Lightfoot on the Problem Tongues of Corinth

John Lightfoot

A digitization of John Lightfoot’s Commentary on the tongues of Corinth.

John Lightfoot was a seventeenth-century English Churchman and Rabbinic scholar whose exegetical system was significantly advanced for that time period.

A small but brief window had opened in England during the Reformation for Hebrew studies, but the roadblocks to full public acceptance were great. England had long banished Jews from living in England1 during Lightfoot’s era. Later novels like Ivanhoe by Walter Scott, and Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens indicate negative perceptions concerning the Jewish race was strong. In light of these obstacles, Lightfoot began a very scholarly journey into the connection between Judaism and Christianity. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time doing a great job. He was a time anomaly. He should not have succeeded in this field of studies, but he did, and his work, though with some defects, has withstood the test of time.

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A History of Glossolalia: Did it exist before 1879?

To find out if the words ecstasy or glossolalia existed before the 1800s and how these terms have developed over time.

As described previously in A History of Glossolalia: Origins, it was approximately 1830 that the introduction of tongues as glossolalia first occurred in German religious circles, but it was not universal. Neither was the concept found in the realm of English works until Farrar introduced it in 1879. The previous article cited tertiary source materials with few references to primary and secondary ones.

A further examination of the primary, secondary, and additional tertiary sourcebooks is required to substantiate the addition of glossolalia as a tongues doctrine after 1879. Indeed, after careful review of such materials, this was found to be true. The Gift of Tongues Project likes to substantiate all claims. Therefore, the rest of the document is for providing the actual evidence. The article then goes one step further to document how this influence affects us today.

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