More to the point, for our purposes, is the evidenceâfrustratingly scattered and inconclusive, I admitâthat the early Christians engaged in ecstatic practices resembling those of the mystery cults in Greece and the “oriental” religions in Rome. Certainly the Romans suspected that they did. The first-century Roman writer Celsus compared Christians to practitioners of the “Bacchic mysteries” and to the “begging priests of Cybele and soothsayers, and to worshippers of Mithras and Sabazius.”
17
Beyond that, Romans imagined Christians performing all the lewd acts attributed to the cult of Bacchus, with even more diabolical variations such as human sacrifice, infanticide, and cannibalism thrown in. As Fronto, the tutor of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, understood the Christian sacrament of communion: “It is the blood of this [sacrificed] infantâI shudder to mention itâit is this blood that they lick with thirsty lips; these are the limbs they distribute eagerly; this is the victim by which they seal their covenant.”
18
The attractiveness of Christianity to women, and the consequent mingling of the sexes, was another source of prurient Roman speculation.
On a special day they gather in a feast with all their children, sisters, mothersâall sexes and all ages. There, flushed with the banquet after such feasting and drinking, they begin to burn with incestuous passions ⦠with unspeakable lust they copulate in random unions, all equally being guilty of incest, some by deed, but everyone by complicity.
19
Most of what Christians of the first and second centuries actually did togetherâwhether they even possessed a standardized form of worship, for exampleâis unknown to us today, but the general scholarly view is that “church services were noisy, charismatic affairs, quite different from a tasteful evensong today at the parish church.”
20
They met in people's homes, where their central ritual was a shared meal that was no doubt washed down with Jesus' favorite beverage, wine.
21
There is reason to think they sang too, and that the songs were sometimes accompanied by instrumental music.
22
Justin Martyr, a gentile convert who died at the hands of the Romans in 165 CE, once wrote that children should sing together, “just as in the same way one enjoys songs and similar music in church.”
23
Very likely, Christians also danced; at least this is how the historian Louis Backman interpreted various statements of the second-century Church fathers. Clement of Alexandria (150-216 CE), for example, instructed the faithful to “dance in a ring, together with the angels, around Him who is without beginning or end,” suggesting that the Christian initiation rite included a ringdance around the altar. At another point Clement wrote that in order to invoke the “zest and delight of the spirit,” Christians “raise our heads and our hands to heaven and move our feet just at the end of the prayerâ
pedes excitamus
,” where, according to Backman,
pedes excitamus
is “a technical term for
dancing
.”
24
So Christians sang and possibly danced, but did they dance
ecstatically,
as did members of the old Dionysian cults? The evidence for ecstatic dancing, such as it is, hinges on Paul's instruction, in his letter to the Corinthian congregation, that women should keep
their heads covered in church (1 Cor. 11:5). This may represent nothing more than a concern that Christianity remain within the normal pagan and Jewish bounds of gender decorum. After all, Paul did not want women prophesying or even speaking in church, despite the fact that he worked with women as fellow proselytizers and had at one point proclaimed that “male and female are one in Christ.” An alternative explanation for the head-covering rule, proposed by the theologian E. S. Fiorenza, is that the women of Corinth were becoming a little too exuberant for Paul's tastes.
It seems that during their ecstatic-pneumatic worship celebrations some of the Corinthian women prophets and liturgists unbound their hair, letting it flow freely rather than keeping it in its fashionable coiffure, which often was quite elaborate and enhanced with jewelry, ribbons and veils. Such a sight of disheveled hair would have been quite common in the ecstatic worship of oriental deities.
25
Roman women spent hours on their tight coiffures, leaving the long, unbound look to the worshippers of Dionysus, Cybele, and Isis. If we know one thing about Paul, it is that he was greatly concerned about making Christianity respectable to the Romans, and hence as little like the other “oriental” religionsâwith their disorderly dancing womenâas possible.
This may seem like a rather tenuous inference, but the association between hair-tossing and ecstatic practice is widespread and was well established in the ancient world. Recall the prehistoric depictions of dancing women whose flowing hair suggests headtossing or at least rapid motion. In the second-century Roman Empire, the Syrian writer Lucian reported that the
galli
, or male worshippers of Cybele, “shook off their caps and rolled their heads downward from the neck,” while Apuleius described them as “hanging down their heads a long while, moving their necks around with supple motions, and whirling their loose hair round and
round.”
26
E. R. Dodds, in his famous work
The Greeks and the Irrational
, suggested that hair-tossing might be a universal hallmark of religious ecstasy. A nineteenth-century missionary, for example, who witnessed a “cannibal dance” in British Columbia, thought that “the continual jerking [of] their heads back, causing their long black hair to twist about, added much to their savage appearance.” Similarly, a notable feature of certain Moroccan dancers was that “their long hair was tossed about by the rapid to-and-fro movements of the head.”
27
An observer of the eighteenth-century American Great Revival reported of people overcome by “the spirit”:
Their heads would jerk back suddenly, frequently causing them to yelp, or make some other involuntary noise ⦠Sometimes the head would fly every way so quickly that their features could not be recognized. I have seen their heads fly back and forth so quickly that the hair of females would be made to crack like a carriage whip, but not very loud.
28
The hypothesis that Paul was concerned with controlling ecstatic activity, and not just women, is at least consistent with the fact that, a few verses after the hair-covering line in his letter to the Corinthians, he warns Christian men to keep
their
hair cut short (1 Cor. 11:14). Furthermore, there is archaeological evidence for the continuing worship of Dionysus in Corinth during Paul's lifetime, prompting one twentieth-century evangelical Christian scholar to conclude that “the Dionysian religion would probably have had some influence” on the overly exuberant Corinthian Christians.
29
Without question, the early Christians indulged in one very odd form of behavior, but whether it was truly ecstatic, or even communal, is not so clear. This was speaking in tongues, technically called
glossolalia
and colloquially, in our own time,
tongue-speaking.
It first occurs among the biblical Christians in the Book of Acts, when hundreds of the faithful have gathered to observe the Jewish Pentecost.
And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind â¦
And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.
And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the spirit gave them utterance. (Acts 2:2-4)
Passersby assume they are drunk, but what has happened is that, miraculously, the assembled Christians of all nationalitiesâParthians, Medes, Elamites, Cretans, Arabians, Egyptians, Romans, and Jews are among those mentionedâcan at last understand one another. The mutual unintelligibility of human languages, which had frustrated the Hebrews since the Tower of Babel story in the Old Testament, was finally overcome.
Later we encounter tongue-speaking among the Corinthians, who are again being rebuked by Paul for excessively enthusiastic behavior. He does not denounce the practice, describing it as a legitimate “gift of the spirit,” but unfortunately this god-given form of speech has by now become unintelligible. Concerned as usual with public relations, Paul worries about how this practice might appear to the unconverted: “If therefore the whole church be come together in one place, and all speak with tongues, and there come in those that are unlearned, or unbelievers, will they not say that ye are mad?” (1 Cor. 14:23).
But is tongue-speaking really a sign, or symptom, of communal ecstasy or some trancelike state induced by it? William Samarin, a sociolinguist and the author of a 1972 book on glossolalia, insists that it has nothing to do with ecstasy, either now or among the ancients. “Anyone can do it,” he told me. “All you have to do is believe you can speak another language.”
30
True enough, unlike some of the physical symptoms of tranceâconvulsions, for example, or unusual bodily contortionsâglossolalia is easily faked or at least consciously indulged in, and there might well have been a motive to do
so: The “gift” of glossolalia seems to have been a source of prestige within the early Christian community; Paul himself boasts to the Corinthians that he can do it “more than all of you.” Similarly in our own time, charismatic television preachers will sometimes demonstrate their spiritual authority by breaking into short bursts of tongue-speaking, after which they return to English without the slightest change of demeanor or tone of voice. And unlike the extraordinary mental states sometimes brought on by music and dance, tongue-speaking does not always take place in the context of an emotionally charged group. There are many reports of its occurrence during solitary prayer, although these are of course impossible to verify.
31
On the other hand, in many of the cultures in which it occurs, glossolalia is associated with what appear to be “altered states of consciousness”âamong shamans, for example, or members of certain African charismatic Christian cults that also practice ecstatic dance. An ethnographic account of a Caddo harvest ritual in North America describes an old man delivering “a harangue of pure jargon in a hasty, high-pitched voice without saying an intelligible word.”
32
In the 1970s, the linguist and anthropologist Felicitas Goodman surveyed glossolalic utterances in a number of different cultures and found what she thought was a universal intonational pattern within them, suggesting some common underlying mental state. In our own time, Christian tongue-speakers sometimes report feelings of bliss, as in the case of the Reverend Darlene Miller of Knoxville, Tennessee: “It's a beautiful, peaceful, comforting feeling. You know the presence of God, the power of God. It is sweet, beautiful, a rushing sensation, a power of God throughout the body. It has to come forth in the audible voice of tongues. The body cannot control it.”
33
Or to quote a modern Catholic charismatic, who first experienced glossolalia when praying alone: “And then it happened. Very quietly, very softly, I began to praise God in ecstatic language. And in that instant I understood that in giving myself to God, I was not consumed but
fulfilled, complete. The Spirit was singing for me the inexpressible love I felt.”
34
In the ancient Mediterranean world, glossolalia was well known before the Christians and clearly associated with ecstatic experience, in particular with ecstatic prophecy. The Pythia, the priestess who delivered oracles at the Greek shrine at Delphi, ingested what were said to be laurel leavesâby chewing them or inhaling the smokeâbefore delivering predictions, which usually came out in unintelligible form, requiring detailed interpretation by priests. Apollo was supposed to be the source of her insights, except in the winter months, when Dionysus took over this responsibility. It is probably from the Delphic oracle that the early Christians got the idea of glossolalia as an appropriate way of expressing the feeling of being “possessed” by a deity or overcome by religious emotion.
This is not to diminish the experience of early Christians or to say that they simply copied the Pythia and other Greek ecstatic adepts. But along with so many other bits of Greek culture, the early Christians may have absorbed the idea that glossolalia was a good way to communicate the fact that one has entered an extraordinary mental state, presumably granted by the deity. Some may indeed have “faked” it, that is, learned to make glossolalic utterances while in a normal, nonecstatic state of consciousness. And almost everyone could control its onset and durationâotherwise Paul's injunction against excessive tongue-speaking would have been meaningless. Wayne A. Meeks argues that glossolalia was a more or less controlled and ritual element of early Christian worship, occurring “at predictable times, accompanied by distinctive bodily movements,” perhaps triggered by other ritual events, and serving to both increase the prestige of the gifted and heighten the solidarity of the group.
35