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Speaking in Tongues: Interpreting Acts 2 (Pentecost) and 1 Corinthians 14 Together

I reprint this post, which was originally published last year (May 9, 2007), as we now approach the great Feast of Pentecost on May 11th. As Pentecost approaches, some anti-charismatics will, predictably, feel compelled to churn out again tired distortions and half-truths against the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. You can expect that type of predictable distortion, as you can expect the predictable attacks on the Nativity accounts in December and on the Resurrection as Easter approaches. Hence, I reprint last year's post on Pentecost as a sort of "preemptive" strike for readers who deserve balanced and judicious writing. Yes, the compulsion of those who like to stir up religious hysteria, whether consciously or not, is lamentably predictable but nevertheless offers a great opportunity and inducement to offer a better alternative, a more excellent way. The post from May 9, 2007, follows, with some minor editing (it's hard not to edit anything!):

One of the prime, sensible rules of biblical interpretation is to interpret the Bible canonically, that is, to interpret Scripture with other Scripture. Let's try to do that with the needlessly controversial topic of the gift of tongues described in Acts 2 at the time of Pentecost and described by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 14. Some blithely dismiss the possibility of the modern, widespread manifestation of the gift of tongues because they insist that the gift of tongues, based on the Pentecost account of Acts 2, must involve in all cases, without exception, a real, known human language, such as German or Spanish or French, etc. In contrast, most charismatic tongue speaking is in unintelligible utterances that do not appear to match any known human language.

Yet, this common anti-charismatic argument is at odds with the text of Acts 2 itself and is also at odds with Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 14:3: "For one who speaks in a tongue speaks not to men but to God: for no one understands him, but he utters mysteries in the Spirit" (ESV: all citations herein are from the English Standard Version, which has a good reputation for the literal nature of its translation). Paul is undeniably describing speaking in a language that the listeners do not understand. As a result, Paul requires interpretation when a tongue speaker formally addresses the Christian assembly (see 1 Cor. 14:27-28). If the tongue speaking were intelligible as a known human language, no interpretation would be needed. (Of course, if you are really polemically adamant, you could arbitrarily insist that the Holy Spirit was empowering people in Corinth to speak in, say, Latin to the Greek-speaking Corinthians and that is why interpretation was needed. But that view is overreaching because it flies in the face of the plain sense of 1 Cor. 14:3 quoted above which says that the tongue speaker is speaking "mysteries in the Spirit" to God, not to men).

First, let's take a fresh look at Acts 2: 1-13, where the speaking in tongues at Pentecost is described. The first thing to notice is that the term "tongues" is used to mean two differnt things: the physical organ in our mouth used for speaking and the actual language or utterance spoken. I mention this apparently minor point because it is a favorite contention of "anti-charismatics" that in the New Testament the reference to "tongues" (glossai in Greek) is exclusively to languages. That is not the case. New Testament Greek, like all other languages, is nuanced, depending on context. In Acts 2:3, we have the famous image of "tongues as of fire" resting on the Christians at Pentecost. Does the writer mean that "languages as of fire" were resting on each of them? Not at all. The writer uses the word "tongues" to describe the shape of the flame; he is not using "glossai" in verse 3 to refer to languages. So much for one of the favorite, easy arguments of the "anti-charismatics." What we see is that we must look to context and not adopt the superficial habit of assigning one rigid meaning to one particular word whenever it appears in the text--if our primary interest is in the truth and not in mere polemics to justify a predetermined conclusion.

As we read on, then in the very next verse, verse 4 of Acts 2, we do have a different context and a different meaning for the Greek word glossa: "And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance." Here, it makes sense to interpret "glossa" as languages because the context is speech, not the description of the shape of a flame resting on someone's head. Now, we come to the crux of the issue. The "anti-charismatics" maintain that the apostles were speaking real, known human languages of the time, such as Greek or Latin. Yet, the text does not explicitly say that.

What the text explicitly says is that the Jews present in Jerusalem from various nations of the diaspora heard them each in his own home language. For example, we read in verse 6: "each one heard them speaking in the native language of each" (see also verses 7-11, for the same description of what the "foreign" Jews heard; emphasis added). The late erudite scholar and historian Jaroslav Pelikan, who, to my knowledge, was not a charismatic, even noted that the passage talks about "hearing" in one's own language, thus implying that what was heard need not have matched the sounds actually uttered by the Christians at Pentecost. I quote from the late Prof. Pelikan, who was, by the way, a Lutheran convert to Eastern Orthodoxy:

But at [Acts] 2:8 the word is "we hear, each of us" (akouomen hekastos), which suggests the appearance here not of a polyglot congregation but of the phenomenon of glossalalia familiar from the experience of the Christian community in Corinth (1 Cor. 14). Did the apostles actually speak--or did those present only hear--all of these other languages?

Jaroslav Pelikan, Acts, p. 53, in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2005)(I have transliterated the Greek words appearing in Greek characters in the original; bold emphasis added).

It is certainly possible that the Christians spoke with their lips sounds unintelligible to any human being but somehow made directly intelligible by the power of the Holy Spirit. In other words, under this proposed (but certainly not definitive) scenario, the Holy Spirit in Pentecost was himself the interpreter that Paul requires in Christian gatherings in 1 Corinthians 14. In this scenario, the uniqueness of the Pentecost event was not necessarily that the utterances were simply real, known human languages unknown to the speakers; but rather that the Holy Spirit himself translated the sounds made and spoken by the Christians "filled with the Holy Spirit" into known, human languages. Later, in the Corinthian context, human interpreters, inspired by the Holy Spirit, were needed as intermediaries for this same task. The fact that the disciples were thought to be drunk at Pentecost (Acts 2:13) further supports the possibility that they might have actually made unintelligible utterances as in 1 Corinthians that were translated by the Holy Spirit into the human languages of the attending Jewish pilgrims (see The Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Micheal D. Coogan [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993] under "Glossolalia" at p. 255).

Another detail in the text of Acts 2 lends support to the view that the Holy Spirit at Pentecost could have been acting as the interpreter of unintelligible utterances spoken by the Apostles. Notice in these verses how the diaspora Jews speak about hearing "them" each in his own language: "[E]ach one was hearing them speak in his own language. And they were amazed and astonished, saying, 'Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? . . . . we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God" (portions of vv. 6, 7, 11 of Acts 2; emphases added). Now, did the diaspora Jew from Rome hear Peter in Latin? While the diaspora Jew from another country heard John in Greek? Or did the Latin-speaker hear all of the apostles speaking in Latin? Did the Greek-speaker hear all of the apostles speaking in Greek? The wording of the text seems to possibly imply that each one heard all of them in his own native language, not just one or several of the Christians, here and there, in the group of Christians filled with the Holy Spirit. If that is a sensible reading of the text, then it implies that the Holy Spirit interpreted the utterances of all into different known human languages for the benefit of the diaspora Jews present, so that the Latin-speaking Jew heard them all in Latin, the Greek-speaker heard them all in Greek, etc. That scenario is consistent with viewing the gift of tongues as utterance in an unknown language needing interpretation, as was the case in 1 Corinthians. This scenario of the Pentecost event dovetails with the picture presented by Paul in 1 Corinthians.

Under my proposed (but note: not conclusive) interpretation, the two biblical texts are thus consistent in viewing the gift of tongues as utterances needing interpretation, either directly by the Holy Spirit in the case of Pentecost without human interpreters or indirectly by the Holy Spirit using human interpreters as in 1 Corinthians 14.

What is the bottom line? We have here a sensible, canonical interpretation of Acts 2 which does not require that the actual utterances of the Apostles at Pentecost be known human languages of that time and era. Rather, this sensible interpretation reconciles Acts 2 and 1 Corinthians 14 by proposing that the utterances were not known human languages and hence needed interpretation by the power of the Holy Spirit so that each one in the diaspora crowd at Pentecost could hear all of them in his own native language. Under this reading, in Pentecost, the Holy Spirit directly interpreted what all said for the full benefit of each listener far from home. In 1 Corinthians, Paul insists that there be a human interpreter present who can interpret under the power of the Holy Spirit. Thus, interpretation by the Holy Spirit, whether direct or indirect, was needed in both cases.

My proposed interpretation certainly does not even pretend to close the matter. The truth is that, in spite of our very human curiosity, we can never really know definitively the exact, minute, microscopically dissected sequence of events in the great event of Acts 2. But what this proposed exegesis does accomplish is seriously question the blithe assumption of "anti-charismatics" that the gift of tongues means that you always hear a known human language, unfiltered, without interpretation. The view I propose makes sense of Scripture by appealing to other Scripture.

At the end of the day, what really happened at Pentecost? In my own mind, the bottom line is that in Acts 2 the Holy Spirit at some point transformed the ecstatic utterances of the disciples (the "Galileans") into known human languages. At what exact point that happened, whether as the words were actually being pronounced by the lips of the disciples or when the words were heard by the different Jewish pilgrims, makes little theological difference to the central point of Acts 2: the Holy Spirit was poured out in power on all present as prophesied in the Old Testament book of Joel (see Acts 2:16-21); and the New Israel, the Church, was manifested to the entire world! At the same time, we should not see it as contradictory at all to find that in 1 Corinthians we have a speaking in tongues that is unintelligible speech in need of interpretation by those fellow Christians granted the power of interpretation by the Holy Spirit. Whether, with or without human interpreters, the Holy Spirit is at work in a new and marvelous way in both Acts 2 and in 1 Corinthians, in a way that fulfills the longings and foreshadowing in the Old Testament. That fulfillment of the Old Testament is the central point of the great feast of Pentecost, not tiresome polemics that would mislead us into thinking that speaking in tongues must follow one rigid, preconceived pattern. That polemical agenda may reflect more our own preferences for some sort of straight-jacket consistency not found in the biblical texts rather than reflecting the sovereign independence of the Holy Spirit to do as He deems fit and appropriate in different settings. Let the Holy Spirit be the Holy Spirit, even if He does not follow our personal preferences for compulsively neat, human templates!

Addendum: Pentecost has long been seen by commentators as a reversal of the confusion of languages in Babel (Genesis 11:1-9), in which mankind lost one common language. At Pentecost, the barriers to communication are overcome because each one hears the proclamation in his own language (see Acts 2:6, 8, 11). A thoughtful and careful reader will realize that what happened at Pentecost is not an exact reversal of Babel. An exact reversal of Babel would have been the restoration of one, common, single human language. What happens in Pentecost is that the pilgrims from different countries hear the proclamation each in his own language. The Holy Spirit brings unity out of the diversity of languages without eliminating the diversity of languages. With apologies to partisans of the exclusive use of Latin in the liturgy of the West, this detail provides, in my opinion, a biblical argument for our having the Mass available in the vernacular languages, so that each group may hear in his own native language.