Thank you all for supporting this GREAT WORK!
I have no doubt this is Matthew 6:20 in action.
To check out the T-Shirt store click HERE.
100% of all the proceeds will go to First Bible Church (in their effort to print and distribute the KJV French translation all throughout Haiti).
If you wish to support First Bible Church Directly (no T-shirt), you can donate HERE.
If you need to reach out to someone from First Bible Church to donate in some other way, you can email FBC’s bookkeeper, Mrs. Bavaro, at bookkeeper@firstbible.org.
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The Story
The following is from pastor Mike Veach:
I got involved in this project thanks to a hurricane! In October 2012, after Hurricane Sandy hit Staten Island, Gail Riplinger called me to ask if we needed any help or finances. I guess she assumed, from what she saw on TV, that FBC blew away in the storm, lol. I told her we were fine, and that, in fact, we were out with crews of men every day helping dig people out and repair houses and clean up the mess. She called back the next day to tell me she had looked at our website and was impressed with the story of the Cebuano Bible that we helped produce for the Philippines. That was a translation effort we helped with starting in 1995. It resulted in a Cebuano Bible that is now the standard for the churches in the southern Philippines. (The fourth edition was finished in 2010 and, since then, every few years, we pay to print and ship a container, about 25,000 Cebuano Bibles, to a pastor in Mindanao who does the distribution). Mrs. Riplinger asked me if I would be willing to do the same thing for a French woman, Nadine Stratford, who had been working on a French translation of the King James Bible for many years but had gotten very little help and needed someone to guide her. The timing of all this was very strange because that very week, Maurice LaPierre was staying with me. He had been working on a French translation himself for about ten years. I had promised him that when he was ready, I would take him around and introduce him to some printing ministries that might be willing to print his translation. So, he took a short furlough from the mission field, and came to New York, the same week the hurricane hit! But in spite of the hurricane, we made plans for a road trip to Ohio, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Florida, to visit these various big printing ministries. But first, I had a three-week mission trip scheduled for November to the Philippines. Maurice and I were going to leave as soon as I got back from that trip. But just before the mission trip, is when I got the phone call from Gail Riplinger, asking me to help Nadine. At the time, I told her I would pray about it, but I did not expect to be getting involved, since I had already promised Maurice. However, the next day, Nadine called me, and after an hour or so on the phone with this dear old lady (in her mid-seventies at that time), I felt strongly persuaded by the Lord, that I was supposed to help her. But I didn’t know how to break the news to Maurice, so I told him that when I got back from the Philippines, I had something very important to talk to him about. Over the next three weeks in the Philippines, I started receiving emails from Nadine and Gail detailing the history of Nadine’s work and showing me the serious problems with the French Bibles that are out there. I prayed and prayed about it, and felt absolutely sure God wanted me involved.
When I got back from the Philippines, I sat down with Maurice and his wife Gerda to tell them the story. I gave them the whole thing, even showed them the emails, and Nadine’s website where her translation, still a work in progress, was posted for public feedback. Maurice got very emotional and started to cry… but not for the reason I thought! He told me that four or five years earlier, his computer had crashed, and he lost all of his translation work. He was devastated, depressed! And then, looking around on the Internet, he saw a French translation that was posted online and was not copyrighted. As he read the translation, he was excited to see how well it was done, and how true it was to the King James Bible. All he could remember was that it had been done by some woman in France. But it wasn’t copyrighted, so he downloaded it and tweaked it and worked on it for the next four or five years, and was now ready to print it. He and his wife both were very emotional as they told me this! Maurice said he told Gerda at the time, that if he could ever meet this woman, he would thank her personally for the great work she had done. He didn’t know that Nadine had recently moved to the United States to be near her daughters in Kentucky. I told him, well, brother, would you like to meet her? He said, “Are you kidding, I would give anything to meet her!” So we got in the car that afternoon and drove to Kentucky! We had a wonderful visit with her and her husband, Richard. After spending a few hours with Nadine, Maurice felt led to tell her that he wanted to back out of this project himself and turn everything over to her. And that’s what he did. He gave her all of his manuscripts. But that’s how God worked this out, to keep me from losing a friend and confirming to me that I had made the right decision.
Since then, FBC has shipped four containers of French scriptures to Haiti. The first shipment was 250,000 gospels of John in 2016. All of those were distributed during the next few mission trips. Then, after we finished the New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs in 2018, we shipped 10,000 copies to Haiti in February 2019. I traveled there a few months later, and with our missionary and a few guys from FBC, we held a Pastors’ Conference in Port-au-Prince. Seventy pastors attended. I preached for three days on the history of the French Bible, using charts, PowerPoint, and several object lessons. The first French translation was printed in 1535 and, since then, has gone through many variations, all of them influenced by John Calvin’s doctrine and later corrupted by Westcott & Hort’s critical text. The pastors at the first conference got very excited and even a little angry at the end. We asked them to stand up and let us know what they thought. They were very outspoken, very upset, some were even yelling that this information had never been taught to them before. One old gray-haired pastor stood up, crying, waving his (corrupt) French Bible in the air, and said, “Why didn’t you come sooner?” They encouraged us to let the whole country know about this, so we held another conference six months later and had 1,200 pastors! I preached and taught for five days on inspiration and preservation, pointing out the corruptions in the French translations, and showing them what they could expect if they had a real Bible and were real Bible believers. We gave each pastor a case of New Testaments. This has now taken off like a wildfire. We did not originally intend this to be a project only for Haiti. However, our missionary (Maurice LaPierre) has helped us in this project from the beginning and the translation (officially called the King James Français) is being very well received by churches all over Haiti. To keep Maurice supplied with scriptures, we sent another shipment in August 2020 (32,000 copies) and a fourth in October 2021 (40,000 copies).
Out with the Old
The French bibles before this new translation:
1535- Pierre Robert Olivétan (c.1506-1538), a Calvinist by faith, and cousin to John Calvin, was the first to translate the Scriptures into French from the Masoretic Hebrew Text and the Greek text of Erasmus, which had recently become available. The translation was historic, but was not widely distributed in France. The Olivétan Bible and all subsequent French Bibles based on it contained extensive Calvinistic commentary. The translation itself was also influenced by Calvin’s doctrine, especially in the Old Testament where prophecies relating to the future millennial kingdom of Jesus Christ were translated in the present tense, reflecting Calvin’s belief that the Church had replaced Israel! Also, Olivétan introduced the word “Éternal” as a proper name for God, which persists in ALL the French translations! Other problems, such as the improper translation of the word hell, were also carried into future revisions.
Because the French language was rapidly evolving in the sixteenth century, the Calvinist pastors in Geneva made frequent revisions of the Olivétan: in 1536, 1538, 1539, 1540, 1543, 1546, 1551, 1553 (by Stephanus), 1560 (by John Calvin), and 1588 (by Theodore Beza). As a result, there has never been an “authorized version” of the Scriptures in French, i.e., no translation has ever achieved in French the universal authority that Luther’s Bible did in German or the King James Bible did in English.
1560- The Olivétan Bible was revised by John Calvin & came to be known as the “Bible de Genève.” The 1588 revision of the Bible de Genève by Beza became the main French Bible until 1696.
1696- The 1588 Bible de Genève was revised by David Martin. The New Testament was published in 1696 and the complete Bible in 1707. It came to be known as the Martin Bible. The Martin Bible was revised in 1744 and 1855. The 1855 Martin Bible is still in print.
1724- The Martin Bible was revised by Jean-Frederick Ostervald in 1724 (NT) and 1744 (OT). It came to be known as the Ostervald Bible. It was revised in 1805, 1822, 1835, and 1881.
1874 Louis Segond made a brand-new French translation from the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts that were available to him in 1874 (OT) and 1880 (NT). The Segond translation was revised in 1910 using the corrupt Westcott-Hort Greek text. The 1910 Segond, which reads the same as the NIV, is the most commonly used French Bible around the world.
1881- The Ostervald Bible was revised by Pastor Charles Frossard using the critical text of Westcott and Hort. The OT was the work of Frossard along with eight pastors and a number of theologians. As would be expected, many corruptions found their way into the translation.
1996- The 1881 Ostervald was revised by C. N. Baughman using the King James Bible as a guide, however, many of the problems were not corrected, as a side-by-side comparison reveals.
2016- The King James Française: a French translation of the King James Bible by N. L. Stratford. The New Testament with Psalms & Proverbs is available from First Bible Church, Staten Island, NY and from Bible and Literature Missionary Foundation, Shelbyville, TN.
2018- A revision of the 1744 Ostervald New Testament by Mario Monette, a Canadian pastor, with much of his work “borrowed” from Stratford before the King James Française was copyrighted.
2022- The King James Française: a French translation of the King James Bible by N. L. Stratford.
The Complete bible is available from First Bible Church, Staten Island, NY and from Bible and Literature Missionary Foundation, Shelbyville, TN. This is the bible we are supporting.