Now, how do we express all this in Toba? This is José’s translation:

Which means: “God is the Spirit that created life, and so there is one way people can really worship him, when his Spirit gives them new life.”

How do we translate the Scriptures into Toba? Sometimes a straightforward literal translation can lead to a wrong understanding of the text. In Toba we have to take great care in translating references to spirits, Holy or otherwise, in order to avoid misunderstandings ...

Here’s an example from John’s Gospel. The Greek text of this verse
says (with literal translation word for word):






The New International Version translates it as follows:

God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.

The problem in this verse is what does “God is spirit” mean. In Toba, the obvious understanding of a literal translation of this phrase would be that God is a spirit, one of the countless spirits that live in the spiritual realm and control and affect our world in different ways, themselves being controlled to a certain extent by the witchdoctors. Obviously, this is not the correct understanding of what John was saying.  

But we must be careful that we don’t misunderstand it either. Many in our western culture would understand the phrase to mean that God doesn’t have a physical body. But that’s not what John was getting at either. When John talks about the Spirit, his emphasis is on God’s creative capacity, the source of life itself. And in the second half of the verse, worshiping God “in spirit and in truth” can be understood as worshiping in a way that is “truly spiritual”, or, in other words, through a born-again life.