In the international trading centre of Panama City today, at least twenty different languages are regularly spoken. So too in ancient Corinth. There, none of those various foreign languages was to be spoken during worship in the Corinthian Church –unless translated. If so used, those foreign languages were always to be translated into the Corinthian dialect — so that all present could understand the message concerned.
According to the earliest extant comments — those of the 185 A.D. Irenaeus and the 190f A.D. Clement of Alexandria — the Corinthians tongues were clearly linguistic (and therefore not ecstatic). So too Origen, Eusebius, Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianze, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil, Hilary, Jerome, Chrysostom, Epiphanius, Augustine, Theodoret, Vincent, Leo, and Gregory the Great. Likewise Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and John Calvin. So too Matthew Henry, Lange, Plumptre, Meyer, Alford, Buswell, E.J. Young, Morton H. Smith, Robert Reymond, Richard Gaffin, Leonard Coppes, and Francis Nigel Lee. Indeed, even some (Neo-)Pentecostalists themselves — such as Harald Bredesen, Carl Brumback, Howard Carter, David J. DuPlessis, Donald Gee, Harold Horton and Oral Roberts — also concede this point.
