The story is contributed by Dr. David King
When I first met him, Ghassan Khalaf was a lanky 19 year-old with a fifth grade education who had applied to study at the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary where I served as teacher and dean of students. Our seminary president, Dr. Finlay Graham, had asked me to sit in on his required interview with the young man.
He asked Ghassan, “Don’t you know that you should have at least graduated from high school before applying to study here?”
“Yes,” he said. “I know that; but I’m too old to go back to fifth or sixth grade to finish high school. I have to work to help support my family, but I told the Lord and my pastor and my father that I need to leave the work in my father’s store so that I can study to become a pastor as God has called me to do.”
Dr. Graham looked at him with compassion and then replied, “I will present your request to the admissions committee of the seminary, but I think it is doubtful that they will accept you with so little background education.” We prayed together then and asked that the Lord’s will would be done in this passionate young man’s life.
When the admissions committee met, we learned that Ghassan was a very faithful member of his church and very active in Bible Study and other church activities. He was sincere about his call and his desire to study at the seminary and to serve God as a pastor.
We finally agreed to let him try to study the courses offered that semester and see how he did. When he heard the good news he promised to study hard and to do his best.
No one could have guessed the result of this decision.
That first semester Ghassan struggled but managed to pass all his courses. The next semester he did better. He continued until he had successfully finished all three years of the diploma curriculum and graduated!
As professor of Greek, I had taught him the basics of New Testament Greek. He showed a gift for languages and also learned a lot of English as he read materials for his course work. After graduation he continued to study the Greek New Testament as he prepared sermons for his church in the southern suburbs of Beirut each Sunday. Ghassan was also an employee of Baptist Publications where he was responsible for a correspondence course that was mailed all over the Arab world to people who requested it. All day he received completed lessons from the students, and answered their questions. About 2000 people were involved in these studies.
What Were the Things I Said I Would Do?
In 1975 civil war in Lebanon crippled the correspondence ministry, because letters could neither come nor go. During the first few months of the civil war there were times when Ghassan could not get out of his house to visit his parishioners, and it was almost impossible to go to the publishing office which was on the other side of a fighting line. For nearly a year he did not see Frances Fuller, who was director of the publishing program. When he finally did see her, he was carrying a remarkable piece of work that he had done at home. He told her that for months he had, like most of the people in Beirut, walked the floor while listening to gunfire and to news reports on the radio. Then one day he had become aware of all the wasted time and thought, “Now what were some of those things I often said I would do, if I had the time?” One of those things, he remembered, was to create a concordance of the Bible.
He had a copy of The Englishman’s Concordance to the New Testament and began to translate it into Arabic. While the shells exploded around the apartment building where he lived with his wife and baby girl, he plugged away at his project. This was much more than simple translation and required all of his skills in English, Greek and Arabic. As he studied each word in the English New Testament, he had to look carefully at the original Greek texts and then determine which Arabic word best fit the usage of the Greek word in the New Testament context. To be useful to the student of the Bible, each Greek word had to be related accurately to the words of the Van Dyke Arabic Bible, the most commonly used translation in the Arab world. In the process he became far more understanding of the Greek New Testament than I am!
A Historic Opportunity
Mrs. Fuller was thrilled to see it—history’s first Arabic Concordance to the Greek New Testament, though the Arabic Bible had been distributed and read for a thousand years! It was a much needed tool for Bible study in the Arabic-speaking world and here it was sitting on her desk in front of her! Well, about one-third of it, with its creator hoping she would change his job description and allow him to finish it. Knowing that the production of this book would be difficult and expensive, but knowing that she had to find a way, Frances encouraged him to complete it.
In the final stages of production, Ghassan himself did the tedious task of cutting the Greek words from copies of the Greek dictionary and using a light table to paste each word into the space saved for it by the Arabic typesetter. In 1979, four years after its shaky beginning, the book rolled from the presses, with a foreword by the renowned scholar, Dr. Kenneth Bailey, and the acclaim of a prestigious Beirut newspaper in a full page article describing it. Three thousand of the 5000 copies printed had already been sold to an Egyptian distributor. It is still in use today among Arabic-speaking pastors, priests and serious students of the Bible, and still the only Arabic concordance!
Using What He Learned
Because of what he learned through working on the Greek-Arabic concordance, Ghassan was invited to become a consultant to the Bible Society in its translation projects. Through the help of a friend, he enrolled in a seminary in Belgium where he studied sources in English, French and Arabic and earned a Ph.D. degree! He has continued to study and to write and has published twelve more books, including Lebanon in the Bible.
Now Ghassan is working on the project he considers to be the peak of his career: A translation of the New Testament, directly from Greek into Arabic. His aim is to present the NT books as historical documents so that researchers can detect the flavor of the New Testament time and culture exactly as they were, without any modernization of biblical terms or expressions. He expects his work to be of value in seminary classrooms and used by professors, pastors and other educated people in the Arab world. He is adding footnotes to take care of ambiguities in the text. Ghassan hopes to finish this project in 2018.
These are amazing accomplishments for a boy with a fifth grade education who wanted to study in the seminary though he didn’t qualify!