Publication Preview | Beyond the "Cessation of Prophecy" in Late Antiquity

Jae H. Han, Prophets and Prophecy in in the Late Antique Near East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.

My book, Prophets and Prophecy in Late Antiquity, contains all the interesting things that I stumbled upon in graduate school. And I do mean “stumble.” I had always envied those who seemed to know exactly what they wanted to study, read, or do with their lives. I was never one of them, even in graduate school. I started my PhD with a vague sense that I wanted to work on “Jewish Christian relations.” I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, nor did I know precisely what I was looking for. But I did know what I liked. I liked reading rabbinic literature. I liked the way it felt, its texture. I liked how the rabbis were both complicated and complicating, how broader questions about culture, religion, textuality, and empire didn’t fit in quite the same ways when thinking with and about the rabbis.

It was in reading about the rabbis that I stumbled upon the Sasanian Empire. I had never taken the Sasanian Empire seriously before, yet a series of happy coincidences conspired to make it a more important part of my training. In fact, many of my peers interested in “Irano-Talmudica” were already studying Syriac and incorporating it into their research. And if they were learning Syriac, I had to as well. What worlds it opened up!

At the same time, professors Renata Holod and Ann Kuttner at the University of Pennsylvania were co-teaching a graduate level course on the art and architecture of the Sasanian world. This class made me think seriously for the first time about space, movement, and materiality. More importantly, this class offered a material framework for thinking about topics that I had only previously encountered in texts, especially regarding the religious diversity of the Sasanian world.

And I felt that there was more that could be said about this “diversity.” In reading something like Shai Secunda’s The Iranian Talmud (2013) alongside John Reeves’ Heralds of that Good Realm (1996), it seemed as if there were two as-of-yet unintegrated visions of religion in the Sasanian Empire. To be crude, on the one hand, there was the vertical relationship that stressed the rabbis alongside the “religious” literatures and institutions of the ruling Sasanian elite. On the other hand, Reeves seemed to highlight a more horizontal vision of “religious diversity,” one that placed the Manichaeans alongside Mesopotamian Baptists, Jews, Christians, and Mandaeans. Of course, this division was merely heuristic; the Mesopotamian incantation bowls, for example, demonstrate the close proximity of Christians (including perhaps Manichaeans), Jews, and Mandaeans to one another. There must therefore be different ways of contextualizing rabbis along the horizontal axis. Given the wealth of Manichaean texts discovered in Egypt and across Asia, the possibility of reading rabbinic and Manichaean texts together began to take shape for me.

Other circumstances led to the emergence of prophets and prophecy as the topic of my dissertation and eventually the book. “Prophethood” (or more accurately, “apostleship”) is a central idea in Manichaeism. There was also the example of the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, which scholars had long claimed contained some idea of a “cycle of prophets” as well. The Homilies was especially fruitful in so far as it seemed to lay at the intersection of so many of my different interests: prophethood, prophecy, orality, revelation, rabbinic Judaism, and even Neoplatonic theurgy (which itself is concerned with “true divination” and how one attains it).

The stakes of this topic became clearer with the publication of Patricia Crone’s The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran (2012), especially because I found myself disagreeing with Crone’s assessment of the late antique texts. The book is courageous in its attempt to chart a development against the persistent discourse, both ancient and modern, that prophecy ceased or waned in late antiquity (or earlier). As I read it, Crone wanted to find in late antiquity a “Jewish Christian” conception of prophets loosely similar to the idea of a “cycle of prophets” found in various forms in early Islam. The problem – which is not unique to Crone by any means – is that such a conception of “prophethood” seemed possible only if we looked at the late antique texts at just the right distance, angle, and filter.   

To be frank, I just don’t think any of our texts say this. Or, if some of them do, alternative readings are available and perhaps more plausible. In fact, the Manichaeans themselves do not have a single model of prophethood (although they do exhibit a push for systematicity). In the introduction to the encyclopedic work known as the Kephalaia of the Teacher, for example, Mani (not the historical figure, but a stock literary character within the work) tells us that the Church of Jesus Christ will perish sometime in the future because Jesus never wrote down his teachings. Yet in the very first chapter, the very first kephalaion, that very same “Mani” tells us that the Church of Jesus Christ already perished, which is why Mani had to restore the Church. Which is it? Did the Church of Jesus perish in the past to make way for Mani, or will it perish in the future, to prove the ultimate triumph of the Church according to Mani?

These concerns would eventually make their way into my published work, especially the book. The book itself is divided into two halves of three chapters each, with the first half on the topic of prophethood and the second half on the notion of prophecy and revelation. I will now spend some time explaining the first two chapters of the book, just to give a sense of how I am historicizing the ancient texts.

In the first chapter, I focus on a polemical homily attributed to an early follower of Mani named Baraies. I forefront the argumentative nature of this homily in order to move away from habituated ways of reading Manichaean texts as if they simply contained “facts” about a religion called Manichaeism. Let me briefly explain the problem. If we already have a conception of Manichaeism as a “pre-modern modern religion,” especially a “Religion of the Book,” then one tends to read Manichaean texts as if they simply and unproblematically refer to and represent “Manichaeism.” Thus, when Baraies argues that Mani was only the last apostle in a line of ancient apostles, we merely confirm what we already knew about Manichaeism, namely, that it “believes in” a cycle of prophets. The circuit of knowledge is closed.

But the moment we try to parse out relevant actors and potential counterarguments to Baraies’ bitter homily, this too-irenic-to-be-true picture of Manichaeism begins to shake. It is in this spirit we should revisit Baraies’ homily. Baraies argues against his opponents by stating Mani is the most recent apostle in a long list of ancestral apostles. These ancestral apostles included figures like the Apostle Adam, Apostle Sethel, Apostle Enoch, and the Apostle Paul. Yet for Baraies’ argument to work at all, his opponents must have shared Baraies’ roster of ancestral apostles. Baraies could not have made an argument designed to convince his opponents based on the apostolic commonalities between Sethel or Enoch and Mani, for example, if his opponents did not also believe Sethel and Enoch were their ancestors as well. And if Baraies and his opponents shared this ancestral heritage, then it seems plausible to me that they were members of the same community, however divided. The only point of difference is whether Mani “fits” in that community’s ancestral heritage or not. If so, then Baraies cannot represent an already-distinct and independent religion that we can categorize under the sign of “Manichaeism.” Rather, it seems more likely that he is a member of an already-existing community in the midst of a schism, a schism centered on whether Mani fits a “traditional” mold of prophethood. Conveniently for him, Baraies assumes that he has the right to define what “traditional prophethood” even looks like!

The second chapter expands and contextualizes Manichaean prophethood as found in the Manichaean Kephalaia, which consists of two enormous codices known as the Kephalaia of the Teacher and the Kephalaia of the Wisdom of my Lord Mani (both probably early 5th century). The introduction to the Kephalaia explicitly states that these codices are the records of Mani’s oral revelation that cannot be found in his written revelation (how could one not immediately think about the distinction between the Oral and Written Torah?). Of course, we are in no way beholden to believe this claim. Instead of reading the Kephalaia as an account of the historical Mani’s preachings, scholars today see it as the product of a largely anonymous “scholastic community” following Mani’s execution in 277 CE. Therefore, instead of reading these kephalaia from the prism of the 3rd century, we can instead contextualize it through developments in the Late Antique Near East up to the latter half of the 4th century. 

The broader goal of this chapter is to normalize Manichaean texts within the scholarly imaginaire beyond the sorts of cookie-cooker caricatures of Manichaeism that one stumbles upon every now and then. By reading the individual kephalaia contained within the Kephalaia as literary-rhetorical units, rather than as repositories of information about Manichaeism, we can begin to propose specific historical, cultural, and religious contexts that rendered these kephalaia both possible and urgent for Manichaeans in the late 3rd through the 4th century. To do so requires us to even the playing field by framing Manichaeans as “agents” in their own right as opposed to two-bit players in some dusty corner of antiquity.

This chapter does so along three sets of contextualizing ventures: the first is focused on the anthological form of the Kephalaia itself, especially in comparison to and through rabbinic discourses and practices of anthologization. The second, which I will elaborate upon below, focuses on the Manichaean “chain of prophets” in relation to Christian arguments that Manichaeism was too “late” to be “really” Christian. The third focuses on the how Manichaeans sought to make the truth of Mani’s revelation legible to and from the experience of a rapidly expanding Sasanian Empire.

Just to dwell on the second point: whereas scholars of Syriac Christianity have tended to use Manichaean sources as “background” to understand Ephrem the Syrian’s Hymns Against the Heresies and Prose Refutations, we can flip the direction of approach the other way as well. What if Manichaeans are, in fact, responding to people like Ephrem (or both are, in fact, traces of an earlier “event”)? More specifically for our purposes, what if the so-called Manichaean “chain of prophets” as found in the Kephalaia is not some timeless doctrine inherent within Manichaeism but a well-crafted response to contingent historical and theological developments? In the second part of this long chapter, I argue along these lines: our primary evidence of a “chain of prophets” in the Kephalaia is a well-crafted argument designed to demonstrate that Mani was not some Johnny-come-lately to the Christian story of salvation, but that, like Gandalf, he arrived precisely when he meant to. This kephalaion, I go on to argue, emerged as a response to claims by Christians like Ephrem who insistently portrayed Mani as too tardy to be true since the golden “apostolic age” had passed, and whose obscene errors represents the surpassing evil of this late moment in history. The irony, of course, is that Ephrem came after Mani.

The other chapters follow a similar strategy of reading. The latter half of the book in particular experiments with different ways of redescribing revelation. In chapter four, I follow the lead of rabbinicists to contextualize the Kephalaia and the Homilies as expressions of what I call “ideologies of oral revelation.” Chapter five shifts gears to discuss the emergence of divinatory knowledge as panoptic knowledge, whereas chapter six explores the fantasy of total and immediate Torah-knowledge in the early “mystical” literature known as the Hekhalot corpus.

At the end of the day, the book is an experiment. I wanted to see how much I can get away with. If we believe that “context matters” as a or even the basis for contemporary knowledge of the past, then we should also ask up to what point does context matter? In practice, whether we like it or not, we answer this question every time we write since there is always something more that can be brought into the discussion. The task of this book was to demonstrate the potential, possibility, and even plausibility that the texts discussed within all hang together in some significant way, that they compose a meaningful set of texts that should be read with, through, and against one another. In this sense, “prophethood and prophecy” are for me nothing more than tools for a “disciplined exaggeration in the direction of knowledge.”[1]

Jae Han is assistant professor of religious studies at Brown University.

[1] J. Z. Smith, “A Matter of Class: Taxonomies of Religion,” in Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 175.