From Media Bible
to an Applied Linguistics School

n the Wishing Well Motel I had every reason to be unhappy. It was 1978. I had lost everything, and for no fault of my own. But I had submitted to my teacher, Dr. Donald McGavran^[1], with whom I had been in close contact through correspondence for some time. I had obeyed the L-rd and had planted the seed of a great Jewish people movement in Florida. All the congregations I had started were beginning to grow and flourish. Yet in planting these messianic synagogues I had lost nearly everything it was possible to lose. Now I was a penniless, forsaken, homeless man, without even the dignity of my office as a minister. It was Labor Day, Monday, September 4, 1978.

However, hitch-hiking with only two dimes and three pennies $.23 in my pocket, I cried out to my Savior on the I-95 highway and received an immediate divine answer. Psalm 91:15 says, “I will be with him in trouble and deliver and honor him.” So, hearing my cry, the L-rd, on the spot, had the manager of the Boynton Beach Wishing Well Motel give me a ride and a room. And in that free motel room the business card on the night stand said, “Your Wish Will Come True At The Wishing Well Motel.” So I prayed for the L-rd to give me a film called The Rabbi from Tarsus — which He did eight years later, almost to the day. William Carey says, “Expect GREAT things from God; attempt GREAT things for God.”^[2]

Tap to enlarge · original book cover

The Call for $23,000

“Phil, we have your stage play, the film crew and the director, and your screenplay, but you have to send us $23,000 now. Do you have the money?”

Neil Lash called me up and said those words. I said, "No problem." Then I prayed again, and the L-rd brought Tommy Peters to mind. Because the Lord was going to make an even bigger miracle and actually multiply the $.23 Wishing Well Motel room rate 100,000 times. The day before I called Tommy, Tommy Peters had been given a directive from his administrative board: “Spend the $23,000 in the bank account tomorrow!” Then, the next day, actually the day the administrative board directed, the Holy Spirit also directed me to call Tommy, and Tommy immediately sent me the check for $23,000. By the grace of God I was speaking the truth when I told Neil Lash, "No problem". With our Lord, there is no problem. "I know the plans I have for you...to give you a future and a hope." Jeremiah 29:11.

The movie was made, and, as the promise in Psalm 91:15 says, I WAS delivered and honored. God is faithful to His Word.

On the Set, 1986

When people came up to the set on the day of filming in 1986, they looked around in amazement and asked, “Who is producing this movie production?” I said, “Well I know it is CERTAINLY not a homeless washed up guy with 23 cents in the Wishing Well Motel. Let me give you a hint who the Producer is. The Producer is Jewish and He was born in Bethlehem. Now guess his Name.”

From Media Bible to a School for Translators

The Rabbi From Tarsus was never only a film. It was the first proof, worked out in dollars and film stock and a motel room prayer, of a pattern that has since repeated itself across AFII’s work: a text is given, a form is found for it, and the form travels farther than the person who made it ever could alone. The stage play became a screenplay; the screenplay became a film; the film became, in time, a doorway to other media Bibles, audio Bibles, Bible translations, and online Bible platforms and cutting edge Bible access technology.

Tap to enlarge · ancient attire, modern device

Forty years on, the same instinct that put Sha’ul on film now puts the Yiddish Bible in the palm of a hand.

The dash from the film to the school runs with relay sprinters who are great men of God, historic as missions heralds. A few months after Dr. Ralph Winter published Everything You Need to Grow a Messianic Synagogue — edited by Dr. Donald McGavran^[1] — Dr. Ralph Winter sent its author, Phil Goble, to Wheaton, Illinois, to speak at SIL (Global) founded by William Cameron Townsend, the linguistics organization that would later develop PTXPrint, the very typesetting engine behind today’s Yiddish Triglot. The applied-linguistics school AFII is building now is not a new idea grafted onto the ministry; it is the same 1974 Lausanne-era conviction — McGavran’s Church Growth thinking, Winter’s frontier-missions thinking, SIL’s linguistics — still running in the same direction it was pointed fifty years ago. McGavran’s decision to edit that book is easy to read, in hindsight, as a small editorial favor. In this chapter it is treated as the opening of a channel: a Jewish-rooted movement finding, through one editor’s attention, a route into the wider infrastructure — SIL, Paratext, PTXPrint — that now carries Scripture toward all 7,000 languages, not only Yiddish.

The Yiddish Triglot, complete: Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim, and the Brit Chadasha in Hebrew-script Yiddish, transliterated Yiddish, and the Orthodox Jewish Bible in English, side by side.

The same instinct — find the form that carries the text fastest into a listener’s own tongue and idiom — is what later shaped the Orthodox Jewish Bible and the Yiddish Triglot, and it is what shapes AFII’s applied linguistics training for missionary Bible translators today: the conviction that translation is not finished when a manuscript is finished, but when a people can hear it in a form native to them — whether that form is a printed Tanakh, an interlinear, sixteen millimeters of 1986 film, or a phone screen in Boro Park in 2026. AFII carries that same conviction toward its goal of seeding Scripture in all 7,000 of the world’s languages by 2033.

The Tools of the Craft

What the school actually trains people on — the four tools behind every page and recording in AFII’s current Yiddish work.

Large Language Model

Anthropic’s Claude, used to recognize and modernize archaic 19th-century Yiddish vocabulary and orthography.

Voice Model

A text-to-speech model (built on ToucanTTS, trained largely on the REYD dataset) that reads the Yiddish Scriptures aloud in hours rather than years — where Alexander Scourby needed four years to read the KJV aloud in 1953, this model narrated the whole of the Yiddish Scriptures in a few hours in 2026.

Paratext

The global standard for Scripture translation software: manages text, notes, checking, collaboration, and versioning for thousands of translation projects worldwide.

PTXPrint

An open-source typesetting engine built on XeTeX. Takes Paratext-formatted text and produces publication-quality PDFs, including right-to-left Hebrew-Aramaic script and multi-column interlinear layouts — the engine behind the Yiddish Triglot’s aligned columns.

Three related exhibits in AFII’s Yiddish Scripture Museum go further than this chapter does: Room VII, “From Print to Digital” (the smartphone photo above, the LUMO film, the Cru Yiddish Four Spiritual Laws, and yiddishbible.net), Room VIII, “PTXPrint & Paratext” (the full technology tools story with AI enhancements), and Room IX, “A Bridge Without Erasure” (the Triglot as a platform shift in global Scripture access for the remaining 7,000-language goal, and the case for Muslim-friendly outreach).

Testimony