tongues Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians is ecstatic speech. In practice we do not know much about the psychological state of New Testament tongues-speech. Those who speak of it as ecstatic utterance tend either wrongly to assume that glōssais lalein belongs with a range of inspired-speech phenomena in non-Christian religions of antiquity (and which they assume were unintelligible and ‘ecstatic’), or they assume that New Testament tongues-speech is largely to be identified with reports of ecstatic