Actually, the early church got it from the Irish--an old pictogram text found by a peat digger shows that a few surviving slope-headed, prognathuous browed honkey-ponkey devotees fled the continent, their bough-runns not yet destroyed by the tall people, and landed on the Emerald Island--which seemed to them to be simply green--and thought long and hard about how their arm, leg, head, and butt flailing was lethal without the rhythmic assistance of a drummer. One of their leaders suggested that if they do all their dancing straight up and down, their hands held tightly at their sides, they were no longer lethal to their neighbors. They also found the style useful for getting rid of snakes, which abounded on the island in the millenia prior to the arrival of St. Patrick (who drove the snakes across the Irish Sea to Brittain where they mated with the invading Franks, producing the ancestors of the Conservative party). St. Patrick's followers, on pilgrimages to Rome, showed the dance to the Romans, who--because of their inability to communicate without manual flourishes--brought the dance back close to the form depicted in the yet-to-be-discovered cro-magnon cave paintings.

--seed