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In 2019, seminarians at my institution reported being pressured to attend charismatic meetings to learn to ‘speak in tongues’ and receive ‘Spirit baptism’. The rector formed a commission, and the pressuring momentarily ceased. Having no background in the subject, curiosity led me to devote an entire sabbatical to it in 2020.
This research led me to Charles Sullivan, a Canadian linguist with a fluent reading knowledge of Latin and Greek, as well as Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac, which he studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. With a 30-year background of involvement in the Pentecostal movement, Sullivan initially sought support for the Pentecostal practice of glossolalia as a ‘personal prayer language’ by combing through electronic databases of patristic sources in the original languages, such as Migne’s Patrologia Graeca and Patrologia Latina, and Syriac sources. To his dismay, however, he found no such support.
The Greek word for ‘tongue’, glossa, as found in the Church Fathers, meant either (1) the physical tongue, or (2) human language – nothing more. The same result was yielded by the Latin word, lingua, and the Syriac leshan. No mysterious quality is associated with the word such as we find in today’s Pentecostal-Charismatic references to ‘speaking in tongues’. Further, no lexical basis exists for the claim that Church Fathers began referring to ‘tongues’ as ‘jubilation’.
By the time I met Sullivan, he had already devoted well over a decade of study to his now widely consulted online Gift of Tongues Project. We joined our efforts in 2019, the yield of which is our four-volume series, Speaking in Tongues: A Critical Historical Examination (2022-2026). Our inquiry takes the form of an archaeological excavation: starting at the ‘surface’ level with contemporary glossolalic practices, we then dig down into Church history to find where these contemporary beliefs and practices came from.
Our first volume examines the rise of tongues as a ‘personal prayer language’, a redefinition that did not exist before the 20th century. Both the Irvingite revivalists in London (1830) and the Pentecostals in Topeka and Azusa Street (1900-1909) believed ‘tongues’ referred to human languages. The Irvingites drew such large crowds in London that they took to selling tickets, with audiences including celebrities such as Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alfred Tennyson, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle and even members of the Royal Family. Interest exploded across Europe, where German higher-critical theologians, concluding that tongues were irrational ecstatic utterances, coined a neologism by joining the Greek words glossa (‘tongue’ or ‘language’) and lalein (‘to speak’ or ‘to babble’), which they called ‘glossolalia’. This term was introduced into English by the Dean of Canterbury, Frederic Farrar, in his 1879 book, The Life and Work of St. Paul. Yet the first Pentecostal missionaries who went to India in 1906, still believing God would grant them a miraculous gift of foreign languages, found their attempts at preaching thwarted by uncomprehending audiences. Consequently, Alfred Garr and other Pentecostals began quietly redefining their understanding of tongues as a non-human ‘heavenly language’.
Read more on smry.ai
This research led me to Charles Sullivan, a Canadian linguist with a fluent reading knowledge of Latin and Greek, as well as Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac, which he studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. With a 30-year background of involvement in the Pentecostal movement, Sullivan initially sought support for the Pentecostal practice of glossolalia as a ‘personal prayer language’ by combing through electronic databases of patristic sources in the original languages, such as Migne’s Patrologia Graeca and Patrologia Latina, and Syriac sources. To his dismay, however, he found no such support.
The Greek word for ‘tongue’, glossa, as found in the Church Fathers, meant either (1) the physical tongue, or (2) human language – nothing more. The same result was yielded by the Latin word, lingua, and the Syriac leshan. No mysterious quality is associated with the word such as we find in today’s Pentecostal-Charismatic references to ‘speaking in tongues’. Further, no lexical basis exists for the claim that Church Fathers began referring to ‘tongues’ as ‘jubilation’.
By the time I met Sullivan, he had already devoted well over a decade of study to his now widely consulted online Gift of Tongues Project. We joined our efforts in 2019, the yield of which is our four-volume series, Speaking in Tongues: A Critical Historical Examination (2022-2026). Our inquiry takes the form of an archaeological excavation: starting at the ‘surface’ level with contemporary glossolalic practices, we then dig down into Church history to find where these contemporary beliefs and practices came from.
Our first volume examines the rise of tongues as a ‘personal prayer language’, a redefinition that did not exist before the 20th century. Both the Irvingite revivalists in London (1830) and the Pentecostals in Topeka and Azusa Street (1900-1909) believed ‘tongues’ referred to human languages. The Irvingites drew such large crowds in London that they took to selling tickets, with audiences including celebrities such as Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alfred Tennyson, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle and even members of the Royal Family. Interest exploded across Europe, where German higher-critical theologians, concluding that tongues were irrational ecstatic utterances, coined a neologism by joining the Greek words glossa (‘tongue’ or ‘language’) and lalein (‘to speak’ or ‘to babble’), which they called ‘glossolalia’. This term was introduced into English by the Dean of Canterbury, Frederic Farrar, in his 1879 book, The Life and Work of St. Paul. Yet the first Pentecostal missionaries who went to India in 1906, still believing God would grant them a miraculous gift of foreign languages, found their attempts at preaching thwarted by uncomprehending audiences. Consequently, Alfred Garr and other Pentecostals began quietly redefining their understanding of tongues as a non-human ‘heavenly language’.
Read more on smry.ai
Amen!!!
