What this is about
Arguments about speaking in tongues normally go nowhere. One person says the gift is real and continues. Another says it stopped with the apostles. Both quote verses. Nothing either of them believes can be checked by anybody standing outside, so the argument ends where it started.
This page is about a period of about seven years when that was not true — when the claim being made was the sort of thing a passer-by could settle in fifteen seconds, and somebody did.
The short answer
- The first Pentecostals believed tongues meant real foreign languages. Not a heavenly language. Actual Chinese, Bengali, Zulu, the languages of West Africa — given by God so that a missionary would not have to spend years learning one. They said so in newspapers in 1901 and in their own church paper in 1906.
- They acted on it. Within three months of printing a list of the languages received, groups left Los Angeles for Liberia, Angola, India and China.
- It did not work, and they said so themselves. In 1908 one of the men who had sailed wrote home from Hong Kong: he had not met a single person who could preach to anybody in a language God had given them. He was preaching through an interpreter, like every other missionary.
- Several of them died. Two of the parties that sailed for Liberia buried members within weeks of landing, of fever, in a place they had gone to without the ordinary preparations because they had been told the ordinary preparations were no longer needed.
- Ten years later the belief was withdrawn in print. The movement’s own weekly paper, in June 1916: “We see that the belief that the gift was for the preaching of the Gospel to foreigner, is unfounded.” Nineteen words. Six weeks earlier the same paper had printed the replacement — that tongues is “an emotional or heavenly language, in which the speaker speaks only to God.”
- That replacement is what almost everybody means by tongues today. And the thing to notice is what changed. The old belief could be tested by anybody who spoke the language. The new one cannot be tested by anybody at all.
Why the first claim could be checked
Read Acts 2 carefully and something odd stands out. The disciples never once say what language they are speaking. The crowd does.
“And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?”
Acts 2:8, Authorised Version
Luke then lists fifteen different peoples in the crowd — Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Egyptians, Cretans, Arabians and the rest — and records their verdict: “we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.” He even leaves in the people who thought the whole thing was drunkenness.
That is a well-built piece of evidence. The people confirming the miracle are the people least likely to be fooled and least motivated to be kind. If the disciples had been talking nonsense, fifteen nationalities were standing there to say so.
Now compare the other main passage, which is about what happens in a church meeting:
“For he that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men, but unto God: for no man understandeth him.”
1 Corinthians 14:2, Authorised Version
Nobody understands him. That is a completely different situation, and the remedy Paul gives is an interpreter from the same congregation — which is a much weaker check than a Parthian who has just walked in off the street.
The first exercise: when was this written?
Six statements about tongues. Three are real and dated. Three were written by this page. Place each one. Most people get about half.
0 of 6 answered.
What they actually printed
Six days after the first tongues-speaking at a small Bible school in Topeka, Kansas, the local paper carried the claim:
“The Lord will give us the power of speech to talk to the people of the various nations without having to study them in schools.”
Topeka State Journal, 7 January 1901
Five years later, when the revival at Azusa Street in Los Angeles began printing its own paper, the first issue said the same thing and tied it to the Great Commission:
“The gift of languages is given with the commission, ‘Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.’”
The Apostolic Faith (Los Angeles), September 1906
The same issue listed what had been received: Chinese, Japanese, Zulu, Bengali, the dialects of India, the languages of Africa, and a dozen more. This is not something a critic said about them. It is what they printed about themselves, at the height of their confidence.
What happened when they got there
A pastor named Alfred Garr left Los Angeles for India with his wife Lillian at the end of 1906, believing he had been given Bengali. He had been saying the word “Bengalee” for weeks, and when he arrived he found himself in the Bengal province — which must have felt like confirmation. Then, in his own words:
“After reaching Calcutta I noticed another change but could not understand the words.”
Confidence (a Pentecostal paper), May 1908
Writing later from Hong Kong, he gave the general result rather than just his own:
“So far I have not seen any one who is able to preach to the natives in their own tongues with the languages given with the Holy Ghost. Here in Hong Kong, we preached the word to the Chinese through an interpreter.”
Confidence, May 1908
Not one person, in two countries, two years after the list of languages was printed. And an interpreter is exactly what the 1901 claim had said would no longer be necessary.
He also wrote one other sentence, and it is the most important sentence in this whole story:
“Whether or not I was speaking an Indian language in Los Angelos does not shake my faith or even cause me anxiety. I know that God was talking through me.”
Confidence, May 1908
Read it twice. The part of the belief that could be tested has just been taken out of it, and the belief has been kept. In 1901 the claim was you will be able to talk to people in their own language. By 1908 it is whether it was a language does not matter. Those are not the same claim, and only one of them can be checked.
The second exercise: who said it?
Four quotations from the period. For each, say who wrote it. Most people put at least two of them on the wrong side, and the mistake always goes the same way.
0 of 4 answered.
The bit that actually matters
It is easy to read this as a story about people being wrong, and to leave it there. That is not the interesting part. Movements are wrong about things all the time and correct themselves, and correcting yourself in your own newspaper is a decent thing to do.
The interesting part is the direction of the correction.
What was believed in 1906
- The speech is a real human language.
- A native speaker can confirm it or refute it.
- You would know within a minute of landing whether it had worked.
- It could be wrong, and you would find out.
What is believed now
- The speech is between the speaker and God.
- Nobody outside can confirm it or refute it.
- There is no landing, and no minute, and nothing to find out.
- No possible result counts against it.
That does not prove the modern belief is false. A belief can be true and still be impossible to check. But it does mean something has been given up, and it is worth being clear about what: the only feature of the original claim that would have let anybody tell.
And it is worth noticing that the traffic has only ever gone one way. In a hundred and twenty years, no Pentecostal body has moved a doctrine from an untestable form back to a testable one. Corrections that always run in the same direction are doing something other than following the evidence, even when each individual step is reasonable.
The two best replies, and what they are worth
Two answers to all this are good, and the full dossier concedes both.
“Acts 2 and 1 Corinthians 14 were never describing the same thing anyway.” Probably right. The Bible nowhere promises a missionary a language on request, and a reader who thinks these are two different gifts is on solid ground. Notice what that concedes and what it does not. It means the failure in 1907 tells you nothing about whether tongues in a church meeting are real. It does not touch the charge, which is not about the Bible at all — it is about a movement that made a specific claim, staked lives on it, got a clear answer, and then moved to a claim that cannot get an answer.
“Doctrines get refined by experience. That is how theology has always worked.” True, and this is the best single reply there is. Two things qualify it. Honest refinement names the error — this one named it once, in 1916, and then forgot it so completely that people today can know the story of Azusa Street in detail and never hear that its founding missionary doctrine was withdrawn. And refinement normally moves in both directions over a century. This one never has.
Three other replies are made and none of them survive the documents: that hardly anybody really believed it (the newspapers and the church paper say otherwise); that it was one man’s private mistake (his mission’s own paper printed it and his mission’s own people sailed on it); and that the movement’s later growth settles the matter (growth is not a test of whether eighteen people could speak Bengali in 1907, and the same argument would validate any movement that grew quickly).
Where this page lands
Check it yourself
Five things. All five are free.
- 1. Acts 2:1–21, and 1 Corinthians 12 to 14 straight through. Forty minutes. Read Acts 2 twice — once for the story and once marking who says what. Then read the three Corinthian chapters whole rather than in the usual fragments; chapter 14 reads very differently after 12 and 13.
- 2. The Apostolic Faith (Los Angeles), September 1906. Twenty minutes. Digitised free at the Consortium of Pentecostal Archives. This is the movement in its own words, and it is the best corrective to any account of the period, including this one.
- 3. Confidence, May 1908, Special Supplement. Twenty minutes, free at the same archive. The Garr account in full. If you think the quotations above have been arranged unfairly, this is where to check.
- 4. The Weekly Evangel, 22 April and 3 June 1916. Fifteen minutes, digitised by the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center. The replacement doctrine and the retraction, six weeks apart. Notice that neither of them mentions the missionaries.
- 5. Topeka State Journal, 7 January 1901. Ten minutes, free at Chronicling America, the Library of Congress newspaper archive. Read the whole article rather than the quoted line. The reporter thought he was writing a story about missionary logistics, which is exactly what it was.
The full version
Nine interactive sections: six statements to date, eight elements of the Pentecost account to sort into what the speakers claimed and what outsiders confirmed, a passenger manifest of six parties whose outcomes you predict before you see them, eight quotations to attribute, a ten-step timeline where you guess the year before it opens, ten biblical texts to sort into the three kinds of tongues, a four-question test of each kind applied by you rather than asserted by the page, six objections you weigh before they are answered, and twelve pieces of evidence you mark as things that would or would not change your mind. Plus every source dated and cited, the weakest link in the evidence identified as the weakest, a statement of what would refute the page, and the prompt that produced the whole thing.
Read the full dossier → Simple English →