Passwords to Paradise
How Languages Have Re-invented World Religions
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
So opens the Gospel of John, an ancient text translated into almost every language, at once a compelling and beguiling metaphor for the Christian story of the Beginning. To further complicate matters, the words we read now are in any number of languages that would have been unknown or unrecognizable at the time of their composition. The gospel may have been originally dictated or written in Aramaic, but our only written source for the story is in Greek. Today, as your average American reader of the New Testament picks up his or her Bible off the shelf, the phrase as it appears has been translated from various linguistic intermediaries before its current manifestation in modern English. How to understand these words then, when so many other translators, languages, and cultures have exercised some level of influence on them?
Christian tradition is not unique in facing this problem. All religions--if they have global aspirations--have to change in order to spread their influence, and often language has been the most powerful agent thereof. Passwords to Paradise explores the effects that language difference and language conversion have wrought on the world's great faiths, spanning more than two thousand years. It is an original and intriguing perspective on the history of religion by a master linguistic historian.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ostler (The Last Lingua Franca) roams across several millennia of world history and delves into precise linguistic shifts looking for clues to how the "missionary religions" of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam have been affected by the new language communities they entered. Paradoxes arise when "diversity of expression" meets "unity of revelation," Ostler writes, then demonstrates exhaustively how these three religions may have been altered not only by the imperfect art of translation but by their social, political, and military contexts. The growth of Mahayana ideas as Buddhism moved north, the splintering of eastern Orthodox churches into separate linguistic communities, and the spread of Christianity into a new continent with multiple native languages are only a few of the topics Ostler investigates. While his treatment is generally accessible, his enthusiastic, wide-ranging inquiries sometimes venture far from his thesis, and into abstruse detail. Stating his religious unbelief at the outset, Ostler is largely even-handed, though not without some pointed wit at expense of adherents. Quite noticeable is the contrast between his love of languages and his attitudes toward organized religion, with religion coming across as more grist for the mill of his intellectual curiosity. For those fascinated by linguistic transitions, this impressive study is a feast.
