Passwords to Paradise: How Languages Have Re-invented World Religions

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

So opens the Gospel of John, an ancient text translated into almost every language, at once a compelling and beguiling metaphor for the Christian story of the Beginning. To further complicate matters, the words we read now are in any number of languages that would have been unknown or unrecognizable at the time of their composition. The gospel may have been originally dictated or written in Aramaic, but our on...