ABSTRACT
Just as in some cases, as we have seen, a sacred text was not committed to writing for many centuries, so there are a number of religious traditions in which a sacred text may be recited only in the original language, even in a congregation where a small minority are familiar with the language or language variety in which it is written. Translation of the Bible into every known language has been such a prominent feature of Christianity since the beginning that it is hard to imagine situations in which this is not the case. Yet in most varieties of contemporary Judaism the weekly reading from the Bible at public worship is still in the original Hebrew. Translation of the Qur‘an is actually forbidden by Sunni law, and the Avesta was not even written down, let alone translated into the language of the people, for over 1,000 years. We have noted the role of Old Latin, unintelligible to most, in the ritual of the Arval Brothers in ancient Rome, as well as the custom of consulting the Sibylline books in the original Greek. A Latin translation of the Sibylline books was finally commissioned in the second century CE, but the precise meaning of the Arval hymns was completely lost by the time of Augustus.
