Here is what I do in place of a full-time job, in a nutshell:

• Seek permission to publish Bibles electronically for free, with no copy restrictions, which God moves copyright owners to provide;
• Process Bible texts and audio recordings in a variety of formats to make them publishable;
• Write free and open source software to assist in the publication process;
• Operate high-capacity web servers to host Bible sites;
• Create and maintain Bible web sites in many languages;
• Register domain names for those web sites;
• Coordinate with others doing similar work;
• Continue translation work on the World English Bible; and
• Keep communicating with you, because we really need your prayer support in this battle.

In addition to all of that, I try to keep balanced in being a good husband and father, paying the bills, helping out at church, and whatever else the Lord asks of me.

That is a long list that involves different kinds of work. In a “normal” commercial company, one person wouldn’t do all of those things. I really can’t do them all at the same time, but I concentrate on one thing at a time, then switch to something else on the list. For a while, I was moving ahead with great speed on processing Bible texts. I caught up on that (i.e. I’m getting new translations much slower than I can post them), so for the last couple of weeks, I laid that aside, and worked on software development.

My current push in software development is to make a bridge between the file formats used by Bible translators and those used by Bible study software publishers, just as I already made a bridge to go to HTML for web sites. There are many Bible study program formats, so my first priority has been to support The Sword Project, which includes free and open source Bible study programs for Windows, Mac OS X, Android, iOS, and Linux. Converting between the two formats used to be a manual labor-intensive process, because the conversion involves much more than simple replacements. I’m trying to automate it as much as practical, because I have literally hundreds of translations to process. I just reached a major milestone in that conversion process, and I’m about half way there.

I’m excited. It isn’t just the fun of doing something technically challenging and getting it to work. It is knowing that what we do gets the life-changing Word of God to more people in more languages and more places than ever before. This isn’t just some video game. This is about working with Jesus Christ to populate Heaven with redeemed people to praise God! That is why we live on donations instead of a regular salary.

Thank you for your prayers and support!

In the process of securing permission to publish translations of the Holy Bible and portions thereof, I have had to study some copyright law in detail. I’m not a lawyer, but I can read English and understand some complex issues. I recommend that you check my assertions against the actual law and/or get competent counsel from a real legal expert who specializes in intellectual property law before acting on what I say. If you find an error in this article, I invite your correction.

Fiction: Copyright can be renewed indefinitely.
Fact: All copyrights expire and the protected work enters the public domain at that point. Exactly when that happens depends on when and where it was published, when it was created, and if the copyright is owned by a corporation or individual(s). Anything published in the USA before 1923 is in the public domain, now. Current copyright law provides a longer period of validity than earlier laws, but it is still finite and copyrights still don’t last forever. Anything published in the USA today for the first time will enter the public domain 70 years after the last surviving author dies, or for work for hire by a corporation, 95 years from this year. For details, please see http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap3.html and http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm. Some people claim that the Crown Patent on the printing of the King James Version of Holy Bible is a non-expiring copyright, but it isn’t a true copyright and has no effect in most of the world. It is also doubtful that it has any effect on digital editions of the KJV Bible. If you live in Great Britain and have doubts, see if you can find someone who knows for sure.

Fiction: Converting a work to another format merits a new copyright claim.
Fact: Copyright only protects substantial creative works. Typing the contents of a book into a text file is work and it is tedious, but it is in no way creative. This is true even if some sort of standard markup is applied to indicate the structure of the printed book. An example of the law working this way is a decision that merely arranging names and telephone numbers in alphabetical order does not merit copyright protection, thus invalidating copyright claims on the main part of telephone books. So, if you convert the Latin Vulgate to USFM, using hours of your time laboriously inserting markers, don’t expect to win a lawsuit against anyone who copies that work without your permission.

Fiction: Copyright can be extended by revising a work.
Fact: If the revision amounts to a substantial creative work, such as a language update, adding new material, and such, a new copyright can be claimed on the new revision, but the original, unrevised work will still expire at the same time as it would have before the revision was made.

Fiction: A publisher must be listed as the copyright holder.
Fact: Nothing in the copyright law requires such a transfer. All that is required is that the copyright owner grants permission to publish to the publisher. The normal means of doing so is via a contract. It is also possible to transfer ownership of a copyright. In that case, the copyright becomes the property of the new owner, and the original owner no longer owns the copyright. Increasingly common practice among authors and publishers is to never transfer the actual copyright, but only selected rights associated with the copyright. The verso page of a modern book will often list the author as copyright owner, and have a separate statement of who the publisher is, with still another statement of who to contact for permission to make copies of all or part of the book (i. e. to quote a portion in another book).

Fiction: Copyright just applies to a particular form or expression of a work, like a single printing of a paper book.
Fact: Copyright means that the copyright owner has rights to allow or disallow copies in any format, including digital, printed, etc. See the definition of “copies” in http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html for a very emphatic, watertight definition of anything that could possibly be a useful copy in any format.

Fiction: Copyright can actually belong to someone besides the person, group, or corporation claiming copyright in a copyright notice in a work.
Fact: A copyright notice is a legal notice of who owns the copyright, with very specific rules about the format. Essentially, there are three possibilities: (1) the notice is present and correct, (2) the notice is present and incorrect, and (3) the notice is absent. Case (1) is good. Case (2) indicates theft, implicit transfer of copyright ownership, outdated copyright ownership information, or a printing error. Unless the notice in a work is publicly and vigorously contested, the effect is one of implicit copyright ownership transfer, reducing this to case (1) either intentionally or otherwise. Copyright notices should be taken seriously, because the general public will assume that the notice is accurate. Case (3) is allowed under current copyright law, and is preferable to an incorrect notice, but makes defending a copyright more difficult. Case (2), when allowed to persist uncorrected, makes defending a copyright claim nearly impossible.

Fiction: Copyright claims on Bible translations can prevent heretical translations.
Fact: Since the original manuscripts of the Holy Bible were written well before 1923, they are firmly in the Public Domain. A new translation is a new creative work, and the more it differs from other translations, the less likely a claim of copyright violation against an existing translation can succeed. At a minimum, a translation need only differ from another translation as much as current translations differ from each other. Indeed, the more heretical, the more creative, the better under copyright law, at least with respect to overthrowing an attempted copyright infringement lawsuit. Orthodoxy is not nearly as creative, but it is preferable for some very compelling reasons that have nothing to do with copyright law. Of course, there is a HIGHER LAW concerning God’s Word, and the consequences of violating God’s Law are potentially much more serious than anything copyright law can offer. Copyright law and treaties are ignored in significant portions of the world, and enforcement may be technically possible but extremely improbable, so what “protection” is there is marginal, at best. The best you can do with copyright as a form of “protection” of God’s Word is to sue someone who makes a few simple but heretical changes to a translation you own the copyright to.

Fiction: A Public Domain work can be licensed under a Creative Commons or Open Source license.
Fact: “Public Domain” is the opposite of copyrighted. It means that a work is not copyrighted. Without a binding copyright, Creative Commons and Open Source licenses are meaningless, and cannot be enforced, because they rely on the fact that the licensed work is copyrighted. (So don’t bother suggesting that the World English Bible or the American Standard Version be licensed under a Creative Commons license.)

Fiction: There is no copyright law in Papua New Guinea (or another country)
Fact: Although there was a short time after PNG independence before a copyright law was passed and international treaty signed, that is no longer true. Even a new country like Kosovo has a copyright law.

Fiction: Copyright law is clear and consistent.
Fact: Copyright law leaves a lot to the imagination and the discretion of judges and certain administrative offices. Copyright law and respect for the same varies by country and region, even though international treaties provide some consistency and international protection. For example, the “fair use” doctrine in the USA is nice, if somewhat fuzzy as to how much of an excerpt is protected, but Australian law has no such clause.

You can read more about copyright… much more… at http://www.copyright.gov/.

The flight attendant looked at me, wondering why my eyes were watering. I asked for a soft drink, and continued reading Sleeping Coconuts. Macho or not, I think a few tears is a normal reaction to being freshly reminded of such intense disaster affecting close friends.

Our friends, John and Bonnie Nystrom, wrote a book about their adventures in Bible translation. Apparently, Bible translation in Papua New Guinea is not for whimps. This is a story of God’s grace, and His awesome ability to once again bring great good out of terrible tragedy. You might think that Bible translation sounds like a lot of detailed language work, with day after day of language learning, translating, and checking your work. It is, actually. It also involves a lot of support work (like I do). But there is also a serious element of spiritual warfare and a need for the kind of endurance that only God can empower you with.

This book is about real life with real people (most of whom Lori and I know) and real victory in Jesus Christ. I heartily recommend it. You can get a copy of Sleeping Coconuts from Amazon in paperback or Kindle format at mpj.cx/buyscb.

I just read again about a dear friend of mine, Steve, returning to service as a missionary pilot in Papua New Guinea. This is an awesome miracle, really. It may not seem to be spactacular, or quick as we would like it, but it is nonetheless awesome and a reflection of a serious servant of the Most High God.

Now, for the rest of the story.

Steve was riding his motorcycle between Ukarumpa and the Aiyura airstrip in Papua New Guinea– a curvy dirt road that I’m very familiar with. It was my daily commute for a few years, by foot, bicycle, truck, or van. One day a PMV truck went way too fast around a blind corner on the wrong side of the road and smashed into him. The guilty driver ran away, abandoning the truck, and was never seen again. Broken bones, bruises, abrasions, and more threatened his life. Normal people die on impact with a truck like that, but somehow the Lord softened the blow just enough. Somehow, he was gathered up alive and flown straight to Cairns, Australia, nursed back to health. Months later, he actually was healed enough to pass a flight physical. He returned to his job, but his wife and he agreed that he shouldn’t commute by motorcycle any more. (It could be worse– going by bicycle or foot, like me, but he rode the Aviation department van, instead.)

Enraged that he failed to take the missionary pilot out, the enemy tried again.

Steve was in the left front seat of a van full of missionaries, mostly short termers. Another good friend of mine was in the right front seat, driving. (Yes, we drive on the left side of the road in PNG and the steering wheel is on the right.) Instead of a little local road, they were on the highlands highway, heading up the infamous Barola Pass. On a blind corner, they met a huge semi-trailer truck loaded with heavy steel pipe, coming way too fast down hill on the wrong side of the road (dodging a pot hole). Wham! There was no way to dodge the truck. No way. Conservation of momentum was NOT on their side. The truck driver abandoned his vehicle and ran away, never to be seen again. (Understandable, since bystanders probably would have killed him for that.) By the time some of them regained consciousness, one of them, a short term missionary with no language or culture knowledge to speak of and serious injuries, had been taken to the Kainantu “Hospital” by a well-meaning passerby. One of them radioed for help, and our center sent both helicopters, both doctors, and a few others. The auto shop staff took off by land to help. It took a long time and a lot of cutting of steel to get Steve out. His legs were smashed like so much spaghetti in wrinkled metal. The helicopters kept shuttling people back to our hanger, where triage took place. The worst cases were sent to Cairns on our own aircraft. The next worse were sent on another air ambulance. No more air ambulances. We did what we could. At one point, Steve’s wife was almost sent to a PNG hospital, based on the fact that the doctor didn’t think she would survive all the way to Australia… but just as he was saying that, her blood pressure came back up, color returned to her face, and the doctor sent her with her husband to Cairns.

None of them died. The misplaced passenger was retrieved.

Steve’s x-rays looked like a jigsaw puzzle that had been manhandled by a toddler and fed to the dogs. It took months of prayer, surgery, external frameworks holding bones in place, etc. Finally, Steve was released. He could walk, barely. But the doctors in Australia seriously doubted that he would ever pass a flight physical again, because he didn’t have full control of his feet, and didn’t see how that could happen. But God did.

Steve kept praying and trying to walk, run, and work that foot. God answered prayer. Again.

God wins. Steve wins. The Bible translators in Papua New Guinea that get flown around the country doing their jobs win. Glory be to God!

by Michael Johnson, 24 July 2012

Electronic media of various kinds offer the potential of making God’s Word available to more people in more ways and in more languages than ever before. Just turning a paper book into some random electronic format is a nice start, but won’t necessarily take full advantage of the new platforms and media. It also might not take into account the needs of each audience. Here are some thoughts on how to get the life-transforming Holy Scriptures not only to more people, but into more of their hearts.

Getting God’s Word to More People

Here are some things to consider that can improve the number of people effectively reached with the Good News about Jesus Christ:

• Translate the Holy Bible into every living language on Earth.
• Encourage Bible sharing. Take advantage of the relative simplicity of downloading, copying, and sharing electronic media. Unlike with paper Bibles, you can give your copy away 10 times and still have your own copy. Let the Holy Scriptures “go viral” in the social media sense among those who appreciate God’s Word.
• Make Scriptures available on multiple platforms. Bibles can be read on various kinds of computers of various sizes, running many operating systems. This includes smart phones (and even some not-so-smart phones), tablet computers (like iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab, etc.), specialized electronic book readers (like Kindle, Nook, etc.), notebook computers, desktop computers. Operating systems include Windows, Mac OS, Linux, iOS, Android, Symbian, etc. It is great if you reach users of one platform but not so great if you leave the others out.
• Make the Holy Bible in each language available in multiple formats, like HTML (for web pages), full web applications, Bible study programs (like Xiphos, PocketSword, AndBible, Olive Tree Bible Reader, etc.), PDF, ePub, etc. People will pick their favorite Bible study program, reader, etc., and they won’t all pick the same one.
• Make each translation of the Holy Bible available on multiple web sites. Some sites are customized just for one segment of a language group. Others are customized for a particular country. Some are like massive libraries of Bibles and other books in many languages. Each one appeals more or less to a different segment of each target audience. Some sites may be off-putting to part of the target audience, but if there are other sites that are not, and which also distribute the same Scriptures, this problem is mitigated.
• Include audio as well as text Scriptures. Many language groups, especially among minority languages and groups with difficult writing systems have low literacy rates. There are also some people who are visually impaired. Even among those who can and do read, listening to audio Scriptures can be very encouraging and helpful in walking the Christian walk.
• Keep costs as low as practical. This means not only making Scripture downloads free of cost, but giving due consideration to those who pay for Internet access by the megabyte and/or by the minute. This means keeping file sizes down as far as practical without serious compromise of quality. It also means allowing and even encouraging offline local caching of Scriptures to avoid the traffic associated with redundant downloads of passages already read.
• Allow and encourage offline access to Scriptures. Even in a developed nation, Internet access is not available everywhere and all the time. In some places, Internet access is rare and expensive, causing data to be passed around more on USB memory sticks than via the Internet.
• Use creative means to make the Holy Bible available in places where there may be persecution of Christians. This includes, but is not limited to, allowing anonymous access to Scriptures, distributed distribution techniques, use of cryptography and steganography, and diversification of distribution methods.
• Make each Bible translation look and sound attractive and appropriate to its target language community or communities. This is where cultural sensitivity meets graphic and typographic design, recording quality, and quality of recording and presentation. A diversity of presentations is appropriate, here, to appeal to, for example, those who like to listen to a dramatized Bible and those who prefer a simple reading. One person may like a musical background, and one person may be repelled by the same background. Nobody likes a noisy, scratchy audio recording or hard-to-read text.
• Seek ways of cooperating with and helping others who are involved in electronic Scripture publishing, both at the organizational and personal levels. Share applicable software, databases, and most important of all, Scriptures. Why make others spend time and money duplicating effort to do what you have already done and could share with them?
• Embrace intentional redundancy and diversity. A smart retailer will place more some items, like candy and batteries, in more than one place in a store. Likewise, a smart electronic evangelist will place the Holy Bible in more than one place on the Internet.

Thinking Outside of the Box

To really get the most impact for the Kingdom of God from the Bible translations that God has given us stewardship responsibility for, we need to think some new thoughts. There are new ways to do new things, as well as new ways to do old things that can actually be more effective at accomplishing our goals. Some of these new ideas and practices are necessary to truly implement the above ideas. There are some obvious “elephant in the room” sorts of issues that need to be dealt with in any case. These include money and funding models, protecting the integrity of Bible translations, and effectiveness monitoring.

Funding Ministries

Asking those being evangelized to bear the cost of reaching them with the Gospel for the first time has not been an effective technique. It ranks right down there with insisting that people learn Biblical Greek to read the New Testament for the first time in terms of bad ideas. Therefore, we obviously need a better plan. The Good News of Jesus Christ is free, as is the gift of eternal life that He paid for already on the cross. Unfortunately, delivering the Good News is costly. Every medium of communication you can think of (and some you might not think of) cost something, be it printing, networking and computing resources, or in some cases, the very lives of the messengers. So where does the money to fund these ministries come from? Some possibilities include donations, other business ventures, self-funded missions (“tent making”), labor by “retired” people with a pension, and sales of related materials.
Because you can’t really print Bibles for free, anyway, people have long accepted draconian copyright restrictions on printed Bibles, making them a very lucrative revenue source when managed as such. Unfortunately, managing Bibles to maximize profit does not maximize distribution or ministry impact. Now that electronic Bibles files are a reality, it costs more to put mechanisms in place to limit distribution and demand payment for electronic Bible files than it does to make an actual copy. Such mechanisms are exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. We should be encouraging people to make a copy and read it, not telling them that they are forbidden to do so unless they fork over payment.
Obviously, this leaves some ministries that rely on printed Bible sales in a similar position to Kodak Corporation before they went bankrupt. Kodak should not have gone bankrupt when their film sales plummeted, because they had developed new digital photography business models and products, but they failed to make the turn with the market. It was a management problem. If we are to learn something from this example, it is that we need to embrace reality and prepare for the change, not delude ourselves to think that the status quo can continue. This means getting serious about developing alternate funding models for ministries, including raising funds from donors, asking God for creative business ideas that don’t negatively impact ministry, and in some cases pairing ministries with business activities and services that raise money. Printed Bibles will not go away entirely in the foreseeable future, and indeed may increase some with print-on-demand services for minority Scriptures, but their monetary profitability will drop preciptously.
On the bright side, the costs associated with electronic Scripture distribution are a small fraction of the cost of print Scripture distribution, because it involves the use of mostly pre-existing networks and devices. The main costs involve software development, text preparation and formatting, and high-bandwidth web hosting.

A Near-perfect Tamper-evident Seal

Although it is trivially easy to alter most kinds of electronic books, it is also easy to sign them with a cryptographically strong digital signature. These digital signatures provide a tamper-evident seal that, when properly made and checked, assure that the text is exactly what was published by the original publisher. Such checking can (and should) be built into Bible study software, much like web site authenticity assurance via SSL is built into web browsers. The assurance provided by this sort of digital signature far exceeds the assurance provided by copyright (which is for limited terms and only effective when the copyright owner is willing and able to sue violators). Of course, both digital signatures and copyright “protections” of content are insignificant compared to what God Himself does to watch over and protect His Word.

Yielding Control to God

Working together as a team, or more accurately, as the Body of Christ, means that we must yield control to the true Head of the Church, Jesus Christ, and really trust Him to guide us in areas where we just cannot humanly control and monitor the outcomes of our work. Indeed, that is really the best policy even in areas where we think we have it all under control. We may not know the full extent of the fruit of our efforts until we meet some of the people blessed by our work in Heaven.

What Now?

It is time to recognize traditional copyright licenses, “digital rights management”, legal and technical distribution and copying restrictions, and efforts to monitor Scripture “engagement” with the public for what they are: impediments to maximum ministry impact of God’s Word. We need to turn around and do something different: put the motive of God’s prophets above money profit motives, and seek God’s wisdom in implementing the changes. We need to applaud those who have started to do so, like Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Bible Society of Papua New Guinea, for their good progress in electronic Scripture publishing, done in a way that maximizes ministry impact. May God be glorified in us, and pleased with not only what we do, but how we do it and our motives!

More to the point, when did you last actually use a telephone booth (or any public pay telephone)? Have you ever seen a pay phone in a rain forest?
Over 80% of the world’s population now has a mobile phone. There are over 5 billion mobile phones in the world, and over 1 billion of those are smart phones.
A friend of mine amazed me with a story of smart phone use in Papua New Guinea, on Manus Island. In that country, only about a tenth of the people have access to electrical power utilities. Mobile phone use was limited to a few cities until a few years ago. However, thanks to the government opening up mobile phone service to competition and rapid tower building by Digicel, much of the population now has access to mobile phone and Internet service, even in areas that never have had fixed line telephone service. As my friend was walking along a trail in the rain forest, he told a man he met there that the book of Genesis was available online in his language (Nali). The man took out his smart phone, and within minutes was reading Genesis aloud to those standing around him.

After many months of acknowledging that our own missionary web site was in serious need of revision, both in the content and in the structure, I celebrated the President’s Day weekend by actually doing it. I tried to present the important stuff in bite-sized chunks so that important details that people might want to know didn’t get lost in the sea of information, while still providing most of the information that was there, before. I also disposed of the old frame-based structure with a WordPress/PHP structure. As for the domain name, eBible.org is great, but that domain is primarily about the Holy Bible, and not about us, which left Kahunapule.org and mpj.us. Unless you speak Hawaiian or know my initials well, those aren’t so memorable. So, we added the new domain name MLJohnson.org (for Michael and Lori Johnson, of course) as the primary domain name, and left the others as aliases for that. Also, to avoid potential problems with unwanted advertising, we moved this journal to our own server instead of using our old free WordPress account. The net effect is less patchwork-like. We hope you like it!

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clarke

As people watched intently in Bulal Village, I worked on some things using a notebook computer, using some of the precious little electricity I got walking a mile to a church that had a connection to a generator. In Melanesian village culture, people watch and listen to learn what others are doing. This works great for basic life skills, like cooking over a fire, hunting, fishing, coconut husking, learning languages, building bush houses, gardening, canoe construction, etc. In the case of things I do on computers, it is a woefully difficult way to learn. You can’t really see what is going on in the computer and in my mind, just by looking. I might visualize data structures, algorithms, and program flow in my mind while all an observer sees is that I am poking buttons and silently looking at incomprehensible (to him) text on a screen. Now, as I work at electronic Scripture publishing in many languages, it is kind of like that even for observers who have much more formal education and who even use computers themselves. I imagine that it looks something like this to the casual observer: I sit down at my computer, wave the mouse, press buttons, study the screen, press some more buttons, and lo and behold, web sites appear on the public Internet with translations of the New Testament and other Bible portions in many languages. The more I do that, the more Scripture translations appear. Cool, huh? Of course, I get some interesting questions about that.
Q: How do you learn all of those languages?
A: I don’t. Teams of Bible translators spend a lot of time, usually between 3 and 30 years, to learn a language and translate a New Testament into that language. I just help with the electronic publishing of the Scriptures once it is ready. The number of people involved in translating all of the Scriptures I have posted so far, plus all who support them, adds up to a true army of people.
Q: How do you type all of those languages?
A: First, I don’t retype Bibles. Think about that. A good typist can type 33 words per minute at simple transcription in a language  she understands, and there are about 788,280 words in the Bible. That means it would take about 50 8-hour days of fast typing to do one if I could type as fast with a language I can’t read as a good typist can with one she can read. But I do type small amounts here and there. From time to time, I need to type some characters not found in English, like a r̃ or ŋ. For those, I either use an alternate language keyboard layout, or if it is only a few characters, insert them from a character map. I also made an alternate keyboard layout of my own that contains every character found in every written Papua New Guinean language.
Q: Do you have a computer translate Bibles?
A: No. Machine translation of natural languages is tolerable, if somewhat humorous at times and dead wrong at other times, for a few of the largest language groups. This is the result of a great deal of work and refinement for large customer bases. Nobody does that kind of work for the little tribal languages. Not yet, anyway. Even if they did, it would still take human review to make sure it was right.
Q: Don’t computers help the process of Bible translation?
A: Yes, of course. They greatly assist in the process of Bible translation, especially with some of the new software that is being made available to Bible translators, like Adapt It. Good Bible translation remains utterly dependent on humans who are utterly dependent on God.
Q: Are you a one-man show?
A: No. There is no way to do this by myself. This project involves cooperation and coordination between several organizations and many people. I work with people in different countries helping with different aspects of the process of Bible translation and publication. There are also others who work on electronic Scripture publishing in other geographic areas.
Q: So what do you actually do?
A: I help write open source software that processes Scripture files, essentially typesetting them into different formats. These formats are are then made available to people to read and study the Bible on various electronic devices. I also create and maintain several related web sites. My goal is to post Scriptures without barriers to making and sharing faithful copies so that they can spread to as many people who can read them as possible. I’m focusing right now on the Pacific area, but have helped a few people in other areas.
Q: How fast can you post new Bible translations and formats?
A: That depends on many things. It depends on what format I get the Scripture in and how much work I have to do to get the files into the format expected by the conversion programs. It depends on when I get translations and permission to post. It depends on how long it takes to write software to convert to a new format. The biggest limit to the speed of this work is the time it takes to actually translate the Holy Bible. Actually running the software and posting Scriptures is very fast, once the software is ready and the Scriptures are in the correct input format. This can make for some impressive bursts of speed, but there can be longer delays between postings while working on more challenging input formats (like, for example, paper only) and writing software to produce alternate output formats (like software for specific Bible study programs). The net result looks like intermittent bursts of activity that are hard to predict.
Q: How many many languages have you posted Scriptures for?
A: That is a rapidly-moving target, right now. Check out the current count at PNGScriptures.org and VanuatuBibles.org. I suppose you could count English, too, with eBible.org.
Q: Do you do any actual Bible translation?
A: Yes, for the World English Bible, which I’m the senior editor and chief bottleneck for. Please pray that I stop being a bottleneck and start being more of an editor. Its claim to fame is being free. Free of copyright. Free of hassles. Free to use and publish. It is a bold statement that I believe that God’s Word really belongs to God, not me. If it were copyrighted and designed to make money, there would be no need for it, really. There are already plenty of those in English.
Q: Are the Scriptures you post whole Bibles?
A: Only a few are. Most of the minority languages don’t have a whole Bible translation. Many have a New Testament. Some have a few books of the Old Testament and/or New Testament. Some only have one book. I post whatever has been translated and sent to me for posting.
Q: Does anyone else post freely downloadable Scriptures on line?
A: Yes. One good example is ScriptureEarth.org, which hosts over 230 minority languages spoken in North and South America. We keep in touch with each other and, where practical, help each other. I’m concentrating on the Pacific nations.
Q: Who is going to read and listen to the Scriptures you post?
A: The current primary audience is the diaspora. Those are the people who have moved from their remote villages into towns and cities where they have Internet access, access to computers and smart phones, etc. The secondary audience is those who already have that access in their own villages. The secondary audience will grow in time, and become primary, as access to technology and networks improve in remote areas.
Q: Will electronic Scriptures replace printed Bibles?
A: No, but they make a great supplement. There are many advantages to electronic Scriptures. I carry an impressive library of Bible translations to church in my smart phone, but I’m not ready to get rid of my paper Bibles altogether. People’s preferences and situations will vary. The more ways to get God’s Word to people, the better.
Q: What do you charge for Bible software and Bible web hosting services?
A: Nothing.
Q: What do you charge people for downloadable Bibles?
A: Nothing.
Q: Who pays for the costs of Scripture web hosting, other ministry expenses, and your cost of living?
A: Our partners. May God bless them all!

Very early Friday morning, 21 January 2011, I had a dream in which I saw a very large house in which we were working and living. It was in the mountains, and a creek ran between the house and a tall volcanic mountain. From time to time, hot lava rocks fell from the top of the volcano and landed in the creek, where they cooled and solidified. Nobody was afraid of the rocks, because they seemed to pose no threat, and any fire started across the creek would be quenched before it reached the house, even though the house was not far from the creek. This went on for some time, and people ignored it, eventually. Then I looked and saw an open crack, a fumarole, from which toxic gasses (H2S, etc.) came from deep in the earth. People looked at it, then carried on after a while, becoming used to both the hot rocks from the top and the fumarole. Again I looked, and the fumarole started slowly oozing hot lava. It attracted attention again, people took pictures, then got used to it and carried on. The lava stopped and froze at the creek, boiling lots of the water in the process. Nobody saw a threat, so they carried on as usual. Then the Lord told me to pack up and get ready to leave, so my family and some others did. Some didn’t. We had all of our stuff in the cars and trucks behind the building. Then I saw the hill across the creek starting to bulge, and the Lord told me to tell everyone to leave. Some did. Some did not. One crazy woman went and stood on the lava flow, and burned to death. She had told her daughter to go with her, but we kept her with us, instead. The Lord told me to give a last warning, so I did. Then those who were willing went to the loaded vehicles and drove away. As we left the area, there was a huge explosion of lava, rock, and gasses behind us, leaving no survivors among those who did not listen.
It was a vivid dream, with more details than I have written. It reminded me of the watchman warning to Ezekiel (33:6-7). The interpretation may be obvious, but I reserve the right to state the obvious. People get used to sin in increments, and don’t always perceive the danger that they should when they should when it gets close to them by degrees. Woe unto those who don’t heed the voice of the Lord, directly and through prophets, but listening and obeying can save your life, which is far more valuable than anything you might leave behind.

I got a call from someone claiming to be from Microsoft, today, wanting to warn me that my computer was downloading viruses from the Internet continuously. They lied. Microsoft doesn’t do that! Criminals who want to steal your money, damage your reputation, and take over your computer do that. Beware! If you get such a call, don’t even THINK about following their instructions.