no record that Christ ever read the Scripture or participated in a syna gogue service throughout Judea. Peo ple rejected Him by asking, “Shall the Messiah come out of Calilee? We’ll not have this Man to rule over us!” People react to dialects. We’ve be come very conscious of this in our work as translators among tribes- people. The acceptance of a despised dialect was part of Christ’s humilia tion for us. He who was God, and for whom it was not a matter to be grasped at to be equal with God, made Himself of no reputation and took upon Him the form of a ser vant. Dialects do make a difference in our attitudes toward others. There’s a stigma attached to certain speech. People are embarrassed, made fun of, scoffed at, mocked and hurt by the snobbery of social dialects. Jesus Christ felt that stigma. The Bible says that the common people of Gal ilee heard Him gladly. The reason was that He talked like they did and in this sense was one of them. The fact that our Lord spoke a despised dialect qualifies Him in an unusual way to be a sympathetic Saviour to all those minority groups today who may be looked down up on because of their language or dial ect. There are hundreds of tribes which have been pushed back by the ruling class. The Indians of Mexico were forced into the mountains by the Spanish invaders. Their villages were taken away from them. The same was true in our own land when the white man moved Westward. They were exploited and belittled. I’ve seen Indians slapped by people simply because they were talking their own language. They’ve been refused their basic human rights be cause of the way they speak. How could it be their fault when they were born in a community using this language? Linguistic science tells us that one language is as good as any other language. Some of the lan-
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