In Depth:  Tyndale House

Becoming a Christian when nobody else in your family is a Christian can be difficult whatever your culture, but for Chinese believers there is an additional hurdle.

Chinese communities have a strong tradition of ancestor worship, under which the living are responsible for caring for their relatives after death. Parents whose children become Christians often worry that their son or daughter who no longer accepts their beliefs won’t look after them in the afterlife. If families of Christian converts are to embrace the change in their loved one, Chinese pastors and evangelists need to be equipped to handle this issue with sensitivity.

A major revision of the New Japanese Bible (Shinkaiyaku 2017) was completed in August and is about to be published.

David Tsumura (see photo), editor-in-chief and former postdoctoral research fellow, has been working for over a decade towards its completion. David is known worldwide as a scholar in biblical Hebrew linguistics and recently published two papers in a collection of essays on Temporal Consistency and Narrative Cohesion in 2 Samuel 7, 8-11 in and Verticality Biblical Hebrew Parallelism. This is the fifth edition of the Bible in Japanese.

News outlets have been reporting the paper, published in January, which appeared to prove that archaeological discoveries have shown the Bible to be totally wrong about camels.

Commenting on the widely reported Tel Aviv University document, Dr K. Martin Heide of Philipps University Marburg, an expert on Semitic languages and cultures, has made some interesting statements in support of the biblical narrative.