Category Archives: faith

Jesus outside the New Testament

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So what about other 1st century writing? Doesn’t this provide extra-biblical evidence for an historical Jesus?

The Jewish historian Josephus wrote his Jewish Antiquities around 93/94CE. In the section known as the ‘Testimonium Flavianum’, he appears to talk about Jesus in glowing terms:

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct to this day.

I’m not here going into great detail about why many scholars believe this to be an interpolation; suffice to say they do. A later Christian added the entire passage in the middle of an account Josephus is relating about Pontius Pilate that has nothing to do with Jesus. It employs language and a style alien to anything else Josephus wrote and appears to be a rewrite of the appearances of the resurrected Jesus on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24:13-35. None of it is testimony to any Earthly Jesus.

Josephus’ apparent second reference to Jesus is in a later section of Jewish Antiquities. There he relates a story about the execution of a certain James who happens to have a brother called Jesus. Unfortunately, despite the two names corresponding to gospel characters, the two are, as the context makes clear, two entirely different people. This James is a Jewish High Priest who, Josephus mentions incidentally, had a sibling called Jesus. They lived at a later time. Unfortunately, at some point, a scribe or someone else added the phrase, ‘called Christ’ after the second mention of this Jesus. This may have been accidental when a marginal note (who wrote it and why?) was transferred to the main text. This Jesus is not remotely ‘the Christ’.

Josephus, therefore, tells us nothing about Jesus, neither as a celestial super-being nor as a real person. 

Around the same time as Josephus’s Antiquities, the document now known now as 1 Clement appeared. Thought to have been written circa 95CE (though Carrier thinks it might be as early as 65), 1 Clement appears to quote gospel Jesus:

(Be) especially mindful of the words of the Lord Jesus which He spoke teaching us meekness and long-suffering. For thus He spoke: ‘Be merciful, that you may obtain mercy; forgive, that it may be forgiven to you; as you do, so shall it be done unto you; as you judge, so shall you be judged; as you are kind, so shall kindness be shown to you; with what measure you measure, with the same it shall be measured to you.’

Certainly this sounds like the things Jesus is reported as saying in the gospels, Matthew in particular. Nevertheless, it is not identical to anything Jesus does say there. These words sound suspiciously like an exposition of the behaviour the early cult expected of its members (though didn’t always experience, 1 Clement addressing this very issue). Similar words had already been put into the mouth of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel allegory. Of course if Carrier is right with his dating, Matthew might easily have appropriated them from 1 Clement itself. Whichever it is, they could as easily have been ‘spoken’ by an imaginary saviour in heaven than from a man who had lived on Earth several decades earlier.

Outside of these ‘words of the Lord Jesus’, every other reference in 1 Clement is to the Jewish scriptures. Its author makes all of his points using the scriptures, even when a reference to Jesus’ teaching, miracles or parables would be far more apposite. Like almost all of the New Testament writers, Clement appears not to know any of these details. When he addresses suffering, he uses Peter and Paul’s deaths as his examples, not Jesus’ crucifixion, which gets no mention at all.

Clement’s ‘Lord Jesus’ is, like that of Paul and other New Testament writers, a supernatural superman, whose existence is exclusively proven by ‘prophecies’ in ancient scripture.

And that’s it. No first century writer outside the Bible tells us anything about an Earthly Jesus. Those who appear to mention him, do so only briefly and offer no information about his life. The majority of first-century writing about Jesus then, both inside and outside the Bible, speak only of a mythical Christ who had cultic followers.

We’ll take look at some early 2nd century documentation next time.

You can already guess what this offers though, can’t you.

The New New Testament: part 2

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We’re up to Hebrews in our new, chronological New Testament. The authors of Hebrews contend that their salvation was first ‘announced by the Lord’ and confirmed by those who ‘heard him’. This is not necessarily evidence of an earthly Jesus. Their declaration could equally refer to a cosmic Christ who, as he did with others, provided internal ‘revelations’, just as there are those today who claim Christ speaks to them in their heads. Hebrews’ authors say as much when they claim their faith has been confirmed by spiritual experiences such as ‘signs, wonders and various miracles, and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will’ (Hebrews 2: 3-4). They go on to announce that the New Covenant initiated by the new Moses – Jesus – is in every way superior to the Old Covenant and that he is the new, sinless high priest. Bizarre doesn’t doesn’t begin to describe it.

Hebrews contains the only example in the New Testament of a prediction of Jesus’ second coming: ‘so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him’ (9:28). Hebrews, however, regards the Christ only as a supernatural high priest, operating in the heavenly realms. This second appearance then can only refer to this character, who is not conceived as having had any existence here on Earth.

Around the same time as Hebrews appeared, a senior cultist was writing to a group of Jewish Christians to remind them that faith alone isn’t enough for salvation. It must, James says, translate into improved behaviour. This runs contrary to Paul’s teaching which is that faith alone is sufficient. The letter mentions Jesus only twice (James 1:1 and 2:1) as ‘Lord Jesus, the Christ’. When reminding its readers to love their neighbour as themselves it doesn’t, as we might expect, tell them that this is because Jesus said so. Rather, it quotes from Jewish ‘scripture’; Leviticus 18:19 to be precise. An incongruous thing to do if, as some insist, the James in question was Jesus’ half-brother. In fact, the author makes no claim to have known Jesus and tells us nothing about him. He doesn’t make any reference to the teaching, miracles or activities attributed to Jesus in the first three gospels. Instead, he refers to him 11 times as ‘the Lord’ and tells his readers to be patient because ‘the coming of the Lord is at hand’ (James 5:8). Note what this is saying: the coming of the Lord is not a second coming or a return. And his arrival is ‘at hand’ (εγγύς, ‘engus’), meaning real soon, first century time.

Then, when you thought we’d never get to it, along comes a fourth gospel. Its authors revise the Jesus character and everything about him in this late entry. This Jesus speaks differently about different things. He’s fixated on himself, fully aware he’s a celestial being, completely in control of events, directing the entire story. The gospel introduces a new sidekick too, Jesus’ gay lover ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’. This is possibly Lazarus, first introduced as a character in a parable in Luke 16:19-31 ‘John’, not Jesus, brings this symbolic character to life in the fourth gospel referring to him as the one the Lord loves (John 1:3). The previous three gospels know nothing of him as a real person.

John goes on to change the day of the crucifixion, to Thursday, because it fits his forced symbolism, and goes overboard in portraying the resurrection as a physical one, Jesus displaying his wounds and inviting the disciples to poke about in them. Preposterous grotesquery that, together with John’s unique resurrection accounts, the other gospel authors somehow missed. Were they not part of the much vaunted oral tradition when they wrote? Did they not know of it from Q? As commanding as John’s Jesus is, he is a very much a literary creation, of the ‘what if our celestial Christ had lived on Earth?’ type. But then again, aren’t they all?  

The latest, most accurate translation of 2 Corinthians 12:1-5

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I met this bloke down the pub, oh, I dunno, 14 years ago maybe, and he was telling me how he’d taken a wild trip to another dimension. Yes, really. I believed him and so should you. I mean, why would he lie? He said it was absolutely fab and totally mind-blowing. The incredible beings he met in this other dimension told him that once he sobered up got back to reality he’d have to keep schtum about what he’d seen and heard. So really he couldn’t say much about it. Now, I mean, why would he make up stuff like this? He wouldn’t, right? Specially when people would say he was a nutter if he did. So it really happened, right?

Anyway, I promised I’d write it up for him if ever I started a blog, so I did, way back here. Honest to God, even after all that time I could remember what he told me word for word.

I might though have claimed it was me who’d tripped out in the other dimension (a spliff or two can do that to ya) so I’m here to set the record straight.

You do believe me, don’t you?

Your best mate,

Paul

What to make of the Supernatural

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When I was young, about 8 or 9, I was frightened of creatures that invaded my bedroom in the dark: monsters under the bed, devils in human form lurking in the shadows, that kind of thing. One night when I couldn’t sleep through fear, it came to me that if these creatures were real then so too were the super-heroes I loved: Superman, Batman and the Legion of Super-Heroes! Now, I knew these DC characters didn’t really exist and so I reasoned (I think pretty well for a 9 year old!) that that neither did their evil counterparts, the monsters and devils I was scared of. With this realisation, the horrors were vanquished. Shadows were just shadows. There was nothing scary under the bed.

Somewhere in a recent comment, either here or elsewhere (I can’t remember which nor can I find it), someone informed me that I make the a priori assumption that the supernatural isn’t real.

The term a priori is used with abandon by people who don’t necessarily know what it means so here’s how The Oxford English dictionary defines it:

relating to or denoting reasoning or knowledge which proceeds from theoretical deduction rather than from observation or experience.

I’ll take that. The only way one can assess the supernatural is through reasoning and deduction. There’s no independent evidence for it that can be considered; no external phenomenon to observe and analyse; no science, history or philosophy books that take it seriously or even consider it. I have no personal experience of the beings that supposedly inhabit the supernatural realm; no gods, angels, spirits, demons, ghosts or goblins have manifested themselves in front of me. I’ve never experienced magic, spells or exorcisms, at least not ones that can’t be explained far more convincingly in other ways. So what does that leave in terms of evidence?

Fantasy stories and religious texts. These are the only sources of information about the supernatural, and at least one of them is entirely fictional. Fantasy stories are by definition fiction. They are made up. Similarly, religious works are the products of minds from before the advent of science; explanations of the world and human experience that their creators could construct only in terms of their localised, pre-scientific superstitions. No-one outside of those who’ve chosen to believe in them takes them seriously, which is why their claims are never considered in serious science or history books (Ken Ham’s ‘scientific’ publications are nothing of the sort; they’re religious texts masquerading as science.)

That the supernatural has to be argued for, from an assumption that it does exist, is clear indication it does not; such powerful beings would surely be apparent in the real world, just as they are in Stranger Things (a fiction in case you’re not sure.) No-one has so far demonstrated that the supernatural is real. It is possible to argue it is but only through reliance on the same religious texts, the authority and reliability of which is in dispute on such matters

So, do I make an a priori assumption the supernatural doesn’t exist? Yes, in the sense I take it a priori that it doesn’t. Is this an assumption? No, it is a conclusion arrived at through an assessment of the evidence – there isn’t any: consideration of accounts of the supernatural reveals they’re fictional or prescientific, while personal experience of the apparently supernatural is better explained by rational means. I don’t therefore assume the supernatural doesn’t exist, I deduce it does not.

Actually, I did this when I was 8 or 9.

Back by unpopular demand – it’s the New Year Pop Quiz!

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All set? Here we go!

1. Which one of these fantasy figures actually exists?

2. For which one of these ideas is there refutable/verifiable, corroborative scientific evidence?

3. Which one of these events is demonstrably historical?

4. Which one of these phenomena is verified and corroborated by psychology?

5. Applying logic and reasoning, which of the following scenarios is most likely to be true:

6. Which of these statements is verifiably true?

Answers:

Question 1. The answer is none of them, though C, Donald Trump, comes closest. 10 points if you put C, none if you plumped for any of the others: despite the volumes written about them there isn’t an iota of  evidence that they exist.

Question 2. Award yourself 10 points for B, though if you’re a True Believer this is the only one you think isn’t true. There is an abundance of refutable/verifiable, corroborative scientific evidence that it is. You can only wish there were for the other three.

Question 3. A is correct – 10 points. There is a considerable amount of evidence that the moon landing occurred on 20th July 1969. There is absolutely none at all that the other three are historical. For the sake of argument, let’s say they’re mythical. Nul points if you think otherwise.

Question 4. The answer is all of them. Oh no, wait… that’s my cognitive dissonance speaking. D is the only one of those listed recognised by psychologists. My bad and 10 points to you.

Question 5. The answer is of course E. Award yourself another 10 points if you thought outside the box on this one. (You can also have 10 points if you said they’re all equally likely, as in ‘not at all’.)

Question 6. 10 points for D. 

Scores: 

If you scored 50 or more, congratulations! If you scored nothing at all, you are confirmation that question 6’s answer – D. Human beings are capable of believing just about anything – is true. Well done.

A happy new year to you all.

 

 

When A Child Is Born… Supernaturally

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To what extent are the conflicting nativity stories in Matthew and Luke historical? That depends on whether or not you believe in the supernatural.

There is no evidence of a supernatural realm nor the beings who are said to inhabit it: God, heavenly Jesus, the Holy Spirit, angels and those they are constantly at war with: Satan and his demonic hordes. It is not as Jonathan Cahn describes it in The Serpent’s Prophecy:

Behind the perceivable realm lies another, beyond our ability to measure or quantify. Behind the history of this world lies another, unrecorded, unrecited, unknown. And behind that which moves and transforms the world lie unseen forces, causes, agents, undying and primeval (p3).

Cahn cannot possibly know any of this, any more than fake-Paul could when he wrote Ephesians 2,000 years ago (6:12). A reality that exists above and beyond nature – the meaning of supernatural – that is ‘unseen’, undetectable and ‘unknown’ is one that doesn’t exist, except in the imagination of a few fantasists.

Yet the supernatural is the basis of Christianity. Without it, its agents, as Cahn calls them, could not have interacted with the only reality there is. The Holy Spirit could not have impregnated Mary; angels could not have materialised to announce Jesus’s birth to a group of credulous shepherds; a divine being could not have communicated through dreams with Joseph and the Magi; a magic star could not have been manoeuvred into place over Jesus’ house. Most significantly, a non-existent God could not have sent his ‘son’ into this world.

It is futile to argue whether Matthew or Luke’s nativity narrative is the more historically accurate. Nor is there any point in trying to harmonise the two accounts. Neither is historical: the involvement of the supernatural rules out their being factual.

The inclusion of the supernatural in everything that follows is also fatal to claims made for the gospels’ historicity. The clues are there in the text: God’s pronouncements from the sky; the inexplicable miracles and healings; the presence of angels, demons and Satan; the dead rising; visions, prayers and prophecies. These tell us that what we’re dealing with is fantasy material. The creators of the gospels and other books of the New Testament had no more evidence than Cahn does that secretive super-beings existed, even if they did take them for granted. God and his interventions no more exist than Santa Claus and his magical Christmas deliveries.

Paul tells us that God raised Jesus from the dead (Romans 8:11). But there is no God, so he didn’t. There was no supernatural resurrection and without a resurrection there were no encounters, like those in the gospels, with a reanimated body.

Remove the supernatural from the Jesus story and there’s nothing left. Some wise advice lifted from Jewish scripture perhaps, plus a few cult rules, but that’s all. Paul’s experience of the risen Christ, like that of Cephas before him (described nowhere in the New Testament but allegorised in the gospels) and John of Patmos after him, were as Paul himself says, a ‘revealing’ in their own heads.

I hope none of this spoils Christmas for you. The Nativity isn’t a bad story, indeed it’s quite beautiful in places. But it is not historical. Like much in gospel Jesus’ life, and the resurrection itself, it is a fantasy generated by irrational and superstitious minds.

A very happy Christmas to both my readers.

Experiencing Jesus

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Back in my students days, sometime in the Middle Ages, I was involved in the conversion of a couple of friends. I’d only just met them, after starting college a week or so earlier. I was training to be a teacher and the college thought it would be a good idea if their new recruits spent a couple of weeks travelling to a school miles away to observe how education was delivered there (pretty chaotically it turned out.)

Jan, Karen and I travelled to the school in Rob’s Triumph Herald car. Rob was a new friend too. He and I met the first day of college and hit it off straight away, both being evangelicals (his guitar was covered in Arthur Blessit ‘One Way’ stickers) and bonding over our mutual love of Larry Norman.

Rob had one such sticker on the dashboard of his car and one day, on our way back from the school, Jan and Karen asked about it and what it was like to be a Christian. We had somewhere taken an unintended detour and the journey back to the college was taking longer than usual so we had plenty of time to share our faith with them. It was a dream come true – what committed Christian didn’t look for opportunities to witness to non-believers, which we did with great enthusiasm.

Before going off to college I’d had a strange vision: a vivid scenario playing out in my head. In it, some people I hadn’t yet met came to my dorm room and asked me to lead them to Christ. While I hadn’t seen my room at this point it turned out to look exactly as I’d seen it in the vision. Lo and behold, after our chat in the car, Rob appeared at my door that evening and said Jan and Karen had arrived at his room saying they wanted to become Christians. We took them to the little prayer room in the back of the college chapel and there the Holy Spirit took over. We prayed with ‘the girls’ and introduced them to Jesus. The entire room was filled then with another powerful presence like a wind or tongues of fire as we sensed Jesus there with us.

It was a powerful experience and for the girls an overwhelming one. They left praising the Lord on an all-time spiritual high. Soon after, Jan had to go into hospital (I forget why) and used the time to read the Bible we gave her in its entirety. She was on fire for the Lord there in that hospital ward. Later she surrendered her yoga materials to us once we’d shown her how the practice was Satanic and, doing the Lord’s bidding, we destroyed it for her. Jan and Karen joined the Christian Union, coming to the twice weekly meetings and began to attend the local evangelical church every Sunday.

To this day, Jan remains a Christian. I haven’t seen her for many years but we share Christmas cards and very occasionally comment on Facebook posts. Karen abandoned her faith a few years after her conversion.

How to explain this amazing experience? Conditioning meets emotion. That it was life-changing for both Jan and Karen (for a while) and also for Rob and me, was the result of our own intense feelings. Neither Jesus nor his Spirit was present in that little prayer room. We thought he was and that was enough. We didn’t need to see him, it was enough to sense his powerful presence (in reality our own heightened emotions.)

Wasn’t this how it was for the earliest Christians? Those Paul told about Jesus never actually ‘saw’ him; they felt him among them. This is how the gospels say it works, not the sighting of a physical body but the sensing of a presence. Matthew makes his version of Jesus predict that this is exactly what will happen (in reality Matthew is reflecting what early cultists had been experiencing for decades when he came to write his gospel):

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them (Matt 18:20).

In other words, a small group intent in their worship would experience the presence of their heavenly saviour. They would manifest a sense of his being there through their collective emotions, just as Jan, Karen, Rob and I did in that prayer room. As did those, like Cephas, who experienced him way back at the start of the Jesus movement, and as Paul did in his imagined encounters with the risen Christ.

No reanimated corpse required.

A World When Revelation Was Possible

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Greek and Roman cultures of the ancient world were obsessed with seers, oracles, prophets, muses and the fates. Politicians, priests and ordinary people were desperate to know how to keep on the right side of capricious gods and what the future held. Word from the supernatural realm, channelled through seers and prophets, was sought after and valued. Visions, dreams, portents and auspices that revealed secrets and mysteries were highly prized. It was a world saturated in superstition. Jewish culture, operating within this milieu, was no different.

Jews too revered prophets, dreams, visions and divination. This is apparent in both the Jewish scripture, the Old Testament, and also in the New, the writing of the early Christian cult birthed from Judaism in a Greco-Roman world. There are in the New Testament:

6 instances of god-induced dreams;

11 visions of heaven and heavenly beings;

578 new prophecies;

300 or so supposed fulfilments of earlier ‘prophecies’;

‘An abundance of revelations’ (Paul’s phrase) as well as those of Revelation itself (one long revelation or a series of shorter ones?);

113 visits from supernatural agents (Satan, demons, angels);

Assumptions that dead people can reappear (Jesus mistaken for Elijah and Jeremiah; Elijah and Moses manifesting themselves);

Multiple ‘resurrections’ both before and after Jesus’s.

People believed this kind of stuff! The supernatural, prophecy, ‘revelation’ and resurrection were regarded as entirely plausible, a given in the culture in which early Christians lived. The pagans around them may not have subscribed to the new cult’s reworking of these superstitions, nor accepted that Jesus was the Messiah, but they would not have found anything amiss with the idea and presence of the supernatural, with its attendant revelations, visions and prophecies. These were the currency of the day.

That such manifestations were mistaken or misinterpreted by the new cult would have been the point of disagreement for most people (though its important not to over-estimate how many actually knew of the Jesus cult in its early days), not that it manifested and incorporated them in the first place.

In the first century world, revelations, prophecies, visions and the like were considered to be gifts from the gods. Paul insisted that what he ‘received’ was from the supernatural realm, specifically from the heavenly Christ (Galatians 1:12). Accepting this was a prerequisite for believing what he went on to say about salvation, resurrection and Christ’s descent from the clouds. The supernatural world and its ability to communicate with ordinary mortals had to be accepted as real before anything Paul said could even be considered. Fortunately for him, the culture in which he operated embraced the idea that this was a reality.

If, however, there is no supernatural – and let’s be honest, we know there isn’t – there can’t ever have been revelation, prophecy or God-given visions. With no heavenly realm to transmit revelation, prophecy and visions into the brains of seers, prophets and visionaries, from where did – and do – their revelations, prophecies and visions originate? From brains conditioned in an environment infused with irrational, magical beliefs, whether that of the first-century or one of the many Christian, Bible-soaked bubbles that exist today. ‘Revelation’, ‘prophecy’ and visions emanate entirely from the human brain. It is this which originally created revelations and now sustains ideas like heavenly saviours and supernatural resurrections. These things have no independent existence outside of the human imagination.

 

Encounters with God

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I had a couple of encounters with God on a recent trip to the Baltic states of northern Europe. Both were in churches, the first in Helsinki, Finland. The Lutheran Temppeliaukio Kirk (above) is a remarkable structure hewn from solid rock into a stunning enormous cavern. The choir was practising when our tour guide took us there. The singing was sublime, amplified and enhanced by the acoustics of the cave. Listening to the ‘heavenly’ voices was a truly spiritual experience. After the performance, the choir leader dedicated their performance to the glory of God.

The second church was the protestant St Nikolai’s in Kiel, Germany where, local legend has it, a miracle occurred during the second world war. When the town was in danger of being bombed, church officials had all of the church’s historic pews removed and safely stored. The massive suspended crucifix, however, was too big to take down and had to be left in place. Some parishioners quickly became unhappy standing for services and started bringing their own seats, including quite a few sofas. When the town and the church were eventually bombed, the huge crucifix fell from its height and crashed down. While the church itself was all but destroyed, the crucifix survived with only minimal damage, thanks to the sofas on which it landed. A miracle!

The cross suspended again in the restored St Nikolai church

Singing that reflects the glory of God and a miracle in which Christianity’s holy symbol is preserved. Presumably today’s attendees at both churches (St Nikolai’s interior was rebuilt) believe these events to be the work of God. Our tour guide that day expressed his scepticism, as did I, inwardly at least. The singing in the cave church was a tribute not to God but to the human ability to create beauty. It spoke too of the skill of the church’s architects and engineers who provided the building with its stunning acoustics. Human ingenuity, creativity and, I would guess, hours of practice produced the sublime sound.

The crucifix ‘miracle’ was a remarkable convergence of coincidence. A good story to be sure, but not an event that requires any God.

I drew the same conclusion from the two experiences: human beings are prone to give credit to their deities for things they achieve themselves – beautiful singing and stunning architecture included – and to attribute chance events and coincidences to their gods. We should take credit for our achievements (as well as responsibility for our bad behaviour.) The gods have no part to play. There are no gods.

Speaking in Tongues

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I used to be so uncomfortable in prayer meetings that I attended back when I was a true believer when someone would start praying in tongues. It usually went something like alaluboolubamuba repeated over and over again, like a babbling brook. Babbling is what it was. In the churches I experienced it in, there was rarely any interpretation of the tongues as Paul instructed there should be. Even when someone was led by the Spirit to pipe up, what the speaker in tongues had said in gobbledegook was standard praise stuff: ‘Thank you Jesus for your wonderful mercies. Praise you for all you have done for us. Alleluia! Praise you’ etc, etc. And who were we, the others present, to say it wasn’t? Some would add their own Amens to the interpretation, adding credence to the meaningless phenomenon. The Spirit at work indeed.

Speaking in tongues, glossolalia, seems to have afflicted the cult in Corinth in particular. Paul addresses it in his first letter to the church there, and nowhere else. He doesn’t seem to know what to make of it. He feels unable to say that it’s merely a few people getting carried away (because that’s pretty much what all early Christian worship was) and can’t say it’s not the Spirit moving them to babble when that’s what the church was claiming. So he fudges it, claims he speaks in tongues more than anyone else (why do I hear Donald Trump in this boast?) and makes a few stipulations:

Only speak in tongues if there’s an interpreter present. (What happens if you get the urge the Spirit moves you when there’s no interpreter around?)

Glossolalia is ‘uttering mysteries’ in the Spirit that no-one can understand (so how can they be translated/interpreted by someone else?)

You shouldn’t speak in tongues all at the same time. It’s unseemly.

Use tongues only in private (according to the great know-it-all apostle, tongues are of the spirit and are merely a way of praising God. Tongues then are God praising God: what a narcissist he is! Other than this, Paul concludes they’re not much good.)

Interestingly, at no time does Paul suggest or acknowledge that some of the tongues manifesting themselves are other languages – real languages as opposed to unintelligible babbling. In fact he makes much of the fact that no-one understands what is said. It’s left to Luke to elevate linguistic nonsense to miracle status. In Acts 2:4-12, he has the disciples speak in real foreign languages after the Holy Spirit takes hold of them. Those around are ‘amazed’ (aren’t they always?) that they can suddenly hear the gospel message in their own tongue. Luke labours the point that, conveniently, there were men from ‘every nation under heaven’ present to verify the use of multiple languages by otherwise uneducated fishermen. Far more likely is that Luke, aware of the outbreak of babbling in at least one early church, shaped what he’d heard into what he thought was a more credible account. In other words he made up the story of the disciples spontaneously becoming fluently multi-lingual.

Later still, the unknown writer who invented the longer ending of Mark decided to mention the tongues phenomenon in the prophecies he invented for Jesus. In Mark 16:17 he has Jesus promise that those who believe in him would miraculously speak in ‘other languages’. How many times has this happened in the ensuing two millennia? I’d put money on there only ever having been sporadic outbreaks of meaningless babbling, such as that which I experienced. 

The church today continues to be confused about tongues. Some claim that ‘the gifts of the Spirit’, of which tongues are a part, no longer manifest themselves among believers. It’s a neat way to consign bizarre behaviour to the dumpster of history, but alas, it’s unscriptural. Nowhere does Paul suggest tongues and the other gifts of the Spirit would have a sell-by date before the Lord’s coming. Admittedly, he thought the Lord would be coming real soon. Only then, not before, would tongues and the other gifts of the Spirit ‘pass away’.

Other churches today are open to the possibility of tongues. Some even claim that the Spirit does indeed enable believers to launch fluently into languages, complete with correct syntax and vocabulary, that they don’t actually know. We can be sure there would be evidence of this online if it really occurred. There isn’t. 

Others are happy to go along with the unintelligible babbling, preferably with an interpreter who makes stuff up is also led by the Spirit to make sense of the mumbo jumbo.

Some abandon all restraint, with entire congregations babbling at the same time. Paul’s rules be damned!

And they wonder why we don’t take them seriously. As Paul himself warned:

If the whole church comes together and everyone speaks in tongues, and inquirers or unbelievers come in, will they not say that you are out of your mind? (1 Corinthians 14:23)

They surely will.

Have any of you encountered speaking in tongues? What did your church make of it?