The Gift From Christianity

Amongst the controversy over Christian ethics and biblical morality one of the true gifts to humankind comes directly from the work of early Christians. Today it is quite common to think of national languages such as English, French, German, or Russian. This; however, is a modern phenomena. It was not always the case.

When one picks up a book written in English that book is a record of a language spoken by both the reader and writer. Most of the earliest writings that have survived history were not vernacular. They were not written in the native languages. The earliest writings were in Cuneiform (Mesopotamia) or Hieroglyphics (Egypt). The people of Mesopotamia and Egypt; however, did not speak "Cuneiform" or "Hieroglyphic." These are modern terms describing the writing form. The people spoke native languages. The writings were simply an interpretation of the language, mimicking the sounds with symbols. One could write any language they wanted in either Cuneiform or Hieroglyphic, including English. A modern equivalent to these writing forms would be graffiti where symbols are used to express sounds and ideas such as "I love you" written with a drawing of an eyeball, a heart, and the letter "u".

The reason the native languages did not get translated into a written lingua is simply that there was no need. The ancient writing forms were primarily for record keeping and developed only slowly as a means for communicating stories and poetry. It wasn't until the middle of the first millennium BCE (1000 BCE to AD 0) that written language began to take form and this was limited to only a few languages. The primary languages in the Near East during this period were semitic languages, the ancient Persian languages and Greek. Latin would emerge with the Roman Empire but most people outside of Italy did not speak latin. They spoke their native or tribal languages of which there were probably thousands.

The reason languages gradually became consolidated, standardized, and later recorded is thanks to Christianity. It was the spread of Christianity that led to the Bible being translated into numerous local tongues. In probably numerous cases the Bible would have been the first written book in many of these local languages. Having a standardized version would gradually coalesce all the local dialects around a primary lingua and singular languages such as French, Spanish, Arabic and English would emerge from the chaos. "High German" gradually emerged from the collection of gothic , franc and saxon tongues but didn't become standardized as the German spoken by the locals until Martin Luther translated the Bible into German. With Luther's Bible, there developed a desire by the locals to "read the word of God" and the standardization process took hold.

If one tries to read materials written in English during the middle ages they are practically unrecognizable today. It was the translation of the Bible into an English form that gradually standardized that form into the English that is recognized today. Western civilization may have gained some abominable politics, a disjointed, unequal and irrelevant moral code because of the spread of Christianity, but the standardization of language is something to be thankful. Atheists can communicate to each other thanks to the gift given to them by Christianity.