This week, I’m posting the first in a series of short essays about the complicated process of Bible translation. Over the last several years, as I worked through the various stages of translating the Gospel of John with the Mamusi translation team, I sometimes found myself frustrated by how long it was taking. To help keep things in perspective—and maybe to address similar concerns you might have—here’s a taste of translation. To start off this series, here’s a description of one of the countless issues we wrestled with.

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Whose Father?

One of the linguistic features of the Mamusi language—as in many languages across Papua New Guinea and around the world—is the concept of inalienable possession. This means that certain nouns (typically kinship terms, body parts, and a few other categories) must be grammatically possessed by someone or something.

For example, the Mamusi word for “arm” is kama-, but it never appears in that bare form (hence the trailing hyphen). This makes sense when you consider that arms are nearly always attached to someone. Any time we see this word in Mamusi, it includes a suffix indicating possession:

• kamang = “your arm”
• kamara = “their arms”

This pattern extends to non-human entities as well:

• ya kamana = “branch” (literally, “tree’s arm”)
• maeli kamana = “hamlet” (literally, “village’s arm”)

This feature differs from the structure of Biblical languages and from the European languages most of us are familiar with. Most of the time, context clarifies who the possessor is. But occasionally, we face translation challenges with theological (or at least sociological) implications.

One such instance arises in John 6:46. The New International Version translates this verse as follows (emphasis mine):

No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father.

The Mamusi word for “father” is tamang-, but like “arm,” it requires a possessor suffix. In Greek and English, “the Father” appears without a specified possessor, so we are forced to make a choice. Here are the most reasonable options we debated for dealing with this issue:

1. Tamangku (“my Father”)

Since Jesus is speaking, we know He is referring to His Father, God. However, Jesus speaks in the third person here, not the first. He refers to Himself as “the one who is from God.” If we translate this as Tamangku (“my Father”), the sentence reads:

“No one has seen my Father except the one who is from God.”

This wording makes it sound as if “the one who is from God” refers to someone other than Jesus, which is misleading.

2. Tamana (“his Father”)

This option aligns the possessor with “the one who is from God.” However, since “No one” is also in the third person, the sentence:

“No one has seen his Father…”

could be misinterpreted to mean “no one’s own father,” which is incorrect.

3. Rewording for Clarity

We attempted a rewording approach, restructuring the sentence as:

“The one who came from God is the only one who has seen his Father.”

This resolved the ambiguity, but in doing so, it lost the emphatic structure of the original verse, where Jesus restates the same idea twice with the phrases “No one has seen… except…” and “only he has seen…”

4. Tamara (“our Father”)

This generalization avoids the previous issues by referring to God as the Father of Jesus and His audience. However, this is not how Jesus originally phrased it. Additionally, tamara can mean either “our Father” or “their Father,” and in Mamusi, “their” cannot refer generically to singular entities like “no one” or “the one who is from God” as it can in English.

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These were just some of the options we debated throughout the translation process. Which one would you choose, and why? Or do you see a better way to handle this issue?

Leave your thoughts in the comments, or email us at thewadejourney@gmail.com. Next time, I’ll reveal what decision we made and dive into another tricky translation issue.

Thanks for reading!