Jumping for Jesus

Rev dear Rev: Is there any truth in the rumour that the early Christians were all charismatics to a man, and believed in dancing for Jesus during the Eucharistic banquets and shared meals?

Well, this might come as a surprise, but not all the early Christians were fully paid up members of the charismatic renewal movements from those times, not because they did not believe in the Holy Spirit as a fully paid up Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, founder of the Church, as is painted against the other side beyond charismatica by moderne charismatics themselves sometimes, nor because they were not really very gospel-greedy and gung-ho and happy-clappy, but because the charismatic dance movements were still regarded in the early centuries as essentially external imports into a rational Christianity from their older counterparts in the Jewish charismatic Hasidic sects of that timeframe. These deployed dance moves during Passover rituals. Indeed, under the early Christian Pope Eleutherius the First around the year 174 AD, this pope was one of the first to revoke the faculties of such dancing Christians and their leading light of the time among them considered as Montanists, a famous apologist and preacher and writer, the first theologian in the modern world, namely Tertullian the Great - great theologian and a great apologist who used to write books to the emperor but a charismatic dance inspired Montanist (see Regesta, Vol I, no 67).