Christian translations of God
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Christian translations of God have varied throughout that religion's nearly two-thousand year history. Because of the nearly absolute degree of its missionary urge (at least for many extended periods, with the present era being perhaps the most exhaustive of any in history), Christian adherents have faced the challenge and the opportunity of having to secure a suitable term or terms for God in the local language of those to whom they proselytize.
Christianity began in a Jewish, Aramaic-speaking milieu which was heavily influenced by liturgical Hebrew and Hellenistic Greek, and to some degree, the Romans' Latin. Almost from the very start, however, Greek speakers played a major role in the religion's development, and Latin came to be used in Christian worship and thought very soon as well. With the missionary urge emerging even from the very beginning, Christians in the first few centuries CE faced the task of translating their thoughts and language into Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Caucasian, Ethopian, and a host of other language groups. For many of these language groups and the cultures by which they were used--fortunately for the sake of the Christian missionaries--there were great linguistic and socio-cultural similarities with Greek and Latin, the languages most dominant among the Christian population. Indeed, most of the European languages into which Christianity's thought and worship came to be translated are of the same wider language family (Indo-European languages), as those two Mediterranean tongues. However, many languages, such as the Arabian languages, Ethopian, Caucasian, and other groups, were vastly different, and their surround cultures, equally dissimilar from those of the Europeans.
By the early 21st century, the Christian Bible (or portions of it) and much liturgical and theological material had been translated into literally thousands of languages.
