The life of Jesus is now available in the OBV - "Old Bush Vernacular". Author Kel Richards explains the power of the gospel rendered into i>The Aussie Bible - Well Bits of it Anyway.

Transcript

THEME

Rachael Kohn: Let's face it, a lot of people today aren't familiar with the Bible stories that their parents knew. The question is, do they have to read the Bible to learn them?

Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn and this is The Ark.

Bible stories used to be conveyed orally, and they still are if you attend religious services. But for those who don't, there's only one thing to do: sit down and read the Bible. Now that can be a daunting task because the language is often archaic and the setting is so far away in the distant past that even the most basic ideas get lost in a fog. Confusion turns to disinterest, and that's the end of the story.

Well, maybe not. Now you can read the Bible as if it was told around a barbie, in good old Aussie English. ABC announcer Kel Richards is the author of The Aussie Bible - Well Bits of it Anyway, and this is how it sounds.

A bit later Jesus came across a local bloke who collected taxes for the Roman army, a bloke named Matt Levi, sitting at his desk. And Jesus said to him 'Follow me'. The tax man left his account books, and his cash drawer, and followed Jesus.

Then Matt Levi turned on a humdinger of a barbie on his front verandah, and all his mates from the Tax Office were there, getting stuck into the snags and tomato sauce, along with Jesus and his mates. So the lawyers got all snide and yelled out, 'What are you hanging around with that bunch of sharks for?' Jesus said, 'Blokes who are in the pink don't need a doctor, only those who are crook. I've come to call the wrong 'uns to turn away from their wrongdoing and turn back to God. I haven't come for the blokes who think they're already hunky dory.'

Rachael Kohn: Kel, you must have enjoyed writing up Luke's Gospel in Aussie slang; was there any Aussie slang you didn't use in this?

Kel Richards: I keep finding bits and pieces I haven't used, which suggests maybe I should do another one, but that was enough work to do just that one. Aussie English, and it's not all just slang, it's conversational Australian. It is the stuff which Australian English has contributed to world English. I was talking to Bill Rampson , the Editor of The Australian National Dictionary, he says Aussie English has contributed about 10,000 terms to world English. Now for a small country that's a lot.

Rachael Kohn: I was just surprised to learn that furphy was an Australian term.

Kel Richards: Oh right, yes, the whole story of Joseph Furphy, you know the story? Joseph Furphy and company were in Victoria around Gippsland, and they built water carts, and the water carts were used for the troops in First World War, so they would gather around the water carts in the desert when they were fighting there, and of course the gossip exchanged over the water cart was always unreliable. So any unreliable gossip came to be called a furphy.

Rachael Kohn: Isn't that incredible? Well this is about the Bible of course, and it's quite extraordinary to be rendering holy writ into this tongue, but it's obvious that the way you've just read it, it's not so much to be read as to be told.

Kel Richards: I think so. The first thing is, it's not a proper translation, I'm not pretending to be a translator, I don't have Greek. I work from an interlinear Greek-English New Testament, so it's not a translation, it's a re-telling. And yes, it is meant to be oral, but of course the original material was oral. So it works really well orally. The other thing is, we've been a bit baffled by the King James Version, which is elegant, and magnificent, but the Greek is not elegant and magnificent, the Greek is the Greek of the marketplace.

So the New Testament is actually written in the Greek in which a bloke stood in the marketplace of Jerusalem and yelled out the price of his melons. That's the Greek that it's in. So to render it into fairly conversational, ordinary language, our language, is not all that improper I don't think. I don't think. There'll be protest phone calls, but I don't think.

Rachael Kohn: Well Kel, how did this project originate? Because it sounds to me like something around a campfire, after all it's kind of bush argot.

Kel Richards: Well it actually started with a guy named Mike Jones, I think it is, who was teaching in the East End of London. This is a weird way for it to start. But he was teaching High School kids in the East End of London and tried to teach them Bible stories and it just wasn't working. So he had the bright idea of paraphrasing some of the Bible stories into Cockney rhyming slang, which was their street slang. And suddenly it worked, they understood the stories, 'Ah, that's what it's all about'. So when he'd done a few of them they were published as a little book called The Bible in Cockney - Well Bits of it Anyway. And I saw this, and I thought, this bloke has done this for a language spoken in one part of one city; we've got a distinctive language covering a whole continent, the same thing should be done here. And if the thought occurs to you, it's your responsibility to do it. So I sat down and did it. So it actually sprang from that, the idea that we've got our own English, it's a very rich language, I think richer than Cockney rhyming slang in fact.

I'm convinced that this actually works, with all due respect to the bloke whose idea I pinched, I think it actually works better in Aussie English than Cockney rhyming slang, which only works for the jokey stuff. This will work for the drama as well, so you can read a story which is one of the parables, where there were some jokes and so on, and it works really well. But you can read Peter denying Christ which is all drama, and because Aussie English is so concrete and down to earth, it still works there.

Rachael Kohn: Now of course this fits into a long tradition of rendering the Bible into the vulgar language. Originally of course that was Latin, but then it was translated into German and into English. But William Tyndale lost his life on that account, did he not?

Kel Richards: Well yes he did, and his threat was, 'I intend', he said, to a Lord Bishop who was opposing him, 'I intend to make the ploughboy that driveth the plough to understand the Bible'. So that's been the intention, as you say, with all sort of popular languages, all conversational languages all the way along. In fact if I was Jewish I'd probably say this was a Targum.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, indeed, that's right.

Kel Richards: Because it's that kind of rendering and explaining as you go kind of thing, which is what a Targum is. There's a very old tradition that it's really nice to feel part of.

Rachael Kohn: Now today these days, there is a version that I recently read called The Message; have you seen that?

Kel Richards: Yes, I've read bits of that, done by an American, or Canadian?

Rachael Kohn: Eugene Peterson.

Kel Richards: Yes.

Rachael Kohn: Now that elicited quite a lot of criticism, as indeed have other, even the New International Version has caused quite a row because it refers to Mary as being pregnant, and refers to brothers as brothers and sisters, so of course this is regarded as the Bible by stealth you know, inclusive language and modern views creeping in.

Kel Richards: That kind of thing I've got to say doesn't bother me. Adelphoi in Greek is literally brothers, but it's quite clear when Paul writes to the Adelphoi, he's writing to all the Christians. It is not when he's using it, gender specific language, and for a long time it wasn't read as gender specific language. When the King James translators, or William Tyndale, translated Adelphoi as brothers, it was read as covering everyone, because we can remember only a generation ago, men covered men and women. It doesn't any more because there have been changes in language; language is a living thing, but it did. So it was not gender specific; now it's read as being gender specific, it shouldn't be.

So in that kind of instance I think Eugene Peterson's got it right. I haven't read the whole thing but I've read bits of The Message. A lot of it is in very colloquial American English, and some of it's fun to read, some of it is strangely, I find, stilted. But I think that's a very American thing. Americans love Latinate expressions, the bigger, fuller, more Latinate sort of sound, whereas Australian English has got a more Irish, more Anglo-Saxon sort of influence, and is much earthier, much simpler I think.

Rachael Kohn: Kel, criticisms of this kind of translation is that it actually alters the meaning of the Bible itself. For example, Jesus in this is a really good guy, he's a top bloke, perhaps he's the best bloke. But isn't that short-changing the Christian message?

Kel Richards: I don't think so. I certainly don't intend it to. I'm theologically conservative, so I don't intend to change anything, I'll try to get it right. On the other hand, I'm just a bloke, and like all blokes, full of failings, so I could have got it wrong. But I tried not to. So if I say Jesus is a top bloke, in fact the top bloke, what I'm doing is in fact echoing the old Christian doctrine that Jesus is fully human, fully God, but fully human at the same time. So he is the top bloke, it seems to me, is doctrinally theologically OK. There are going to be some people who won't like it; well, that's all right. But it's not a translation, I'm not trying to say This is authoritative, it's just a re-telling.

It's not a Bible that I expect to ever be part of any liturgy anywhere, to be read in church or studied, it's a bedside, bathtub, beach Bible, it's an enjoyable Bible. There's a London rabbi by the name of Sidney Brichto I think you pronounce him, who's doing a thing called The People's Bible. Now he says his aim is to give the Bible back to the people who like a good story. Well, I'm sort of trying to do the same thing.

Rachael Kohn: In fact is the good story element something that people are really trying to recapture as that London rabbi is, because I note that there are conferences now on this very topic.

Kel Richards: I think so, because a lot of the truth is in the story. When Jesus wants to say in Luke 19:10, that his purpose in coming is to seek and to save the lost, he can spell it out plainly like that in Luke 19:10, but in Luke Chapter 15, he says exactly the same thing by telling three stories, the lost sheep, a lost coin and a lost son. So stories embody the truth.

Rachael Kohn: And they turn the heart, don't they? It's not about theological argument amongst academics or theologians.

Kel Richards: I think what they certainly do is they work at the level of understanding, because I think most of us don't think in abstract thoughts. We think in stories and pictures. They say, developmental psychologists say that from about puberty we're able to think in abstract ideas, abstract concepts. But I think most of the time, we don't. Even Professors of Philosophy don't most of the time. Only when they're at their desk do they think in really abstract terms. Most of the time we think in stories and pictures, we imagine things. So while we have difficulty with concepts like poverty, we can't see how it hurts people because it's too vague an idea, but if you're doing a story as a journalist, you find an example of people who are struggling, then we can understand what poverty is. We think in stories and pictures. Jesus understood that, that's why he told so many stories, God understands that, it's why the Bible is full of so many powerful historical narratives, because the story is the way we think.

Rachael Kohn: Well you certainly have some powerful support. The Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, has launched your book; what value does he see in it do you think?

Kel Richards: Well a couple of interesting things. The first is, he said to me, I gave him the manuscript to read, and I said 'Are you prepared to write an introduction to this?' And he said to me afterwards, 'When I sat down to read it, I thought it was going to be just a novelty; it would a novelty and the novelty value might get people interested in the Bible again, and that would be fine. But,' he said, 'it did a bit more than that.' He said, 'I was surprised to discover that I was feeling the emotion of very familiar stories very strongly,' and he said, 'I came to the conclusion that this language, this sort of very Aussie English, is the language of the heart.'

Now I call this language that the book's in, OBV, Old Bush Vernacular. And after talking to Peter, now this is a man with an Oxford PhD, but he's still saying this very colloquial Australian is the language of the heart, and I think most of us have got two layers of language. We've got the ordinary conversational language in which you and I talk all the time, but underneath, there's this second layer of OBV, Old Bush Vernacular, and Australians who would normally not use it in their conversation, keep dipping into it, and we dip into it to say we're sincere, or to have a bit of fun.

When Beazley challenged Crean for the leadership of the Labor Party, at the press conference he said to the assembled media, 'Now I'm fair dinkum about this'. He was dipping into his reservoir of Old Bush Vernacular to say he's genuine. If you've got a problem with someone and they're being stupid, you can either say 'You're being stupid' or you can make it a bit lighter and more acceptable by saying, 'You're being a bit of a boofhead.' So I think just below the surface of our normal conversational English, there's this well which is part of our Australian-ness, it's part of what makes us Australian, and I think it is the language of the heart. I think that's what Peter found.

Rachael Kohn: Well give us another example of the language of the heart.

Kel Richards: Let me read one of the - I could read one of the funny ones, but let me read one of the dramatic ones. I was talking about Peter's denial of Christ. Now this is a really heavy moment, but I think Aussie English can deal with this sort of thing. This is Mark, Chapter 14, Verses 66-72 as it turns up in the Aussie Bible.

Meanwhile, Peter was around the fire in the courtyard below. A girl who worked in the kitchen saw him and said, 'I know you, I've seen you hanging around with that Jesus from Nazareth.'

Peter denied it. 'I don't know what you're talking about', he protested.

'Yes, you don't know what you're talking about, either.'

He moved a bit further away, but the girl said to some of the guards, 'This bloke's one of them.'

Peter shook his head, 'No, no, no, not a chance.'

But then one of the guards said, 'You've got that funny accent, you're from Galilee.'

Peter began to curse and swear, just like a fisherman. And then half shouted, 'I don't even know this bloke you're talking about.'

At that moment, a rooster crowed for the second time. Then Peter remembered those words of Jesus 'Before sunrise, before the rooster crows twice, three times you'll deny even knowing me.' Peter rushed out in the darkness, and broke down in tears.

Rachael Kohn: Kel Richards re-telling the Gospel of Mark 14: 66-72, in his version of the Bible called The Aussie Bible, Well Bits of it Anyway, published by the Bible Society.

THEME

Guests

Kel Richards
is an Aussie journalist, author and broadcaster. He's heard every weekday on two national ABC radio networks: doing WordWatch on the NewsRadio network and Word of the Day on Clive Robertson's breakfast program on the Classic FM network.

Further Information

The Aussie Bible

Publications

Title: The Aussie Bible (well, bits of it anyway!)
Author : Kel Richards
Publisher: Bible Society NSW, 2003