How the Jesus Trade Harms the World - the Iron Curtain of Copyright & Cost - episode 3

These things you're about to hear represent just a tiny fraction of the problems many believers face around the world.

It was either, put my kid in private school, or buy a book to teach the theological class.

There are resources that I can't use in any way.

The copyright cartel.

That's a month's salary.

Do you think that our master who provided this fine meal is impressed when we charge those around us for every helping?

So the last thing they need are paywalls and juridical handcuffs. They need advocates. They need access.

And we believe the lie that it's our job as the disciples to charge each person for the bread and fish. The Muslims are publishing translations of the Quran under the license of no rights reserved. I was hungry and you gave me no food.

I was thirsty and you gave me no drink. Now that we've spent some time laying the biblical foundations for freely giving ministry, it's story time. I want to share some anecdotes and interview clips to give you a picture of the bitter fruit of the Jesus trade.

Because when we refuse to follow Jesus' command in Matthew 10 8 to freely give the grace that we have freely received, the repercussions are tragic. Much of the fallout of the modern church's obsession with monetizing ministry has been invisible to Westerners.

Copyright as Control Over the Word of God

That's because it's usually casting a dark shadow on people in other countries who don't speak English or who aren't as wealthy. You see, our tendency is not to mind if the rest of the world is suffering as a result of our selfishness and greed, as long as we don't have to see it or hear about it.

Ignorance is bliss. So I'm here to lovingly shatter the rose-colored glasses with a reality check. These things you're about to hear represent just a tiny fraction of the problems many believers face around the world in trying to get access to Christian resources because of the Jesus trade's fixation with control.

Control over the distribution of truth for the sake of maximizing profits. Part of this control is what in other industries has been labeled the copyright cartel. And Christians have drunk deeply from this spring and fully adopted the all-rights-reserved paradigm.

Some employ it out of misguided fear and a failure to trust God, and others out of complete ignorance or just irrationality. No matter what lies at its root, copyright restriction is one of the fundamental pillars of the Jesus trade.

And has been wielded like the shackles of the slave trade to keep the Word of God in bondage. And when we chain the Word, we starve the world. So we're here to speak out so that the Word will be emancipated.

And if this sounds a bit dramatic to you, just wait. The Word has always been intended to be a shared family feast, enjoyed together as the church without hindrance. But imagine that as you sit at the table, you say to your rich brother, could you please pass me the potatoes?

And he responds, pay me first, or fill out this form, and maybe I'll give you permission to have some. Does this kind of attitude belong at a family meal? Yet this is the grotesque world we live in, where the marginalized people groups of the world say, please pass the meat.

And wealthy Westerners say, only after you give me your credit card information. And some just say, no, but maybe you can have some of the leftover scraps when I'm done. Let's be real. We did not prepare this feast ourselves.

It's a gift from God, overflowing from His free abundant grace. Do you think that our master who provided this fine meal is impressed when we charge those around us for every helping? Is he pleased when we block the hungry brothers and sisters sitting next to us from freely partaking simply because they haven't got the money?

As we've said before, most Christians don't engage in this legal binding of grace out of nefarious motives. Most people who bolster and defend the Jesus trade do so with the best of intentions or simply unwittingly.

Just like so many people who bought, sold, and held slaves in the U .S. before the Civil War. You can read Uncle Tom's Cabin to see the many sophisticated ways they spoke of themselves doing God's will and how they were enslaving the Africans for their own good.

It's amazing how we can slam the doors of hope in men's faces in the name of doing what's right. So let's get into some true stories and interviews. To begin with, let's ask some people from the majority world about the financial challenges they face on the ground when it comes to accessing the kind of biblical resources they need.

The Cost of Biblical Resources in the Majority World

If I want to do a master in biblical languages, I need basically a fortune. The price of a Hebrew grammar book would be maybe half of a monthly salary, for example, to buy one book. So it becomes this impossible cycle of challenges and obstacles that you can break into somehow.

I think when you try to look for a specific academic resource in biblical studies, usually the most important resources are the prices can be really high. I mean, $100, $150, that's a month's salary for some people in the Middle East or even Africa, maybe two or three months' salary.

So even getting a soft copy on Kindle or something, not as much cheaper than these prices. So it's really, really hard to spend that much money on one book when you have trying to feed your family and trying to get by.

Pastors, seminary students, and lay leaders, they usually cannot afford printed Greek and Hebrew Bible readers. One interlinear Bible that I bought in the U .S. for $30 was sold in Brazil for over 500 reais, which is almost half a paycheck if you're working a minimum wage job.

If you earn $400, it's impossible for you to do it. You get a scholarship, you cut $100, $90, it's still a high number. I think in electronic resources, it's basically impossible for a person to pay $1 ,000, $1 ,500, $600, and then buy materials for $20, $100, $200.

Our economic reality doesn't allow for $200. I can tell you that maybe I'm above the average salary of an average person in my country, and there are resources that I cannot afford in any way, that I would like to have.

Another big issue is that sometimes you can have access to these resources, but they're just so expensive, and they're in another language. They're not written in Portuguese. Let's say I'm going to be preaching through Genesis.

For me to get a really good Bible commentary on Genesis, let's imagine it's $30 U .S. Well, I mean, $30, for many people, it's about a tenth of what they make in a month, and you have to pay that to buy a book.

So it's a lot of money. At one point, there was a month when I bought a book, and I had to return it, because I needed to pay to put my kids in school. It was either put my kid in private school, or buy a book to teach the theological class that I need to teach at the institute where I'm a professor, and my institute couldn't afford it.

I couldn't afford it on my salary, and I'm not saying that I receive little. For Brazilian standards, I receive quite a bit. It was the price of the monthly tuition for my children in school.

Copyright Restrictions Blocking Access to Scripture

In fact, the Jesus trade is not only restricting access to study tools and books, but actually restricting access to the Word of God itself. In an article published back in 2015, Tim Jory shares some true anecdotes.

He tells about a Bible society in Southeast Asia that does not consider there to be any financial value in printing more copies of the Bible in certain languages. So they don't. Even though the churches are pleading for more, and no one else is allowed to print it because of the copyright restrictions.

He then describes two people groups in Africa. In the first, almost no one knows how to read, but they have a written translation of the New Testament. And a Bible society owns the copyright and refuses to allow anyone to record an audio version of it so that it can be used by those who can't read, as well as freely spread from phone to phone for the building up of the church.

In the second people group, yet another Bible society is deliberately starving the Bible market to keep prices high artificially. So the local churches can't afford copies of Scripture in their language, while the Bible society's warehouses sit filled with the very Bibles local Christians are longing.

For.

A Brazilian scholar friend of mine published an important book once on a certain area of biblical Greek. And he told me that my professor here inspired him to write that book in the first place. So meanwhile, my professor here hears about the book and the book is too expensive for him on the publisher's website.

So he asks me to bring him a copy from the author. So he wants a copy from the author's hand when I come back to Canada from Brazil. And I agree to that. But the book never gets to me, never gets to my professor, and never gets to the author himself.

Why?

Because the publisher did not give the author enough of a discount on his own book. Isn't that something? A publishing system in North America that manages to slow down meaningful academic exchange that hinders both South and North Americans in the process.

Another thing that worries me is that this way of disseminating Christian content is starting to be copied by Brazilian publishers and content producers.

So did you catch that? We have been exporting the Jesus trade mentality far and wide through our example and our policies. And others around the world are following our bad example. And why wouldn't they?

We've told them loud and clear that this is how ministry is done. So does the copyright restriction regime help or hinder the advance of the gospel and growth of the global church? Here's some more food for thought.

My commentary, the NIVAC commentary published by Zonderman, that has been published into.

Chinese.

And it was available for Chinese taking video courses on Deuteronomy that I have videotaped in Hong Kong and whatever else. But then the president of China passed a law saying no hard copy religious books.

And they couldn't use the book anymore. Can't circulate it in China. So what are we going to do? The missions agency for whom I work, they wrote the publisher of the translation and asked, can we use your PDFs and circulate electronically the translation?

And for some mysterious reason, they said, no, I don't get it. Nobody, none of us in this circle gets it. So then we were trying to figure out, well, what are we going to do? How are we going to give our people access?

They need a textbook.

Intellectual Property and the Free Sharing of Christian Resources

Ideas ultimately come from God, right? And especially when these ideas are ideas that we are using to help edify the church. No, I don't. I don't think that putting a copyright on ideas is going to help.

So it would be great if less people actually used copyright, if less people thought that their ideas had to be financially protected. I think it would be excellent if we could use more resources and more ideas from people all over the world and there would just be more sharing, especially in Christian circles.

Now, what he's talking about here is the fact that many books in Spanish are never released as e-books. And that's completely intentional because they're afraid Latin Americans will strip the digital rights management from the file and start sharing pirated copies of it.

So since the book is only available in print, it's often extremely difficult or impossible to get a copy in your country. And the price ends up way higher than it would be if it were made available digitally.

I know some Brazilian academics and I know some missionaries working in Bible translation. And one issue that they face is they are unable to access and share good academic resources on linguistics, on translation.

And that's mostly due to copyright issues of distribution. Many Brazilian missionary translators do not know English and they are focused, of course, on doing their faithful, underappreciated, underfunded, under-resourced, lonely, painstaking work of translating that local language for the few speakers in that community.

So the last thing they need are paywalls and juridical handcuffs. They need advocates. They need access.

Now, if you still think that locking down ideas and truth with copyright is necessary, we've linked to the best books and articles that disprove this on the books and resources page of sellingjesus .org.

For example, the book Against Intellectual Monopoly argues persuasively that the status quo of intellectual property law actually stifles human flourishing and kills innovation instead of promoting it.

And Tim Jory writes, you may be wondering, so what? Why does it matter if the Bible is restricted by copyright? It may not be ideal, but what's the worst that could happen? Without overstating the case at all, the worst that can happen is what actually is happening all over the world today, the perpetuation of a total famine of God's Word in thousands of people groups.

This is true for people groups where the Bible has already been translated but is not freely accessible to the church. It is also true for the thousands of living languages where the church is restricted from using existing biblical content, tools, and training to engage in effective Bible translation in their own languages.

In that same article, Jory goes on to share two more stories. The first is about another Bible society in Africa that owns the right to a translation of the Bible and has refused for over a decade to print more copies for the people who speak that language.

Why?

They can't afford the print run. So, instead of making the Bible available for lower cost printing options like print on demand or in digital form, the Bible is simply not made available at all. The same thing happened for an even longer period of time to another people group in Africa.

So long, in fact, that the speakers of that language gave up and began functioning as though the Bible had never been translated into their language in the first place. All because of copyright restrictions that blocked access to a priceless gift.

As a Bible translator myself, I find this to be an unspeakable tragedy and shameful embarrassment. Where did so-called Christians learn to do this to fellow believers, you may ask? They learned it from their bigger, older brothers in the West, publishers like Crossway, who exercised tremendous influence over the evangelical world by example.

Their illustrious English Standard Version, which I have loved, memorized, and used for years, is published under the following legal terms. All rights reserved, the ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license.

The ESV may not be translated in whole or in part into any other language. What this means is that if you want to follow Jesus' command to give freely by publishing a book about the gospel under an open license, Crossway explicitly denies that you have the right to quote the ESV in your book.

And if God puts it in your heart to translate the ESV text into your local language where the Bible doesn't yet exist, Crossway explicitly denies you the permission to do so. We politely reached out to them for further rationale and explanation on these policies, but received no answer.

Even in spite of this kind of obviously petty behavior, people are still quick to defend the peddling of God's Word by relabeling or rebranding it as the stewarding of God's Word. That sounds so much better, doesn't it?

John has written an article precisely to destroy that notion. He says, We celebrate smuggling Bibles into hostile countries and yet forbid anyone from copying and sharing Scripture with their neighbor.

We say the Reformation put God's Word back into the hands of ordinary believers, but it has once more been taken away by modern day publishers. A future generation of Christians will look back and remember the 21st century as the time when the sharing of God's Word was restricted by Christians themselves, and it was called godly.

Even more perplexing will be why churches allowed it to happen in the first place. You know, back in 1967, a man who has come to be known as Brother Andrew published a book called God's Smuggler. Fantastic book, which tells the story of his adventures smuggling Bibles behind the iron curtain.

It has thousands of five-star reviews and has sold over 10 million copies in 35 languages, but ironically, the millions of Christians who celebrated his ministry over the years have not even realized that they themselves live behind the iron curtain of copyrighted Scripture.

The Iron Curtain of Copyright and the Call to Open Access

Let's pray for this iron curtain to fall. Meanwhile, the Muslims are publishing translations of the Quran under the license of no rights reserved. Let me read to you what it says on the cover page of this physical edition that is freely distributed to anyone who wants one.

Any part of this publication may be reproduced in any language, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the express permission of the publisher. Christianity is the most gracious of all religions.

Please hear me out here. It's one in which God has freely given his own Son, the Word who became flesh. This should be reflected in the way we distribute his written Word as well, and sadly, it's not.

And we've opened ourselves to being shamed by practitioners of false religions.

Another major obstacle for the Brazilian church is the lack of natives with a PhD to teach graduate courses in Bible and theology. Most of our top scholars had to move to North America for their studies, so they could access lectures and books under copyright there.

Ironically, most library resources I use in my PhD here in Canada are digital, but I'm not allowed to share any of it with my fellow scholars, pastors, church friends in Brazil, or translate this content.

Even our worship music needs to be emancipated from the chains of commercialization and copyright. While many songs tell of giving everything to Jesus, almost all modern songs are not freely given to Jesus and his church.

In Southeast Asia, many young people love to sing western worship songs, even if missionaries encourage them to use their local music styles. And so, they'll download and translate the lyrics to these songs and use them in their churches, almost certainly without permission, without a license, and without paying any royalties.

In other words, they do it illegally, not because they have bad motives, they simply don't understand copyright or even realize that they would be breaking the law. And now many of these churches already face persecution and so are already illegal in that sense.

And so these western copyright restrictions simply just add another legal burden to these churches.

I myself have experienced the long arm of the copyright cartel. When I was in Israel, I recorded a video of my experience of the Sea of Galilee, but someone was playing a Hillsong worship song in the background.

So even though the video was only 30 seconds long, when I uploaded it to YouTube so I could share it with others, it was flagged with a copyright claim. And Hillsong forced the video to start displaying ads that would accrue money 100 to them just because it contained a poor quality fragment of their song.

So you might be thinking, well, just ask permission and these publishers will give it freely and quickly. Wrong. This is by far the exception rather than the rule. And John can tell us a bit about this from a ton of experience.

His non-profit called Gracious Tech has contacted many different Christian organizations about these kinds of things. And here's how it's gone.

So on behalf of my organization, I've requested a number of different types of Christian resources over the years, whether that's Bible translations, images, or Bible data. And almost always it's ended up being not granted, whether that's due to them simply not replying in the first place, which has happened a number of times, or whether there's a long back and forth with lengthy delays between each email.

And eventually the process just gets stalled and they again don't reply or they simply say no and deny permission. And so in my experience, asking for Christian resources from Christian publishers and different authors, I generally expect to get knocked back.

And so these days I don't even bother asking quite often, especially if I can do it myself.

Here's another story from a while back. We've got a guy named Ken, who was a Bible enthusiast and self-taught programmer who met with a Chinese missionary named Chang. And he introduced Chang to these two pieces of commercial Bible software, PC Study Bible and Logos.

And when Chang saw the abundance of the resources, he started weeping. He then asked Ken to give him copies of these programs so that he could share them across China. And Ken said, no, that's illegal.

It's against copyright law. Chang asked, why do you care about American copyright law when we are going to jail for distributing Bibles? In most cultures, it would be hard to find a home where food is sold at the family dinner table.

Yet our global reality often paints a very different distorted picture. When it comes to the meal, Christians are called to share as brothers and sisters. You see, the spiritual food meant to freely nourish everyone gets packaged into products sold mainly to the privileged.

So fearing that God might not provide enough, we hoard and nickel and dime each other, ignoring Christ's command to set a free banquet that can satisfy the hungry soul. You see, a mindset of scarcity has invaded a gathering meant for enjoyment of abundance.

But our Lord counters the prevailing stinginess of man with a reminder that He is powerful enough to feed the 5 ,000 with almost nothing. That meal was free and spilling over, but many of us are slow to learn from it.

And we believe the lie that it's our job as the disciples to charge each person for the bread and fish. We take the family meal and hawk it like street vendors. Instead of sharing from the fountain with exultant hearts, we wrongly assume that His grace is not enough, that it will run out.

And we must sell the living water in order to make it sustainable. I lived in Equatorial Guinea, Africa for about six years, doing Bible translation and teaching local pastors. Now, this small country was once a colony of Spain, so they speak Spanish there.

So that means that they should be able to benefit from all the thousands of Spanish Christian e-books and audio books out there. But can they really? Not even close. I never met a single person there who had a credit card.

You see, Equatorial Guineans, like two-thirds of the world, have an oral culture, which means people learn best by listening to books and rarely read. You can learn more about this in Don't Throw the Book at Them by Harry Box.

Anyway, reading is difficult for them, so giving them a stack of print books would do little good. But because of the copyright cartel, there is no way for them to have legal access to Christian audio books.

It's absolutely impossible because no one is able to get a credit card. And even if they were, almost no one would be able to afford the prices of the audio books. And for the few who could afford them, their foreign credit card would not be accepted by any websites that distribute digital Christian books in Spanish.

So this situation puts me and many other missionaries in a difficult tension. When fellow Spanish-speaking believers ask me to share an audio book with them, what should I do? Break the law? Or tell the person that although I could easily copy the file to their phone, my hands are tied because some Christian organization in another country refuses to share?

Is that what I should say? Is my subservience to an unjust, ungodly legal restriction more important than my brother's salvation or growth or edification in Christ? And here's another question. Will God be pleased with me for being so moral that I withheld grace from my brother, even though my morality only served to perpetuate and honor the publisher's sin?

But does anyone even care about all this?

No.

People in the West are spectacularly clueless about these kinds of things. Most people have never even heard of Equatorial Guinea, nor are they interested in learning about the incredibly poor health of the local churches that's brought on by withholding the ministry of the word for worldly gain.

You may not realize that 2 .9 billion people in the world have no regular access to the internet. The Alliance for Affordable Internet estimates that a decent internet connection is out of reach for 90 of people in low and middle-income countries.

Now, an internet connection is a prerequisite, by default, for access to most Christian resources that are free. That's because most are very hesitant to give out downloadable files of their free resources without any digital locks on them, so they can be spread around from phone to phone, with Bluetooth or through SD cards, to those with little or no internet.

Even if there's no price tag, the fear of releasing intellectual control keeps those resources from spreading to those who need them. And the situation is similar with credit cards. It's estimated that 76 of the adult population in the world have no credit card.

In Bangladesh, it's even worse. Out of 174 million people, only 1 have a credit card. And out of 1 .5 billion people in India, only 3 have a credit card. What this means is that billions of people cannot buy your sermon, or worship song, or lecture series, or Bible study, or biblical counseling training, or virtual conference, or your commentary, or whatever, even if you only charge a penny.

Let me quote a relevant passage from the English Standard Version. I was hungry, and you gave me no food. I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink. Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.

So is it all doom and gloom? No, we're actually seeing the beginning of a movement toward more openness and generosity. Every tribe, every nation is creating a digital library of open resources and tools in various languages for Bible translation.

And Biblica has released a number of Bibles under Creative Commons licenses over at Open .Bible. StepBible .org is providing a free suite of tools designed particularly to give those in disadvantaged countries free access to trustworthy Bible expertise.

And scholars like Jeffrey Kahn are publishing academic books under a Creative Commons license through OpenBookPublishers .com. And the Berean Standard Bible was just released as public domain. The United Bible Societies recently released their translation handbooks for the New Testament into the Creative Commons, along with some other valuable resources.

And Alan Bunning, who founded the Center for New Testament Restoration, has provided the first modern, free, and open critical edition of the Greek New Testament. The Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome recently released the best Hebrew-Spanish lexicon in the world under a Creative Commons license.

The Gospel Coalition has been publishing their journal and a series called Concise Theology as Creative Commons. And there are others who are getting on board with this movement slowly but surely. There's still a long way to go.

And there's still evident confusion about the best way to do this, since the licenses people choose tend to hold on to various restrictions rather than actually release resources into the public domain.

But we see God at work and pray to see the ministry of the Word increasingly emancipated as more Christians become convicted that it's time to abolish the Jesus trade.