6 - The languages of Christianity

Summary

Bible translators and cradle-snatchers

Sacred books and texts are central to many religious traditions. These may be based on a believed divine or mystical revelation to a single individual, as the Qur'an was transmitted to Muhammad or the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith. Alternatively, the central texts of a religion may be a compendium of a variety of separate texts, perhaps associated with named authors or perhaps anonymous, which have been grouped together sometimes centuries after they were first written. The Zoroastrian sacred texts, known as the Avesta, provide one example of such a compendium, including both hymns thought to be composed by Zoroaster at some time earlier than 600 BCE and later hymns and accounts of myths and rituals, which may be as much as a thousand years later than Zoroaster himself. The Jewish faith makes use of the Hebrew Scriptures or Tanakh, known in Christian contexts as the Old Testament of the Bible, which include material ranging from the Torah (or Pentateuch), five books combining narrative and religious prescriptions, to works of prophecy and poetic texts. The Christian Bible incorporates the Hebrew Scriptures with a collection of texts, originally written in Greek, known as the New Testament, which include four different versions of the life of Jesus (known as the gospels), a narrative of what happened after Jesus (called the Acts of the Apostles), and a number of letters, many of them written by, or ascribed to, the apostle Paul. Religion can be a key factor in language change and language spread, as the impact of Arabic, the language of the Qur'an, on North Africa and the Near East shows. In this chapter, I will focus mainly on the effects of one religion in particular, Christianity.

Christianity changed the linguistic map. Early translations of the Bible provide the first written evidence for a diverse array of languages, and missionaries devised new alphabets that have remained in use until the present day.