Roots and beginnings
When I was at the age of ten our family moved to the Shetland Islands (the northernmost part of the British Isles) where my father was to work for a Norwegian Lutheran mission in Lerwick, visiting boats, and holding regular services in the Seamen’s Mission. That was back in 1981. As my father was invited to preach at various churches, he would use a so-called version of the bible named, The Good News Bible. However, many people would come up to him afterwards, and say, You must get yourself a REAL BIBLE, Hans. When asking what bible that would be, the answer was always the same, The King James Holy Bible.
Living in an English speaking country between the ages of ten and fifteen, and attending high-school like all other children, my knowledge of the English language grew and matured. I remember we used to have spelling competitions in the English class in 7th grade of Primary School, and once I was number two in the class. This was after having learned English for only two years. God has graciously given me a photographic memory, where I can see words in my mind like pictures.
Moving back home to the Faroe Islands in 1985, my father would continue his missionary work in a Faroese Seamen’s Mission in Runavik, where our family would be for the next fourteen years. An elderly Irish Christian man named Gordon Wallace would come to work with us several times for half a year at a time, and he and I became good friends. As I would go and see him in his room, I noticed he had two big Holy Bibles, and they were both of the same kind, The King James Holy Bible. He once read a chapter to me in his room, and his eyes went all red and watery, and the presence of God filled the room.
From that point on, I knew that there was something special about the King James Holy Bible. Little did I know, that God one day would call me to translate it into my mother tongue Faroese.
The current bible status in the Faroe Islands
Our current bible status is that we have two bible translations, which were both done from the wrong text-type, that is to say the Alexandrian text-type, which apostate scholars Westcott and Hort revived and released in 1881, and from which all of the modern corrupt apostate bibles come, such as the NIV, NASB, NKJV, NRSV, NAB, REP, RSV, CEV, TEV, GNB, ESV, LIVING, PHILLIPS, NEW JERUSALEM, NEW CENTURY, etc., etc. Of all the English bibles there are today, the Authorized King James Holy Bible stands alone as the only pure Antiochian, or Byzantine Bible in English.
There are thousands of differences between the two text-types. Alexandria, in nothern Egypt, was the main seat of the gnostics back in the 1st and 2nd centuries, and it was always known by the early true Christians that the gnostics down in Alexandria did not take the Bible literally, but were the very ones who corrupted the Scriptures. Paul wrote already in the first century, For we are not as many, which corrupt the word of God. (II. Cor. 2:17).
Translating begins
In 2007 I aquired two books by Gail Riplinger called, New Age Bible Versions, and, In Awe of Thy Word. Through them I would find out and see most clearly, that it is the Roman Catholic Church, the Whore sitting on seven hills (Revelations chapter 17), that is the force which today is trying to wipe the true word of God from off the face of the earth. Their main tactic is to replace the real Bible with countless counterfeit ones. Also I would see that all of the Reformation Bibles were translated from the pure Antiochian text. It wasn’t until after 1881 that bible translation slowly started shifting from the pure Antiochian text-type over to the corrupt Alexandrian text-type. Mainly due to growing lukewarmness amongst Christians, they gave the stewardship of God’s word over to unsaved meat-heads in apostate seminaries. Having read this, I wanted to see proof of this first hand. So having found an old Danish Bible with my father’s, printed in 1895, but evidently being a translation of an older date, I checked almost all of the critical verses in the New Testament, and found this Bible to be almost identical to the Authorized King James. I also checked an old Icelandic Bible which is in the old church in Kirkjuboe, the Gudbrands Biblia of 1584, and found it also to be higly conformable to the King James.
The hard conclusion I had to come to was this: MOST OF US CHRISTIANS HAVE BEEN ROBBED OF THE TRUE WORD OF GOD. … then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart (Matth. 13:19). But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way (Matth. 13:25). Most countries of the world have had the true words of God snatched from them while the Christians were asleep; but the English speaking countries still have the words of God only in the King James Holy Bible. My country has never yet had the pure words of God in Faroese, but only in Icelandic and Danish. Having seen this most clearly, I soon saw that I could not just wink at it and say it is not my problem. Something had to be done.
In the end of 2007 the Lord started speaking to my heart to start translating the Authorized King James into Faroese. I translated Genesis chapter one, and found myself in deep waters, hard struggle, and much ado. I finally decided of my own accord to start correcting the text of the Faroese corrupt bible that I had been using since I got saved at the age of fifteen, and which I had been given by my grandmother. I did this for the next half year or so, but soon found that this would never be good enough; for there kept remaing mistakes, because the differences were seen to be down to every word, and even down to syllables of words, and also in the forms of words. I wrote to Gail Riplinger, and she told a Danish couple about me, Tonny and Susan Moellerskov, who contacted me by e-mail, and invited me to a conference on Street Evangelism and Bible Translations in Kolding, Denmark, in march of 2008. It was there that final preparations, ignition and blastoff, would take place. The speaker on the Reformation Bibles, Dr. Nico Verhoef, missionary to Switzerland, graduate from Pensacola Bible Baptist Institute (conducted by Dr. Peter S. Ruckman), would make most clear to us all the line of the pure Bible, and also the necessity of getting back to the pure Bible, or, if our country did not have the pure Scriptures, simply to translate the Authorized King James Holy Bible word for word into our own language.
It was at this conference that I finally settled it in my heart to translate the King James Bible into Faroese. And I started right away. I would translate one chapter, or one page, every day; and it would take only fourteen months to finish translating the whole of the New Testament. Every morning I would get up at six o’clock and translate until 9:30, proofreading the page twice through afterwards, before going to work.
Having translated for three months, and having reached the first chapters of the Gospel of St. John, starting from the Gospel of St. Matthew, the Lord most graciously confirmed his calling to me by a voice in my sleep, in July of 2008, saying, Thou shalt translate the King James Bible, and your reward will be great. Although many will not receive that such things can take place today, I myself can not and will not deny it, for it took place in my life in a very real way; I heard the voice very clearly, and it echoed in the room when I woke up the next morning. Whatever way you look on things, the thing is that I translated the word of God for the word of God’s sake, and not because of the voice. But off course I know the voice came from God. I know who my foundation is, the Rock on whom I stand, the Word, the risen Lord Jesus Christ.
And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God. (Revelation 19:13).
Translation procedures
I would decide to translate every word, having the words in their proper forms. I would translate verb to verb, adjective to adjective, noun to noun, pronoun to pronoun, etc. Initially I translated every word, in the very order they appear in the Authorized King James, and then when reading the text through in Faroese, I would sometimes change the word order whenever necessary.
I use a Cambridge Large Print Text Edition Holy Bible; I have quite a large edition, which would sit on the labtop dock while I translated. Also I have the Luther Bible (Die Heilige Schrift) from 1545 (unchanged), and the Danish King Christian the VI’s Bible of 1740. These are pure Bibles, from the Antiochian stream of Bibles, and I have used them to confer with whenever in doubt about a passage, or in need of a second and third witness to help settle a translational issue. I also have a Norwegian translation of the Authorized King James, done by Gunnar Gjemlestad, published in 2003. Also, I have the computer program, The Sword of the Lord, which has the Textus Receptus Greek text with word explanations that pop up in English, and a King James Concordance and Dictionary. I also have many various language dictionaries in the computer, which I used frequently while translating.
Looking up so many words for their meaning and best translation, I would find it very useful to make my own word-list, in alphabetical order, and now there are many hundreds of words now in that word-list.
When translating the Old Testament, I had gained better training, and would manage to do two pages a day.
Proofreading procedures
Having translated the New Testament, I would go ahead and proofread it ten times myself. I would download files of a man reading clearly the Authorized King James Holy Bible, and I would play portions of the file, while carefully following my translation on the screen, and doing corrections when needed. After this I would proofread the text solely in Faroese. I did five of each type of proofreadings. Also, I put the text through spelling check in Microsoft Word twice. Three men were since given the New Testament text for proofreading, and not many mistakes were reported.
Proofreading would show to be not so difficult at all. Loving the word of God makes all the difference. I would make a plan of a calendar, distributing quotas of proofreading of twenty pages to every day, and this way I would get through the New Testament each time in only 19 days, the text being 346 pages long. Having finished one proofreading I would rest a day or two, before commencing another proofreading. All this time I was sitting five to seven hours with the work every day; God giving me grace and sustaining me; having also my regular work as a graphic designer to attend to. But the Holy Bible is become my life.
Printing of the New Testament in 2010-11
When I started translating, I did not think about how the Scriptures would be printed, or who would pay for it. That lay in God’s hands. Some things, or maybe most things, are too big for us to see and bear and handle, but not for God. The Lord has graciously connected me to brother Charles, who coordinated the financing and printing of the New Testament in America. I have no back-land here, and very few people really support me as yet, for most are still ignorant in respect to the two streams of bibles. However, I know that I am doing what the Lord has called me to do, and nothing can stop or hold me back. However, many people have been getting clearer knowledge about these things on my homepage www.kjv.fo. We printed about 2000 New Testaments in 2011, and in 2012 I received two big barges with 27.000 more. It would do trips to the villages in the islands every Saturday for 15 months, and managed to distribute all of the total 29.000 New Testaments to almost all of the houses in the islands. They were given two New Testaments each, all for free.
The Old Testament
The translating of the Old Testament took three years, and I was finished in March of 2012. Here I would translate two pages a day, that is, one whole opening or spread of the Bible. Immediately I started proofreading about 20 pages a day, like I had done with the New Testament. Now the Lord had a good proofreader in store, who proofread the Old Testament three times through, and the New Testament a good number of times also. I myself would proofread the Old Testament 11 times through, and the New Testament another 7 times, for a total of 17 times, before the whole Bible was finally finished and sent for printing in August 2016.
Printing of the whole Bible
The Lord surely has had his hand on the work, for just before I started translating in 2008, I received a Norwegian King James Bible from a missionary couple in Denmark. It was printed in 2003 by a good Bible printer in America. They told me it was to be distributed absolutely free. So all the time while I have been translating, I have been praying that the Lord would let the Faroese King James Bible be printed by the same printer which printed the Norwegian King James. Then during the spring of 2015, Charles told me that he had found a very good printer, whom he had asked if they would be willing to print the Faroese King James Bible. The printer was the very ones, which I had been prayting to the Lord to print the Faroese King James Bible. I was then given a leaflet with questions for my proofreader and myself to fill out, and some time later the answer came from them that YES, they would we willing to print 20.000 Faroese King James Bibles. Many words of thanksgiving went up to the Lord.
Plan of distributing the Bibles
This time I will try to get as many local Christian people to distribute to the houses in their village or nearby area as possible. There are about 100 villages here in the islands, and the more local people I can get to help distribute, the better. However, I know that I will likely have to do a good number of villages myself, which I am more than willing to do for my Lord and Saviour. Distributing will also be done of booklets of John and Romans, together with 10.000 Chick tracts of the title, CREATOR OR LIAR, translated into Faroese. They will all be distributed at the same time.
Another timely confirmation to the calling
There is another thing which dawned on me when I was just finished translating the whole Bible. When I was studying graphic design in Reykjavik from 1993-1997 and staying at the Faroese Seamen’s home there, there came two very extraordinary persons twice for a week’s visit . They were sent by the Lord to warn the Icelandic parliament of impending dangers ahead. They were from California and had a prophetic ministry. The Lord showed them by vision many things, and the first time they came, the Lord had given them a sign to give to the people to show that they were sent from the Lord God Almighty; it was that there would be an earthquake the day that they would leave Iceland; and indeed, on the Friday when they left, there was an earthquake and volcano eruption. The second time they came, the older man came to me and said that he had been praying for me, and the Lord had shown him some things, which he told me; and lastly he said, “I even see some Bible translation”. I totally rejected this prophetic word from this man back then, I thought he had to be mistaken in this, for I know neither Hebrew nor Greek. But I said nothing, kept it all in, and have not even thought about this thing, for I rejected it as a mistake. Not until about 3-4 weeks after I had finished translating the Old Testament, I suddenly remembered what this man had said back in March of 1997. He was right on. This also is a sign and a great encouragement to me, that I’m doing what the Lord would have me do. Praise the Lord! To Jesus Christ be all the glory!.
In Christ Jesus,
Sjúrður Højgaard.