The chapter analyzes the remarks on the use of languages in hagiographical narratives, including episodes that describe the mundane and miraculous linguistic skills of holy men as well as demons and demoniacs speaking in foreign tongues. References to knowing or speaking foreign languages in the hagiographical tradition were closely connected to expressions of holiness in late antique Christianity, both in social practice and in the realm of rhetoric. The use of language is a performative act that is closely related to issues of social differentiation, power, and control in any society, and even more so in multilingual communities. The appearance of Christian hagiographical narratives that depict miraculous linguistic events and abilities of holy men and demons reveals that symbolic power and authority started to manifest themselves through remarks on one’s multilingual competence or the use of specific languages.

The book’s concluding chapter summarizes its content and contextualizes the ideas in a broader historical and cultural perspective. It is the story about the transformation of the ways in which the increasingly Christianized elites of the late antique Mediterranean experienced and conceptualized linguistic differences. Confessional and linguistic identities of the time overlapped in ways that produced an astonishing variety of dynamic combinations, hybrid loyalties, and local peculiarities. The chapter raises the question of what we do with language when we speak and how references to a linguistic code through which communication happens can be no less informative than the content of communication itself. It problematizes the concept of “other languages” and different ways in which different cultures, including early Christianity, imagine their principal alloglottic Other. We introduce the concept of “communities of linguistic sensitivities” – a group that share similar language-related socio-cultural stereotypes and subscribe to approximately the same views and ideas about linguistic history and linguistic diversity. The history of Christianity in Late Antiquity could be described in terms of the formation of several such related communities around the Mediterranean – communities that developed dynamically, constantly readjusted, and mutually influenced each other.

The chapter focuses on the early Christian interpretations of “speaking in tongues” (glōssais lalein), the most spectacular linguistic phenomenon attested in the New Testament. The description of the Pentecostal events (Acts 2) and Paul’s exhortations (1 Cor. 12–14) became an important point of reference in Christian discussions about languages and religious identity. The second- and third-century authors either presented the phenomenon as ecstatic speaking with an uncertain degree of intelligibility or simply quoted biblical passages without any explanation. Explicit statements that the gift of tongues was a miraculous ability to talk in foreign languages that enabled apostles to preach abroad (xenolalia) are dated to the fourth century and attested in Greek, Syriac, and Latin texts. Simultaneously, in the fourth century, the alternative idea that “speaking in tongues” refers to angelic languages decreased in popularity. As time passed, different Christian traditions and authors developed their own peculiarities in interpreting “speaking in tongues.” The chapter demonstrates various ways in which otherness of tongues may have been understood; and that xenolalia is not so much a default interpretation, but a way to channel the growing concerns about foreign languages and their speakers – a way that became especially needed in fourth-century Christianity.