Pentecostal Civilization

Gilbert Highet has a wonderful chapter on translation in the Renaissance in his book, The Classical Tradition . He says that the first translation that we know of was made about 250 BC by the Greek-Roman poet Livius Andronicus, who translated the Odyssey into Latin. This was about the same time that the 70 translated the Hebrew Bible into the LXX. Earlier, this kind of interest in another language and literature had not appeared: “The Greeks studied no literature but their own,” but the Romans studied Greek literature. Call it a proto-Pentecostal movement of the Spirit during the restoration period. In Christian civilization, this Pentecostal emphasis has been at the core of what it means to be civilized, educated, cultured. Exposure to other civilizations and languages and literatures has been at the heart of education since the Renaissance. Subtract Pentecost from history (as Stanley Fish and others attempt to do), and we’d all be living in our little tribes, our language incomprehensible to anyone else. And we’d be perfectly content to continue that forever.