Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening! Christ is risen! He truly is risen! Welcome, giant-killers and dragon-slayers! You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana. We are recording live, but we’re not going to be taking any phone calls tonight. That said, if you leave a question on our Facebook or our Ancient Faith YouTube streams and we spot it, it is possible that we might take it and respond.

So tonight our topic is prophets. What is prophecy? Who is a prophet? Do prophets predict the future? Does prophecy still happen in our times? What’s the difference between a prophet and an apostle? How can we recognize a true prophet or prophecy? What about people who claim to have prophecies even now?

It’s been a while since we did this, a few episodes maybe, but we always love going back to the Ancient Near East, and it turns out that there is a larger context for prophecy than just what we see in the Bible. Where are we starting tonight, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen De Young: Well, I’m starting with a disclaimer.

Fr. Andrew: Okay! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Because I know Ancient Faith is a big tent, with lots of different podcasts, lots of different voices, lots of different opinions, but that guy whose podcast you were playing right before we went on the air—

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yes, that guy.

Fr. Stephen: —I do not want to be associated with him in any way. [Laughter] So I disavow that person and everything he has ever said.

Fr. Andrew: That’s good! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Just for the record.

Fr. Andrew: Well, thanks for that.

Fr. Stephen: So, that taken care of, we can now move on.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: We’re starting—yeah, we’re starting in the Ancient Near East. That’s a broad swath. The earliest written material we’re going to be starting with is going to come from the 18th century BC, the 1700s BC, so for us, relatively recently. [Laughter] I say that—that is not sort of when the idea of a prophet or prophecy begins; this is just the earliest written sources we have, that we’ve found so far, that we have to talk about tonight.

But by the time we get there, the idea of prophets and prophecy are already established. There are already multiple terms in different Semitic languages for prophets and prophecy. The idea of “a prophet” is a known quantity. So if someone is identified as a prophet, people know what that means already. This is something that goes back centuries and centuries and centuries before even the 18th century BC, but we have to start where we have data and records, in terms of getting specific.

But before we get specific, we’ll get a little general, because we have to first talk about what prophecy was in a broad sense. A lot of times today when people talk about prophecy or call someone a prophet, it’s about, as you mentioned in your intro there, predicting the future. People want to find a prophet who can tell them the future. If they’re in the stock market, they want a prophet who can prophesy profits. [Laughter] But that’s not really what it’s about. That’s not really what it’s about.

Prophecy, as such, is sort of a subspecies of divination, divining. People may not have noticed before that divination involves the word “divine.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah, it’s about talking to gods or some kind of spirit, or trying to get some sort of knowledge that you could not otherwise know, by divine assistance in some way.

Fr. Stephen: Right. There’s a divine realm, a divine perspective, which is greater than the perspective of humans. There is a wisdom that divine beings have, or an understanding, or a knowledge, a perspective that they have, that human beings aren’t otherwise privy to. Divination, as a broad category, consists of various ways in which humans have or have tried to access that wisdom or knowledge, either with the spirits themselves or through signs left by the spirits or some means by which spirits were thought to communicate.

Now, that includes—because, as we’ve talked about many times, and we’ve talked about this when we talked about apocalyptic, I know—this includes the fact that divine beings have a different relationship with time than humans do.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so they might know things that it seems like they’re from the future or whatever.

Fr. Stephen: Right, or from the distant past. We see this, for example, in Isaiah, when Yahweh the God of Israel is talking about the gods of the nations and sort of comparing himself to them. He says, “Who will tell you about the things of the past? How the earth was formed,” all these things. “Who will tell you about those things in the future?” That is implying that Yahweh the God of Israel is the One who truly has this total and complete perspective, unlike the fallen spirits who are “the gods,” who may have a greater knowledge or sense of these things than humans, but don’t really have the knowledge and wisdom that the true God possesses.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re much bigger and smarter than [we], but they’re not omniscient, they’re not omnipotent, they’re not omnipresent—they can’t know everything.

Fr. Stephen: Within divination, you have a whole bunch of things. A lot of these things in the Ancient Near East and the [ancient] world in general are related to employing some kind of technique or reading signs. The most—probably the most obvious and well-known of those today would be astrology, which we’ve talked about before.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, looking at the stars: figure out what’s going on there.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the stars or the planets seem to be divine beings, and so there could be some communication from the divine realm there. They could be read. But again, there’s a technique there. You have star charts, and you sit there and plot the movements of the constellations and the planets. A person who’s going to participate in that is going to be a specialist; he’s going to be somebody who has devoted his time in study to it.

A fairly well-known one would be a haruspex (plural haruspices)—

Fr. Andrew: It’s about guts!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, whom we’ve also talked about before; they’ve got guts. [Laughter] —who would read the entrails of sacrificial animals. For science.

Fr. Andrew: There’s a whole subspecies—well, not subspecies of that, but there’s a whole variant on this, which is about watching animal movements. My favorite is myrmomancy, which is reading the signs by watching ants. But also ailuromancy, which is about watching cats. I can’t remember the term for birds; I don’t know…

Fr. Stephen: Birds was actually more common than either of the other two. Birds of ill omen, for example.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I know, I know. But I love the idea that people— I mean, it’s a real thing! People would watch ants to try to read the signs.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because built into the world— There are spirits connecting to all of these things, and so those spirits can potentially communicate through them. But again, it’s all technique. Your haruspex has—we have a lot of them, because they’re fired clay, so they basically last forever—livers and kidneys, like models, with little indentations in them of what to look for in different places. This is again—you’re a specialist. And this is what most pagan priests were, frankly, in the ancient world. Most pagan priests, they were not preaching sermons and giving counseling. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Running parish council meetings, doing stewardship.

Fr. Stephen: Building programs with a big thermometer.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Aw, man!

Fr. Stephen: They were specialists. If you go to the early—the Old Kingdom of Egypt, and even in the Middle Kingdom, most of the priests were basically people who could read and write.

Fr. Andrew: Included in that, then, is reading signs, omens.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so if you could read and write, you were a priest, and you were in charge of keeping all the sacred texts, which texts contained the methods for reading all of these things. You’re sort of preserving this knowledge. And a haruspex was a priest who knew how to read the signs in entrails. They knew these things.

We see this in the Bible, too, when people are called in to interpret dreams by, like, Nebuchadnezzar. There were priests who—that was their job. That was what they had studied and mastered. A long time before Freud, they figured out the interpretation of dreams. [Laughter] It’s a specialist knowledge thing, and that plays into a lot of the things we’ve talked about, like with the Watchers and the apkallu and this knowledge that gets revealed.

Prophecy is also a subspecies of divination, but it’s different [from] those other ones we’ve been talking about, because, unlike those, prophecy was not primarily—there’s exceptions to everything—but for the most part, prophecy did not involve that kind of technique. It was not about reading signs; it was about a direct, more direct encounter and direct relationship between the person who’s considered a prophet and the deity for whom they are a prophet. And there is a relationship there, where someone is a prophet of this god or this small group of gods; they weren’t just a prophet in general and then different gods came and whispered in their ears. There was an ongoing, direct relationship between them and some spiritual being.

That took a couple of forms in the sense that, on one hand, you have prophets the way we tend to think about them in the Old Testament, where it’s a question of contact and interaction between the two. Then you also have what are usually called oracles, or some version of that, where the spirit actually possesses the person and literally speaks through them, so more like the council of the gods in Moon Knight than your typical Hebrew prophet.

Fr. Andrew: I haven’t watched!

Fr. Stephen: I know you haven’t watched Moon Knight. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I know I haven’t watched it yet. It’s on my list! I don’t know… Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But those are sort of celebrated… But in both of those cases, it’s direct. There’s not sort of an intermediary of birds or ants or stars or guts through which some kind of message is conveyed; it’s a direct relationship. The phenomenon of prophecy, from what we can tell—again, we go by the evidence we have—seems to have primarily been a phenomenon in Semitic areas. So it’s less pronounced—you get more of other forms of divination in Egypt, for example. There are some sort of prophet—things that you would call prophecy as a phenomenon in Egypt, so it’s not totally absent, but it’s much less prominent than other types of divination in Egypt. We don’t have really record of a lot prophecy among the Hittites, for example, who were an Indo-European people.

But even among the Semitic people in the Near East, it’s kind of a scattered thing, and again we’re going based on evidence, so it may be less scattered than we think, because we just don’t have the texts and stuff. But from what we can tell, there are certain periods and certain places where this phenomenon comes to a great prominence, and then others where we don’t find and read a lot about it. And that includes—it’s not purely fragmentary evidence, because there are a lot of places and periods where we don’t have a lot of written records and don’t see much about prophecy, so it’s not purely the fragmentary evidence, but we always have to have that as a proviso. There could be a big textual find tomorrow that could change that, hypothetically.

Now we want to look at—now that we’ve done that general kind of thing, we want to look at more in particular a couple of those places where sort of prophetic activity in the Ancient Near East starts to flourish. The first one of these, these are written records that come from before any part of the Bible was written down, because we’re talking now 18th century BC. I’m still bored.

Fr. Andrew: Is that before Abraham, even?

Fr. Stephen: Well, Abraham didn’t write anything. I don’t know if you’ve been hanging out with Mormons, but he actually did not.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Little-known fact about me, actually: I’ve been to more Mormon historical sites than most Mormons. Whenever I meet a Mormon and tell them that, they’re like: “You are so blessed!” I’m like: “Well, I’m interested in religious history.” “But that’s so great. Do you feel…?” I’m like: “No, I don’t, but thank you.” So anyway…

Fr. Stephen: I was physically ejected from the temple in Salt Lake City, but that’s a story for another time.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, it is! How many holy sites have you been ejected from?

Fr. Stephen: And probably less blessed and less great in the eyes of most of our LDS friends.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. We’ll have to use that one for a fundraiser!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter] So this is after Abraham lived, but I’m still bored by arguments about the date of Moses, but even on the earliest possible date—or I should say, the earliest suggested date, that puts him in the 16th century BC, this is older by a couple centuries. So no text that’s currently in the Bible had been written down. That doesn’t mean the stories didn’t exist, doesn’t mean things didn’t happen, but nothing had been written down at the time of the writings we’re about to talk about.

These are usually talked about as the Mari Documents or the Mari Letters, because they were found in a city called Mari.

Fr. Andrew: M-a-r-i, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, super creative name for them.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s better than the usual way that documents get named, where you get like “A36.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, a letter and a number. “Gothic P46.” Except, if I were— Let me vow today: if I ever find a trove of ancient documents like this, the letter before the numbers will be in Comic Sans. I’m doing it.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow! A cruel joke for the ages!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] The Mari Documents or the Mari Letters are from the city of Mari, which was in sort of the central Euphrates region, part of Akkad.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and you know, folks, you can look this up. You can actually look up where this is on Wikipedia. Mari, Syria. M-a-r-i, comma, Syria, and you’ll get cuneiform right there in the top. Hey!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, cuneiform. These are clay tablets; that’s why they survived. There was a massive trove of these, and a lot of them are communications from people who identified themselves as prophets. There are contained in here things referring to both male and female prophets, of different gods, but this is also important because this is not just an example of prophecy, like the phenomenon of prophecy that we see in the Scriptures, but these are also, then, writing prophets, prophets who write things down or whose prophecies are written down.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so they become sacred texts, maybe?

Fr. Stephen: Maybe. But, at any rate, they’re writing. So that then puts it in a genre that’s similar to big chunks of the Old Testament. This idea that the prophecies of a prophet would be written down, or that a prophet himself might send it in the form of a letter, is not sort of a new phenomenon in the Old Testament. This is something that’s already been around in the Ancient Near East, copied over, with weird lacunae notations, and, before I edited it, weird Greek letters inserted in places and things… Just one of these at semi-random, this is like a typical ones for the folks to get a flavor of what it sounds like.

Fr. Andrew: Even though there were random Greek letters, this was not in Greek. It was not written with Greek letters; it was a cut-and-paste thing. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because I had to get it out of this… So this is my plight. I got it out of this book published by SBL, where they had the transliterated Akkadian in one column, and then an English translation in the other column, and I had to try to pull the text out of the English column, and I ended up with all kinds of weird diacritical marks and symbols.

Fr. Andrew: I feel your pain.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it was a tragedy! It was a tragedy. If you want to support me in my plight, you can PayPal me and help assuage my difficulty and pain.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I will consider that. I’m going to read this, and, like you said, this is just a typical one of these cuneiform tablets from the Mari Letters.

Moreover, a prophet of Adad, lord of Aleppo, came with Abu-dalim and spoke to him as follows, “Write to your lord the following:

Am I not Adad, lord of Aleppo, who raised you in my lap and restored you to your ancestral throne? I do not demand anything from you. When a wronged man or woman cries out to you, be there and judge their case. This only I have demanded from you. If you do what I have written to you and heed my word, I will give you the land from the rising of the sun to its setting, your land greatly increased.

This is what the prophet of Adad, lord of Aleppo, said in the presence of Abu-dalim. My lord should know this.”

Not that exciting, really.

Fr. Stephen: No, but this is, again, just sort of typical. Abu-dalim is some kind of scribe to whom the prophet comes and says, “Hey, write this down for the king.” He’s bringing this word from Adad, the god of Aleppo. Yeah, I’m going to do it. I’m going to pause here and talk a little trash on Hermann Gunkel.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! I don’t even know who that is.

Fr. Stephen: One of our German scholar friends.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay. So, dead for 150 years probably, more or less.

Fr. Stephen: Ah, I think he’s—not that long, but not long enough, probably. You may have noticed, when you’re hearing that, that that sounds a lot like a lot of the prophecies in the Bible.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! It’s very similar to a lot of what you get from the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: In the format and everything. Gunkel was a big guy in prophetic form criticism. What form criticism does is you get sort of all the examples of a genre you can, and then you categorize them. So Gunkel did like: “Well, this is an oracle of judgment against a person. This is an oracle of judgment against a king. This is an oracle of judgment against a nation. This is an oracle of deliverance for a nation.” Sort of categorizes them all, and sort of tries to find patterns in the genre. Because this is what German scholars do: they just taxonomize and catalogue everything.

So he’s including the Old Testament stuff in this, and then stuff like the Mari Documents, all these kind of things, and some of the other stuff we’re going to talk about in a minute: throws it all in there. And then he says, “Okay, well, so any time a prophecy in the Bible follows the format”—now, these are templates he’s created based on his taxonomy. He says, “Every time it follows the template, it’s unimportant and not interesting!” [Laughter] “The only important part of any biblical prophecy is if you can find a place where it breaks from the template.” And so you take wherever it breaks from the template— Now, mind you, this is a template that he made up, based on the limited examples we have that have survived to his day. So if he finds a place where it breaks the template, then you read everything that reads into that word or phrase that you didn’t find in all the other similar ones. And that becomes what the whole thing is about.

This has been another episode of why most biblical scholarship has been kind of goofy by Fr. Stephen De Young.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] By the way, I looked it up— That should have its own theme! [Laughter] Chris Hoyle, you know what to do! Yeah, no, I looked it up and he died in 1932, so he’s been gone for 90 years.

Fr. Stephen: I was going to say, not that long.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not 150 years, but 90 years.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, early 20th century German friend. But the reason why I wanted—not just because I like picking on Germans; I mean, you know, they spent the 20th century picking on the rest of us, so it’s fair game—

Fr. Andrew: Wow. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: No, it’s not just because I like picking on Germans, it’s that this is an example of how to do what we try to do on the show—how we try to use this kind of data, like the Mari Letters, or things from the Ancient Near East, or Second Temple Jewish literature—how to use that really badly and really unhelpfully. It’s very scholarly and very academic, just sort of categorize and taxonomize everything. I don’t begrudge him that. Publish your journal article. You do you.

Fr. Andrew: Sure, but would the people who used this as part of their life, culture, and religion have understood it that way?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and for a chunk of the 20th century, Gunkel’s stuff was being taught in seminaries and grad schools as how to interpret prophetic texts of the Old Testament. It just kind of makes a mess of it.

Rather than seeking to learn what we can learn about the background of the Ancient Near East and how prophecy functioned, like we’re trying to do tonight: “How did prophecy function in the Ancient Near East? Okay, now that we’ve talked about that a little, now let’s look at the biblical text and see if that enlightens us on anything that’s sort of in the background here of these prophets and prophetic books.” It’s trying to plane out and reduce the biblical texts to— There’s nothing privileging the book of Amos for Gunkel over one of the Mari Letters; it’s the same thing, and it’s only even interesting, again, if there’s something “weird” in it, based on his established normal.

When you attack things in that way, you really are attacking them. Rather than sort of deepening the meaning and understanding of the biblical text, you just kind of make it uninteresting and irrelevant. So, anyway, now I’m done with Gunkel.

Fr. Andrew: That being said… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but I think it’s important that once in a while we point to these things, because every once in a while there’s someone on the internet who doesn’t like this show.

Fr. Andrew: How dare they!

Fr. Stephen: Hard to believe, I know, right?

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: And one of the things is—one of the sort of knee-jerk criticisms we get is that “Well, they’re taking all this biblical scholarship, and that wrecks the Bible!” And it’s not that that’s totally wrong—like, it can. There are modes—

Fr. Andrew: Right, there’s scholarship and there’s scholarship.

Fr. Stephen: There are modes of doing it, yes, that sort of relativize and negate the force of the text of Scripture. There certainly are approaches that do that, but the fact that we talk about this Ancient Near Eastern stuff—there are also ways to read this stuff and understand this stuff that actually helps to deepen the understanding of the biblical text. And you can differentiate those at the level of method. Enough banging on, beating Gunkel’s dead horse. Or is he the dead horse? I don’t know.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, his 90-year-old dead horse.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] But what that text, that Mari Letter that you read, also shows is is that even in Mari this prophet sort of shows up and says this to the king, and that means this prophet, his sort of authority and his voice is derived directly from the deity also, meaning he stands apart from the king. He’s able to come and tell the king something.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s not part of the king’s administration. He’s not appointed to that position by the king. It’s not… He’s not part of the establishment is I think the big thing to take away from this here.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so the king is himself a priest—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, for pagans.

Fr. Stephen: —and we’re talking about combined kingship, divine kingship at this point in history, so one of the gods… His priests are, as we were just saying, were mostly what we would call diviners of various kinds. You have that establishment, and then you have a prophet who comes, who derives their ability to speak directly from this god, who is at least the king’s equal, because they think the king’s divine, but who can then come and challenge the king and tell the king what to do, or correct the king, or in this case remind the king of his duty to establish justice, which most people could not get away with doing, shall we say, if they wanted to live. [Laughter]

So this prophet has this kind of outsider role to the establishment here in the Ancient Near East. Another place where we see sort of a flowering of prophetic activity is actually in and around Nineveh in the seventh century BC.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, good old Nineveh.

Fr. Stephen: You may see where we’re going with this. [Laughter] Nineveh at this time, it’s the capital of the Assyrian Empire. The Assyrians made those 20th-century Germans I was joking darkly about earlier look like choir boys. [Laughter] They were possibly—again, based on records—possibly the most brutal regime in the history of the world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, is this where we recommend everyone listen to the Fall of Civilizations podcast again?

Fr. Stephen: About Assyria? Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: They did an episode on Assyria which—I can’t remember how long it was. People think that this podcast has long episodes. That show is routinely four hours.

Fr. Stephen: I also recommend their YouTube channel, too.

Fr. Andrew: Right, got some nice visuals.

Fr. Stephen: Because they’ve taken the audio podcasts and they’ve just sort of put really high-quality—sometimes like 4K—visuals of actual archaeological sites, to give you an idea of the places that are being talked about.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It’s been a while since I listened to the Assyria episode, but yes—there were some mean, mean people. [Laughter] Like, it was a really nasty empire. These are the people who carry off the northern kingdom of Israel.

Fr. Stephen: Right, which ceases to exist. And they’re incredibly brutal, but also there’s this flowering in the seventh century of prophecy that we have from written sources again that tell us they have this tradition of prophets, which again—this is standing apart from the Assyrian king, who’s seen as a divine king, his priesthood of diviners and that kind of thing, who are doing their thing to try and get the signs of the gods. But also it was just a phenomenon that a prophet could arise, bringing a message from one of the gods, and deliver it to the king or deliver it to the civilization.

This is in the background of course, then, and helps us understand what’s going on in the book of Jonah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, when he just shows up out of the blue and says—how is it?—“In 40 days or whatever, Nineveh will be overthrown.” Or is that three days? I can’t remember off the top of my head now. And they are able to receive that, and they’re not like: “Who is this wacky Hebrew? Why should we listen to this guy?” It’s because this guy fits into—he looks, he sounds, he smells like a prophet. Wow, he’s saying stuff that’s really scary, so maybe we should go ahead and listen to him. They’re able to receive— Maybe his God isn’t their god, but “you don’t want to get a god mad even if he’s not your god” kind of thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you don’t know, that’s right. And this is important for a couple reasons. One, I think a lot of people’s picture of Jonah is sort of like he shows up in Nineveh and he’s carrying around a sign saying, “The end is near,” like the crazy guy outside Comic Con, but this is not. He fits into for them— This is a phenomenon that they know about. This also affects not just our 19th-century German friends, but lots of our scholarly friends, who will say, “Well, of course Jonah’s fictional and couldn’t have happened. There’s no record of Nineveh repenting or converting to the worship of Yahweh.” But that’s not what the text is talking about. The text is talking about them repenting, because a prophet showed up and told them that there was a God who was very angry at them for having done certain things, so they performed rituals of repentance.

This explains why Jonah would have thought that that was the likely result. Because, remember, in the book of Jonah, Jonah says after the fact that one of the reasons at least that he didn’t want to go to Nineveh was that he knew they’d end up repenting and God wouldn’t nuke them after. Because Jonah, remember, goes and proclaims this to Nineveh and then goes and sort of sets up his folding chair on a nearby hill to watch the fireworks. [Laughter] And then it doesn’t happen, and he’s all ticked off, and he’s all: “I knew this was going to happen!” [Laughter]

So why would he have suspected that? This is the most brutal regime in the world. Why would he have thought that if he walked into the capital city of the most brutal regime in the world at the time, that they would have listened to what he said about a God destroying the city and repenting? Well, because the Ninevites had— This was a cultural idea sort of thing—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a thing.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] —that they understood.

Those are just two examples, but this is a known phenomenon. So now we’re going to talk a little bit about— This isn’t really Fr. Andrew’s etymologies here, because it’s going to be mostly Akkadian and Neo-Assyrian.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, “Fr. Stephen’s Etymology Corner.” [Laughter] Once you step out of Indo-European, I’m pretty lost.

Fr. Stephen: Some of these are very hard to pronounce, at least for me with my white-boy tongue, so we’ll see how we do. In Akkadian, in Akkadian records, the most common title for a prophet is muhhu for a male prophet and muhhutu—muhhu-tu: it’s two syllables—for a female prophet, that -tu ending is feminine. Neo-Assyrian, it’s mahhu and mahhutu. So you can tell the difference. The consonants are the same; the difference is the vocalization, the vowels, we would say, because that’s how Semitic languages work, basically.

Those are the two main words. Those are derived from the verb, the Akkadian verb, mahhu, which means to go insane, basically, or to enter into a frenzy.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, kind of a crazy trance, altered consciousness sort of thing.

Fr. Stephen: Flopping around on the ground, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: What’s interesting— So, I looked this up, because I remembered a similar etymology. I’ll bring it over into the Indo-European world now. Odin, whose name properly is really Othin—no one in any of the Norse periods from then to now would have said “Odin”; it was “Othin,” but “Odin” is the way we generally say it in English—his name means “the infuriated one,” and he is this god associated with wisdom and prophecy and visions. That’s what the whole single-eye thing is kind of about, that he sees things. I’ll just finish out my little side-break about Norse mythology by mentioning— And I just learned this recently, actually. So, again, I’m not an expert in these things, but I’m learning them.

Apparently cultic helmets related to Odinic religion have been found that have a mask included in the helmet, and on the one side, if I remember correctly, the eye is sort of blocked or just nothing special about it or whatever, but then on the other side, one eye has gems embedded around it in the helmet. The idea is that when you are entering into this—I don’t know if it’s a sacrificial space or whatever, but some kind of cultic space, that would be dark, that would be only lit by firelight. That would happen then would be the gem-studded eye on the cultic helmet would sort of light up because of the light. So the person wearing this helmet is sort of embodying Odin, and their one eye, the eye of wisdom, lights up, the eye of seeing and prophecy and that kind of stuff.

It is interesting that, even though that’s a very long distance from the Ancient Near East, but this idea of frenzy and prophecy kind of going together is totally a thing. I don’t know if this is the case in Native North American and South American religions, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that same association were not there as well.

Fr. Stephen: You even see it—and this’ll be a non-controversial part of our show—in the very early accounts of Muhammad. When he first receives his visions, he’s sort of in this state of terror and panic, and even seems to be about to throw himself off a cliff. I mean, that Ancient Near Eastern conception sort of sticks around in the Middle East, at least to the sixth, seventh century AD.

That kind of… And this is describing sort of the state that’s brought about by this direct contact with this spiritual being that provokes this response. As we said before, there’s sort of two categories, then, of prophets, in the sense that there are some of them who are sort of visionary prophets with that external relationship with the spirit, who usually describe that interaction as “seeing,” as sort of encountering, and that’s usually in visual terms. I wouldn’t— Well, we’ll talk more about visions later on. Yeah, I won’t get into all that.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, we’ll get into that later.

Fr. Stephen: I was about to digress about Aristotle a bunch, and we don’t need to. And then the other is that oracular, that internal, that possession idea.

Those are the most common words for prophecy in this context. There are a couple of others. In Akkadian, sometimes prophets are called apilu, which means “answerer,” because it’s from the verb apalu (or aypalu) that means “to answer.” The idea is this seems to convey a function more like, say, the oracle at Delphi, where someone comes to this person and asks them questions, inquires—in order to inquire of the gods, rather than them showing up with a proclamation from the gods.

Now we’re going to get weirder, because with the Assyrians in particular, there was a particular group called the assinu.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so what does that word mean?

Fr. Stephen: That word means man-woman!

Fr. Andrew: Well, there we are.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] These were people in Assyria who were men, but then the encounter they have with the spiritual realm causes them in some way or another to sort of no longer be men. So they’re in this sort of weird, liminal space between sexes and genders.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and, to bring it back over to Odin, he was known to practice— Now, this is from—this is from the real, actual source texts that we have of Norse mythology, which I should say, by the way: all are written down by Christians. So we don’t know that this is exactly Norse pagan religion; we don’t know, but this is what we’ve got.

So anyways, Odin practices divination called seithr, s-e-i-eth—I don’t know how you would call that letter in Norse, but in Old English it’s an eth—r: seithr, and it’s considered to be disreputable kind of divination because in Norse society it’s mostly associated with women, and in order for men to practice it, they have to cross-dress. So there is, again, this sort of androgyny or liminal thing going on in terms of prophecy, at least some particular kinds of prophecy that exists all the way over there. And the reason why it’s considered disreputable in Norse culture is that cross-dressing was a big no-no. It was a dark, weird thing that you’d do. Very different image of Odin than you get from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, although, hey, you never know what Anthony Hopkins might be up for in the next movie.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That is true!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and you see this kind of thing lots of other places. One place that sort of gets brushed up against in the New Testament is there was a cult center to Kybele, often pronounced Cy-belle or Cybeli or Cybeleh, or all kinds of different ways in English, in Galatia, the region of Galatia. And those priests would, at a certain point in their initiation, enter into this level of ecstasy at which they would emasculate themselves physically.

Fr. Andrew: Yikes.

Fr. Stephen: So then after that, they, too, occupied this space, and the Romans also found the whole idea repulsive, which is saying something, because the Romans were into some weird stuff, man.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, when even the Romans think you’re weird…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, even they had their limits. They were like: “Man, this is just too weird for us!” And so they would confine the priests of Kybele to their temples and wouldn’t let them leave, because they didn’t want to see them, except for one day a year when they could come out and beg from people on one of their feasts.

But so this isn’t just a weird Assyrian thing. There are versions of this, and this is part of that frenzy, that insanity, this idea that having this encounter with these spiritual forces sort of breaks people.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re touched. That’s what that word means. Yeah, they’re touched, “tetched.”

Fr. Stephen: And in these pagan contexts we’re talking about, like Assyria and Kybele and some of these others, these pagan contexts, you notice that it’s always in destructive ways. It’s not that they’re made somehow wiser and more virtuous by this experience; it’s that they’re made crazy, or they do physical harm to themselves, or they’re removed from society by no longer to function—being able to function if they wanted to, in sort of a normal, societal, and cultural way.

And then there’s one more term before we leave our Ancient Near Eastern terms, and that’s a Neo-Assyrian term, which is ragamu—is the verb which means “to shout.” So certain prophets are called either raggimu if they’re male or raggintu—see that -tu, feminine ending again—if they’re female. That literally means “shouters” or “yellers,” but this is the kind of the idea between the Greek word that becomes important in Scripture—more on this later—of kerigma, the idea of a message that’s proclaimed.

So these would be— If the answerers are more like the oracle of Delphi whom you could go and consult with, this would be designated this prophet as more the type who shows up yelling, “The end is near,” or whatever. [Laughter]

Having talked now about those Ancient Near Eastern prophets outside of the Old Testament, we now turn to the most famous pagan Ancient Near Eastern prophet who shows up in the Old Testament, who was not an Israelite prophet, and that is Balaam, the son of Beor.

Fr. Andrew: The donkey guy. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: He does not turn into a bear, despite certain Tolkienian similarities.

Fr. Andrew: No, no, he’s not a were-bear. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: He did kind of turn into a donkey at a certain point, in a way.

Fr. Andrew: In a certain sense.

Fr. Stephen: In the book of Numbers, which I know is everyone’s favorite book of the Bible—people can’t get enough of it—Balaam gets hired by Balak, the king of the Moabites. Balak, not to be confused with Balok—played by everyone’s favorite actor, Clint Howard in Star Trek: The Original Series, episode “The Cormobite Maneuver”—

Fr. Andrew: Wow! Wow, and see, I thought— We actually had a request from someone saying the fact that we titled this episode “Prophet Motive,” that we had to make references to the Deep Space Nine episode.

Fr. Stephen: The DS9 episode, right. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: No, see, sorry, Scott Brewer. I know you’re listening. He referenced Original Series first, so.

Fr. Stephen: Way too old school for that. I worked in a TOS and a Clint Howard reference.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: I’m pretty sure that was Clint Howard’s first movie role, because he was literally, like, four years old or something at this point.

Fr. Andrew: Really?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes. He offers him tranya, which looks like orange juice.

Fr. Andrew: Right! Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Back to reality. [Laughter] Balaam gets hired by Balak, the king of Moab, and he’s hired to curse Israel. So he says, “I want you to go and put the whammy on Israel so that they will fail in battle against me,” and does not explain the scientific basis of the whammy. In Numbers 22, there’s probably the most famous episode regarding Balaam, which is where he’s riding his donkey and trying to ride over— He’s on his way to go over and curse Israel, and the Angel of the Lord comes and blocks his path. Balaam can’t see him, but the donkey can.

Fr. Andrew: The donkey does, yeah. I mean, could you say in trying to put the whammy on Israel that he was pushing his luck? Sorry, I couldn’t… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: [Sigh] First of all, it’s Press Your Luck.

Fr. Andrew: Press your luck, okay.

Fr. Stephen: So you even lose that advantage. Live radio, ladies and gentlemen! Live radio.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, right! Well, it’s not original series, I know. You could tell the joke was not in the notes.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Is that show still going? I don’t know. I have to look that up now.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they brought it back… What’s her name?

Fr. Andrew: Of all the things to bring back!

Fr. Stephen: Elizabeth Banks hosts it now. Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. The original series ended in 1986! Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, there was that whole controversy with the guy who won, like, 200,000— Anyway, now we’re really digressing. But there was a documentary about it, about the guy who won, like, $200,000-some on Press Your Luck. There was a whole scandal.

So. Balaam is riding his donkey. Donkey sees the Angel of the Lord; Balaam doesn’t. Stops, and you get this whole thing, beating the donkey trying to get it to go, and finally sees the Angel of the Lord and is like: “Oops.”

But now that we’ve talked a little about Ancient Near Eastern prophecy, and since before on this show we’ve talked about who the Angel of the Lord is, here’s an example of how this provides some important subtext. Because what makes Balaam a prophet? Why would someone hire him to go and curse Israel? Well, because he has seen and encountered the gods.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah, that’s why; that’s the only reason.

Fr. Stephen: So his powers of divine vision are apparently inferior to that of your average riding donkey in Israel.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Alas.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s a deliberate juxtaposition.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that the donkey sees God and Balaam doesn’t.

Fr. Stephen: The donkey sees God. The donkey has a better understanding of how the spiritual world works and how it affects the physical world than Balaam, the famous prophet, does.

That said, Balaam’s been hired to do a job. He’s a professional if nothing else, so he goes to try to do it anyway. First he goes to the seven altars to Baal at Kirjat Huzoth and tries to curse Israel; ends up prophesying blessings for Israel. He’s trying to speak, and God keeps putting words in his mouth. So he’s now gone from being sub-donkey-level prophet to ventriloquist’s dummy.

Then in chapter 23 of Numbers, he goes to the seven altars of Pisgah, to have another go at it. The idea— They actually build the seven altars at Pisgah. The idea here is that they’re offering sacrifices.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, to attract divine attention.

Fr. Stephen: Sort of before each try. They go to the one place where there are already these altars, they offer their sacrifices, it doesn’t work, and he’s like: “Oh. Let’s try somewhere else. Maybe this place doesn’t have the vibe any more. This sacred space is not so sacred any more.” So they go to this other sacred space, they build seven altars, they make their sacrifices. Attempt number two, strike number two: he ends up blessing Israel.

And then finally in Numbers 24, he goes to Baal Peor, another high place to Baal. Third time not the charm, and he ends up super-blessing Israel and making some important prophecies that actually— We’re not going to read the whole thing, but there are a couple of bits that we wanted to highlight, because these are bits that are quoted as prophecies in our hymns, in church, that we think about and talk about, and we may not realize that they came out of the mouth of Balaam when he was trying to curse Israel at Baal Peor.

Fr. Andrew: Right, he was a demon-worshiper! But, yeah, he said these very famous lines in Numbers 24:9: “He crouched, he lay down like a lion, and like a lioness, who will rouse him up?” Or sometimes it gets translated: “Like lion’s whelp.”

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, this is picking up on imagery from the prophecy concerning Judah, the tribe of Judah, in the testament of Jacob in Genesis 48, so this is dove-tailing with that.

Fr. Andrew: And then another one, probably more famous, Numbers 24:17: “A star shall come out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel.” I mean, these are messianic prophecies about Jesus, coming out of the mouth of this guy!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter] Now, given, he’s operating as a ventriloquist’s dummy at the time. Yeah, he also pronounces doom on the Amalekites, so he does curse somebody.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, curses the giants.

Fr. Stephen: But notice, though, how prophetically those things go together. The coming of the Messiah and the doom of the giants here are in Balaam’s prophecy sort of wrapped up together, and those two things continue to be wrapped together, throughout the Old and the New Testament. We had to talk about giants at some point; it’s Lord of Spirits. Come on.

Now, somebody may have had the ding-ding go off when we said that this third time, this third and final time that he tried to curse Israel, he was at Baal Peor. So you may remember some other stuff that went down there, some bad stuff. That was that there were these groups of Moabite—they’re usually called “priestesses” or just “women” in bowdlerized English translations; they’re actually essentially shrine prostitutes for this high place, at Baal Peor. They seduce a number of the Israelites. That results in this plague breaking forth in the camp. We talked about Phineas or Phinehas or Pinehas before, who puts an end to it.

Importantly… so there’s these two sort of dots. Dot one is: this is where Balaam makes his third attempt to curse Israel and fails; dot two is: there’s this apostasy by Israel at the same place. You might expect that at some point in Rabbinic and/or Christian tradition, they might connect those two dots and say that Balaam was involved in the apostasy, but you don’t have to wait for that, because those dots are connected already in Numbers 31 and in Joshua 13, where essentially Balaam, having tried three times and failed to curse Israel, the idea is: “Well, I can’t curse them as long as they’re following their God, but if I could get them to betray their God”—because he’s looking at it as: “Their God must be too powerful for me and for my gods”—“but if I could get them on the wrong side of their God, they’ll end up cursed.”

Fr. Andrew: Which is not entirely wrong! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, so he does understand some sort of spiritual technology here! [Laughter] “Well, you know, their God is too powerful for my god to curse, so maybe I could get their God to curse them by getting them on the wrong side of it.” And so that’s how it’s then portrayed there in the Old Testament. That idea of Balaam, then, also gets picked up in the New Testament—in 2 Peter 2, in the book of Jude, in Revelation 2—where Balaam is presented as sort of this archetype of the heretic, of the false teacher who arises within the Church and who sort of leads people into apostasy, leads them away from Christ, leads them back under the curse; they’re sort of analogized to Balaam the son of Beor. He becomes sort of the archetype of that.

But, interestingly, he did still make those messianic prophecies. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, which are quoted and affirmed, yeah!

Fr. Stephen: And it’s not that the apostles didn’t know about that when they were using him as this archetype, so they didn’t have to say every word that comes out of the mouth of these false teachers is a lie. St. Paul talks about people who were preaching the Gospel for false motives and says, “Ah, well, at least the Gospel’s getting preached.” [Laughter] It’s not sort of all-or-nothing. The fact that the prophecy came out of Balaam’s mouth or the donkey’s mouth doesn’t make it false, but the fact that a prophecy came out of their mouths also doesn’t make them true as beings. It did not make that a holy donkey.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, sometimes God makes use of people even against their will, without endorsing them.

Fr. Stephen: Right, which is very reassuring as a priest.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, thank God!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And then, just another note: Philo of Alexandria, whom we’ve brought up on the show before, identifies Balaam as a wizard.

Fr. Andrew: “Yer a wizard, Balaam!”

Fr. Stephen: Which I just think is kind of cool.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It is!

Fr. Stephen: But even cooler than that is that there was an inscription found in Deir Alla, which is now in Jordan, but which was in Moab, and this inscription is from the late ninth or early eighth century BC. The inscription is in a wall, but it’s written in a wall— These Iron Age buildings were generally made of stone, and then the inside and sometimes the outside were then plastered with sort of primitive plaster. While the plaster was wet, they would paint, essentially, use pigment to paint or write in the plaster.

Fr. Andrew: So basically fresco.

Fr. Stephen: Right, sort of, although a lot cruder than the frescoes you’re thinking of, later in history.

Fr. Andrew: Right. But basically the same technique.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Often it was writing rather than elaborate paintings, and in this case it’s writing; it’s an inscription, which makes it kind of mysterious, because it’s unclear why someone would want this on the wall of their house. But anyway. But it does date from that time; we’ve got firm dating on it. This is within what was Moab, and it refers to Bala’am, the son of Be’or, so literally the same name: Balaam, the son of Beor. It identifies him as a prophet of Ashtar, A-s-h-t-a-r, who was the wife of Kimosh, the moon-god, who was the primary deity of the Moabites.

Fr. Andrew: Is this the same guy as Shemesh?

Fr. Stephen: No, Shemesh is the sun-god.

Fr. Andrew: Sun-god, okay!

Fr. Stephen: Ashtar is generally seen, I mean, linguistically, to be a version of Astarte, who’s Baal’s wife. So this is sort of the goddess figure, your usual goddess figure coming out of Canaanite religion. So that’s who he is.

And also of a god whom we’re not sure who it is. We only have consonants, and the consonants are sh, g, and r. [Laughter] So, sugar? I don’t know. Or Shagur or Shagre. There’s a lot of ways it could go, it could have been vocalized. That is a secondary god maybe in some way related to Ashtar.

And then also the gods of Shadday, which may be a collective name for those, too, or something else, but we’re not exactly sure.

This Balaam son of Beor—exact same name—is said to have brought a prophecy from that goddess, saying that that goddess— He had had a dream that that goddess was coming to destroy the earth and bring about everlasting night.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. That’s a cheery thing to put on your wall.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I guess it was like “Don’t worry; be happy”: “Eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow we die”; “Live, laugh, love”? I don’t know.

Fr. Andrew: It’s the “Live, laugh, love” of its time, eighth-ninth century BC.

Fr. Stephen: Have a great time, because—endless night! But what it shows us is this Balaam son of Beor was some kind of known figure.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, this is still how many centuries later or whatever that he’s still being talked about.

Fr. Stephen: He’s some kind of known figure, and a lot of people interpret this as him being some kind of folk-hero. I think that may be a little bit of presentism, comparing him to Paul Bunyan. [Laughter] Hey, Minnesotans! There’s a bunch of Minnesotans listening to this, going: “You’re saying Paul Bunyan isn’t real!?”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] He’s just very tall and Dutch, right?

Fr. Stephen: He’s not. Babe is real.

Fr. Andrew: The blue ox is real.

Fr. Stephen: The blue ox is real.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the bull of heaven, Behemoth.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s probably reading a little too much back in terms of the idea of a folk-hero like that, but he is clearly some kind of major figure, some kind of major figure in their religious past, too. And this is in Moab, and of course it’s the Moabite king in Numbers who hires him. This is, to be really presentist about it, this is like a special guest appearance; this is a crossover episode in Numbers. This is like when Mork showed up on Happy Days, where Balaam shows up during the story of Israel.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow! I had almost forgotten about that! Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Wow, we’ve ranged far and wide in this episode so far.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: You know, when we don’t have an engineer sitting on us, this gets weird, man, even in real life.

Fr. Andrew: Because I’m engineering this show, right. It’s okay.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So, finally, in our first half here, in talking about extra-biblical prophecy, we need to say a little bit about prophecy in Greece, Greek prophecy. It’s really going to verge into Greco-Roman. How was it seen in those circles? In Greek prophecy, oracles are way more common than yellers.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because I’m sure there’s more money in being an oracle. They’re coming to you. It’s a little cynical, but, I mean, they’re coming to you, looking for answers.

Fr. Stephen: Well… A lot of the oracles also were slaves, either virtually or literally, like in Acts.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that’s true.

Fr. Stephen: But the oracle at Delphi was virtually a slave. And Delphi, the oracle at Delphi was the most famous one, probably, but there were oracles all over the Greek and Roman worlds who practiced this. And this is possession, remember. The oracle at Delphi was believed to be possessed by Apollo. Apollo was generally seen to be the god connected with prophecy. We talk about him a lot. I think even people who haven’t read Nietzsche are under this whole Nietzschean Apollonian-Dionysian; it’s kind of infected everybody to speak of Apollo. But Helios is the god of the sun, so Apollo—there is a connection to the sun, but Apollo is more a light-bringing figure. That’s why he’s connected with philosophy: a bringer of light and wisdom. So, light-bringer more like the devil in the Old Testament. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, that kind of light-bringer.

Fr. Stephen: If you look at—I know we’ve mentioned this before—actually one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse is actually a moldy old Canaanite god, [Resheph], who was depicted as an archer. This is actually referred to in the psalm. The arrows that fly by day, the fiery darts of the evil one: these are [Resheph] references. He was a sort of demonic being, this Canaanite god, who had these plague arrows. The earliest those artistic depictions of Apollo we have are similar: he has plague arrows. He seems to have been an assimilation from the Near East of that type of idea.

Apollo is a much darker figure than we give him credit for being, ironically, being the light-bringer type, but he’s also the one associated with prophecy.

In terms of the shouter-type of prophet, who shows up in the message, the most famous one is easily Tiresias, at least in terms of texts we still have that have been passed down to us, who was associated with Apollo, and who was blind. We’ll talk about how he became blind in just a second. Tiresias shows up a bunch of places. He was thought to be the son of a nymph and a human, so we’ve got some nephilim action going on there. There’s this nature-spirit and a human who produce him. He’s from and associated with the city of Thebes.

He has this— What makes him a prophet is that he has this encounter with Zeus and Hera, sort of direct encounter with the gods. That sort of initiates him as a prophet, but then he kind of gets in trouble with Hera, because he sees two snakes copulating and gets grossed out by it and kills them. So Hera, and Athena for that matter, when you look at their cults in Greece, are constantly connected to serpent imagery and snake imagery. There were snakes in certain places that were sacred to Hera; Athena is often depicted with a snake. So there’s a whole “woman and a snake, snake giving woman wisdom” motif in Greek stories that gets really creepy when you think about Genesis 3.

But so when Hera gets mad because he killed these snakes, Hera turns him into a woman. This again. And Tiresias, now a woman, decides to make the best of it and becomes a priestess of Hera and gets married and has some kids.

Fr. Andrew: Does he change back after a while, like seven years or something?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, he remains a woman for seven years and then gets changed back into a man. And then he has the misfortune—because, again, he’s having these encounters with the gods all the time, because he’s a prophet—he sees Athena naked, taking a bath.

Fr. Andrew: Not good.

Fr. Stephen: Walks into the bathroom. “Oh no!” And gets struck blind. This is how he becomes the blind prophet Tiresias. So you get that kind of blind seer motif that you were referring to, this idea that you sort of sacrifice, again, your ability to fit in with and interact with the material world in order to instead interact with and see the spiritual world, and also the idea that, again, these encounters with the gods, in his case, are all sort of destructive to him. They all exact this horrible sort of toll on his humanity, whatever there is, since he’s only half-human in the first place.

Then he shows up a bunch of famous places. He shows up in the Odyssey, and in the Odyssey, the interesting thing about him is it’s his shade; it’s his spirit.

Fr. Andrew: He’s dead.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that shows up in Hades when Odysseus goes there to talk to Achilles, and he sacrifices the black goats and he pours the blood into the pit and the shades come and drink the blood. Not creepy at all! [Laughter] But before even— The other shades have to come and sort of drink the blood, like, to reinvigorate themselves, like Achilles, so he can talk to them, but Tiresias just sort of comes wandering out.

Fr. Andrew: “Hey, guys! What’s up?” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Tiresias’s shade is sort of of a different category. It’s still in Hades, but there’s still shades of the rephaim here. He’s kind of quasi-divine, and so even his shade seems to be in this different category, albeit in Hades, the goth club that is Hades. He’s in a sort of different state.

He also shows up in the story of King Cadmus. He shows up in Oedipus Rex, Oedipus the King, to tell Oedipus, “Hey, oopsie! Killed your dad, married your mom: not cool!” which leads to Oedipus gouging out his eyes, sort of in imitation of Tiresias with his blindness, because now the truth has been revealed to him and so now he can’t see any more.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. We’ve given you here kind of the outlines in the first half of sort of what the prophet is in the pagan world, sort of surrounding the Scriptures. Hopefully you’ve seen the through-line that this is sort of a dark thing. This involves madness; this involves mutilation. This involves sort of destructiveness, the interaction of humans with these spirits. So in our second half, we’re going to turn to the Old Testament, where we will get a little bit of a different picture of prophecy—not completely dissimilar, but different.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] A little bit of a breather, as it were, from all this weird, dark stuff! All right, we’re going to take a break and we will be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! That’s our theme in metal. That was sent in by listener Rob. So, thank you, Rob, very much for that. I know you were trying to get our attention. [Laughter] Wanted to leave you hanging for a while!

Fr. Stephen: In terms of that commercial, was that Fr. Jeremy doing the…?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that was Fr. Jeremy doing the—yeah, reading his own book there.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t do great live reads. That was a better live read than I do. But it came off to me as a little dry, so I want to tell people: Even if that came off to you as a little dry, that’s a really good book, and you should buy it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Fr. Stephen did endorse the book.

Fr. Stephen: I endorse this product. I am Commander Shepard. No— [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I’ve looked through it. I haven’t read it yet, but it looks like he’s… A lot of the stuff that people like about some of the stuff that we talk about is in there, just focusing on this one topic, though, on sacrifice. I’m looking forward to reading it myself. I haven’t read it yet.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, I will not have to write a book on sacrifice, because he covered it.

Fr. Andrew: Wow! There you go, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes, so, by all means, get it. With that said… [Mysterious whining noise]

Fr. Andrew: Nice. All right, well, we’re in the second half despite what you— I’m not sure what that sound was. [Laughter] But we’re live!

Fr. Stephen: It was terribly mysterious!

Fr. Andrew: Yes, despite what you heard from the Voice of Steve as we were going to the break, we’re not taking calls, but I am monitoring the chat on our YouTube stream and on Facebook. A couple of people have asked questions that basically would just simply be—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, what are they saying?

Fr. Andrew: Oh! [Laughter] Well, it’s funny. There was a fun little blip during the first maybe 15, 20 minutes or so, where if you actually sort of watched the video feed, instead of the generic banner, you could see the furniture at the Chesterton studio. And people were talking about: “What could this mean? Why are we looking at furniture?” So that was a lot of fun.

Fr. Stephen: I think you know why that happened. We were talking about divination.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right! That became the discussion.

Fr. Stephen: “This must be a sign!”

Fr. Andrew: “Why is this chair at that angle?”

Fr. Stephen: “Who can interpret this for us?”

Fr. Andrew: Yes, yes. And also we received one little bit of review from a gentleman who is unhappy with the number of Star Trek references we’ve made so far.

Fr. Stephen: What, how few? We can make more!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I think it’s too many for him.

Fr. Stephen: I’ll take it under advisement. We’ve only made one!

Fr. Andrew: I know! I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: One and a half!

Fr. Andrew: Here we are. But, you know, this is the show! [Laughter] All right, back to prophecy, but now we’re looking at prophets of the Old Testament, prophets of Israel, rather than this dark, freaky, bizarre pagan stuff.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] It gets a little freaky sometimes, but not nearly as freaky as what we were just talking about.

We’re going to start with titles again, the Hebrew titles that are used to refer to prophets. The main one, and the one that people know if they don’t know any others is navi, naviim being the plural. That “v” sound is actually bet, so it could be pronounced as a “b”: a “buh” or a “vuh,” depending on context or vocalization: navi or nabi, naviim or nabiim. And that word comes into Hebrew from Akkadian, from the Akkadian nabu, which means to call out or to yell. So, again, keep in the back of your head this Greek idea of kerigma, of a message that is called out.

That’s going to be the primary context in which prophecy is talked about. We don’t really see oracular prophecy, possession-type prophecy in Israel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you get David inquiring of the Lord, “Should I do this?” especially like: “Should I go out to this battle” or whatever, and God saying, “Don’t do that” or “Yes” or “Do that.” But, like you said, there’s not oracles being possessed and God speaking through them kind of thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right. There is a phenomenon, especially in Joshua and Judges and 1 and 2 Samuel (or 1 and 2 Kingdoms) of Holy Spirit possession. And using those terms probably freaks people out, but deal with it. [Laughter] That’s what everybody calls it. It’s usually translated that the Holy Spirit “comes upon” someone, like one of the judges, who rushes upon them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not that they were filled with the Holy Spirit, which is this very kind of saintly image, but, yeah, like you said, comes upon or rushes upon.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then usually they kill a whole lot of people, but it’s that they do something. It’s not that they’re possessed and a voice comes out of them, and someone speaks through them. So that particular type of prophecy you don’t really see in the Old Testament, but you do see that.

There is a certain affinity in that Holy Spirit possession phenomenon in the frenzy idea, but the idea there is more that the actions that the person is taking in that case are the actions of God, not their own. Like they’re meting out God’s judgment; it’s not their own vengeance or what have you, is the idea that’s trying to be conveyed by that. So that’s a different thing than sort of oracular possession.

So, that said, navi is not the only term that’s used for prophets. The actual earlier term that we find in the older, or the oldest parts of the Old Testament are—there are two terms: hoze or roeh, both of which literally mean a seer, someone who sees something. That again gives you this visionary idea, the idea that they have this direct encounter with God and then the second piece, that they’re given a message to deliver.

There’s also the feminine form, nevia, which is used both for a prophetess, if you want to go all King James, a female prophet, someone like Deborah in the book of Judges, but is also used for the wife of a prophet.

Fr. Andrew: Sort of a title by association, just like we have, like presbytera.

Fr. Stephen: Right, which literally means “priestess.” [Laughter] Literally means “female priest,” and is used for that as well. So the same thing was true with prophets. A good example of that in the Old Testament is Isaiah. God tells him to go into the prophetess—and that’s not some woman who’s not his wife; that is his wife! [Laughter]—and have a son and name him Maher-shalal-hash-baz.

Fr. Andrew: Right. God would not tell him to go and be with a woman who is not his wife. That’s not something that God says to do.

Fr. Stephen: Right. “Go to the prophetess,” definite article, meaning specific one: your wife.

Fr. Andrew: Yours, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And name him Maher-shalal-hash-baz. We actually read that at I think two points in the liturgical year. And let me just say: people who translated that from the Greek so you don’t have “Maher-shalal-hash-baz,” and they put in: “Name him ‘Rose-quickly-and-divides-the-spoils’ ” or something. It’s not working, dude. Maher-shalal-hash-baz.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There’s an actor now that that’s his name. Like, that’s his name. I can’t remember what his last name is, but he goes by something shorter, but that is his actual first name.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. It’s impressive. I mean, Isaiah’s son, I’m just saying. Throwing it out there. Baptismal name, got to come up with one… [Laughter]

So these are the terms. One of the most prominent ways, though, that we talk about and use that term of navi or naviim, prophets, is to refer to a division of the Old Testament. Classically, the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament is divided into three parts. There’s the Torah.

Fr. Andrew: Right, first five books.

Fr. Stephen: There’s the Naviim, the Prophets; and then the Ketuvim, which is the Writings, sort of the rest of the stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Right, these are the traditional Hebrew terms for these divisions in the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Right, those are the Hebrew words: Torah, Naviim, Ketuvim. That’s why you’ll sometimes hear Jewish folks and the occasional Evangelical who’s trying to sound cool refer to it as the Tanakh, because those are the first letters.

Fr. Andrew: T-N-K, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: That big central division is the Prophets. And you’ll hear sort of the Scriptures referred to in the New Testament as “the Law and the Prophets,” which is a translation of “the Torah and the Prophets,” to sort of cover everything, because people were still debating which of the writings were in and which ones were out. They weren’t really debating it, just different places had received different collections of writings that they considered authoritative at that time.

The Prophets, that division of the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament, is generally considered to consist of, one on hand, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, the books of Samuel, the books of Kings (or the books of Kingdoms), and then also, on the other hand, the sort of writing prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the Jeremiah material, Ezekiel, and then the book of the Twelve, which I have now discovered a lot of people haven’t heard that term before.

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: But the book of the Twelve is what you’ve probably heard referred to more commonly in modern English Bibles as the Minor Prophets.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so it was bound together as a single collection, is that why it’s called—?

Fr. Stephen: It was all one scroll.

Fr. Andrew: One scroll, yeah. What’s interesting about that list that you gave is that normally, at least in English, when we think about prophetic books, we would think about books like Isaiah or Jeremiah, but Joshua!? which is a series of wars and so forth. Judges!? These are just sort of narratives. Is that prophecy? “Thus saith the Lord…” etc. etc.?

Fr. Stephen: Right, so this is where our German heads once again rear their ugly heads in the 19th century. A lot of English Bibles, you will not find the Prophets, including all these books as a division; instead you find historical books and prophetic books. These have been divided. And those books with Joshua and Judges and Ruth and Kingdoms, those are considered “historical books” that are telling us about “history.” And then the other books are books of prophecy, and that even gets skewed into “this is all stuff about the future.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so I mean these are genre categories that we’re putting onto them, versus the ones that the people who received them initially, how they understood.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and not just initially: until modern times.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, sure, right.

Fr. Stephen: Even when these are distinguished, like by Church Fathers and stuff, it’s “the former prophets and the latter prophets.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just a chronological distinction.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but it’s still all considered Prophets. So this is a problem we’ve talked about at length now on the show, the modern view of history intruding itself into how we read the Scriptures and the Old Testament in particular. It makes a big difference whether you read the book of Joshua as a prophetic book, as a book of prophecy—or as a history book, especially if you have a modern idea of history.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Yeah, it’s the story of a people, which is the traditional view of history, versus a reconstructed narrative of events based on evidence.

Fr. Stephen: Right. [Laughter] And prophecy, remember prophecy comes out— We talked about this a little bit when we talked about apocalyptic again. Prophecy is presenting this divine perspective, so it’s not objective; it’s not claiming to be objective. The book of Joshua is making no more claim to be objective than Isaiah is. The author of the book of Joshua is presented to us in Scripture as speaking for God. This is God speaking about these events, just as in Isaiah, God is speaking about events. So there’s not a fundamental difference between the prophetic writer of the book of Judges talking about these elements of the history of the tribes of Israel and Isaiah coming and talking about what was talking in his day or what was soon to happen or what had happened in the past. This is all presenting God’s perspective, God’s interpretation; it’s presenting meaning of events, not just presenting events and making the claim that those events actually happened in exactly this way. It’s not saying they didn’t happen, but it’s saying something about them and about their meaning, not…

Fr. Andrew: And how does this function within the community; what’s it for.

Fr. Stephen: Not just presenting a series of facts. So, yeah, that is very important in terms of how we approach those books, that those are also considered books of prophecy; those are also considered a message from God. And if we consider that history of the people was understood at that time to be “this is who we are; this is where we came from; this is where we’re going,” then this is God telling Israel: “This is who you are; this is where you came from; this is where you’re going.” And that’s with that prophetic understanding.

Even though those are the prophetic books, those texts are designated as “the Prophets,” prophecy doesn’t start there. You’ve got prophecy obviously—obviously to most people—in the Torah.

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: So, Moses, right? But even before Moses, really the first person who’s presented as a prophet, directly by the text of the Torah—because I know somebody’s going to bring up Enoch, but Enoch doesn’t say anything in the book of Genesis… Anyway. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s just mentioned.

Fr. Stephen: He himself doesn’t say anything. You’ve got to get the book of Enoch for that, and that’s that whole discussion. [Laughter] Abraham is really the person who’s first presented as a prophet.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and the first thing that we—the first major thing that we know about him is that God says, “Get up and leave.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. God appears to him and says, “Get up and leave.”

Fr. Andrew: Right! “Get up and leave.” This is one of these basic sort of elements of prophecy, someone who’s kind of outside of the social order. He’s living in Ur, the greatest city of the time, the civilization, and God tells him to leave and go someplace else.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so he’s removed from the social order by this experience of having this direct encounter, and he has many of them over the course of his life, where he sees God, stands and talks to God, has these direct encounters with God, unmediated. Of course, we’ve talked about how this is Christ in our series on this. So he has these direct encounters, direct encounters with God, and is directed to do things, to go places and do things. This is really the first person who’s presented as a prophet in that sense. We’re told Enoch has this—some kind of direct encounter with God, but we’re not told in the text of Genesis what comes of that. But you can certainly understand why, after the fact, people reading that in Genesis would say, “Oh, Enoch must have been a prophet,” based on that.

So this continues with his— We don’t really have anything very clear like this with Isaac, but Jacob certainly—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, multiple visions.

Fr. Stephen: —sees God multiple times, and wrestles with him, and sees the ziggurat, because—

Fr. Andrew: A.k.a., the ladder.

Fr. Stephen: Right, at Bethel, the house of God. So he has these direct encounters. But then we see a little bit of a shift when we get to Joseph, Jacob’s son, whom the narrative follows, because Joseph does not have, as is recorded, these direct encounters. Instead, he has dreams and interprets the dreams of pharaoh.

Fr. Andrew: Right. And he’s embedded within civilization, although he is still kind of an outsider on some level. He’s brought in as a slave; he’s a Hebrew. But it’s interesting to look at the pattern with his life, it’s that he’s not only brought in as a slave, but it’s when he’s in prison that he’s called up as this answerer, as an interpreter.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but because, ultimately, God is moving him into position there to save his brothers; to save his family, he’s going to have to be sort of re-embedded, unlike his father and grandfather and great-grandfather, re-embedded into society. He’s going to become an official in Egypt. And so he doesn’t have these direct encounters. God still communicates with him, God still has this relationship with him, but it’s more mediated than it was with Abraham who’s going to go live as a nomad, or Jacob who lives as a nomad. So there’s a shift there for that purpose. And then when we get to Moses in Exodus and Moses has the direct encounters again with God in the burning bush and then later on, it’s out in the wilderness. He doesn’t see God while he’s in Pharaoh’s court. He gets pulled back out of civilization and is living in the desert when he has these direct encounters. And he then sort of becomes the paradigm for what a prophet is, because he has these extended experiences, direct experiences with God: 40 days on Mt. Sinai, 40 days and 40 nights in the divine council.

Fr. Andrew: Right, face-to-face, as a man speaks to his friend.

Fr. Stephen: And then going into the tent of meeting. So he’s sort of on this ongoing basis in a way that no one before that, and really nobody after that in the Old Testament, has, just this sort of ongoing basis. And it’s not just me saying, hey, quantity-wise he’s the paradigmatic prophet. The promise at the end of Deuteronomy is that God’s going to send them a prophet like Moses.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he is treated in this mode.

Fr. Stephen: Deuteronomy sets him up as the paradigm: This is what the prophet of Yahweh is going to be like; he’s going to be like Moses.

You can see that there’s a modulation here from what we saw outside of Israel already, just with these prophets of the Torah. On one hand, yes, these figures who have these direct encounters with God, it does do something to them. It does pull them out of society. It does make them sort of function at a different level, it does relativism them, it does remove them, make them kind of an outsider figure. But that is not done in this destructive way.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you don’t see them losing their minds and harming themselves and… Yeah, it’s very different. And I would say, “Well, why is it different?” It’s because they’re having an encounter with the God of the universe, who created them and loves them, versus demons. [Laughter] I mean, that’s a big difference, because the one you’re encountering and having a communion with is very, very different.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so there’s continuities and discontinuities.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed, yes.

Fr. Stephen: But the discontinuities there are significant and important, and they continue. They have wives and children. They have… So it’s not that they’re made something inhuman or subhuman or non-human, and they’re in some weird, liminal, non-human space now, but that they’re now a human who lives and acts and understands things differently because they have this different perspective now on the things of the world.

We get to— As we have prophets coming to Israel and people come and say, “I have a message from Yahweh the God of Israel,” we get to a point where people need to discern who really is coming bearing a message from Yahweh the God of Israel and who’s nuts or a liar or a grifter. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a problem that still holds today!

Fr. Stephen: Really?

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know! I know, you want to believe the best of everyone.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes. You know me. Pollyanna Fr. Stephen. [Laughter]

There has to be an understanding of what makes someone… We’ve talked already about there being these two pieces, but the first and foremost piece we kind of get spelled out in Jeremiah, about the fact that that direct encounter with Yahweh the God of Israel is necessary, because if whatever this message is is something you’ve divined—word choice intentional—that means it’s not from Yahweh the God of Israel. If it’s something you’ve read in the tea leaves or you’ve worked out for yourself or you took every eighth letter of the Torah…

Fr. Andrew: Wait, are you saying the Bible Code… The Bible Code is not…?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man.

Fr. Stephen: And you know how I know this?

Fr. Andrew: How do you know this?

Fr. Stephen: Because if you use the same algorithm on Moby Dick, on page—I think it’s like 173 or something—it says, “There are no codes in the Bible, but there are codes in Moby Dick.”

Fr. Andrew: Nice! [Laughter] I thought there was going to be a Patrick Stuart thing, but no.

Fr. Stephen: No, no. We’ve already gone to that well. If I were going to do another Moby Dick thing, it would be Khan.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah!

Fr. Stephen: Anyway. So that direct encounter, over against those kind of ways of divining—“flipped open my Bible and it opened to this page,” whatever else—that’s sort of the key thing, and that’s spelled out in— So in Jeremiah there’s this contest between Jeremiah and these other people who claim to be prophets of Yahweh. They kind of have the upper hand, because Jerusalem’s under siege by the Babylonians, and Jeremiah’s showing up, actually from the God of Israel, saying, “Yeah, you guys are doomed, man!”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Not what anyone wants to hear!

Fr. Stephen: Right, and they’re saying, “You traitor!” These other so-called prophets of the God of Israel are saying, “No, no, we’re good, man. Everything’s good. God’s going to deliver us.” So God himself, through Jeremiah, sort of lays out what’s required.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so this is Jeremiah 23:18-22.

For who among them has stood in the council of the Lord, to see and to hear his word? Or who has paid attention to his word and listened? Behold the storm of the Lord! Wrath has gone forth, a whirling tempest. It will burst on the head of the wicked. The anger of the Lord will not turn back until he has executed and accomplished the intents of his heart. In the latter days you will understand it clearly. I did not send the prophets, yet they ran. I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied. But if they had stood in my council, then they would have proclaimed my words to my people, and they would have turned them from their evil way and from the evil of their deeds.

I think it’s worth pointing out here it starts out: “Who has stood in the council of the Lord to see and to hear his word?” It’s not just “words”; it’s “the word,” because you don’t see a word; you see the Word—the Word of Yahweh, the Word of the Lord, Christ himself.

Fr. Stephen: And when you’re standing in the council of Yahweh, the Person you see and hear is the Word, the debar Yahweh, the Word of God. See previous episode.

But so you have here those two pieces. You have piece one: you have to be in the divine council. You have to have this direct encounter with God, like Moses had, like the previous prophets have had. And then you get sent on a mission, and so you get this sort of inverted there in verse 21: “I did not send them, but they ran.” They didn’t just show up; they came running! [Laughter] They were very eager. And he did not speak to them, yet here they come with some message they got somewhere.

We see that second piece especially laid out if you read Isaiah, especially. Isaiah has the vision of the Lord, and then there’s the whole dialogue of “Whom shall we send and who will go for us?” And Isaiah said, “Here I am. Send me.” The “us” being the council, meeting there with the cherubim and the seraphim. That being sent, then, being sent out with this message. Again, as we were just reiterating in Jeremiah, remember where it says, “the Word of Yahweh, the Word of the Lord, debar Yahweh came to blank,” this isn’t a whisper lilting in the wind.

Again, because this is being contrasted with people kind of divining it or figuring it out or working off hints. That is the bad kind. [Laughter] The kind we’re extolling here is you see and hear the Word of the Lord. It’s clear. This is the Word of the Lord; this is a Person, showing up and talking to them. So this is the Word who, St. John tells us, became flesh; this is Christ, coming and speaking to these people. Or they are brought into the divine council and Christ is there, speaking to them, and they see him and hear him and interact with him.

We have to here disambiguate a little between a false prophet—which is what we’re talking about here. This is a false prophet. This is someone who presents [himself] as a prophet but is not a prophet, versus, for example, the prophets of Baal.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I just want to break in, actually. We just got a pretty relevant question from question.

Fr. Stephen: That’s shocking that it came from Facebook, but anyway.

Fr. Andrew: I know. This is from Evon—I think it’s pronounced “Evan”? E-v-o-n. She writes this: “So when King Saul prophesied with the prophets, was he just possessed by the Holy Spirit, or was he actually counted among the prophets?” That’s her question. It’s a good question.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So he is an example— We’re going to get into this a little bit more in just a minute, of which this is a specific example. Saul—when that happens, Saul is looking for David. David’s on the lam. And he goes to this dwelling-place where Samuel is. Samuel is sort of the prophet and judge of Israel at this time, but he lives in this community of prophets, this sort of village of prophets, where has his own altar, by the way, and offers sacrifices. What the text says is that this place is so sort of thick with the Holy Spirit, with the spirit of God, with the prophets living there, and this is such a holy place, this has become such a sacred space, that when Saul goes there looking for David, thinking David might be hiding there, as soon as he enters the place, he sort of has this encounter with the Spirit.

We tend to think: Hey, if you suddenly had this direct encounter with God, that would be this wonderful ecstasy or this joyous moment—but you don’t actually see that anywhere with the prophets in the Old Testament. When Moses sees the burning bush, he kind of freaks out. Isaiah, when he has his vision, he’s standing in the divine council, basically curses; he basically cusses! [Laughter] He’s like: “I’m blanked. I am done for!”

Fr. Andrew: “Lo, I am undone.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, that’s a nice, bowdlerized way… “Woe is me, for I am a sinful man!” And so that’s why. To come into the presence of God is to suddenly become very much aware of your lack of holiness. With Saul at this point of his life, where the Holy Spirit has left him and an unclean spirit has entered him, it becomes sort of this almost violent encounter where he strips naked and he’s thrashing around on the ground. It seems more like one of these pagan prophets having an encounter than what we see with the Hebrew prophets, but it’s because of who Saul is at the time. Saul’s a lot more like Balaam than he is like Samuel at that point.

Fr. Andrew: That’s a great question! And she just informed me that her name is pronounced “Yvonne,” which I’ve never seen it spelled that way, E-v-o-n, so I learned something new today.

Fr. Stephen: You’re not the spelling police, man! Just let it go.

Fr. Andrew: I’m not, but… [Laughter] Spelling changes. It just does.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but, I mean, if you spell it with a Y, if you spell Yvonne with a Y, then poor kid’s at the back of the line coming in from recess every day. You don’t need that. Alphabetical order.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true.

Fr. Stephen: Unless there’s a kid named Zeke or something.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, my name starts with an A, so I’ve always been somewhere near…

Fr. Stephen: Deep privilege.

Fr. Andrew: I’m privileged, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Check yourself!

Fr. Andrew: I know.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Alphabetically privileged.

Fr. Andrew: All right, so, yeah, false prophets and Baal prophets. This is another issue.

Fr. Stephen: The Baal prophets aren’t false prophets; they’re really prophets of Baal. They really have this spiritual relationship with this—what we would call a demonic spirit. Whereas these false prophets are people who are not prophets at all but who claim to be. That distinction kind of gets blurred by modern folks who want to say, “Well, Baal doesn’t exist, and so therefore they’re essentially in the same boat. They’re just making it up.” But the kind of experience we’ve been talking about that these pagan prophets had isn’t made up. Someone doesn’t go into a fevered ecstasy and emasculate themselves physically imaginarily. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, one or two crazy people might do that, but you don’t get this sort of sustained institution of that kind of thing unless there’s some kind of results that people are actually experiencing.

Fr. Stephen: Given… I know about Marshall Applewhite, but still. You don’t have that going on over centuries, and I would also submit that there’s probably something demonic going on with Marshall Applewhite, too.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s the Heaven’s Gate guy, by the way, everybody, if you don’t know who that is.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, if you don’t know who Marshall Applewhite… I mean, people don’t just sit around watching documentaries about cults all day? Seriously? In between episodes of Star Trek?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I don’t do it all day, but I do sometimes do that, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So these are two different things. And this is important to distinguish also because—and we’ve even commented on this on the show before—there are folks, among some groups of our Protestant friends, who identify as prophets or as being able to prophesy. And, as we’ve said before, though I don’t know if it got through before, we’re not saying those people are demon-possessed, but if they’re not, they’re not like Baal prophets. We’re not saying they’re like Marshall Applewhite. We’re not trying to draw that comparison. But someone can be self-deluded and be a false prophet in this sense we’re talking about. They might even think they’re legitimately a prophet. They may think that the message that they’ve intuited or however they believed they’ve gotten it—came to them in a dream, whatever—they may believe that that is from the Lord, and it may not be. That makes them a false prophet, and that makes them spiritually deluded.

Spiritual delusions do come. Those are not good things. Spiritual delusions don’t come from God; they come from somewhere else. I’m disambiguating my former comments on the show to try to clarify them. But you enter into this messy space here because Deuteronomy, for example, is so clear on what is supposed to happen to false prophets, which is, namely, the first time they say something that they claim comes from Yahweh the God of Israel that doesn’t, and it becomes apparent that that did not come from Yahweh the God of Israel, they’re stoned to death.

Fr. Andrew: Right! They get executed.

Fr. Stephen: And so we are not, for the record, advocating stoning anyone to death!

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: No matter how much they prophesied that Donald Trump would already be president again by now. They should not be stoned to death by you or anyone else.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Which—that was a thing!

Fr. Stephen: Yes!

Fr. Andrew: I mean, there was a lot of prophecy going on that that… Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so we’re not advocating for stoning anyone to death, but, if you follow the show, if you’ve read Religion of the Apostles, you know that the language that’s used in the Old Testament of being cut off from the people and the death penalty is applied in the New Testament. It’s not thrown away; it’s applied in the New Testament in the form of excommunication, because the life of Christ is the life of God. That’s real life. Biological life is an image of that, a derivative form of that. That’s the real life, so being cut off from that is actually a worse punishment than being stoned to death.

Again, reiterating, the purpose of excommunication in the New Testament is to drive someone to repentance. So the idea here is, what we would be saying is: if someone is under the spiritual delusion that they are a prophet and it becomes clear that what they’re saying and claiming is from God is not from God, then they need to be cut off from communion with the people of God until they come to repentance and come back to the truth and come back to Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and the normal way that happens is excommunication. We see that in the New Testament. As it says—this is very strong language—being handed over to Satan so that they would repent, so that their soul can be saved.

Fr. Stephen: For the destruction of their body and the salvation of their soul. And that destruction of the body is included in there to make the connection between the death penalty of the Old Testament clear. So that’s the idea, but the purpose is repentance. The purpose is to break that delusion that someone is suffering under, because it’s destructive to them as much as to everybody else. Because after the first few times you make those prophesies and they turn out to be bogus, people stop listening to you.

Fr. Andrew: Sure!

Fr. Stephen: But that delusion can still do a lot of harm to you, even though everybody else is over it. So that’s why it needs to be broken in that way.

But again we see in the Old Testament, here sort of at the end of our second half; we see that another point of continuity is that the prophet in the Old Testament, because of this direct encounter with God and this direct relationship, their authority derives from that direct relationship, and so they stand as sort of an outsider over against the king and the high priest and the priesthood in Israel. Not over against as opposed always—sometimes, depending on what the king and the priests are doing—but they are sort of separate; they’re sort of outside that system.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s this sort of— It’s not checks and balances exactly, but that’s kind of the concept. Independent authorities. And the prophet functions as sort of this outsider.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then the prophet can sort of come to the king—Nathan can come to King David, Moses can come to King Aaron and say, “You done messed up, A-a-ron.” [Laughter] And straighten him out. So there are those structures, but then there are also those structures with those whom God is dealing directly and who provide this important check, this important corrective.

We see in the Old Testament that these prophets form communities. We just used the example or talked about the example of Samuel, who had this community of prophets around him. We see this in the lives of Elijah and Elisha; it talks about them going and staying on the other side of the Jordan, with the community of the prophets. There were these groups. These people were married; these people had children, but they’re still kind of outside. They’re in their own place. They’re not within. And it’s not just when it’s corrupt; it’s all the time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s inherent to prophecy that it has this removal.

Fr. Stephen: And so you even get some—not as extreme as we saw in the pagan world, but you get some kind of extreme forms of this in the Old Testament in places. We just talked about that whole episode with Saul; that’s an example of an extreme episode. You get with Ezekiel, for example— So Ezekiel is living with the other deportees in Babylon in a regular Israelite community, but he does things like wandering around naked for a while, burning dung and cooking over it. He does these sort of bizarro things that separate him from everyone else and that are a product of this direct experience with God. So he is changed by it. It’s not in a physically destructive way, but it is in a way where there are these sort of public displays of being set apart, being different, being outside, having this different perspective on all things cultural.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is quite different from a lot of our modern, glitzy, spectacular prophets, who live at the top of a very wealthy heap, generally speaking. [Laughter] I mean, not all the time, but a lot of them are that way. They are not living in caves and exercising asceticism and…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. If Benny Hinn wanders the streets of, say, Omaha, naked for seven years, I will believe he is actually a prophet.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Previously unsaid sentences in human history! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. There you go.

Fr. Andrew: So, that being said, we’re going to go to our second and final break. We’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: There it is. There’s that metal version of our theme once more. Thank, you, Rob!

Fr. Stephen: By your powers combined, you are the Orthodox Intro Team!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true, we’re like Voltron! Well, welcome back, everybody. It’s the third half of our show on prophets and prophecy. In the first half, we talked about prophecy in paganism; in the second half we talked about prophecy within Israel in the Old Testament. And now we’re talking about the New Testament. I mean, are there still prophets in the New Testament? Isn’t that just an Old Testament thing? Wasn’t John the Baptist the last, the final? What’s going on with that?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, is the Church a non-prophet organization?

Fr. Andrew: Hey! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Lame. The answer is no. We may think that, and it is common to refer to Old Testament saints as prophets, for example, and we do talk about St. John the Forerunner being the culmination of the prophets or even sometimes the end of the prophets, but—brief digression. The word “end” like telos, “end,” and the words we usually translate as “perfect” in the New Testament in Greek really mean more like “mature” or “complete.”

Fr. Andrew: The fullness of the prophets in some sense.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, not like the last one—

Fr. Andrew: The Final Prophet.

Fr. Stephen: —and not like perfect like flawless. So, yeah, that’s what we’re saying about St. John, is that he is the ultimate fullness. That doesn’t mean— Just like we said Moses is sort of this paradigmatic prophet; that doesn’t mean there weren’t any others. If anyone would want to say, “Well, no, I’m drawing a hard and fast line: there are no prophets after St. John the Forerunner,” you’re going to run into some problems when you get to the book of Acts.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because that word is used very explicitly to refer to this one guy named Agabus.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, Agabus—also under-utilized baptismal name.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Very true. I have never met an Agabus.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and “Aggie” is a perfectly good nickname in some parts of Texas.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] If you’re out there, Agabus, write in! Tell us! We want to hear from you! Let us know.

Fr. Stephen: Agabus, the Prophet Agabus—he is explicitly identified as a prophet, the two times he shows up in the Acts of the Apostles. The first time he shows up, he shows up in Acts 11 to warn everybody that there’s going to be a famine.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and he comes kind of out of nowhere in the classic prophetic style.

Fr. Stephen: He’s not like hanging around, he’s not one of the apostles, he’s not one of the seven deacons—he’s not in one of these formal Church leadership positions. He just shows up and has this mention. He’s even announcing a famine, so this is like old-school Elijah stuff. [Laughter] This is St. Elias stuff he’s doing. This is as classical-prophet, Old Testament thing as you can get.

The second time he shows up, he shows up in Acts 21, and he even does—this time he does some Ezekiel stuff, because Ezekiel was always called upon to do these sort of visible things—“Take two staves, bind them together, break them,” this kind of thing. When Agabus shows up the second time in Acts 21, he shows up with this belt.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s weird. He takes Paul’s belt and ties up his feet and hands and says—oh, I’ll just read it—“Thus says the Holy Spirit: This is how the Jews at Jerusalem will bind the man who owns this belt and deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles.” So he’s prophesying Paul being arrested.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so he’s doing this kind of weird prophetic act, very Ezekiel. It’s not just that the text calls him a prophet, it’s not that he says, “Thus says…” Notice “Thus says the Holy Spirit” instead of “Thus says Yahweh,” for all you people who don’t think the Holy Spirit being God is explicit in the New Testament. [Laughter] It’s not only the Holy Spirit is God; the Holy Spirit is Yahweh, according to this pattern. But it’s not just that. It’s that he’s, again, doing something that the prophets in Scripture did, doing this prophetic action, this display, which, strictly speaking, isn’t necessary. He could have just shown up and said, “It’s been revealed to me by the Holy Spirit that you’re going to get arrested when you go to Jerusalem.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but everyone’s going to remember how he took Paul’s belt and tied it around his hands. Everybody’s going to be like, “Oh, yeah, I remember that!”

Fr. Stephen: Because this is part of this—again, this prophetic thing, this sort of display.

So we have this prophet in the book of Acts. The book of Acts does not really, like, meditate upon his existence.

Fr. Andrew: No, he just comes and goes.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it just takes for granted that, yeah, there’s a Prophet Agabus.

And so then we also find, especially in 1 Corinthians, St. Paul talking about prophecy, and he’s not talking about prophecy— Like St. Peter talks about prophecy; he says, “No prophecy was ever given by the will of man.” He’s talking about the Old Testament Scriptures. St. Paul isn’t talking about the prophets of old; he’s talking about prophecy as a gift within the Church in Corinth. There are some prophets in the Church of Corinth, or could be in the Church of Corinth. In 1 Corinthians 12:10, he lists it as one of the gifts that the Spirit has given to the Church: “to some, prophecy,” so this is paralleled with these other kinds of gifts, like teaching and these sorts of things.

When he brings it up in more detail of chapter 14 of 1 Corinthians, St. Paul is very deliberately trying to distinguish the gift of prophecy from the gift of tongues.

Fr. Andrew: Right. I mean, it’s pretty clear if you read the chapter. He doesn’t say that they’re the same thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, he’s literally arguing the exact opposite. He’s literally deliberately saying they’re not the same thing, which is a distinction that I think is lost on at least some of our more charismatic friends, who tend to blend those things together a little more.

And the way he distinguishes this in particular is that he says that tongues are directed toward the unfaithful: outsiders, those outside the Church.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so it’s an evangelistic tool.

Fr. Stephen: Whereas prophecy is directed toward those in the Church, toward the faithful.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a pastoral tool.

Fr. Stephen: That makes them two different things, very clearly.

Fr. Andrew: And he says of course that tongues requires an interpreter; it requires somebody to explain what is being said, which basically just means that he’s talking about what we saw in Acts at the day of Pentecost where they’re speaking and people understand in their own language. It’s about foreign languages; this is what we call xenoglossy, that that’s what he’s talking about. The point of being able to speak foreign languages is so that you can preach the Gospel and evangelize.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Tongues is something directed outwards. I don’t know how you explain that from the current sort of charismatic view of tongues-speaking, because that would seem to imply that tongue-speaking of that kind, glossolalia, would be something you did toward unbelievers as an evangelistic tool, and I don’t think that’s how it functions in those communities, but that’s how St. Paul says it’s supposed to function. That’s why I think it’s much more clearly the Pentecost issue, the ability to speak other languages, and saying very basically, “Don’t say things in other languages if there’s nobody around who speaks that language, because it’s pointless. It just creates confusion.”

Whereas prophecy, again, is toward the faithful; it’s directed toward the Church. This is someone who has had this kind of direct encounter with God and who is then going to share from that with the people of God.

We’re going to argue— A lot of the rest now of the third half is going to be making the point—and it’s a point I’ve made before, not in as much detail on this show, but other places—that, really, our paradigmatic prophet for the New Testament—if Moses is the paradigmatic prophet of the Old Testament, the paradigmatic prophet of the New Testament is actually St. Paul.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. So how does that work?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And that’s not how we’re used to thinking of St. Paul.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no. We don’t call him the Prophet Paul.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and we’ve been trained by a long course of Western course history—I’m looking at you, St. Augustine and Martin Luther—to think about St. Paul in a very different way. That starts with what gets called the conversion of St. Paul.

Both… And this comes from a fairly honest place with St. Augustine. St. Augustine was himself a convert to Christianity. After going through sort of a Platonic phase and a Manichean phase and other phases, he finally comes to Christianity. He had this experience, and so when he reads of St. Paul and when he reads St. Paul’s letters, he kind of over-identifies. Since he over-identifies, he kind of casts St. Paul as himself. He says, “This experience I had must be like the experience Paul had when he converted from Judaism to Christianity.”

Martin Luther, of course, is an Augustinian monk, literally, and an Augustinian in influence also. He very quickly casts his own experience as St. Paul’s experience. The Pharisees of which St. Paul was one [become] medieval Roman Catholicism and St. Paul becomes Martin Luther who has this change of religion. Really, it’s all about faith, and now that’s all wet.

But neither of those is doing justice to St. Paul, or the Pharisees, for that matter, as they actually existed. And neither of those is how St. Paul’s experience is actually described. A first big clue to that is the fact that this happens in about AD 35, and there are not two separate religions, Judaism and Christianity, at the time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Christianity is a movement within the Judean community.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and one that’s only existed for a few years. Christ’s ascension was as long ago as Biden becoming president! [Laughter] There’s not been a lot of time for development here. So the idea that St. Paul was leaving one religion and joining another religion just does not work. Just on the face of it, that’s not what’s happening. It can’t be.

If we set that aside, if we set all this conversion stuff and the way we’ve been taught to look at St. Paul, and we look at how St. Paul describes it… Because not only does St. Luke describe it, this episode on the road to Damascus gets described several times in the New Testament. It’s a key event in the New Testament. It gets narrated sort of as it happens in the narrative of Acts. It gets narrated a second time at the end of the book of Acts, when St. Paul is speaking about it. And then it shows up again in St. Paul’s epistles. A couple of times he talks about it directly.

We have a lot of direct sort of testimony here from St. Paul and St. Luke as to exactly what happened here and how it was understood by them. When he describes this experience, he’s on the road to Damascus. Christ appears to him: he sees Christ; he sees the Word of God. The Word of God—debar Yahweh, Christ the Word—comes to him, speaks to him, reveals himself to him. He has this direct encounter, and then he’s sent on a mission.

Fr. Andrew: And that word “sent” is pretty key. The word “apostle,” apostolos in Greek, means one who is sent out. It’s actually also a military term, like for a sortie as we would call it now, which is a good French word. But it’s a group sent out or a person sent out on a mission. But that’s not the first time that we see that word, not just in the New Testament; that shows up in the Greek Old Testament.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The verb apostolo that stands behind it is the verb that’s used, for example, in the Greek of Isaiah. “Here I am, send me”: that’s the verb for send.

Fr. Andrew: Hmm. So it’s already kind of a prophety word. Prophety? Prophetic? Prophetish? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: In Greek, Isaiah is the one sent; he is the apostle of the divine council to Israel. We see there this pattern, but there’s even more direct than that. One of the places that St. Paul talks about this experience directly is in Galatians. He talks about it a fair amount in Galatians, actually. And everyone, every scholar who’s actually a scholar, accepts that St. Paul wrote Galatians. I know there are people who argue about other epistles, but, I mean, friend-of-the-show Bart Ehrman, I once saw in a debate with a Jesus mythicist, and when the Jesus mythicist said he didn’t believe Paul wrote Galatians, Bart Ehrman laughed out loud and pretty much ended the debate, because the guy didn’t like being laughed at. So even friend-of-the-show Bart Ehrman knows that it’s ridiculous to suggest that St. Paul didn’t write Galatians. So this is straight from St. Paul—

Fr. Andrew: If anything is.

Fr. Stephen: —describing his experience, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Right, okay, so this is Galatians 1:11-16.

For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through the revealing of Jesus Christ. For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the Church of God violently and tried to destroy it, and I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers. But when he who had set me apart before I was born and who called me by his grace was pleased to reveal his Son to me in order that I might preach him among the nations…

And that, of course, parallels almost identically in some ways…

Fr. Stephen: And the Greek quotes it.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, and the Greek actually literally quotes it.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, the Greek you can throw in quotation marks.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, interesting. Now, this is not from the Greek, but you’ll hear that this is basically the same. This is Jeremiah 1:4-5, Jeremiah speaking of himself.

Now the Word of the Lord came to me and said: Before I formed you in the womb I knew you and before you were born I consecrated you. I appointed you a prophet to the nations.

And, as you said, the Greek Old Testament, Paul is quoting that when describing himself.

Fr. Stephen: Right, he’s taking the same words and applying them to himself in terms of what happened, again, on the road to Damascus. So St. Paul saw what happened to him as a prophetic call, like Isaiah had or like Jeremiah had or like Moses’ direct encounters. That’s how he understood what had happened.

What else do we see in terms of parallels, then? Moses has this direct encounter, and he’s sent with something: the Torah. In the same way as what St. Paul is saying here in Galatians, he’s sent with the Gospel. Moses receives the Torah during that encounter; St. Paul here in Galatians is saying he received the Gospel in that encounter. He didn’t hear it from anybody else, he didn’t get it from anybody else; he received it from Christ in the way that Moses received the Torah from Christ on Mt. Sinai.

We even see— Notice what happens to St. Paul after his encounter. Note his way of life. He becomes nomadic; he travels from place to place.

Fr. Andrew: And he’s celibate, unlike most of the apostles.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he’s an outsider. He’s even an outsider to the other apostles!

Fr. Andrew: Right, he functions as a correcter even to St. Peter.

Fr. Stephen: And he says—he makes this clear: “I didn’t go after this experience. I didn’t go consult with the apostles in Jerusalem. I went out into the desert of Arabia.” He goes out into the desert by himself. He’s sort of thrust out into the desert by this experience, and that’s where he hones it. That’s the same Arabia where in the same epistle he talks about Mt. Sinai being in Arabia.

Fr. Andrew: He’s not identifying where Mt. Sinai is. [Laughter] Yeah, no, it’s that: “I had a Sinai experience when I was in Arabia” is essentially what he’s saying.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then you notice how he functions going forward, even with the other apostles. Coming to St. Peter in Antioch and calling him to account.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah: “I withstood him to his face.”

Fr. Stephen: What the prophets did with the priests and kings. Or coming with a message to St. James in Jerusalem. Where he’s not part of those structures, but he’s functioning outside of those structures as an apostle to the nations because of this direct encounter that he’s had. St. Paul is a prophet in the New Testament.

Fr. Andrew: He’s doing all the same things that the prophets do.

Fr. Stephen: This is not a different phenomenon; this is the same phenomenon.

We need to have a note here, because of some previous episodes and things and some potential misunderstandings on what we’re saying here, on visions.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so what’s up with visions?

Fr. Stephen: And even dreams.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think most of the time when people think of visions, if someone said, “I had a vision, they think: Okay, you’re deluded, dude. You’re seeing things.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they think: Hallucination! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Hallucination! Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Something not-real.

Fr. Andrew: A mirage.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. That’s not what a vision is in Scripture, or even a dream, for that matter. When we think of dreams, we think of dreams as just being like: well, your sort of brain-computer is still churning while you’re asleep, and it’s still processing the things from the day. Or maybe if you’re a little more sophisticated and into psychoanalysis, then your brain is representing things from your unconscious to you that you can’t deal with while you’re awake or whatever, but it’s still this internal churning and not-real. There’s no sort of reality to it.

Visions in the Scripture… When someone—when Isaiah has his vision of Yahweh, he’s not saying, “I saw a hallucinatory icon of Yahweh the God of Israel.”

Fr. Andrew: No, right. He’s saying God appeared to him. That God appeared to him, not that: “I imagined it.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Jacob at Bethel: Yahweh is standing on top of the ziggurat.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and a vision doesn’t necessarily have to be like some wavy, misty whatever, because most of the visions that we get in Scripture, it says, “And a young man was sitting at the right side of the tomb” or something like that. Like, that’s the way that visions sort of usually work. There’s nothing sort of woo-oo-oo about them. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Woo-oo. Well, yeah. And they come back and they say, “We have seen a vision of angels.” They weren’t saying the angels weren’t really there. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, since they saw them.

Fr. Stephen: “Vision” is here functioning… We’ve got to back to our episode about the nous. The nous, this perceptive faculty for the spiritual world, is most commonly—of our senses, it is most commonly analogized to the eyes, to seeing, more than to hearing or smelling or tasting. So that’s the analogy that’s made. When Gehazi has his eyes opened by Elijah and sees the hosts of the Lord, the angelic hosts, again, they’re actually there; he just did not perceive them before, but now he [does].

So a vision is noetic perception, which most of us who aren’t prophets don’t do all the time. [Laughter] And even most prophets don’t seem to do all the time. Some of them seem to do it all the time; some of them just some of the times. This isn’t fake. This isn’t something not-real. This isn’t the opposite of physical. When St. Paul saw Christ, he saw Christ, bodily: Christ’s body. He saw Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Because Christ still has a body.

Fr. Stephen: He is really there. When we say, “Christ is in our midst,” we mean it, even though most of us don’t see him. There have been occasions in the history of the Church where someone has actually seen him, and they’re really seeing him because he’s really there; we just don’t perceive him directly, because of the clouding of our nous, because of sin, etc., etc. See that episode.

But this is also true of dreams, because otherwise what are you going to do when Scripture tells us that St. Joseph the Betrothed had an angel come to him in a dream?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it doesn’t say he dreamed up an angel.

Fr. Stephen: Right: he hallucinated an angel who told him something and believed it. It says: An angel came to him, and the place where the angel came and appeared to him was in his dream while he was asleep.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And I think the fact that most of us don’t have that experience makes us analogize from our experience to that. Like, I don’t remember most of my dreams. I know people that remember all of their dreams, but I don’t remember most of my dreams. Even the ones that I do, they’re a little hazy. I think that when someone says, “Oh, he had a dream,” that’s what they think, that it must have been just like that: a little hazy, like: “Oh, well, I don’t know. What did that mean?” Whatever, whatever. A little undigested bit of beef, spot of mustard. There’s a Dickens reference for the night.

Fr. Stephen: We need to consider that if the mind is the nous and not a churning away computer, then dreams also involve the nous, not a churning computer. And so this is why, for example, in the compline prayers, which are the prayers before going to sleep, we pray that “during the night God would dispel all the dark fantasies of Satan.” Just like thoughts can come from places, dreams and things in dreams can come from places, and enter in and are perceived by us in dreams.

I don’t think anyone would say, even though the scientific materialism kicks in and we want to say dreams are fake—I don’t think if anyone came to us and said they had a horribly disturbing, like sexually violent dream, we would say, “Oh, it’s just a dream. It doesn’t mean anything. Don’t worry about it!” We would take that seriously. We would say, “Okay, something’s going on here.” Because we know, deep down, dreams aren’t actually fake. There is something going on there. Not all dreams are prophetic visions, but dreams are the activity of the nous while you’re asleep, whereas what we call thoughts are the activity of the nous while we’re awake. It’s just while we’re awake they’re joined by the five senses in a way that they’re not usually when we’re asleep.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s interesting: the question that we usually ask of these experiences is: “Was that real?” I understand why we feel like we need to go there, but the question that’s asked within Christian tradition, within Scripture, is not “Was that real?” but rather “Where did it come from?” And perhaps even more importantly: “What are you going to do with it?”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. “What does it mean?”

Fr. Andrew: “Are you going to repent?” Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So now, all that said—prophecy is firmly at the center of the New Testament as a phenomenon. Then people are going to ask, “Where is it in the Church today then?” What we’re going to say is that primarily—not entirely, because, just like in the Old Testament, King David was a prophet. Part of the whole prophet thing and the direct encounter with God thing is that God can choose to reveal himself to whomever he wants. [Laughter] But generally this is a function of the monastic tradition in the Church.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, you look at the way they live: they live these separate lives… And, the ones that are kind of the most associated with all of these behaviors tend to live pretty separately. They’re even separate from them. If you go to Mount Athos, for instance, most of the monks are living in the monasteries, but there are these guys who live out by themselves in caves. And there’s even this tradition of the naked ascetics who suddenly appear when they’re needed and then disappear when they’re not. There’s all kinds of weird stuff that’s right along these same patterns that we’ve been talking about throughout this whole episode!

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so monastic communities are this sort of direct continuation of the prophetic communities of the old covenant. What is it that is given as this great gift to the people who we would say have the gift of prophecy in this sense is the vision of Christ in his uncreated glory, and that is not a different experience than the one that St. Paul had.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s literally the experience he had!

Fr. Stephen: It literally is the exact experience he had! And we see how that functions, that, throughout the history of the Church, monastics have stood, especially the monastics who had the gift of prophecy, outside of the established—the emperor, the patriarch, those hierarchies—they stand outside of it, and at various points in the history of the Church have come and challenged the emperor, have come and challenged a bishop or two, about their behavior or about what they’re teaching or about how they’re exercising their office. And so, in the same way that the prophet functioned over against the priest and king, we see that happening in the history of the Church.

The saint who sort of articulated this, like put it into so many words, is really St. Symeon the New Theologian, who literally talks about this kind of charismatic—remember, “charismatic” is “gift.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, charisma.

Fr. Stephen: Not: “This guy has a lot of charisma, so people follow him.” [Laughter] But this is the gift; they’ve got the prophetic gift. He talks about the vision of Christ in his uncreated glory. He talks about this experience, and he talks about how those whom God has gifted with that kind of direct authority through this prophetic gift, then have the ability to speak against the established authorities when they become corrupt or when they become… And it’s important that that does not… Well, we’ll get to that in a second.

We also have even sort of extreme examples within monasticism, of people who have this experience with God and have sort of a more extreme reaction in terms of how they stand outside of society.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s the holy fools. They’re kind of, again, “tetched.” They behave in these sort of insane ways, but it’s insanity that leads to repentance for people. That’s calling them—

Fr. Stephen: And it’s not destructive to them or anyone else.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s a weirdness that’s even weirder than sort of the inherent weirdness of monasticism. What’s interesting— It’s interesting to me, particularly the Russian tradition really has a lot of these holy fools, and I think they seem to multiply as the empire gets bigger and more powerful—

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s exactly it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you need more of that kind of thing as worldly power accumulates.

Fr. Stephen: And when you have St. [Basil the Blessed], naked, confronting Ivan the Terrible, that’s not really very different than [Isaiah] going around naked, and calling for the repentance of the people. In fact, it’s the same.

But so there are these sort of extreme things or pillar saints—St. Symeon the Stylite, he goes to live on a pillar. They’ve had this experience, and that now sets them apart. But we always see the other part, too. St. Seraphim of Sarov goes out into the wilderness by himself, has this experience of the vision Christ in uncreated glory, and ultimately ends up opening up his cell so that people can come and receive the wisdom that he’s received from God, so that he could pass it on. It’s not just: Oh, God makes some people weirdos. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: He has this relationship to the people of God, and that’s his purpose, to be this kind of anchoring tension.

Fr. Stephen: And to be a prophet. To speak to them the message that God has for them.

Fr. Andrew: I think that one of the things that is really important to point out about all this is that, as you look at the history of prophecy in the people of God, while they call these structures of power especially to account, they don’t subvert them. It’s about calling people to repentance, not about destroying the community or even destroying authority.

The thing is that you can sometimes see— I think that there’s a certain millenarianism that’s crept into all of Christianity, including Orthodox Christians that live in the West—and maybe it exists elsewhere, too, but this is the culture that I’m living in—that… I’m an American, so I participate in American culture. Americans have a streak within our culture of “Let’s tear it all down and start over.” We just kind of love that idea. This is not healthy, people! It’s actually not.

Sometimes we can interpret this tradition of ascetical charisma and the prophetic gift of correction in those terms, like: “Everyone, disobey your priests and bishops, and just listen to this one holy elder over here.” Whatever he’s saying, if he’s functioning in the traditional role of prophet, then what he’s doing is actually calling everybody to repentance and not saying, “Everyone, leave your church communities.” He’s not destroying the community; he’s actually trying to heal it. I think that’s a really important point. He’s not trying to destroy the community! A true prophet doesn’t do that. There are some revolutionaries out there who are okay with tearing everything down.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So look at how the prophets functioned, for example, at the Davidic monarchy. The Davidic monarchy produced the Messiah. That’s the whole concept of the Davidic monarchy, that it’s leading to the Messiah; it’s leading to Christ. So the institution of the Davidic monarchy was a holy thing that produced the Messiah, but the men who held the kingship in Judah were most often very wicked people.

Fr. Andrew: Right! There’s very few that actually come off well in the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: So God sends prophet after prophet to the kings of Judah and the people of Judah to call them to repentance, as a gift to them, because he loves them and because of the importance of the institution. To call them to repentance, never to undermine the institution. There’s never a call to: “Man, people are too evil to have this much power. We need to get rid of monarchy.”

Fr. Andrew: Or bishops, or the priesthood.

Fr. Stephen: Or the high priest, right. It was never: “Abolish the high priesthood. Let’s forget this whole tabernacle-Temple thing.”

Fr. Andrew: And one of the reasons why that’s important is because prophets aren’t infallible either, as we saw with Balaam: extremely fallible! [Laughter] They’re not infallible either, so you can’t say, “Well, this is where all the authority is now,” and ignore everything else.

Fr. Stephen: The prophetic institution, if we want to call it that, is there as part of God’s provision to make the institutions of priest and king function properly. They need it to function properly. It’s actually a support for it. If it weren’t there, they’d collapse into tyranny and false religion. If God hadn’t sent prophets to Israel, all you would have had were the golden calves of Jeroboam son of Nebat, and a bunch of wicked kings. So in the same way, it’s a gift.

If you really want an example of that, I know we’re a few weeks past it now, but you can still go back and read the Life of St. Mary of Egypt. Look at the way that St. Mary, who’s a prophetic figure if ever there was one—living in the desert, naked, for years, with no food—look at the way she reacts with Elder Zosimas, who’s a priest.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And one of the last things that she says to him is, “Now look, I need you to go back to the monastery because there’s some problems, and I need you to put them in order, and here’s what the problems are.” So she functions in this corrective way.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and she completely defers, though, to the office, the institution of the priesthood.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Yeah. Right.

Fr. Stephen: Defers to it, does not speak a negative word against it, against that institution. So it’s not about: “You shouldn’t be at that monastery; you should be out here with me.” [Laughter] But she’s functioning how? She’s trying to restore health to that monastery.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: That’s part of that prophetic role.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. All right, well, in thinking of some of our final thoughts about prophets and prophecy in the Scriptures and elsewhere, we had just talked about this question of: How does the prophet function in relation to the rest of the community? The way that in my mind it works out is that he’s not a revolutionary; he’s a renewer. That’s his role: he wants to renew the community. He wants to renew the Church; he wants to renew society. That’s his job, and he does that by standing outside of it and by having these encounters with Christ. Suffice it to say, this is not the life for everybody, and it’s not even the life for monasticism, even though monasticism as a whole institution functions in this prophetic way.

But there’s certain individuals that really do have this gift, and I think one of the ways that you can recognize that the prophet is a renewer and not a revolutionary is that what he or she—because there’s some females, too; we just mentioned St. Mary of Egypt— What he or she has to say is actually not anything new with regards to the revelation from God. It’s really about calling people back, helping them to remember and to obey again the Lord. That’s the task.

I think that the way that modern people tend to think about prophecy and the prophetic role is really not that. It might be there; I’m not saying that everybody doesn’t think of that or whatever, but often what we want is a kind of special revelation. “I need to have a special, secret word.” It becomes this kind of— We’re back to divination. We’re back to the pagan style of prophecy. “I need some esoteric knowledge that I can’t get in some other way,” whether it’s the Bible Code kind of stuff or “What is God’s will for my life in particular? Should I do this or that? Should I turn left or right?”

But I think that the cure for a lot of that kind of thinking is found in the parable that Christ tells of the rich man and Lazarus, where they both die: Lazarus is in Abraham’s bosom with Abraham, and the rich man is in torment. The rich man says, “Abraham, send Lazarus back from the dead to go help my brothers,” and Abraham says to him, “Look, they have Moses and the prophets. Let them hear them.” The rich man says, “No, no, if someone came back from the dead, then they’d believe,” and Abraham says, “If they’re not going to believe Moses and the prophets, then they’re not going to believe even if someone did come back from the dead.” Which of course—this is speaking about Christ’s resurrection on a certain level, but also when Abraham makes this appeal to “Moses and the prophets,” that’s to say, in this particular context: “Look, they don’t need some special revelation. They just need to become obedient to the revelation that we’ve all been given.”

Again, much of the Scripture is considered to be prophetic books within the scope of the Scripture, meaning that it is given by God. It’s the story told by God about who we are, where we are now, where we’ve been, who we are now, and where we’re going, and most especially what we need to be obedient to. I think that that’s this notion of Moses and the prophets— We’ve been given that. We’ve been given the Scriptures. We’ve been given the Tradition of the Church. If I want something other than that, I think that’s—I have a big problem: I have a humility problem… I don’t know, there’s all kinds of ways that that’s a problem.

One of my favorite writers, because he’s so witty, is G.K. Chesterton, who—I’ve never checked, now that I think about it, whether he said this or not for sure, but a saying attributed to G.K. Chesterton—maybe he did say it—was: “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.” That one of the difficulties that we have as modern Christians is that, in many cases, we haven’t really tried it. Or we’ve tried bits—if I’ve speaking of myself, I’ve tried some of Christianity, but there’s still been a lot that I have not been obedient to.

I don’t know. Does it make sense to want special revelation if I haven’t actually acted on the revelation that I have? When we think about prophecy, that, I think, is our starting point. And that all these prophets that we already have, that we should receive them in the way that God sent them: to call us to repentance, to bring us back to faithfulness and obedience to the Lord. That’s a compelling call. That is a compelling call. All right! Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: It’s really easy for us to sound like, as a couple of Orthodox priests here, sound like we’re picking on our charismatic friends when we talk about folks who claim to be prophets and then say whatever—whatever political statement, whatever thing they hope happens, that this is a prophecy from God—and to point to them as false prophets and maybe even seem like we’re laughing at them, but I think—and I’m sure this is not exclusive— in fact, I know this is not exclusive to Orthodoxy, but, since we’re Orthodox priests we should probably talk about our Orthodox brethren first and foremost.

We’ve got a lot of false prophets of our own, and it’s false prophets in a little bit of a different sense, in that we’ve been very much acculturated in the United States to kind of want to see ourselves and to take on the role that prophets play over against institutions and the establishment, without necessarily being called to take it. You watch Star Wars: the rebels are the good guys. We don’t make TV shows and movies about an honest cop who follows all the rules. We make TV shows and movies about the tough cop who plays by his own set of rules. We don’t want to be, like, a lieutenant in the Gotham Police Department; we want to be Batman, working outside the system, to bring justice.

That’s sort of our whole ethos: “I’m the one who’s going to stand up and point out to all these bishops why they’re wrong and they’re all sell-outs. I’m the one who’s going to fix the Church and straighten everything out. I’m the new St. Maximus the Confessor, because he was a layperson, and I’m a layperson. Yeah, we’re going to do this. Or pick your priest who had to oppose his bishop.” And what we’re doing when we do that—and I’ve even been guilty of that in the past; I hope only the remote past, but maybe there’s elements of myself I don’t see and I’m still guilty of it—is we’re being like those prophets in Jeremiah whom God didn’t send, but we come running, because we’re eager to get at it.

We’re eager to sort of be St. Maximus the Confessor in the sense that we’re going to speak our truth to power. We’re not so much eager to be St. Maximus the Confessor in getting our tongue cut out and our hand cut off and actually suffering. That, not so much. But we want to be the ones who are going to straighten everybody else out and speak this truth to these powerful people who we’re totally certain are totally corrupt, unlike us.

And that’s not what St. Paul means when he says we should seek the gift of prophecy; that’s the opposite. This is what that whole parable Christ tells us about the splinter in the eye and the log in the eye is about. The way that one seeks the gift of prophecy is you seek the first part. You seek the experience of God. You don’t try to form your own mission. You don’t try to piece together your own message which you’re going to try to claim is from God, but you seek that first part: encounter with God, the experience of God.

And we know, or at least we should know, if we’re listening to the Scriptures and we’re listening to the Church, how you do that. You do that by repenting. You do that by purifying yourself. You do that by being faithful. You do that by loving others, not emotionally or mentally, but concretely showing love to others, through acts of kindness and assistance and help and self-sacrifice. And if we pursue that and if we do that, then it may be—at the time of God’s choosing, in the way of God’s choosing, to the extent of God’s choosing—he may reveal himself to us. And when he reveals himself to us, in whatever way, to whatever extent, he may then have some task for us that we need to do, and it may be that included in that task might be correcting someone, but to jump to that is putting the cart before the horse. It’s saying that Christ said something that he didn’t say. It’s saying that he sent us when he didn’t send us; we just came running. It’s putting the cart before the horse.

And so we should, as St. Paul says, pursue the gift of prophecy; we should seek to come to know Christ ever more deeply, to experience him directly. We have the opportunity, more than once a week in a lot of cases, but at least once a week—most of us have the opportunity to receive Christ himself into our bodies, and then be sent out. We have these opportunities. We know what we need to do, but doing it requires this long, hard work. Doing it may require a lot of suffering, may require persecution, may even require martyrdom. We may end up becoming like St. Maximus in all the ways that we don’t want to become like him, in our flesh, rather than in the ways we think we want to become like him, because of our pride and our vanity.

But that’s what the pursuit of the gift of prophecy looks like. It’s never something we can demand from God. It’s never something that there’s a technique that will guarantee it, but it is a possibility that is out there, if we’re diligent about living the Christian life. And if we do that—if we purify ourselves, if we repent, if we’re loving—we may never receive the gift of prophecy; we may never receive the vision of Christ in uncreated glory. That may not be what God has for us. We may never be sent to correct everyone and save the Church, but we just might find salvation for ourselves, for our own souls, for our own lives. And that is what we’re really after in the end, not the other.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that is our show for today. Thank you very much for listening, everyone. If you didn’t get to listen to us live, we’d still love to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Facebook page; or you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits.

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Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. And while you’re there, order Fr. Jeremy’s book on sacrifice.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, good idea! Thank you very much. Good night, everyone! God bless you. Christ is risen! He truly is risen!ss you.