Why do so many Pentecostals point to William J. Seymour and the Azusa Street Revival as the beginning of Pentecostalism? It could be for several reasons.
They may have been taught it and have accepted it as fact. They may not be aware that Charles Fox Parham actually preceded Seymour by five or six years. The Assemblies of God acknowledges Parham as the founder of Pentecostalism, and Seymour was a student of Parham. Even so, nine times out of ten if you ask someone where Pentecostalism originated they'll say Azusa Street.
Have you actually tried this 9 out of 10 survey you are talking about? I would venture to guess that 9 out of 10 Pentecostals would not know who Seymore or Parham were. Pentecostals preach out of the Bible, typically, whether you agree with all the exegesis or not. I saw a bit of SDA Sunday School material that had a lesson from the life of EG White. That was odd to me. I think it is highly unlikely that a Pentecostal Sunday School lesson would have a lesson about Parham or Seymour. I do not think it is likely that Methodists have lessons on the life of John Wesley. But you could hear a lesson about Adam and Eve, the Exodus, or Daniel.
I do not think I have ever heard a reference to either Parham or Seymour from a Pentecostal pulpit, and I was raised in Pentecostalism, much of it in the A/G. Now if you go looking for this stuff on YouTube videos, you could find it. I suspect that somewhere out there that there is probably a Pentecostal preacher who likes Pentecostal history who talks about Azusa Street.
Also, if you talk to someone in the Church of God denomination, they may trace the roots back to the Shearer Schoolhouse revival, which predated Azusa and had speaking in tongues. The Fire Baptized Holiness have some other pre-Azusa Street roots also.
The Azusa Street Revival and a couple of other revivals in India and South America that sprung up about the same time were where the movement took off and became a global movement.
I think there's another important reason. Parham believed and taught that tongues were actual human languages whereas Seymour did not.
I have never heard of this before. Can you show me one shred of evidence where Seymour expressed the opinion that speaking in tongues is not human languages? The 'Apostolic Faith' was his newsletter, and it had lots of testimonies of people speaking in tongues and it being identified as a human language along with testimonies of hearing speaking in tongues and recognizing the language. These were from the Pentecostal movement in various locations. I have also read other accounts of the Azusa Street Revival of recognizing human languages 'in tongues.' Val Dez's 'Fire on Azusa' gives an example with Russian and an English interpretation of it through the gift of interpretation of tongues. Also 'The Comforter Has Come' relates another account. I think I've read others occurring specifically at Azusa Street, but there were many experiences like this recorded from the Pentecostal movement at that time and since.
Here is a video from the late brother Vinson Synon (I believe this is him; he looks younger than when I met him), Pentecostal historian, interviewing elderly folks who were children a he Azusa Street Revival.
At this point in the video, the woman he is entering is saying what drew people were Chinese, Japanese, and other nationalities hearing the Gospel in their own language through speaking in tongues. From one of Synan's questions in the interview, I pick up on the idea that he may have had some concern about the idea some were promoting that tongues weren't languages, but he does not say it specifically, and I did not ask him during our brief interactions when he was alive. (Btw, he was kind to me, btw, and tried to help me with an obstacle I was facing and prayed with me in his home.)
When Parham sent out missionaries to China, India and Japan, they were not able to speak the native languages by the power of tongues, as they had anticipated. So Parham was severely discredited. But no worries, Seymour taught that tongues are an angelic or heavenly language; strange babbling was standard-fare at Azusa St., which Seymour readily claimed were tongues. Thus, the safest path for those wanting to pass off tongues as legit is to play up Seymour and the language of babble. They say it's tongues and how can anyone argue with them?
Look, I think we have had this conversation in the past. It could have been someone else, but I think it was you. Again, do you have any shred of evidence that Parham taught tongues was not or could not be real languages? That actually contradicts what he ___did__ by putting numerous accounts of tongues as real languages. Show me a quote where Seymour taught what you say he did.
It is easy to use history to make your case, when you just make up the history.
Parham had some sloppy but hopeful eisegesis. There is nothing in the scriptures that says that the apostles were 'preaching the Gospel' in Acts 2. Speaking in tongues did get some attention, then Peter stood up and ___preached___ the gospel. There is nothing in Acts 2 that guarantees when someone speaks in tongues, the language he speaks will be the language of the crowd gathered, or that anyone will understand. I Corinthians 14 says when one speaks in tongues 'no man understandeth him.' That was more for a church setting. If the Holy Spirit wants to give someone the tongue of those present or if God sovereignly wants people present who understand the language spoken 'in tongues', then He an do so. But the scriptures do not guarantee this. Parham's idea that tongues would be used for world evangelism was hopeful guesswork, and it didn't pan out like he thought it would.
On the other hand, there were many experiences in the early Pentecostal movement, from Topeka to Azusa and elsewhere, where one spoke in tongues and others understood. According to the historian Vinson Synon, Agnes Ozman's speaking in tongues was identified as Chinese by someone who worked in a Chinese laundry according to 'some of their papers.' I read a few days later, a Bohemian brother understood her speaking in tongues in Bohemian, which we would now call Czech. There were numerous experiences of people hearing speaking in tongues in their own languages or others identifying them in the movement. This has been an occasional ongoing thing with missionaries also.
AG Garr was at the Azusa Street Revival. At some point, he spoke in tongues, but it was different from what he had spoken previously in tongues, and someone indicated to him that it was Bangla. But when he went to India, he found he could not just preach in tongues in the local language.
But someone may say, most people don't even know any of this so how could this be true for them. That's fair, they probably aren't aware. But something happened back in the early 1900s that caused Pentecostalism to go down the road of babble. I believe it was probably so they could avoid any more embarrassing situations like what happened to Parham and his missionaries.
I don't know that every claim of speaking in tongues is the genuine gift. I wouldn't venture to make such a statement. Doctrinally, I would expect tongues to be the 'tongues of men and of angels' like scripture says. If you ask a Pentecostal preacher who has studied the Bible and has a gift of teaching what speaking in tongues is, he is like to say 'the tongues of men and even of angels.'
There are people who take a reactionary theological position against speaking in tongues who insist that 'tongues of angels' is hyperbole. But the idea of angelic tongues was bouncing around as a real thing, at least in intertestamental literature. In the passage, giving all to the poor is possible, giving one's body to the poor is possible. Moving mountains with faith is possible. If you take Jesus' teaching as a metaphor--that's possible. If He meant it literally, then that's possible. Why must speaking in tongues of angels be impossible?
