THE ICON BIBLE

About a couple of years before 1999 I thought that perhaps this thing of translating the Bible into all the languages of the world was an enormous undertaking and that perhaps there was a better way to go about it. I started thinking why not simply create a single language that everyone could understand? Well as a translator myself I knew of the limits of Esperanto and other attempts at world languages. So the idea of creating another language just was not very promising.

I looked at different ways that a language could be created and came to the idea that perhaps images or icons could fulfill the role of a universal language. After all many icons are used worldwide without any words and most people understand their meaning. These had to be some type of universally recognized symbols. I thought that perhaps computer icons could fill that purpose. However at those times the number of computer graphics was limited, there were only a few wingdings and webdings to make a language out of them.  However I did use some wingdings and webdings in the creation of The Holy Apostolic New Testament, I believe I was the first one to ever embed computer icons in a Bible to convey general ideas.

I had studied some Japanese so I knew about Kanji, but I did not think that was the right approach either. After a while of studying this issue, because I could not create a decent language out of what was then available, I decided to just drop the idea of an Icon Bible to some future time.

Fast forward to the year 2020 when I begun to think that the invention and wide distribution of Emojies and Emoticons could perhaps be used to look again at my old idea of a universal iconic bible, a bible that can be read by anyone in the whole planet, a Bible that relies only on universal images to convey words and ideas. Maybe it is still too early to create a universal bible that uses images to transmit the word of God, but perhaps we could at least start the process and then let some future generation complete this task. I would like to at least lay the foundation or the framework for this work. The building of the Great Wall of China took many generations to complete, but I hope that creating a Universal iconic Bible may only take a couple of generations at most.

During the year 2020 I begun to fiddle around with using the current emojies, emoticons, wingdings and webdings to perhaps start creating the Iconic Bible, but all my attempts just did not work. I could not find a way to convey certain ideas just using images. Maybe one of my readers could perhaps give me some advice on how to create a universal Bible perhaps thru some type of icons or symbolic language.

Anyway, this is just a dream of mine that perhaps one day I could start again. Just think about it a single Bible that could be read by anyone in the planet.