The great African theologian Lamin Sanneh points out that Christianity is unique among world religions for its amazing translatability. For example, it doesn’t require that people of all cultures refer to God in the language of its founder or that they quote their founder in his original language. In fact, most of them don’t even know what the language of the founder actually was!1 The religion, Sanneh says, takes on new languages and fresh imagery each time it enters a new culture. As we began to see in the preceding chapter, Paul—himself a boundary crosser— does much to translate Jesus’
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