Jayrok

Paul, in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14, talks about the church using their spiritual gifts. Some Prophesy, some speak in tongues, etc.

Is the idea of speaking in tongues used in other cultures prior to Christianity?

Anyone know where/when it originated?

To make his point about tongues, Paul points to Isaiah 28:11 "with foreign lips and strange tongues, God will speak to his people".

Of course Paul always used Hebrew scripture as references. Here would have been an ideal place to mention the Day of Pentecost if it had happened or he knew about it. They spoke in tongues for, presumably, the first time.

Yet Paul sites Isaiah. Where did speaking in tongues originate?

Jayrok

Interesting that the author of Acts does not site Isaiah 28 in Chapter 2. When Peter stands to speak to the crowd who thought the men (speaking in tongues) were drunk, he sites Joel (not Billy) 2. He doesn't mention Isaiah 28.

If Luke wrote Acts (as many believe) and Luke was really a companion or knew Paul and his letters, it makes sense that he could have been thinking of Paul's spiritual gift of speaking in tongues for his Pentecost theme. Maybe to sort of give an origin to the idea of speaking in tongues (?).

Chili

The evolution of the adams-apple is what made speaking in tonges possible because it allows the stream of words to flow over the dam without rational induction there.

Zamjatin has a nice line on this in WE (or via: amazon.co.uk): "The speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated; the speed per second of her tongue should be slightly less than the speed per second of her thoughts--at any rate, not the reverse," page 9). Compare this with page 107: "Like a stream of words ran over the dam."

Chili

Sorry Toto, no reviews do this book justice, really, because it is a poem and not a novel. My quotes are from a Dutton paperback SBN 0-525-47039-5.

So anyway, when the stream of words (syllables because words are already conventional) flow over the dam it would be called glossolalia.

The character here was 0-90 who we would call Mary.

Zamjatin calls poetry a commodity on page 65: "And in the same manner we domesticated the wild element of poetry. Now poetry is no longer the unpardenable whistling of nightingales, but a State Servive, Poetry is a commodity." This means that he is gnostic, like Gogol and many other Russian greats at that time.