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New Emoji Bible Translation For Millennial Generation

By Dee Sharp
Published on: 13:36 PST, May 25, 2016

A new Bible translation has just been completed and published — an “Emoji Bible” that is being marketed as “Scripture for Millennials.” The new Emoji Bible will be available for download on iTunes on May 29, according to an article published on Christian Today. Millennials have been brought up in a tech-savvy world and emoji “speak” is quite common among the tech-savvy millennial crowd, so it seems logical for the Bible to be translated in the modern language of emojis. The author, who is known only as ????, told The Memo that the emoji Bible project is about accessibility. An Inquisitr article from two years ago says an artist named Kamran Kastle was in the process of creating a Bible with emoticons, but it’s not clear if Kastle and ???? are the same person.

“Emojis are emotional, and allow people to express feelings in a visual way within the structure of “normal,” written language. What’s made them so successful, is that they’re language-agnostic – they allow you to convey an idea to anyone, regardless of what language they speak.”

???? told The Memo that they hope the translation of the Bible into emojis will “open the Bible up to wider audiences, and hope it will be in the top 5 or 10 books when you type in ‘Bible’ in the iBooks store.”

“A major goal of this whole process was to take a book that I think is very non-approachable to lay readers and try to make it more approachable by removing a lot of its density.”

The author explained that he launched the emoji translator and mapped different ways that the King James (KJV) Bible text could be visualized. “You start with emojis that are really common – for instance, the earth emoji can mean earth, world, or planet,” ???? said.

“Eventually I created an actual translator program with a list of 80 different emoji icons, and 200 corresponding words. In addition: I built in some common shorthand – so that “and” became &, and “first” became 1st,” the author explained. The result is a shorter but complete version of the Bible with about 10 or 15 percent of the total text left out. ???? wants more books in the future to include emojis as well.

The author said that translating the Bible into emoji verse has been challenging. “The Bible has a lot of old language, there’s a lot of nuance involved in translating it – a lot of the time, you need to think beyond 1-to-1 fit,” said ????. “There’s a lot of trial and error, and a lot of rereading.”

The author says some people have also been critical towards the emoji project.

“I’ve received a lot of tweets, some very nice some very, not nice.”

However, the author says it is all worth the goal of making the Bible more approachable. The Memo compares the new translation to the William Tyndale translation of the Bible into English in the 1500s. The “high church” wasn’t impressed because they thought the Bible was only for holy men who could read Greek or Hebrew. Tyndale also wrote a book that showed his disagreement with Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. This book and Tyndale’s “act of tyranny” for translating the Bible into lowly English caused Tyndale, who was a Christian, to be executed and burnt at the stake. While being executed and burned at the stake may be highly extreme, some people will most likely disagree that the emoji Bible translation should be published.

What are your thoughts on the emoji Bible? Do you think it’s a great idea for the millennials, or do you think the new translation would be considered blasphemy? Please share your thoughts and comments below.

[Image By Ignera/Shutterstock]

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