As manager of Bible Lesson Products, Christian Harder and his team are responsible for producing editions in ten different languages in Boston, and they have editorial oversight of licensed production for about 20 other languages.
When he was asked how the team feels about the responsibility for producing “a lesson on which the prosperity of Christian Science largely depends,” (Manual of The Mother Church, p. 31), he said: “The responsibility is not ours—it’s God’s. Our responsibility is to get ourselves out of the way, and make sure that we’re doing what God tells us to do. Often that includes shifting our focus away from the day-to-day operations so we can concentrate (sometimes even exclusively) on the mental protection of the Lesson- Sermon—preparing thought in the world to receive that expression of the Christ. Then the mechanical steps pretty much take care of themselves.”
Speaking of the King James Version, Christian said, “One of the questions we often get is, ‘Why don’t you just use the King James Bible in French, or Swahili, or whatever language?’ Well, the fact is, it doesn’t exist in those languages. In some cases, people have translations of the King James from 1611 in another modern language. Even so it’s not really a close match for the King James because in any translation, you have to make choices, and everything depends upon the understanding of the translators. So we often find ourselves with Bible verses that might have the same coordinates—you find them in the same place in the book—but they say very different things.
