Contesting Languages

How did the Apostle Paul navigate the language differences in Corinth? In this book, Ekaputra Tupamahu investigates Corinthian tongue-speech as a site of political struggle. Tupamahu demonstrates that conceptualizing speaking in tongues as ecstatic, unintelligible expressions is an interpretive invention of German romantic-nationalist scholarship. Instead, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of language, Tupamahu finds two forces of language at work in the New Testament: a centripetalizing force of monolingualism, which attempts to force heterogeneous languages into a singular linguistic form, and a countervailing centrifugal force that diverse languages unleash.