Discovering spirit of Australia

So the Holy Spirit dis-covered Australia because previously the land had been hidden.

Why else should we have an island chain named after Whitsunday, the day James Cook happened upon that picturesque place?

It's the sort of tendentious thinking that goes with "British Israel" – the idea that the Lost Tribes of the northern Hebrew kingdom became the Anglo-Saxon peoples spread across the globe.

Or maybe Whitsunday, celebrated this weekend, plays a symbolic role in our story.

On the first Pentecost – the 50th day after Passover/Easter, marked as a harvest festival in the Jewish calendar – people of all known lands were present and heard the first Christians speaking in their own languages by the gift of the Holy Spirit.

When early modern scholars began to look at the original New Testament texts, written in the common or 'Koine' Greek of the Hellenic world – a coarser, simpler version of the classical prose of Homer – some thought this was the miraculous universal language of the Pentecost, rediscovered after many years of Roman-ordained Latin scripture and liturgy.

As a naïve theological student a few years ago, it was tempting to hope that a Pentecost miracle might relieve the long hours of study and avert the dreaded Greek exam.

But as Kiwi scholar E.M. Blaiklock has written: "It was a gift rapidly withdrawn."

Saints Peter, Paul and the other apostles had to soldier on with the languages of their day - Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin – and the Bible has since been translated into as many languages as the world has thrown up.

Yet something clearly happened at Pentecost, a rush of inspiration which led cynics to assume the Christians were drunk.

"Penetrating clarity and compelling precision are sometimes achieved by simple men in moments of high emotion," Blaiklock comments.

Or as Peter has it: "These are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o'clock in the morning."