Writing a Language That Had Never Been Written

The word took us three weeks to find.

We were working through the Lord’s Prayer, and we had come to the phrase that English renders “forgive us our debts.” Portuguese has its version. Greek has its. But Zo’é — the language spoken by perhaps four hundred people in a forest in northern Brazil — needed its own word. Not a borrowed word, not a word from outside. A word that already lived somewhere inside the language and had simply been waiting to be found.

We sat with elders. We told stories. We described situations — someone wrongs you, you release them, you do not hold it — and we watched their faces for recognition. We found it eventually in a verb that describes the release of a fish: the action of opening your hand and letting it go, completely, into the river.

That is now the Zo’é word for forgiveness.

Language is a window into how a people understand the world. Bible translation is, among other things, an act of paying enormous attention — attention to what a community already knows, already feels, already reaches for, and finding the places where the gospel fits because it was always meant to.

The Zo’é New Testament is not finished yet. We are in the final stretch: the letters of Paul, Revelation. The work is slow because it must be precise and because it must be beautiful. A people deserve to hear about God in words that sound like home.

Last year, we held the first Zo’é literacy class using materials we had made. Twelve adults. Most had never held a pencil. By the end of the month, all twelve could read their own names.

By the end of the year, three of them were reading Mark’s Gospel aloud to their families.

I have never heard anything like it. I do not expect I will again.