Our OP writer has apparently abandoned this thread. I don't blame him, since he maintains that 90% of the group he is advocating for is aberrant, and he himself hasn't spoken in tongues in decades. How can he defend the position when he himself is not there?
I just want to talk a little more about his "proof" from an extra-biblical source that
glossa in the NT can mean a non-linguistic babble. His main source is "Kittel," or the
Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT). To be more specific, it is the article on
glossa in TDNT, which claims that since it was supposedly used for the idolatrous Oracle at Delphi. I linked to a source which debunked that, but Deadworm never answered that (just has he has ignored many points that disagree with him).
Now, Deadworm scoffed at me in post #43, saying, "You seem to have no clue about how academic exegesis is done. Ancient terms (especially those relation to religious experience) derive their meaning from their use in contemporary cultural language games."
Actually, I've done semantics in six different languages (English, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Chinese, Japanese; "I speak as a fool," as Paul said), and he is dead wrong. Lexical units in any language do not "derive their meaning from their use in contemporary cultural language games." (He's referring to Wittgenstein's theory--bet he thought a ghetto Baptist would not know that.
). Ancient terms first of all derive their meaning from context, in this case the context of the NT. There is no place in the NT where
glossa can be demonstrated to mean babble as in modern Charismatic tongues. Therefore in the NT it carries one of its normal meanings: the human organ, or an understandable language.
Usage outside of the NT must always be subordinate to meaning within the NT. According to a leading hermeneutics graduate textbook, "The final area that needs to be explored to determine the potential meaning of a word is its nonbiblical use in the everyday speech, literature, and inscriptions at the time the biblical book was written" (Klein, Blomberg and Hubbard,
Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, p. 197). Did you catch that? Nonbiblical sources are the final step, not the first one.
Now, even if we were to grant that the Oracle at Delphi spoke with typical "tongues" as the modern Charismatics (Deadworm did not prove this, but ignored my link:
Delphi Prophetesses and Christian Tongues - charlesasullivan.com), that is only one source. When there are many extra-biblical sources, we do not determine NT meaning from that one source. That is just lousy semantics. 'Nuff said.