Some religions translate their truths and others are linguistic originalists
By R.L.G. | BERLIN
ANOTHER linguistically interesting holiday is upon us: Pentecost, from the Greek for the “50th [day]” since Easter. The other Germanic languages tend to call it something like the German Pfingsten, which is just pentekoste plus a thousand years of sound change. In Britain, it is Whitsun or Whitsunday, a derivative of “White Sunday”, which itself has several competing explanations.
There is more to Pentecost than just its etymology, though. The holiday highlights the very different attitudes of the major world religions towards language. On Pentecost, according to the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus’s followers
saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language?”
Christianity is a translating religion. Jesus preached in Aramaic, but in Roman Palestine, the language of prestige and commerce was Greek (not Latin, a flub made by Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ”). As a result, just a few of Jesus’s Aramaic words make it into the Gospels; the rest of his teachings were translated to convert the widest possible audience, in Greek. Non-canonical gospels were also written in languages like Syriac and Coptic. It does not seem to have bothered early Christians much that anything critical would get lost in translation.
After the western Church moved to Rome, it translated once more, then froze that translating tradition in place: a Latin Bible and liturgy would prevail for more than a thousand years, with the Council of Trent in 1546 even declaring St Jerome’s fifth-century Vulgate translation of the Bible into Latin official: “no one is to dare or presume to reject it under any pretext whatever.” But the church had split; eastern Orthodox churches went on using Greek and added Church Slavonic. And the Reformation, with its emphasis on a direct relationship to God and the scripture, would bring more translation into the picture: Martin Luther’s German version of the Bible became the Ur-text of modern High German, and the Authorised (King James) Version of the Bible in English would be the most important book in the history of the language. Christian missionaries remain busy translating the Bible into the world’s smallest languages, the better to convert their speakers.
Buddhism is also a translated religion. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha himself, spoke an unknown northern Indian vernacular, but the oldest surviving Buddhist texts are in Pali, a related language that may have been a regional lingua franca. Many Buddhists, especially of the Theravada tradition prevalent in South-East Asia, still study Pali in order to read the oldest written words of Buddhism. But the religion made its way into India’s prestige language of Sanskrit, too. Sanskrit became the main vehicle of Mahayana Buddhism's northerly path to China, Japan, Korea and elsewhere. Sanskrit and Chinese are unrelated, and about as different as it is possible to be; Sanskrit is highly inflected (with long words and complex endings with explicit meaning) while classical Chinese is highly isolating (overwhelmingly one-syllable words, with much left to context and shared knowledge). The translation process, including even the borrowing of Taoist terms (like wuwei, "non-action",for nirvana), contributed to a distinctly East Asian Buddhism.
Being a “translating” religion is not the only way to go: some religions are stubbornly originalist in things linguistic. Hebrew has united the Jewish community for almost 3,000 years. By Jesus’s time, the spoken language of most Jews had become Aramaic, but Hebrew was still the language of sacred literature and prayer. It would remain so long after the Jews were scattered after the destruction of the second temple. Even after Hebrew’s revival in Israel, a majority of the world’s Jews are not native speakers of Hebrew—but they must show their ability to read a Torah passage aloud in Hebrew in the bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah, a ceremony welcoming them to adulthood in the community.
The other big Abrahamic religion shares Judaism’s linguistic originalism: Muslims believe that Allah revealed the Koran to Muhammad directly, in Arabic, and the Koran itself is repeatedly explicit about the importance of the language:
Had we sent this Koran in a language other than Arabic, they would have said: "Why are not its verses explained in detail? What! A book not in Arabic and its messenger an Arab?”
The context indicates that Arabic was intended for the conversion of the Arabs themselves. But Arabic would accompany Islam’s spread far beyond the Arab world. Muhammad’s conquests Arabised huge swathes of the Middle East and North Africa, but even where the language did not take root as a native language, the importance of the Arabic Koran remains. A hafiz is revered for memorising the entire text. Translation is allowed for the purposes of aiding the believer, but the original text is the only authoritative one. This is an improbable success for Arabic: more than 80% of believers are today native speakers of another language.
Muslims like to say that Arabic contributes to a single community of believers, even though actual Muslim practice varies quite a lot from place to place. Meanwhile, many Christians also feel part of a single church, despite the linguistic diversity. The decision to translate does not seem crucial to the spread, the unity or the endurance of a faith. Plenty of people prefer faith in their own languages, but just as many others seem to prefer their religious life kept at one remove from the daily humdrum, sacred mysteries all the more mysterious for being in a foreign tongue.
