One of the most significant advances leading to and advancing the Reformation of the church was the translation of the Bible into the everyday language of the people. The aim was to put the Word of God into the hearts and minds of all the people from the greatest to the least.
From time to time ReformationUCC.org will highlight efforts in Bible translation as part of remembering, celebrating, and building on the heritage of the Reformation.
Jacqueline Huggins is a Bible translator with training from Philadelphia College of the Bible, Fort Wayne Bible College and the Summer Institute of Linguistics. She serves with “Wycliffe Bible Translators”, sometimes called “Wycliffe Bible Society” though the name is not technically correct and misleading. Coming to Jesus Christ the Lord at age 28, by age 36 she was commissioned as a Bible Translator for a people group numbering 25,000 in the Philippines. 20 years later, the New Testament in the Filipino Kagayanen language is now complete.
Jacqueline Huggins—through her involvement in translating the New Testament into the Filipino Kagayanen language—will become the:
– World’s first African-American female to ever complete a New Testament translation.
– First African-American to complete a New Testament translation since the early 1900s (Efrain Alphonse completed the Valiente New Testament).
– First African-American with Wycliffe bible translators to ever complete a New Testament translation.
In 1986, 36-year-old Huggins, a Philadelphia-born linguistics and Bible translation specialist, headed off to the Philippines on assignment with Wycliffe Bible Translators. She would spend more than 20 years translating the New Testament into the Kagayanen language, which is spoken by some 25,000. Now, with the Kagayanen translation complete, the first copies of the New Testament are expected to be delivered in February 2008.
Read Jacqueline Huggins’ presentation at Urbana
