I would like to take you on a little multilingual stroll through a well-known text of Scripture that marks the beginning of one of the most important days in the history of the Christian church: the story of Pentecost in Acts chapter 2.
Let’s begin with verse 2:1 in the scholarly and masterful 1999 German translation by renowned New Testament scholar Klaus Berger and leading translation scholar Christiane Nord (back-translated from German into English):
On the fiftieth day after Passover, on the Jewish Pentecost festival, all the apostles and the female disciples were sitting together with Mary and the male relatives of Jesus.
English Bible readers are likely more familiar with this translation from the NIV — “When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place” — but they are both translations of the same text.
How is this possible?
The German translators saw the need — especially with this verse’s location at the beginning of a new chapter where a reader might begin reading the text out of context — to remind readers of who was meeting (taking some of the information of the previous chapter into account) and why they were meeting: to celebrate the festival of Shavuot, the Jewish holiday that commemorates the giving of the Torah (the first five books in the Hebrew Bible). Shavuot is one of the three major festivals that Jewish males were required to observe at the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, and it was then (and now) held on the fiftieth (Greek: pentēkostē) day after the second day of Passover.
It reminds us that our Christian commemoration of Pentecost was actually preceded and made possible by a communal gathering for the Jewish feast that was celebrated by “the apostles and the female disciples … sitting together with Mary and the male relatives of Jesus.”
The following few verses then tell of the events that took place about 2,000 years ago, recounted in a masterful display of sophisticated storytelling and language use that is among the world’s best literary achievements.
Speaking — and Hearing — in Many Tongues
Richmond Lattimore was a celebrated Greek scholar, poet, and agnostic who also translated the New Testament into English in the 1970s and ‘80s. When asked why he converted to Christianity during that project, he famously said that it happened “somewhere in Saint Luke.”
Here is his version of Luke’s words in Acts 2:2-8:
And suddenly there came from the sky a noise like the blowing of a great wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And they saw what was like separate tongues of fire, and one settled on each of them, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began to speak in different languages according as the Spirit gave each one the gift of speaking them.
Now there were Jews living in Jerusalem who were devout men from every nation under heaven; and at the sound of these voices the crowd came together, and they were confused, because each one heard them speaking in his own language; and they were full of astonishment and wonder, and said: See, are not all these speakers Galileans? And how is it that each of us hears them speaking in the language he was born to?
As learned as this literary translation of our passage is, it still doesn’t do justice to Luke’s original achievement — not because Lattimore wasn’t up to the task, but because he didn’t have access to what we have: the chance to look at this event from the viewpoint of many languages.
Layers of Meaning
As readers of English, we can only guess at the layered meanings in the text, maybe from an earlier study of John 3:8 where Jesus uses the same Greek word for “Spirit” and “wind.” But Acts 2 also contains a word play on the “wind” that “fills” the house, very much like the “Holy Spirit” that “fills” the inhabitants of that house. The Greek terms used for “wind” and “Spirit” is not actually the identical word in these verses, as they are in John, but it’s a closely related word and likely recognizable as such to Greek readers.
As it happens, the Bible has been translated into a number of languages whose readers can see that connection much more easily than we, even without any previous knowledge of John 3 or the Greek text. Yoloxóchitl Mixtec, a language of about 10,000 in Guerrero state in Mexico, and Sinte Romani, one of the languages of the cross-border Romani people in Europe, use Tàtyí (Yoloxochitl Mixtec) and Ducho (Sinte Romani) for both wind and Spirit. The more common Latin uses spiritus and Modern Hebrew uses ruach, also covering both meanings. Each of these languages’ unique vocabulary creates a closer link between verses two and four of Acts 2 than even the original Greek.
The English word “tongue” (Greek: glossa) in verse 2 used to carry the widespread meaning of verse 4’s “language” (also glossa) and is still apparent in terms like “mother tongue.” Modern English speakers don’t often use “tongue” for “language,” though, which can make it difficult to capture the brilliant parallelism in this passage without sounding archaic.
That’s an English problem, though. Many of the world’s languages, including Hungarian, Russian, Polish, Turkish, a number of Romance languages (such as Romanian, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Catalan), and — as in the previous case — Latin and Modern Hebrew use the same word for tongue and language, making the last two the only languages that I’m aware of which mirror the match between both of these word pairs.
The Art and Inspiration of Acts 2
With all of this in mind, let’s look at Acts 2:2-4 again in this rough paraphrase:
“The house was filled with wind that made a sound, and tongues of fire settled on each of them. Then they were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different languages.”
In just these three verses, we can see a foreshadowing in the physical world (“filled,” “wind,” “sound,” “tongues”) that is then personally experienced by Jesus’ followers in complete parallel (“filled,” “Spirit” [“wind”], “speak” [“sound”], “languages” [“tongues”]).
This is well-crafted literary art, and it is no wonder that our secular translator Lattimore finds his personal “Pentecost experience” and his Christian conversion during his translation of the texts of Luke, the author of both the gospel bearing his name and the book of Acts.
God Reveals Himself Through Language
Why is all this so important?
To me these multilingual connections constitute a modern-day mini-Pentecost. It is already impressive to read the story as the recording of a historic event celebrated by the Church ever since. But on top of that, when we can appreciate the beautifully constructed re-telling of the event and arrive at that beauty specifically by looking at its translation into many languages, it reads like an exclamation mark, an asterisk with a footnote saying: “This is Pentecost for you as well. Today.”
Language is such a crucial aspect of how God reveals himself to us. According to the creation story, God uses language to speak the world into existence. In the Gospel of John, we are told that it is the Logos — Jesus — who is that Word who creates.
Language is also the tool God gives humans to organize and categorize the world around them and name the other “living creatures.”
And while God blesses humanity through the existence of language, it’s also a means of punishment: the emergence of different languages comes as a response to the Tower of Babel, to “defeat [the builders] by causing their languages to conflict,” according to the translation into Newari, a large language in Nepal.
In the Acts story of Pentecost, however, God lifts this Old Testament barrier, symbolically and practically, when the apostles start to speak in “their own language” to the Jewish diaspora visitors who had come to the Shavuot festival to Jerusalem and who were “zealously doing what they think was God’s word” (the translation in Tzotzil of the Mexican state of Chiapas for what is translated as “devout” in English). Doubly shocking — and emphasizing the miraculous nature of this occurrence in the visitors’ minds — these languages came from the mouths of heavily accented and, in their eyes, less sophisticated “Galileans.”
Language Is More Than Communication
Pentecost underscores that language is much more than communication. Language, especially as revealed by the Holy Spirit, speaks to the mind and the heart. Hearing about Jesus in their “mother tongues” surprises and amazes (fittingly making “their breath escape” according to Mairasi of Papua New Guinea) the listeners in Jerusalem and viscerally reinforces the personal nature of Jesus’ mission.
This ongoing legacy of Pentecost continues to enable the work on United Bible Societies’ Translation Insights & Perspectives (TIPs) tool, from which many of the insights in this article were gleaned. Started a little less than 10 years ago, it’s based on the audacious goal of creating a unique resource that documents the multilingual nature of the Church and makes it possible for this multilingual communication with God to teach us all more fully. Although this tool can never fully complete its mission, the journey toward that goal is exciting — and is already bearing abundant fruit.
May you have a Pentecost that reminds you of the first Pentecost miracle 2,000 years ago, as well as the ongoing miracle of God’s message revealed, multilingually, to ever more people around the world.
Explore Acts 2 and every other passage of the Bible in dozens of English translations with Bible Gateway, hundreds of other languages through United Bible Societies’ TIPs tool, and with loads of insights, commentary, and devotional reflections from Bible experts through Bible Gateway Plus.
Jost Zetzsche is a translator and the curator of Translation Insights & Perspectives (tips.translation.bible) for the United Bible Societies. His writing has appeared in Christianity Today, The Christian Century, and MultiLingual.
