and he gave gifts unto men

And he gave some apostles, some prophets, others evangelists, others shepherds and teachers ...
- Paul, Ephesians 4:11, Wycliffe Translation
καὶ αὐτὸς ἔδωκεν τοὺς μὲν ἀποστόλους, τοὺς δὲ προφήτας, τοὺς δὲ εὐαγγελιστάς, τοὺς δὲ ποιμένας καὶ διδασκάλους ...

- Paul, Ephesians 4:11, original Greek
And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers;

- Paul, Ephesians 4:11, King James Version

This passage continues from Paul's prophetic interpretation of "he led captivity captive  [i.e. took the spoils of war] and gave gifts to persons" as a prophetic witness to Jesus as the Messiah.  Some of the spoils of war that are given to persons are, for Paul the charismata [χαρίσματα] take form not just in the signs worked in believers, but in the gifts that we actually become to each other.  One is made a gift of apostle to some persons; to another, a gift of prophet; to others a shepherd (pastor) or a teacher, according to the grace given us (or channeled through us).  I think this might be paraphrased as "And he gave some of these gifts as apostles to some people; some as prophets to others, etc."

What sort of hierarchy did Jesus envisage for his Ekklesia?  One of generals and lieutenants and footsoldiers?  Or one where the last is first, the first is last, and the greatest is the one who washes the feet of the others?

When we look upon some gifts (i.e. some people) as more essential than others, more important than others, are we not guilty of not discerning His Body?  Are we not in a place of condemnation and pettiness and belittlement?

The Holy Spirit may make the gift of apostle or prophet or teacher out of anyone, for there is no Teacher other than the Holy Spirit.  There are only vessels, tabernacles for the Spirit.  You are the temple of the Holy Spirit.  And that temple may potentially be the conduit of any gift that the Holy Spirit wishes.  

The Good News

The Spirit of the Lord Yahweh is upon me for Yahweh has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted.

His mission for me: 

To pick up the pieces the brokenhearted.

To proclaim liberty to captives and release to prisoners.

To proclaim the year of Yahweh's favor and the day that our Elohim settles the score [on our behalf]. 

To console all those who grieve.

To bestow on the mourners of Zion a garland of celebration instead of ashes, giving the oil of joy instead of grief, the mantle of praise instead of a malaise of weariness, so they will be known as oaks of righteousness, Yahweh's [own] planting that exhibits His splendor. 

Isaiah 61

Was Jesus Hung On A Tree?

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not ...
 - Isaiah 53:3

Men weep, and bewail their lot, and curse Cadmus with many curses for introducing Tau into the family of letters; they say it was his body [the letter's form] that tyrants took for a model, his shape that they imitated, when they set up structures on which men are crucified. Stauros (cross) the vile engine is called, and it derives its vile name from him.
  - Lucian, 160 A.D., quoted on Wikipedia

Χριστῷ συνεσταύρωμαι·
 - Saul of Tarsus, Galatians 2:19

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us-- for it is written, "CURSED IS EVERYONE WHO HANGS ON A TREE."
- Saul of Tarsus, Galatians 3:13

In yet another instance of the rash of gospel revisionism, there are those who cite the many NT references to Jesus being hung on a "tree" claiming things like:

Although some accounts say that he was convicted and turned over to the Romans for execution, 1 Thess. 2:14-15, an undoubtedly genuine letter of Paul, and probably the oldest book in the entire NT, plainly states that Jesus was killed by the Jews. Assuming this to be correct, Jesus could not possibly have been crucified. [ref]

This particular commentator claims a special priority of the letter to the Thessalonians, but the letter to the Galatians is at least as well attested to, and in that letter Paul claims that the stauros/σταυρος (cross) counts as a tree in terms of the laws of Moses.  The Sanhedrin and the Pharisees did not want to be viewed directly bringing his downfall.  There were strong ties between the ministry of John the Baptizer and Jesus of Nazareth, and they evidently thought it prudent for Jerusalem see the false messiah defeated by the Roman oppressors.  On the other hand, it may not have seemed enough to merely stone Jesus.  With crucifixion, the people would see the would-be messiah utterly destroyed as well as seeing him utterly shamed.  What kind of Messiah would be suffered to die the death of a blasphemer and traitor?  Hence the jibes about him getting himself down from the cross.  No messiah could hang dead on the tree.  His teaching would be discredited when people realized that this man was no deliverer.  

The Israelites didnʼt kill criminals using the method of hanging, but they would at times hang the criminalʼs body after they applied a capital punishment. This action was to show the curse that came from breaking Godʼs Law.  The Hebrew word for curse is qalal (#7043) and it means something that is lifted or lightened, as in, making it little or contemptible. A curse is the opposite of a blessing. When someone was given a blessing, they were shown favor, or value. When someone was hung, it signified that they were despised, without honor. [ref]

Even though Pilate knew they were setting up an innocent rival of theirs, there is only so much he could ignore the person that was welcomed on palm leaves after the Sanhedrin say that he claims to be the Messianic king.  His first revenge is to state Jesus' crime in a way that offends the religious leaders.  Later Pilate allows Jesus to be taken down in order for Joseph of Arimathea to give him an honorable burial and not leave him hanging all night. Of course, the gospel narratives tell us that Pilate did not believe Jesus to be the threat the Sanhedrin claimed him to be; he was a threat to their authority perhaps, but not to his.   

But it is interesting to consider the Torah-based shame that was connected to the Roman cross. 

Three times in the book of Acts the word tree is used to refer to Jesus' crucifixion. In these cases, it appears in a Jewish context as well. [ref]

Also,

..for any Jew...the cross would be doubly repulsive... crucifixion was the most
abhorrent of all deaths because of its cruelty and shame, but for the Jew it also
involved the curse of the Torah, the curse pronounced on 'every one that hangeth on
a tree' (Davies, 1980:227).  [qtd in ref]

But Jewish tradition upholds the view of the Jewish leaders having hung Jesus from some sort of tree or stake rather than him being nailed to a Roman cross.  One writer avers that the stauros could refer to other sorts of stakes, even though Lucian traces the derivation of stauros from the letter tau, which has a crossbeam.  The cross on which Simon Peter was eventually crucified was in the shape of the early Phoenician tau/tav: its crossbeams fashioned as an X.  By extension, a stauros may well have referred to any execution stake or pike.  The Talmud recounts that Jesus was stoned and then hung as accursed according to the law:

On (Sabbath eve and) the eve of Passover Jesus the Nazarene was hanged and a herald went forth before him forty days heralding, 'Jesus the Nazarene is going forth to be stoned because he practiced sorcery and instigated and seduced Israel to idolatry. Whoever knows anything in defense may come and state it.' But since they did not find anything in his defense they hanged him on (Sabbath eve and) the eve of Passover. Ulla said: Do you suppose that Jesus the Nazarene was one for whom a defense could be made? He was a mesit (someone who instigated Israel to idolatry), concerning whom the Merciful [God] says: Show him no compassion and do not shield him (Deut. 13:9). [ref]

Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides) in the 12th century summarized in his letter to Yemen:

Jesus ... impelled people to believe that he was a prophet sent by God to clarify perplexities in the Torah, and that he was the Messiah that was predicted by each and every seer. He interpreted the Torah and its precepts in such a fashion as to lead to their total annulment, to the abolition of all its commandments and to the violation of its prohibitions.  The sages, of blessed memory, having become aware of his plans before his reputation spread among our people, meted out fitting punishment to him.

Some have even conjectured that this is the way it happened and that the early Jewish Christians somehow shifted the blame to the Romans, in extreme contradiction to the sort of revisionism that claims the Romans were at least as much to blame.  Both of these extremes are rejected in the Acts of the Apostles.  There are very clear claims that Jesus was given a Roman execution at the prompting of the Jewish leadership and with the support of the crowds of Israelites inhabiting Jerusalem for the Passover pilgrimage.  Jesus was "handed over to the Gentiles" to be abused and killed;  by Israel he was "disowned" because they "asked for a murderer [Barabbas] to be released instead" and so "put to death the Prince of Life"; the people of Jerusalem "condemned him" and "asked Pilate that he be executed"; and so they "nailed [him] to a cross by the hands of godless men and [thus] put him to death."

At one point the high priest accuses Simon Peter and the disciples of trying to "bring this man's blood down upon us."  Peter responds that he has no choice but to obey God and tell the truth.  The Daily Beast, of course, rejects the NT as anti-Semitic and chides believers for not realizing that the gospels are the sort of "unsympathetic portraits of Jesus’s Jewish contemporaries [that] persist in simplistic TV adaptations of the Easter story and in Mel Gibson’s drunken rants."  American Christians hold to the NT, this writer avers, out of "historical [in]competency."  David Klinghoffer, an Orthodox Jewish writer, states that "if Gibson is an anti-Semite, then to be consistent you would have to say that so was Maimonides," and admonishes, "I don't think it's very wise for a few Jewish leaders to try to tell millions of Christians what they are supposed to believe. Would we want some Christians to try to edit our scriptures and to tell us what we should believe?"

Ex-Pope Benedict Ratzinger in his latest book revels in the political correctness of the times, first by repudiating  (implicitly) the many proclamations in the Acts in favor of an interpretation that implicates only the "Temple aristocracy" and a fortuitous gathering of Barabbas supporters.  If Ratzinger were to travel back in time, he could correct the evangelists!  He seems to imply curiously (for a Catholic) that the chant of the crowd that appears in Matthew's gospel alone should be understood mystically, as an unknowing cry for salvation, finding some way for the text to have some  metaphysical truth, if not literal truth. These unnecessary detours eventually lead to some essential truth: that Jesus' blood  "does not cry out for vengeance and punishment, it brings reconciliation. It is not poured out against anyone, it is poured out for many, for all."  Well, shoot, he could've just started there.

The New Testament writings are synoptic on these points: (1) that Jesus was killed because God's chosen people rejected him and turned him over to death in their hardness of heart,  (2) that they were too blind to understand what they were doing, and (3) that there is nothing but forgiveness in the heart of the suffering Messiah for that betrayal and rejection.

Having taken the curse upon himself, "on the tree" as Paul says, he repudiates the curse.  Where Jerusalem says, "Let his blood be upon us and our children," Jesus can only reply, "Father, forgive them."  Those that look for anti-Semitism in the New Testament, whether moralizing secularists or anti-Semites, they are barking up the wrong tree.  

Belief in the Resurrection

From Craig's "Jesus and His Passion":

In opposition to Crossans’s conjecture let me summarize four facts which are agreed upon by the majority of New Testament critics who have written on this subject.   

The Name of God

"... our ancestors were arrogant ... but you are Eloah Selichot Channun v'Rachum (God of pardons, grace and mercy), slow to anger, and of great chesed, and you did not forsake them."
  - Nehemiah, (in Nehemiah 9:17)

"In order to forestall this [business of repentance and forgiveness], I fled to Tarshish, since I had knowledge that You are El Channun v'Rachum Erech Apayim V'Rav Chesed, (God of Grace and Mercy, Slow to Anger and of Great Chesed), Who relents from judgment."
  - the prophet Jonah (in Jonah 4:2)

"I will make all my goodness pass before you, declaring the name of I AM [THAT I AM]:  And I Will Have Chen (grace) On Whom I Will Have Chen and Racham (compassion) On Whom I Will Have Racham."
  - God to Moses, (in Exodus 33:19)

"Because of the chasdei (faithful kindnesses) of Yahweh we are not destroyed, because his rachamim (mercies) are unfailing and are new every morning.  Great is Your faithfulness."
   - Jeremiah, (in Lamentations 3:22-23)

"But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus ..."

  - Saul of Tarsus, (in Ephesians 4:19-21)

Questions about an Exclusive Way of Salvation

For most people the "scandal of particularity" is a stumbling block.  Is Jesus the only way?

There is a sort of modern Christian parable in which someone receives a letter offering to wipe out any large debt if only the letter is brought to an obscure office in town. In the story, the person crumples up the letter as an obvious scam.  This is supposed to represent the relationship between faith and salvation in Jesus: the debt remains because this person was unconvinced by the letter, and how sad too.  His debt will remain unpaid.

But think how many believe that salvation is predicated on the being convinced of a particular idea, and not only that but that one's salvation is predicated on not having the wrong idea about how salvation works.  How much does one have to understand about what a Messiah even is in order to believe Jesus is the Messiah and escape eternal damnation?

It is one thing for the Creator to draw his human creatures to Himself through the revelation of a certain people, through a certain rabbi among a certain religion among a small group of people in a small territory; it is another to commit to eternal damnation all that remain unconvinced of this.  Why, the idea must be so convincing all on its own that everyone who doesn't come around to the truth must hate the truth (or so we tell ourselves) -- and we're convinced of this because otherwise it would mean that some cosmic injustice has been perpetrated on humanity.

Of course, this manner of thinking is often used as an excuse to deny any number of things about Jesus of Nazareth.  It is more hip to believe that he was merely a compassionate rabbi who never suggested any metaphysically untoward things about himself.  It is more hip to believe that he never made himself out to be anything special.  It is more hip to think that he was an Hindu guru who was trying to shake the Israelis out of their provincial monotheism.  It is more hip to declare him to be yet another political revolutionary.  It is more hip to declare him to be merely a Marxist ahead of his time.  Because nothing is more uncool than the belief that Jesus was a supernatural being from the Father God with a message that was connected to God's covenant with Abraham.  In this Western culture's recommitment to secularism and to the Mammon of utopianism, nothing could be more uncool.

In spite of all these many ways to reject received wisdom about Jesus, we have so have some curious stories told in the Gospels.  Contradictory sayings, if superficially so, bizarre generalizations, friendship with sinners and unholy, extreme grace at times and extreme law at others.  There is such a diversity in Christendom about the relationship of God's free grace to holy living that one can pick almost any point of view about it they want.  Some denominations will teach that salvation is has nothing to do with what you do and only with what beliefs you profess with conviction.  Some denominations predicate one's salvation on paying the high cost of discipleship (as they envision it), effectively being as holy as the Father above.  Grace is only in operation if you are perfect as your Father in Heaven; and so any number of modern day Pharisees (figuratively speaking) walk around believing they are walking uprightly, as they are assured of damnation otherwise.

Grace seems to be a critical concept to the New Covenant, but how can we generalize it?  If anything can be generalized historically, from the standpoint of recorded Christian experience, is this:

'Son of God' Movie - Remembering When Newsweek Bashed the New Testament

And the high priest questioned them, saying, “We strictly charged you not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you intend to bring this man’s blood upon us.” But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men.  The God of our fathers raised Jesus whom you killed by hanging him on a tree."
- Acts 5 

The Roma Downey project Son of God appears to be coming out this Easter, and it's difficult to believe that it will be the 10th anniversary of Passion of the Christ.  For almost 10 years now, I've wanted to respond to Newsweek's response to Passion, published before the release date.  But first, let me say ...

put off by the sneer

"We now have crowning irony after a long tradition in which orthodox theology has been “playing away from home” expressing Christian truth in non-biblical patristic and subsequent formulations, we are now told that if we wish to go back and discover what the [New Testament] meant within its own universe of discourse—in other words, the world of Second Temple Judaism—it is we who are playing away from home.  And let us not be put off by the sneer that if these meanings were what God had intended us to have they would not have been forgotten for two thousand years.  Those who stand in the Reformation tradition should remember what Luther said when people tried to pull that trick on him."  [emphasis mine]
    - N.Thomas Wright, "Jesus and the Identity of God"  

Parthenos and Alexandria

Some thoughts on the Jewish writers of the N.T. relying on Greek scriptures...

An interesting future subject of a post could be the association of Jesus with magic in Jewish tradition.  There is a Talmudic exchange about the lawfulness of inscriptions on human flesh.  As one rabbi argues that it is lawful, another counters that Ben Stada (considered a reference to Jesus of Nazareth) brought the sorcery he learned in Egypt into Judaea in the form of marks on his skin.

What is interesting about this is the idea of Jesus as having spent a significant time in Egypt, an idea promoted by only one of the canonical Gospels.  If Jesus had lived in Alexandria for a length of time, he may have been exposed to many influences.  Could he have been there long enough to have learned the writings of Philo?  Could he have listened to Greek-speaking Jews debate Torah in the words of the Septuagint?  

I don't know how much has been hypothesized about the education of Jesus.  It appears the twelve apostles were largely not of significant religious training.  If koine Greek was more familiar to them than Hebrew (as they spoke Aramaic instead of Hebrew), their knowledge of the Tanakh may have been mostly through the Septuagint (the Greek translation complete 270-130 B.C.) and perhaps indirectly through Aramaic Targum as well.  

One petty objection to Passion of the Christ was the use of Latin instead of Greek in dealings between Judaeans and Romans, Greek being the lingua franca of the Roman Empire, formerly lands of the Greek Empire.  The apostle Paul seems to not be unique in his reliance on the Septuagint.  The Alexandrian writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews seem to as well.  Peter and the Gospel writers in general are said to have relied on the Septuagint as well.

Which brings us to παρθένος [parthenos], the Greek word for virgin.  The Septuagint typically dates at least 100 years before the time of Jesus.  Because of the use of the Septuagint by the NT writers, its use has been derided as being inherently un-Jewish (a "real Jew" would have translated the Hebrew differently).  The Septuagint gets its name from the 72 Jewish scholars who purportedly translated it.

So it has since been argued that either the Prophets were translated centuries after the Tanakh, or that the Septuagint was revised centuries later by Christian scholars to match the Gospels.  This seems to present a chicken-or-egg problem.  What is the timeline for the Matthean translation, and why did the author think that the Isaiah reference would lend support to the virgin birth without a widely recognized Septuagint with parthenos in the translation.

One writer argues not only that the Septuagint was altered, but that parthenos doesn't really mean virgin anyway, since the Septuagint still refers to Dinah (the daughter of Jacob) as parthenos after Shechem takes advantage of her.   Of course, this ambiguity has been part of the etymology of the English word maiden, which is pretty obvious comparing the meanings of the cognate words maidenhood and maidenhead.  (The general sense of Dinah's maidenhood is conveyed by "damsel" in Elizabethan English and by "talitha" in Aramaic.) Though the possible ambiguity of "a maiden shall conceive" is unimportant if parthenos is a fabrication anyway.  It is evident that the Greek writing in the Matthean Gospel has a specific idea of parthenos in mind.    

The Isaiah 7 Immanuel prophecy seems to be a reference to a child born in Ahaz' lifetime, and I don't think anyone other than the Matthean writer references it.   It is possible that parthenos, depending on context, refers to a young woman, and that this is the only sense of "maiden" that the Septuagint translators had in mind.  The virgin birth itself is a weightier subject than whether Isaiah 7 supports it.

continuing as they were

... knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires.  They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the forefathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.”
  - 2 Peter 3

"... let us not be put off by the sneer that if these meanings were what God had intended us to have they would not have been forgotten for two thousand years."
  - N.T. Wright  

I think it is only natural that modern believers in Jesus wonder where the last two thousand years have gone.  Is there a more central tenet of Christianity than that the death and resurrection of Jesus the Nazarene was a game-changer for human history?  Perhaps the biggest disappointment has been the centuries of the reinvention of the Jesus' ἐκκλησία [ekklesia] as an oppressive political regime.  The ἐκκλησία is a spiritual body in which all the body parts are connected directly to Jesus who is the head of Body of the Anointed.  The Church™ supplanted the ἐκκλησία, in which popes became chief cornerstones.  Where Peter (considered the first Pope by the Catholic believers) himself said Jesus rather than he is the cornerstone on which the ἐκκλησία is built.  Of the popes, I can only say what Paul said about Peter, James and John: "They may have seemed to be pillars of the ἐκκλησία, but I don't care either way; God does not respect some as greater than others."

http://www.evidenceforchristianity.org/did-jesus-use-the-word-synagogue-or-church-in-matthew-1618/
Some Catholic believers have since encountered the baptism of the Holy Spirit in the charismatic sense that Protestant seekers were reintroduced to the experience as it described in Acts and 1 Corinthians in 1906 on Azusa Street.  The popes have mostly had the good sense to not speak against this, even though it has taken a century for most Protestants to warm to it.  But it isn't through the Church of Rome that the charisma.

The epilogue to the Marcan Gospel (which is supposedly not in the oldest manuscripts) describes the signs that follow those that believe.  This version of the Great Commission seems to be in accord with the Acts of the Apostles.  The Johannine Gospel reports Jesus telling his disciples "greater works shall you do."  That's been a heavy prediction from the man that fed five thousand people from one meal, who resurrected a man 4 days dead, who brought a storm to a sudden halt, who made a boatful of people arrive instantly at land, who walked on water, who made a fig tree wither in a day.  Greater works, he says, because he will go to the Father and replace tabernacling with us physically with the indwelling presence of the Ruach ha-Qodesh.

They shall all know Yahweh from the least to the greatest, so that no one will have to teach his neighbor how to know him.   This is the covenant the Father will make with them in those days.  The same days that the Spirit will fall upon all flesh so that men and women will prophesy as was once common only with a prophet.

I think we are still waiting for the fulfullment of that promise.  It began at Pentecost, but in subsequent generations, the baptism of Jesus lost way to the baptism of John.  Prophesying and speaking in tongues diminished.  Healings and resurrections became less reported.  (Papias writes wistfully of one of Philip the Evanglist's daughters reminiscing to him about a resurrection.)  The only exhibition of dunamis was in withstanding torture and death for one's belief in Jesus the Anointed.  The charisma of the Spirit was practically lost, as described by Paul as necessary for the building up of Christ's tabernacle on the earth, as necessary for paraklesis.

The writer of the 2nd Epistle attributed to Peter was worried that a fearful vigilance for the Second Coming was necessary to keep people from sinful living.  Personally, my experience is that people get burned out with the hypervigilance and preoccupation with the End Times.  They either live in fear and dig a trench or they walk around acting superior to those who are "living for today," or they give up on yet another burden "that was too great for our fathers to bear" and consider religion burdensome. 

Peter exhorts us in 1 Peter 4 that the "the end is near".   The epistle of 1st John notifies that the antichrist spirit in the world showed that the "last hour" was upon the church.  2nd Peter warns us that in determining when the end of days would come, it was important to understand that with the Lord, "a thousand years is as a day."  Apparently the last hour is as a few thousand years.  The "perilous times" described in 1 Timothy 3 have been going on for a long time.  But just as the disciples ask Jesus about the coming of a Messianic Age, he says, "Don't worry about that. Just focus on the outpuring of the Holy Spirit."

Does the ἐκκλησία of Jesus keep itself pure by fearfully expecting the Master to burst upon the scene and catch us being ungodly?  Those born of the Spirit, unpredictable as the wind, keep from fulfilling the lusts of the flesh, not by looking at the skies, but by walking in the Spirit and making their selves into tabernacles of the abiding Presence of God on earth.  Look not here or there.  The kingdom of God is here in your midst.  Look for the Spirit poured out on all flesh. 

Does the ἐκκλησία of Jesus keep itself pure through a healthy fear of hellfire and brimstone?  Those born of the Spirit instead keep themselves pure through an expectation to eventually be overtaken by a revelation of God's Son that he or she takes on the likeness of a Child of God.  One day we will fully take on the character and splendor and grace of the Anointed Jesus, because we will no longer see through a glass darkly but will perceive him in all his beauty, and take on his glory.   

Lazarus, Hell, the Rich Man, and the Parable

http://www.tidings.org/studies/fables200007.htm
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/secretmark.html

Whatever else is interpreted about the true nature of hell relies much on Jesus' recorded quotation of Isaiah 66 (about a fire in Jerusalem that could not be put out until it had consumed) and on the presumed literalness of the parable about Lazarus and the Rich Man.  In fact, many think that it is not a parable at all but an account of what happened to Jesus' friend Lazarus before he was resurrected.

The writer of the gospel account attributed to Luke writes later (Acts 1-2) that Yochanan the Baptizer's prophecy about the baptism with the Holy Spirit would be fulfilled, at least in part, during the Jewish feast of Shavuʿoth (Pentecost).  He doesn't reference the "with fire" part of the prophecy but curiously the Spirit manifests, not as a dove as with Jesus, but as "tongues of fire" even as speaking with "tongues" first makes its appearance in early Christianity.

16Yohannan answered and said to them, “Behold, I am baptizing you in water, but he comes after me, who is mightier than I, the straps of whose shoes I am not worthy to loose. He will baptize you in The Spirit of Holiness and in fire,” 17“He who holds a winnowing fan in his hand and purges his threshing floor; the wheat he gathers into his barns and the chaff he will burn in unquenched fire.”*

Many will connect this with Jesus judgment of "the quick and the dead," though the closest Jesus appears to hold a winnowing fan or a threshing fork is when he wields a whip in the Temple, and declares it to be a "house of prayer" that has been converted into a "den of thieves."  Paul the Apostle speaks of a fire that will consume all the works that are not of the Spirit so that in some cases people will pass through with nothing left over.  At some point, we are given to understand, the One who sees the "thoughts and intents of the heart" will separate the corruptible works of the flesh from the eternal works of the Spirit.

An article (here) lists evidence of Jewish traditions that Jesus appears to be riffing on, rather than expounding revelations about the afterlife (quoted here but abridged):

1. The "Bosom of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob" (papyrus Preisigke Sb2034:11), was a specific concept in contemporary popular belief.
2. Jewish martyrs believed that: "After our death in this fashion Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will receive us and all our forefathers will praise us" (4 Maccabees 13:17 in The OT Pseudepigrapha).
3. Other early Jewish works describe paradise as being separated from the fires by a river (not substantially different from the chasm of Luke 16). In one apocryphal work this river could be crossed only in an angelic boat: (Apocalypse of Zephaniah 9:2).
4. The same first century Jewish work also shows the popular belief concerning the role of Abraham as intercessor for those in torment in the fiery part of Hades: "‘Those who beseech the Lord are Abraham and Isaac and Jacob’" (Apoc. Zeph. 11:1-2).
5. In another work, Abraham causes some of the dead to return from Hades to life (Testament of Abraham ‘A’ 18:11).