Mischievous as ever, George Bernard Shaw is famously said to have observed that England and America are two countries divided by a common language. He could equally well have said that England has so many dialects – Scouse, Geordie, West Country etc – that it is hardly possible for two Englishman to understand each other. One good thing that the British Empire did for India was to provide a language, English, that made possible a nationwide conversation.
The writer of the Acts of the Apostles records that in the infancy of the Church the first believers received a remarkable linguistic gift. They suddenly became fluent in other languages. Visitors to Jerusalem from all over the known world heard their native languages being spoken by Jesus’ followers. It must have been as surprising for them as it was for Robinson Crusoe to hear men speaking English after his years of isolation on his remote island. Strangely, this useful Mediterranean gift did not continue. It was back to the grind of learning other people’s nouns and verbs and picking up new idioms. We still live with that grind.
And that is what Christianity, for most of the time, is all about – the daily grind. What a grind it was when it first came into being! For Paul, it meant beatings and intimidation. For Peter and his friends it led to a sense of being strangers in their own lands. For Barnabas it meant a slog round the Mediterranean as a dutiful number two to Paul and a painful dismissal of his nephew from the team. One generation after another went on to endure a cat-and-mouse game of loyalty to family, state and Christian community. Grind, grind, grind.
We can hardly appreciate what it was like. It wasn’t easy. It often came back to language. People had to make an effort to understand each other. Whatever language they spoke at home, the early Christians had their distinctive documents in Greek. Later, in the West, that distinctive language became Latin. For scholars at least it proved to be an international language that was familiar from the Atlantic to the Baltic. It symbolised a loyalty higher than patriotism. The era of nation-states followed by the present affection for local units and local languages takes us back to the place of our mother-tongues in a cosmopolitan society. In many UK churches today we can listen out for UK dialects, African and east European languages. We can learn a few words in those tongues. It matters.
And another thing that matters is translating the biblical documents into the world’s vernaculars. One organisation doing this is Easy Bibles. Consult their website: easyBibles.co.uk.
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