Biblical Glossolalia - Thesis 4

By William Graham MacDonald

This article contains the fourth of seven theses conserving a defense of biblical glossolalia. Thesis 1 contended that glossolalia is inaccessible to worldly comprehension because of its holiness, its “from heaven dimension,” and its inextricable connection with the glorified Jesus. Thesis 2 argued that in its inception and continuation the Pentecostal experience of the Spirit glorifies Jesus. Thesis 3 contended that biblical glossolalia has no antecedents, no precedents, and no parallels, either in the Old Testament, or paganism, or pathology.

Another thesis of great import follows here to advance a scriptural understanding and to preserve Pentecostal truth from contemporary distortions. This one and the three to follow in subsequent articles do not profess to say all that could be said in a full-length exegesis, but they, as did the preceding three, are addressed to those who really care about Pentecostal truth; and they state positions currently under attack, or positions that have never been solidly based. The seven theses are interlocking. Consequently, they need to be considered altogether, since in the economy of exposition, certain pertinent aspects may be left unsaid at any given thesis, because a fuller elucidation occurs at another.

Thesis Four

Biblical glossolalia has a uniform character throughout the New Testament. While there are “kinds of tongues/languages” spoken in the Spirit and kinds of situations where glossolalia is appropriate there are not kinds of glossolalia.

One of the most basic presuppositions of Pentecostals is that only those who have been baptized/immersed by the glorified Jesus in the Spirit of God have true understanding of the edifying value and glory of glossolalia. Even though the verbal contents of the utterance are a “mystery” to the speaker (1 Corinthians 14:2), there remains also the assurance that God, to whom the speaking is addressed, is attentively receiving the communication and without need of translation. The gifted speaker worships “in spirit and in truth” in sublime transcendence. His or her approach consists of worship. Glossolalia is not the realization of a physical feat, or the actualizing of abstract definitions, or the application of techniques of tongue-tumbling acrobatics. It is the by-product of personal experience with God in the depths of one’s spiritual being.

Glossolalia Not Amenable To Philosophical Definition

Philosophy depends on definitions for its constructions. Biblical theology, on the other hand, develops descriptions of what God does, and that divine dimension takes us beyond the outer limits of definitions, of human understanding, and of do-it-yourself formulas. Since the personal God cannot be known by definition but only as He reveals himself, we must enter His temple worshiping in order to understand.

The classic description of the first Christian Pentecost explains in the simplest words what Pentecostals mean by glossolalia: “All, … began to speak in other tongues [lalein heterais glossais] as the Spirit enabled them” (Acts 2:4). That is the inaugural statement. It tells how the event occurred, but it does not explain how in any way that could be imitated. Luke states only for the record, “All of them were filled with the Spirit,” and notes that by the Spirit’s filling them, they were enabled to speak in what were for them unlearned languages and dialects of other nations (Acts 2:6,8,11).

Glossolalia, A Noun Of Convenience

Since “to speak in other tongues” is a verbal expression in the New Testament, the summary substantival form, glossolalia, has been coined by modern interpreters as a term of convenience.¹ The doctrine is not derived from the term, but the term as we use it is based on the full biblical expression: lalein heterais glossai (‘to speak in other languages’ — Acts 2:4), and on that firm pillar the doctrine rests. Glossolalia is best described, therefore, by using the words of Scripture as they occur in the classic passage. As a noun glossolalia stands for the verbal action of “speaking in other languages” as God’s Spirit, filling the believer, makes possible that speech. Whenever the terse expression “speaking in tongues” is used, the elliptical heterais (“other”) is to be understood, or there would be no distinction from ordinary speaking.²

The combining term heteroglossai (“other tongues”), found in 1 Corinthians 14:21 for the foreign languages alluded to in the prophecy of Isaiah, the languages of Israel’s ancient captors, could serve as a description of the content of glossolalia, but it would need the addition of -lalia to capture the whole concept of “speaking” in other tongues — heteroglossolalia. Rather than use this precise but lengthy term, frequent users have found the contracted form, glossolalia, to be more serviceable.

No Babbling

In the 35 biblical texts that refer to glossolalia (and in their associated contexts) there is no mention anywhere of battalogein, translated generally as “babble,” as in Matthew 6:7) “babbling like pagans.” The allusion here is to repetitious formula-prayers said so rushed that words are run together and the whole flow of utterance is garbled. A verb for rushed loquacious speaking is readily available then in battalogein. But the concept ‘babble’ is never used in any association with speaking in tongues by any biblical author. The reason? Glossolalia is not what many commentators have assumed it to be, disordered speech produced by an individual on his own. On the contrary, it is special — supernaturally special — speech in languages other than the speaker’s own, produced by the Spirit of the Lord residing within the renewed human spirit. The biblical terms for such speaking are all standard for proper, normal speech.

Argument from silence or not — being precisely what one would expect — never once in the New Testament is glossolalia compared to the disordered speech of pagans. Many contemporary non-Pentecostals assume that glossolalia is just “babbling” or, as they say in Australia, “lalling” (non-language vocalization)³ or according to Samarin, a deviant form of speech that cannot be learned but which everyone is capable of, given the right religious context.⁴ The antisupernatural opposition to glossolalia as language generally can be subsumed under one of the following overlapping categories: (1) infantile speech; (2) non-language vocables; (3) pseudo-language.

In attributing any such categories to the biblical text the analyzer reads something into them that is not there, because of failure to come to terms with the basic words, glossa (“language,” “tongue”) and dialektos (“language”), that are there. Had any of the apostolic writers wanted to indicate that glossolalia was not genuine language, their choice of words would have reflected this. But it is a hermeneutic of desperation to build a case for the depreciation of glossolalia on linguistic grounds. For instance, the apostle Paul used the same Greek term, logoi (“words”), for the linguistic units of his ministerial speech in the common language in church as for the verbal units of his private voluminous speech in tongues (1 Corinthians 14:19).

What analyzers state as the nature of glossolalia — whether structural language or not — generally follows closely the analyzer’s suppositions about its spiritual nature (whether Spirit inspired or humanly originated). Those critics who construe the phenomenon of tongues as coming wholly from human contrivance are then free to cast aspersions on its character as language, because no one — neither critic nor advocate — claims that the sounds (phonai, “voices,” “sounds,” “languages”) are being generated by the speaker’s reasoning faculty. That deduction of supposed irrationality could be decisive, were it not for its being based on a faulty premise.⁵ The proper premise and relevant texts attribute the agency not to the obvious speaker, but to the enabling Spirit, to the Lord who is the Spirit (Acts 2:4; 10:44–46; 19:5; 1 Corinthians 12:4–10; 14:1,2).⁶ God is not known for speaking nonsense.

The Spirit’s Intelligence And Language

One must not confuse the Spirit of God with the human spirit, the site of Christ’s residence within. All the instructions in 1 Corinthians 14 about how to respond in an orderly, edifying way in a gifted church focus on the believer’s spirit as interactive in the operation of spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 14:14–16,32). This human aspect should not divert us from the overriding fact that the essence of any charismatic gift is “the manifestation of the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:7), In this case the content of the holy speech is furnished directly by Christ’s Spirit, although the speaker is responsible as to when and how frequently — if at all — the gift is to be used, and whether his urge to speak in tongues should be expressed vocally or subvocally.

The Spirit manifested in the spiritual gift is God, and God is omniscient, the creator of order, structure, and intelligent communication, Therefore, since God has everything to do with speaking in tongues, His voiceprint, like a manufacturer’s watermark on fine papers, will be visible when held up to the light, and audible as language when the speaker’s airwaves reach ears familiar with that language. To deny the language nature of glossolalia is to impugn the intelligence of the Spirit of God, who furnishes “the kinds of languages” as a gift.

Some critics, not wanting to grieve the Spirit by such an implication of lack of intelligence, attribute glossolalia entirely, both as speaking and as content, to the speaker, just like the humanists do. That way they can belittle the speaker as infantile or irrational, but not the Spirit — or so they think. But to do that, they have to suppress all those texts cited above that credit the Spirit of Jesus with the “gift,” in this case, the glossa (“language”).

False Suppositions Lacking An Adequate Data Base:

It is a limitation of human finitude that no human being can be knowledgeably conversant with all the approximately 6,000 languages and dialects being spoken on the earth at this hour. Many languages of the 300,000,000 speakers among the “hidden peoples” still have not been reduced to writing, and who knows how many languages once spoken are no longer in existence and have no literature. It takes, therefore a great deal of presumption on the part of an expert to deduce from a dozen or more samples of taped tongues of Pentecostals that the glossolalia on tape is not linguistic, a “pseudo-language” as Samarin says.

At the very least, the phenomenalist analyzers of glossolalia should be candid enough to admit: (1) the possibility they have not cracked the code of the samples studied; (2) the limited extent of their personal knowledge of languages even if one adds in the combined knowledge of other linguists at their institution (Note: if thousands of languages are totally beyond their linguistic contact, their data base is also to that degree untrustworthy); (3) the paucity of samples collected and analyzed in view of the multimillions of Pentecostals worldwide; and (4) the virtual absence of samples of non-religious people speaking fluently (for example, for ten minutes or more) in a tongue they have not learned.⁷

Glossolalia In Sounds Unfamiliar To Western Ears

Case in point: Does the fact that many utterances in tongues have been observed to have a great many open syllables (that is, ending in vowel sounds not closed off by a consonant) necessarily mean that the glossolalia in question is not a language? Only if it can be established that no language ever ends its syllables, words, or sentences that way. But one who would entertain such a scruple may be suffering from a western bias for closed syllables, as in English preponderantly. On the other hand, Japanese is exemplary of a language that appears to have a bias for open syllables. Or take Telugu, the official language of over 65,000,000 people [1990 data] in the Andhra Pradesh state of southeastern India. Telugu is rich in vowels, and reduplication of vowels and syllables ending in what seems to American ears to be vowel sounds. Strings of what in English would be called open syllables are common, for example:

pakapaka (‘suddenly bursting out laughing’)

garagara (‘clean, neat, nice’).⁸

Conclusion: There exists no good reason to deny that biblical glossolalia, as expressed today in continuity with New Testament faith in Jesus, is in any given instance either a living language or an ancient (but now defunct) language. Beyond this, biblical glossolalia includes the possible conundrum of angelic languages, even if we humans do not know how “ministering spirits” communicate between themselves or with God. No expositor has established decisively that the apostle Paul was speaking only tongue-in-cheek in writing glossai … ton angelon (“tongues … of angels,” 1 Corinthians 13:1).

Glossolalia Compared and contrasted with prophecy

Glossolalia is like prophecy in one primary aspect: God and the speaker are speaking simultaneously as one through the same vocal apparatus. A typical text relating to Old Testament prophecy reads: “You [Sovereign Lord] spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant” (Acts 4:25). But glossolalia is unlike prophecy in two major aspects: (1) Glossolalia transcends the mind of the speaker, whereas prophecy makes sense at once to the one prophesying, so that the prophet is held accountable to the church for what has been said in the name of the Lord. (2) Glossolalia is directed into the ear of God as a form of worshipful prayer, while prophecy is directed on behalf of God into the ears of the church (1 Corinthians 14:2,3).

The Locus Classicus As Language

Though every conceivable quashing interpretation of the first Christian Pentecost has been attempted, the clear and coherent story of the biblical text will not go away. It stands in all its biblical glory as an impregnable fortress of Pentecostal fact. Within the walls of Acts 2:1–13, glossolalia as real languages is secure and precedential: “each one heard them speaking in his own language … in his own native language … in our own tongues” (Acts 2:6,8,11). What is stated once and then repeated twice, all within five verses, cannot be missed by one who scrutinizes the text. In that triadic statement the full weight of the emphasis falls on the concept, “language.” So whether in Jerusalem, as here, or in Caesarea, or Ephesus, or Corinth, when the same terms (glossa + lalein) are being used, the interpreter has every right to presume that Mark, Luke, and Paul are referring to the same phenomenon, glossolalia, whatever its phenomena, that is, languages of various kinds.

Illegitimate Division: Foreign Languages And Nonsense Sounds

The typical approach of those trying to declassify biblical tongues as languages is to drive a wedge between Jerusalemean tongues and Corinthian tongues, and to assign the Caesarean and Ephesian tongues to the Corinthian-type, if addressed at all. Over a generation ago Theo Preiss, a French Calvinist, could not escape from the obvious meaning of Acts 2:4–11 in regard to speaking in tongues, which he denominated as xenoglossie (‘foreign language’). But rather than consistently extrapolating from the defining moment at Jerusalem to understand the same phenomenon in all the other biblical locales, he chose to follow the nineteenth-century log-splitters who whacked off the knotty Corinthian segment so as to be able to interpret it apart from its Pentecostal language tree. Once on the ground, it could be treated as something less than language, as in Preiss’ definition of the thereby debased glossolalia as “unformed and ecstatic speech.”⁹

Preiss, like many other superficial interpreters, misunderstood Paul’s point entirely. He predicated the unintelligibility to the glossolalia per se, rather than to the problematic situation where the glossolalia was given but not translated. No terms in the Pauline letter justify the supposition that the Corinthians had worked themselves up into a self-induced “ecstasy” that in itself could account for the character of what they uttered, which when interpreted made perfectly good sense. Implicit in the rejection of “tongues” as “language” is the commensurate rejection of “the gift of interpretation” as genuine.

One has to differentiate between the confusing impression that uninterpreted glossolalia has upon others who do not know the language and the objective character of the glossolalia actually spoken. It is a non sequitur to argue that the glossolalia itself is garbled, unintelligible, and meaningless just because those who heard it were not conversant with the language, or were not provided with a translation. Hear Paul state what I have just paraphrased:

“Undoubtedly there are all sorts of languages in the world, yet none of them is without meaning. If then I do not grasp the meaning of what someone is saying, I am a foreigner to the speaker, and he is a foreigner to me. So it is with you” (1 Corinthians 14:10–12).

This statement by the apostle was made right in the center of his counsel about good order for oral ministries in the church. The problem he delineated was that of uninterpreted glossolalia. The fault lay not with the glossolalia (as if nothing was being said that made any sense intrinsically), but the abuse was in having multiple occurrences of glossolalia without waiting for translation of each one serially so the congregation would know what was being said and would be able to say the “Amen.” The apostle corrects the Corinthians as to “order” and appropriateness in the use of the vocal gifts, and he challenged them to “try to excel in gifts that build up the church — his thematic clause in chapter 14. But nowhere does he castigate them for the quality of their glossolalia, as if it were their responsibility an output.

Linguistic Context As It Impacts Glossolalia Verification

Verification of glossolalia as language was not a problem anywhere in the New Testament because Pentecost was assumed to be determinative of the nature of glossolalia. The issue arises today because of those critics who perpetuate the 19th-century defamation of tongues as only nonsensical babbling. There is no basis for saying that tongues are inarticulate either in Corinth, Carolina, or California. Yet the argument for two kinds of glossolalia (xenolalia, “foreign languages”), and what for convenience can be labeled as garblalia [gar-bla-li-a] (the assumed speaking of garbled babel) ignores the changed cultural-linguistic situation in the churches at Corinth, Ephesus, and Caesarea as compared with the uniquely international gathering for the Pentecost feast in Jerusalem in A.D. 31.

The seesaw of antipentecostal interpretation goes up and down. One end digs the dirt when historicists [historians committed to the philosophy of historical relativism] allege gratuitously that the precedent for glossolalia is pagan and centuries older than the first Christian Pentecost. They deny that glossolalia had its genesis at Pentecost. Because they cannot establish the “language” nature of any alleged pagan precedent, they would reduce biblical glossolalia to the same level as the dark mutterings of witch doctors and sorcerers, so that it can have many precedents. Others find it easier to attack the historicity of the Pentecost data. Based on their low view of Scripture, some critics opine that what we read about in Acts as occurring in Jerusalem, Ephesus, and Caesarea if it has any reality beyond Luke’s literary imagination) was only ecstatic gushings of vocables from subconscious minds.

On every teeter-totter what goes down must come back up, in this case when scholars follow standard hermeneutics. Certainly a youth can follow easily Luke’s account that about 120 Galileans were enabled to speak accurately, if not consciously, in “languages” that were foreign to them. Therefore, what could the critics do with so clear a text? One approach was to concede the obvious. Do more. Create a new term to celebrate and simultaneously conceal the concession. Hail it with some fanfare as a scholarly discovery. Behold xenolalia! With that term the Pentecost end of the seesaw achieves its apex. Xenolalia is, after all, “foreign languages” and that means proper meaningful speech.

Whenever an interpreter insists that glossolalia is generally what we have coded as garblalia (a garbage of garbled sound) and looks for a new term to describe Pentecost, he has his choice of several that have been coined usingxeno (“foreign”) as a prefix (xenoglossolalia, orxenolalia, or xenoglossie — all meaning “speaking in foreign languages”). The adjectival prefix, xeno, merely mirror’s Luke and Paul’s use of “other” (languages) — Acts 2:4; 1 Corinthians 14:21. In all cases the speaker’s mind does not comprehend his glossolalicspeech (1 Corinthians 14:14), and it is proper to say the language he speaks is foreign to him. But those who push forward the xeno derivatives do so at a price. With their concession that unlearned Galileans spoke in foreign languages, comes their devaluation (to the point of defamation) of the intelligence of all the rest of the biblical glossolalia as being sounds without glossa (“language”) in the other New Testament cities where the Spirit of God was poured out.

By their acknowledging only one incident where language occurs, Pentecost can now be regarded as unique in the New Testament. Up with xenolalia means down with glossolalia at the Corinthian end. And down with glossolalia at the Caesarean end. And down with glossolalia at the Ephesian end. Division and downgrading have been the rotten fruit of such subterfuge and disdain of the biblical exegesis. Not resting on the seesaw fulcrum, but secure on the level of the biblical texts, the “spiritual gift” of speaking in tongues was then, and is now, indivisible and univocal. At best xenolalia can be a synonym for glossolalia, but never can it be an antonym as its originators surmised

Reinforcing the lexigraphical evidence that all glossolalia is homogeneous as ‘language’ is the cultural contextual principle, inclusive of geography. It is proper to ask if the tongues speaking far away in Corinth was linguistically identical to the glossolalia on the day of Pentecost. Corinth, not on the coast but adjacent to the isthmus, still could be classified as a seaport city. Everyone would need to know Greek to live there, except slaves. Few of the temporary residents, like Aquila and Priscilla, would be presumed to be bilingual and speak Latin as well. There is little reason to think that a diverse group of internationals would have any reason to come to Corinth and settle in this small to moderate sized city in the ancient world. And sailors who visit international ports seldom learn more than a few phrases in other languages when bartering. The church at Corinth would be little different in that respect from Pentecostal churches today in Norfolk or San Diego.

The point is this: If the same languages recognized as being spoken “as the Spirit enabled them” at Pentecost were spoken in the church services at Corinth, there is little probability that native speakers would be there to recognize what was being said in any tongue other than local Greek. On the other hand, Pentecost was very special linguistically from a natural point of view. The assemblage of so many types of bilingual people was as remarkable as it was extraordinary. Pilgrims from 14 far-flung foreign language groups were on a temporary expedition to the Judean festival in Jerusalem. This created a very unusual situation, which, it should be added, returned to normal after the pilgrims returned to the lands of their residence.

After Pentecost the knowledge of languages in the Jewish church there would be only slightly more linguistically diversified (by some Jews of the diaspora having returned to die in Jerusalem) than in Corinth. In any case, and in either city, the speakers in tongues were not aware while speaking, of the language in which they spoke. The genuineness of the “tongue” was not dependent on the kind of opportunity afforded for verification, but on the trustworthiness of the giver of the spiritual gift, His gifts reflect His supreme intelligence as the “Word of God.”

What happened at Corinth when the utterance was unintelligible until translated for the congregation is exactly what one would have expected in that locale on a year-round basis. Unintelligibility is necessarily circumstantial and not systemic. What was lacking in Corinth in terms of language verifiability was a large audience of multinationals or visible angels! But given the most careful attention to the text of Corinthians, one finds the apostle never raises doubts about the genuineness of the tongues in the Spirit’s gift.

Glossolalia as Language — Implicit In Companion Gift

Moreover, the subsidiary gift of “the interpretation of tongues” recognizes that local congregations normally will understand only one language. The church will require a translation of what was said to the Lord in a tongue if the church as a whole — and not just the individual — is to benefit from the praise or prayer being offered in worship. The interpretation is required, not because of any deficiency of language in the mouth of the speaker, but because of the hearers’ ignorance of the glossa. The gift of interpretation compensates for this linguistic insufficiency in the listening congregation, and not for any discrepancy in what they hear, for that utterance was furnished by the Spirit.

Dastardly Delight In Depicting Glossolalia As Foolish Speaking

If the opponents of supernatural spiritual gifts could support with exegesis and evidence their contention that glossolalia is but a concatenation of nonsensical sounds, then it stands to reason that no more arguments would be needed to suppress the gift. Glossolalia would then be deemed to be a form of abject foolishness, “gift” or not. Such foolishness would not be like the “foolishness of preaching the cross,” which is only so subjectively, being foolish within and only in the minds of the nations perishing, people who do not understand the sacrificial symbolism of the Old Testament.

But if glossolalia were actually just stupid sounds projected at random, having no inherent language value — no form (as they say, “unformed” or “broken speech”), and no beauty of coherence — then its objective foolishness would stand up as an evidence against it in any human court of inquiry. The certainty of that conclusion is what accounts for the implacable drive to discredit it at its linguistic base by those who would deny Jesus the right to share His verbal glory in the same intelligent way today. Their logic is relentless, once the false-language fallacy is hypothecated: Glossolalia is garblalia is garbage. Never, of course, is it said in so simple a statement, but the implications are everywhere.

Alas for those conscientious students whose guides to Pentecostal truth are only the works of non-participants and “postpentecostal” defectors. Alas for those who are thereby led by this fiction to despise the unique lingual gift given to Spirit-baptized believers in celebration of Jesus’ having entered His ascended glory.

Sacrifice Of Glossolalia To Sacramental Symbolism

To compensate for an attribution of foolishness — the alleged pseudo-biblical concept of glossolalia — one of the analyzers would allay the pain of the loss, like a bystander who gives pencils and chewing gum to refill the pockets of a man robbed of his valuables. William Samarin predicates a sacramental value to what he regards as the senseless words of glossolalia, in analogy to the bread in the Eucharist; he also compares the Pentecostal’s “pseudo-language” to a Gothic cathedral, which signifies to him the majesty of God. Samarin exchanges glossolalia’s biblically supernatural character for a pragmatically symbolic one: “In short, glossolalia is a linguistic symbol of the sacred … glossolalia is symbolic in the very way the Eucharist is symbolic.”¹⁰ Samarin’s sympathy for glossolalists is an abomination more dangerous than that of those who because of their antisupernaturalism disparage glossolalia altogether. Having cut out the “language” reality, he would sew in a symbol over the hole left by his “pseudo,” which is to say that what is false serves as a symbol of the sacred!

But Samarin’s analogies are inept and misleading. Bread has form and intellectual order in the baker’s combination of ingredients and even to the atomic structure of the life-sustaining materials comprising it. Beauty of form though man-made is characteristic of a Gothic cathedral. Samarin’s analysis of glossolalia contradicts even his own orderly analogies. For whatever reasons (for example, a woefully insufficient data base, God’s proclivity to hide His glory from worldly experts who tackle spiritual things by secular methodology, naturalistic presuppositions, fallacious conclusions) Samarin’s sacramental sentiment for glossolalia while rejecting its true language character is itself wholly to be rejected.

The significant (that is, “sign”-showing) value of glossolalia in the world at large rests exclusively on its being identifiable language as was clearly evident at Pentecost — a convicting sign to unbelievers. A “sign” is powerful because it is based on reality, whereas a symbol, as liberal theologians use the term, is a substitute for reality so that religion may continue whether or not there exists any reality behind what is being projected for faith. It is not that glossolalia must be protected from anyone’s rigorous linguistic analysis. But if the analyst is not in possession of the full data, that is, God’s database — all the languages of all time in earth and heaven — he should at least be the first to state modestly the tentativeness of his hypothesis and conclusions.

Summary

Those scholars who think of themselves as above speaking in tongues usually find it more to their liking to begin biblically with Corinthian tongues in their quest to discredit glossolalia. When an arbitrary definition is assigned there, that understanding moves rapidly like a darkening cloud to overshadow Acts 2:4,6,8,11; 10:46; 19:6. Once the Corinthian caricature gets directly over the three episodes narrated in Acts, the predictable downpour of verbal meaninglessness washes out utterances inspired by the Spirit, and the runoff collects in garblalic gullies. But the Pentecost speech-event occasionally is spared this washout and survives as xenolalia, the result being the equally unacceptable proposition that there are two kinds of glossolalia in the New Testament.

We have contended all along that the proper place to begin to understand glossolalia biblically is with its first occurrence ever. Responsible exegesis demands that when Luke records the repeated phenomenon of glossolalia occurring later in his history, at Caesarea and again at Ephesus, one must understand the introductory account he had explicated in detail (Acts 2:4–13) as the model for extrapolating the nature of Caesarean tongues and Ephesian tongues. The prevailing assumption that glossolalia is the same in character throughout the Lukan narrative cannot be overturned in the highest courts of hermeneutics. Even without international audiences at Ephesus and Caesarea to overhear the believers’ devotions, the character of the speaking itself must be presumed to remain the same in principle, namely, “as the Spirit enabled them.”

Luke’s apostolic history of the evangelization of Greece given in Acts tells of Paul’s mission to Corinth, but since the author had to be selective by space constraints in what he recorded, no mention was made of glossolalia. Other things were featured at Corinth, like the Jewish opposition attempting to bring litigation against the church before the Roman judicial system. When in Paul’s first letter we do read of glossolalia being a part of the gifts at Corinth, we are not at all surprised, since we have already read in Acts of the churches of Jerusalem, Caesarea, and Ephesus speaking in tongues by the anointing of the Spirit.

Paul and Luke were traveling companions and colleagues for many years. There is no reason whatever to suspect that their views of glossolalia differed in the least. Robert H. Gundry in his landmark article on the language character of glossolalia in all the New Testament attests this by saying: “Luke’s presentation is valid presumptive evidence which lays the burden of proof on those who would understand Paul differently from Luke.”¹¹

Therefore, at Corinth the speaking in tongues in the congregation and in private places of prayer had to be part of the big picture, where the same glossolalic phenomenon was taking place across the Aegean Sea in Ephesus, and over 1,000 miles away in the church at Cornelius’ home in Caesarea, and in the Pentecostal church in Jerusalem. There were no grades of glossolalia according to differing locales. Just as Jesus was responsible for the specially given language of praise in prayer at Pentecost, so too was “the same Lord” responsible for the believers’ holy and transcendent speech all over the Mediterranean world. The lungs and larynx were theirs, but the languages they spoke were latent in the mind of Christ within them.

—William Graham MacDonald, Th.D., Front Royal, Virginia, taught a combined 22 years at Southeastern College, Central Bible College, and Gordon College, before engaging in a full-time writing ministry.

Endnotes

1. Frederic William Farrar, while canon of Westminster Cathedral, used it in 1879 in his work St. Paul (Vol. 1, p. 52): “Those soliloquies of ecstatic spiritual emotion which were known as Glossolalia, or, ‘the Gift of Tongues.’ ” While his humanistic definition of glossolalia collides with a sympathetic one based on biblical insights, the term nevertheless remains a handy one today if used in strict conformity to its etymology — glossai (languages) + lalein (to speak). Perhaps Farrar’s antipathy toward tongues may have made him careless in the formation of the word itself, if indeed he was the one to coin it. It appears to be modeled after the more common “-ology” words like “geology,” when it should have been spelled with the Greek alpha transliterated in the middle of the word, like the less common “genealogy,” as expected from glossa and its plural, glossai. This means that the word should have been spelled with paronymous precision as glossalaia. But it is more than a century too late to improve the spelling now, and no exigent need exists for that.

2. F. Blass and A. Debrunner, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, trans. and rev. by Robert W. Funk (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1961), 254, par. 480, left col., (3).

3. B.L. Smith, “Tongues in the New Testament,” The Churchman. Vol. 87, no. 4 (Winter, 1973): 285.

4 “glossolalia … is a form of pseudo-language that is available to every normal human being in a normal state … a marginal form of behaviour, being restricted for the most part to religious experience…. Strictly speaking, glossolalia cannot be learned.” William J. Samarin, “Glossolalia as Learned Behaviour,” Canadian Journal of Theology 15, no. 1 (January 1969): 60.

5. Both in their list of “Dangers” and in their list of “Recommendations,” glossolalia was faulted obliquely for “irrationality” by ecclesiastics in the early 60s: “Report on Spiritual Speaking,” Concordia Theological Monthly 32, no. 4 (April 1961): 219,220.

6. The Greek at the end of 14:2 is simply pneumati and “by [the] Spirit,” in the close context of ta pneumatika (“spiritual gifts”) is to be preferred over “by [the speaker’s] spirit.” As in many other places, the NIV footnote rendering is the superior one.

7. A critic cannot expect to be taken seriously in saying that non-Christians speak in tongues if he then begs off from producing the evidence by saying it is “difficult to document.” William J. Samarin, Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism (NY: Macmillan, 1972) 131, text and footnote.

8. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1976, Micropaedia, Vol. 9, 875.

9. Theo Preiss, “The Inner Witness of the Holy Spirit: The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit and Scripture,” trans. by D. G. Miller, Interpretation 7, no. 3 (July 1953) 277.

10. William J. Samarin, Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism (NY: Macmillan, 1972), 231,232.

11. Robert H. Gundry, “ ‘Ecstatic Utterance’ (N.E.B.)?” Journal of Theological Studies, New Series, 17, pt. 2 (October 1966) 299–307. Gundry’s arguments for the identity of the language nature of glossolalia in Acts and Corinthians are insuperable. They have been incapable of refutation for all these years because they are rock solid hermeneutically. An antecedent to this work was: J.G. Davies, “Pentecost and Glossolalia,” Journal of Theological Studies, N.S., 3 (October 1952) 228-231, which also interprets glossolalia as speaking in foreign languages in both Acts and Corinthians.