THE LANGUAGE OF CHRISTIAN RELIGION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH AND
SOME SELECTED PENTECOSTAL DENOMINATIONS
CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
The major objective of language is communication but the manner in which language communicates appears to be interlinked with individual experiences in terms of linguistic attitude, cultural influences and personal perception. Register is a term that is used to describe variations in language according to use. For instance, Thorne says that lawyers use a legal register, doctors a medical register and the priests a religious register ( 95). The language of Christian religion will be examined by analysing the spoken and written forms of the language of Roman Catholic Church and the selected
Pentecostal denominations. Christian religion is the most widely distributed of the world religions. In the 1990s its total membership exceeded up to 1.9 billion people (Probert Microso Encarta). There are other systems of beliefs and values such as Platonism, Marxism, Freudianism or Democracy. Christianity is in many ways comprehensible only to those who share its benefits and strive to live by its values. Wilken points out that Jerusalem is the center of Christian religion, at least until its destruction by the Roman armies in A.D 70. From it Christianity radiated to other cities and towns in Palestine and beyond. At first, its approval was large although it was not completely confined to the adherents of Judaism to which it was presented as new but not a brand new religion (820). Leith states that in its very beginning, Christian religion manifested a dual relation to the Jewish faith, a relation of continuity and yet of fulfillment of antithesis and of airmation. The forced conversion of the Jews in the Middles ages and the history of anti-Semites condemnations of both by church leaders are the evidence that the antithesis could easily overshadow airmation. The fateful loss of continuity with Judaism has however never been total (450). Above all, the presence of so many elements of Judaism in the Christian Bible has acted to remind Christians that He who they worshiped as their Lord was Himself a Jew and that the New Testament does not stand on its own but it is appended to the Old Testament. An important source of the alienation of