The Translation at Pentecost

October 6 is the feast day of Sts William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale on the Episcopal Church calendar. They are particularly celebrated in Anglican circles because of their special work in translating the Bible into English. Tyndale has the special honor of producing the first English translation that began from the original Hebrew and Greek (rather than starting from the Latin-language Vulgate¹), as well as being the first English translation to hit the printing press. Coverdale completed Tyndale’s unfinished work and is well-known today for his classic translation of the psalter.

I like to see translators get their due on the calendar, especially as a linguist. As sad and far-reaching as schism is, I think the effort to provide religious material in the vernacular language is something worth Reforming over. But we often don’t give the translation task itself, the very idea of what is happening when we translate from one language to another, its theological due.

Far from being a dry, technical, academic necessity, the act of translation, I think, actually catches us up in an overarching theme of scripture and can give a pointer to the ultimate Christian hope, if we consider it duly.

The effect of translation

First, let’s talk about translation itself. There is an unlocking that takes place when we translate something from one language to another: what was previously hidden and incomprehensible becomes clear and alive to the listener. This is obvious enough as a technical point. But something that also must be remembered when considering the theological dimension of the translation task is that there is a real, emotional, and embodied sense in which we are attached to the languages we speak.

It is the common opinion of linguists that we are built to “do language”. Distinct from any specific instantiations of speaking, listening, reading, or writing, the capacity for language is part of our human experience. We see this especially well in the earliest phases of life, before too many intervening variables set in:

• Babies exposed to two languages are able to distinguish between the two by 20 months.

• Babies only hours old are able to distinguish between their native language and a foreign language – suggesting that they were listening and learning in the womb.

• Deaf babies who do not exercise verbal babbling, a systemic experimentation with their sound production abilities, instead exercise manual babbling – they exhibit the same patterns found in hearing babies’ experimentation, but rather with their hands.

A baby babbles in American Sign Language.

Common to these discoveries is a strong attachment to specific languages, underscored by biological substrates, especially if one learns them early in life. Exercise of language is not just mental but embodied. When God made Adam from the dust and breathed life into him, that unabashedly spiritual and physical creature, he was creating this unabashedly spiritual and physical faculty of language in him too.

Therefore, when we translate something from an unknown language to a known one, we are moving it from an unknowable place to a deeply intimate one, where we can experience it and respond to it in an embodied manner, and in the case of one’s native language, a manner fundamentally different than in a second or third language picked up at a later time in life.

The long arc of language

Like all our faculties, the faculty of language can be used and abused. We actually see a typological point being made through the vehicle of language across scripture.

The setup: the Tower of Babel

The story of the Tower of Babel gives us an ancient explainer on just why there are so many languages. Far from being that way from the beginning, we see that multiple mutually unintelligible languages have their root, in the Biblical authors’ minds, in God’s frustration of human pride:

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel — because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Gen 11:1-9

This is a mini-Fall: God created something good; Man abused it for a confused conception of his own gain; God notes the harm that would come of the continued abuse and exiles Man, now tragically wounded, vulnerable and estranged, from his status quo.

The follow-through: Pentecost

But God is not in the business of noticing our Fall without providing us a Redemption. The best story to pair with the Tower of Babel, its very undoing, is the story of Pentecost, where the Holy Ghost descends on people from scattered places and restores to them the ability to communicate.

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They 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? Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs — we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?”

Acts 2:1-12

Much has been made of the speaking in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them part. (What kind of tongues? Human languages or angelic ones? Are there still people speaking in tongues today?) But I can’t help but think that there is lots of emphasis here not on the speaking but on the hearing. The striking thing is that despite all these people having nothing in common, they were able to understand one another.

This kind of understanding is the mirror image and restoration of the confusion that reigned at the Tower of Babel. By the Holy Ghost, proper communion among Christian people was restored, depicted clearly in the understanding of a common message despite uncommon origins.

But there’s more. I posit that what happened at Pentecost was an act of translation. With the emphasis on the hearing and not the speaking, we can also notice that each listener hears each speaker in his own tongue. When the Holy Ghost translated this speech into each listener’s native language, God valorized and sanctified the task of translation. Its capacity to unlock and reunify, to suddenly speak deeply into an intimate part of someone’s very cognition, was used as the primary physical metaphor for the mysterious creation of the Church. Every translator who has ever existed is a little image thereof.

All back and then some

The choice to translate instead of assimilate also has eschatalogical overtones. In discussions of the world to come, that time when God will make all things new in the general resurrection, we often see images of how things will not be identical to the good, pre-Fall creation, but how there will be a surplus of restoration despite the fact that sin has changed things in the meantime. Instead, the marks of sin will be transormed to glorify God.

He will restore “all back and then some”. The new creation is described as a heavenly city, a New Jerusalem, not as a return to the Garden of Eden; Jesus’ body still bore “those dear tokens of his Passion” following his resurrection, and did not return to its same state as before the crucifixion; and, I propose, our multiple and scattered languages are currently being used for the same symbolic purpose. At Pentecost, God could have restored the people to a unified language, to their pre-Tower of Babel state, but he did not. Instead, he worked through translation, allowing for a ridiculously rich, colorful panoply of human languages to flourish – to his glory. By Christ’s resurrection, we have a promise that even our tongues will be redeemed.

The Tower of Babel-Pentecost relationship is a kind of linguistic felix culpa that reminds us of how God is able to pull good things out of bad situations even to the point of surplus. By attending to our faculty of language, this intimate, baked-in part of us, he has also given us an opportunity to remember this long arc of Fall and Redemption through a medium we use daily.

Happy feast day to Sts William and Miles, those little images of the Comforter!