Translating the Personality of Jesus

Let's say someone doesn't speak English and is foreign to hip-hop music. In order for that person to understand the English lyrics of a hip-hop song deeply, more needs to be done on top of merely translating the propositional content of those foreign English lyrics into his native tongue. More crucially, he needs to hear those hip-hop lyrics rapped through a living and breathing human being in front of him who organically incarnates the hip-hop culture in a thoroughly native manner and capacity. Merely translating the content of the hip-hop lyrics into the target culture's native language will not suffice. It needs to be rapped by a living personality that has a mind that has spent years being squeezed the mold of thinking with "hip-hop"py psychological structures, emotional programming that has a hip-hop type of texture of emotional reactions to life's events, a physical body that is thoroughly conditioned to engage with one's physical environment the way a native hip-hopper would (e.g. one's literal "walk"/gesticulations), and social relational habits that conform to an unspoken order of social norms in the hip-hop culture. In other words, the rapper who embodies the hip-hop culture in his very own living personality is the very context for the hip-hop lyrics that he bilingually raps to the foreigner. An example is MC Jin successfully transporting the hip-hop culture to Hong Kong not merely by translating his English rap lyrics into Chinese, but rapping them with his living personality that is thoroughly native with hip-hop consciousness.

In our day, in addition to the need for accurate textual translation of the "lyrics" aka teachings of Jesus in the Gospels to a secular culture that is foreign to it, there is the more pressing need for the translation of the actual living personality of Jesus (1 John 2:6) in order for people spiritually foreign to Jesus to "really get his spiritual lyrics". These personalities have the mold of their mental furniture squeezed into supernatural psychological structures and subconscious thinking patterns that Jesus himself has (1 Cor 2:16), emotional programming that has Jesus' supernatural texture of emotional reactions to life's events (Philippians 4:6-9), a physical body that is thoroughly conditioned to engage in one's physical environment the supernatural way Jesus would (Romans 6:12-13), and social relational habits that conform to the hidden supernatural order of norms that Jesus wired his relational habits to follow (Philippians 2:5-11). In other words, mere translation of the propositional content of Jesus' teachings from Greek to English, while good in and of itself, will not suffice. It needs a context of a living personality that, through the Holy Spirit's supernatural assistance, organically embodies a supernatural texture of Christ-consciousness that teaches or "raps" it to the world.