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g7 RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA 8panheim Speaking with Tongues and in verses 9-11 are named nations representa tives of which each heard in his own tongue the dis ciples make known the wonders of God. While only four varieties of speech are necessarily involved, the implication is that these Galileans were enabled to speak the Gospel in the languages of the world. But the problem here presented is difficult. How could men of different nationality hear, each of them, all the disciples speaking his mother tongue? and it is not suggested that certain disciples addressed groups. Indeed, this appears to be within the region of legend. Moreover, it would not be strange for the Jew of verse 9 to hear a Galilean speak his mother tongue; the conjectures of Tertullian, Jerome, and of modern men that some other word is to be read for " Judea " does not help in view of the text, and the conclusion is that the story of the miracle is a late intrusion. The speech of Peter in verses 1718 im plies a prophetic inspiration, but says nothing of strange tongues. The enlargement which is to be seen here can be traced to Judaistic sources, as in the belief that the law of Sinai was not to be restricted to the Hebrews but to be given to the nations in a miracle like that of Pentecost (cf. Philo, De septen ario, and De decalogo, §§ 9, 11). Such a conception as this, embodied in the work of the Alexandrian Jew, could easily become the basis of an insertion like that in Acts ii. This conception is the more easily understood in that the character of Luke's representation is to make Christianity universalistic. Related phenomena appear elsewhere. In I Cor. xii. 1-3 Paul evidently means by the pneurnatikoi especially those in ecstasy; in verses 4-11 he shows that the working of the Spirit is varied, and in xiv. 37-39 the pneumatikoi may be those who speak with tongues. He also places here the prophets who were endowed with the Spirit alongside those speaking with tongues; with verse 39 should be s. Manifes- compared I Thess. v. 19-20. Paul had tations in not had occasion to warn at Thessalon the Early ica against ecstatic and related phe Church. nomena (cf. II Thess. ii. 2). Gal. iv. 6 and Rom. viii. 15-16, 26-27 are to be brought into this relation, in which the crying (Gk. krazon) of the Spirit and its testimony are distin guished from that of man's spirit. It is God's spirit which speaks within us, and when we know not how to pray, the Spirit makes intercession with unutterable groanings (Rom. viii. 26), and this God understands (verse 27). The apostle himself has had experience of this speaking with tongues (I Cor. xiv. 18; cf. IT Cor. xii. 1, in which he describes ecstasy, and note verse 4, which is to be placed with I Cor. ii. 9). Somewhat unrelated to this species of ecstasy are the phenomena of Rev. i. 10, iv. 2, xvii. 3, xxi. 10, which deal with apocalyptic vision. Justin Martyr relates that in his own times spiritual gifts were active in the Church (Trypho, lxxxii., lxxxviii., Eng. transl., ANF, i. 240, 243-244) though it is not certain that speaking with tongues is here intended; in chap. xxxix. he speaks of seven kinds of gifts, and this seems to combine Isa. xi. 2 and I Cor. xii. ?-10, though speaking with tongues is again not mentioned. The " Address to the Greeks," chap. x., hardly comes into account here, since the Greek doctrine of inspiration is here under discussion.
In the ·Acta Perpetum et Felicitatis, viii., the Spirit overpowers Perpetua and constrains her to utterance of a name of which she had not thought. The description of the outbreak of Montanism in Eusebius; Hist. eccl., V., xvi. 7 sqq. (NPNF, 2 ser., i. 231) does not exclude speaking with tongues, though the concern here is not with unmeaning and unintelligible speech but with prophetic utterance, and not only Montanus but two women had the seizures. Epiphanius (Hcer., xlviii. 4) makes Montanus describe his experience as a taking-out of his own heart by the Lord and the implanting of a new one. Tertullian (Adv. Marcionem, V., viii., Eng. transl. ANF, iii. 44546) seems to include, among his demands of Marcion, that the latter explain what seems to be a claim to glossolalia, and the same thing is probably meant when in his De resurrectione carnis there is a kind of utterance mentioned which no one can know without interpretation. A weighty witness for the continuance of this gift is presented by Irenaeus (Hcer., V., vi. 1), who speaks of " many brethren in the Church who . . . through the Spirit speak all kinds of languages " (ANF, i. 531), and he evidently refers to the phenomena noted by Paul. Yet it can not be decided whether Irenaeus meant speech in foreign languages like that of Pentecost or a phenomenon like that of Corinthians. But that some such phenomena were in his mind is clear, with a probable reference to I Cor. xiv. Chrysostom appears at a loss to describe the facts, which are no longer manifested in his times. In a book that is half Jewish and half Christian, the Testament of Job, is a description of the ecstatic speech of the daughters of Job, one of whom used the method of one class of angels; and this implies the conception of a foreign tongue. Yet the phenomenon is not altogether common, and it can not have been important in the apostolic Church; later manifestations of which church history knows, such as those of the Irvingites, must be explained as repristinations of the events of Pentecost and early Christianity.
Conditions similar to those outlined in the foregoing are indicated in the Old Testament, where the influence either of the Spirit of God or of an evil spirit is represented as producing exalted, enthusiastic, ecstatic speech or action. To the examples noted under Ecstasy (q.v.) may be 3. Old-Tes- added the seventy elders of Num. xi. tament and 24-30, and the illustrations furnished
Ethnic by Jer. xxiii. 32, xxix. 26. Having a Parallels. connection with these phenomena is the condition of the prophet when having his vision; the consciousness however permits the prophet to give a clear and connected account of what he sees and an interpreter is not needed, and nothing is said in this relation of ecstatic speech. But the things seen in the visions appear to the prophet to be psychological realities. The Greek-Roman world furnishes many evident parallels. The Greek oracles were mediated through priests or priestesses who uttered what the divinity suggested to them while their consciousness was in complete abeyance. Another characteristic of the giving of oracles is the obscurity or unintelligibility of the oracle, which ever needs explication. So
