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NASB | 1 Corinthians 12:30 All do not have gifts of healings, do they? All do not speak with tongues, do they? All do not interpret, do they? |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | 1 Corinthians 12:30 Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? |
Subject: speaking in tounges |
Bible Note: Dear Brother Beja, Thank you for asking and sorry for my late reply. I did not realize my post was so muddy:-( It is my fault. To answer your 2 questions in short - “Paul was categorically dismissing speaking in tongues as an intrusion of pagan religion into Christianity. The main evidence that it is not truly a spiritual gift was that it does not edify other men.” - “…do not go so far as to read Paul as condemning this as a non Christian gift…” It is a big NO to both :-) Let me try to see if I can explain myself better (sometimes I fail to make myself understood even in my own tongue, so please bear with me). By the way, I am open to be corrected as well. Speaking in tongues itself is not an intrusion of pagan religion into Christianity as it has been evidenced with the origin in Acts during the Pentecost. My understanding of speaking in tongues (plural) is a miraculous sign that the Holy Spirit empowers true believers to speak languages that they have never learnt of. Why I emphasized the plural form of “tongues” as I see it in contrast to 1 Cor 14:2 where it uses a singular form “For he that speaketh in an unknown tongue…” that I view it as Paul’s denoting it the form of gibberish the Corinthians adopted (of course this is only my personal view and I could be very wrong on this, please correct me if so) for Paul always used the plural form for the gift of Tongues. For 1 Cor 14:2, as far as I understand it, Paul was criticizing the Corinthian’s abusive use/practice/counterfeit of speaking in tongues. As per the historical background provided by John MacArthur, the Corinthians were carnal minded (this we can see from Paul’s letter to them) and affected by the pagan religion - “…But as we come to the Corinthian situation, we find that they had counterfeited the real gift of tongues and substituted an ecstatic kind of speech that we very common in pagan religions…At the time of Corinthian church, the Greco-Roman world had a multitude of gods. In their worship of these gods, it was very common for a person to go into ecstasy, which literally means 'to go out of oneself'…this language of the gods was always gibberish…” (John MacArthur) So much has been discussed on the topic about speaking in tongues and I really lack the ability to contribute more to the discussion. I’d rather commend an article by Fred Zaspel where he has a systematic discussion on the Gift of Tongues at : http://www.biblicalstudies.com/bstudy/spiritualgifts/ch18.htm I hope I did not muddy further while I was answering and typing in “tongues”. Shalom Azure |