In Our Time - Prophecy

Episode Date: June 13, 2013

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the meaning and significance of prophecy in the Abrahamic religions. Prophets, those with the ability to convey divinely-inspired revelation, are significant figures in the Hebrew Bible and later became important not just to Judaism but also to Christianity and Islam. Although these three religions share many of the same prophets, their interpretation of the nature of prophecy often differs.With:Mona Siddiqui Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at the University of EdinburghJustin Meggitt University Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion and the Origins of Christianity at the University of CambridgeJonathan Stökl Post-Doctoral Researcher at Leiden University.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, the prophets are some of the most important and intriguing figures of the Hebrew Bible. Usually, but not always men, their role was to receive the Word of God and pass it on to their fellow human beings and interpret it. Some offered practical advice to kings, others warned against immoral behavior, and a few offered apocalyptic visions of future disaster.

Propheces are a central feature of Hebrew scripture and later came to play an important role in Christianity and Islam as well. Early Christian writers saw the arrival of Christ as the fulfillment of many prophecies in the Old Testament, while for Muslims, Muhammad was the last and greatest of all the prophets. Although Judaism, Christianity and Islam recognized many of the same prophets, these three Abrahamic religions each conceived the role and nature of prophecy in slightly different ways. With me to discuss prophecy

in the Abrahamic religions are Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Inter-Religious Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Justin Meggit, University Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion

and the Origins of Christianity at the University of Cambridge and Jonathan Stekyll, post-doctoral researcher at Leiden University. Mona Siddiqui, the precise nature of prophecy has meant different things at different times. What's the basic definition of a prophet?

The fundamental and binding factor is that prophets are people who have been divinely elected. The centrality and focus of prophecy within the Abrahamic tradition varies, but in the sense that these are people who, through whom God speaks, to whom God reveals, through whom God sends a message, and within Christianity there is a slight shift because God himself descends. The prophetic message is not enough to redeem humankind. But there is a sense that divine election is the binding, a cohesive factor

in this, within the Abrahamic tradition at least. Are there any places where it's defined where what you have said is in scriptures? Well, the definition of prophecy varies within each religious tradition and the centrality of prophecy varies. But within the Islamic tradition, I think it's explicitly stated

that God does not reveal directly himself. So God reveals through media. And human prophets are a way of God revealing something of himself. They are human. Prophets are human. They are also messengers and they are human within the Islamic tradition and also within the Jewish tradition prophets are human. But they have almost a kind of supernatural faculty about them. They have been selected, elected, chosen by God. to receive something that is beyond human. So therefore, a lot of the traditions around prophecy explore this supernatural dimension of prophecy.

How is it and why is it that God chooses certain people? What faculties do they have that enables them to become recipients of this divine message? And to some extent, I think, prophecy, not in Christianity, but I think to some extent within Judaism and Islam, prophecy is the highest divine accolade. So why do you think it is so important in Jewish tradition and in Islamic tradition? There's a sense that we need guidance.

We need to be reminded of the oneness of God. We need to be reminded of the presence of God, the truth of God. the history of the Hebrew Bible ultimately is the history of God's covenants with his people with his particular people and prophets are a way of ensuring that people are constantly not just Moses but all other prophets remind the Jews or the peoples or tribes of Israel that their ultimate devotion their worship their loyalty is to this one God It impresses upon people the absolute fundamentalism monotheism to return to the oneness of God,

return to the truth of God. Jonathan Seccle, what's the earliest evidence we have of the presence of prophets in the Middle East? The earliest evidence that we possess are about 50 to 100 letters written in Cuneiform script on Clayt Hablids mostly from a place called Māori on the Euphrates on the border between Syria and Iraq nowadays

and they are mostly very short oracles that are... What age of these, sorry. Oh, sorry, I should say that, yes. They come from about 1800 BCE, so 3,800 years ago. And they're short oracles that are conveyed by governors

and members of the royal family to the king. Some prophet, either in a temple or elsewhere, spoke an oracle. And if the king wasn't present, but if the oracle was relevant to the king, then it, of course, had to be transmitted to them in some shape or form. And that happened in these letters. But the letters also contain completely mundane things. It's just one of the things that a governor had to transmit to the king.

But in terms of the find of these letters, this was about 25 years ago, wasn't it? Did it change the nature of the way people like yourselves looked at prophecy? The earliest of these particular letters were uncovered in the 1940s, but the real edition only happened in 1988. Yes, because it showed us that the traditional understanding of prophets as these lone figures who spoke for what is called ethical monotheaes, might not have corresponded to historical reality,

but is a later construction, something that is put back on history. Instead, these profits are employed in what you could call a state intelligence service, but in a divine realm. What Mona said, I think, is quite relevant here. People need guidance. People need to know things like governments today

have, say, economic advisors. People in antiquities had diviners of various. different kinds. Well, they should go to war, that sort of thing. That kind of thing. And prophets were a means by which the deity could address the king or anybody else directly without first having to be asked. Mona stressed in her opening remarks that the prophet came from God and was a proof and an

affirmation and a reaffirmation of the presence of the one God. Is that at all present in these Maori letters, we can call them, of 3,800 years ago? Well, they had several gods. So that is not something that they share with the monotheistic religions, but they are seen as messengers of the divine message, of what the respective God wants. Usually it's one of the more important gods who speaks, but it can be minor gods as well.

Is there any way, can you give us somebody to have the role of the property bulbs in the Hebrew Bible? How prophets are recognized, are they self-propelled, or are they inside society? Anyway, first of all, how did it evolve roughly in the Hebrew Bible? In the Hebrew Bible, we have this image of Moses as the overpowering leader and prophet. But it seems, particularly after finding letters from Maori, but also another place called Nineveh, the Neo-Syrian State Archives

from about the 7th century BCE, that... the idea of a prophet like Amos or Isaiah, who were involved in some shape or form in temple or religion or court of worship, seems to be more accurate, historically speaking. So we have a figure who just advises the king. And slowly but surely their authority increases until by the time of the fall of Jerusalem, about 587 BCE, when there is no king anymore, the prophet assumes all responsibility and all authority. And that is then retrojected back onto older figures such as Moses or Aaron,

who are then understood in that prophetic role. In other words, the role has increased a great deal and changed, and that is why these people who were always leaders, but were now understood also as prophets. And there's a famous text, Deuteronomy 18, in which prophecy, the real prophet is understood and defined in a way as a prophet whose prophecy comes true, but that leaves open theoretically the chance that other deities might have prophets too whose prophecies come true. And that's where the second criterion comes in. They must be from Adonai. They must be divinely authorized by the Jewish God if they're not.

They're not real prophets. How do they get this authorization to be recognized by everybody else? Everybody else just has to believe it. It's a great thing of social authorization and construction of any kind of role, but of course also the prophetic role. Is it an, I don't know, with me at the moment, but is that in Deuteronomy where it says more or less, if the prophet gets it right, then that's God telling,

you through. If the prophet gets it wrong, it's because he has misheard it and God is still right, the prophet just got it wrong. There are two options on that, yes. Either the prophet gets it wrong or God consciously

tells the prophet to say something wrong in order to punish the people. That happens in Jeremiah. When did it do that? What's that? Jeremiah complains about God sending messages of comfort and also messages of discomfort and the opposite happens

and of course that is a challenge to his authority as a prophet and so he complains about that to God and God just says no no no this had to happen because I set this up as the way that things should happen a long time ago as a punishment for the bad behavior of my people well it seems that there's sort of no-lose situation Really, quite. Justin, can we move, can we take that on to the Old Testament prophets and shade into the Christian tradition?

Talk a bit more about their significance and their place in the Old Testament and then bring it into the Christian tradition. Well, the prophets are absolutely crucial within the Christian tradition. It's important to remember that the first Christians were, of course, Jews. And in fact, the first Christian scripture was the Jewish Bible. So they're absolutely vital. Christian scriptures that are then written absolutely saturated in prophetic texts. So Isaiah, for example, sometimes referred to as the fifth gospel. But these prophets are normally understood within the Christian tradition, less about sort of what they may have meant in their particularly

historical context. What really matters to the early Christians is them as predicting the events that they believe are fulfilled in primarily the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, but also other things too, such as the fundamental religious ideas, the early Christians such as the inclusion of the Gentiles in a kind of universal faith. So they are absolutely central.

Is there any more you can say about the evolution of prophecy? Is there an evolution of prophecy can be gathered from the Old Testament? From the Old Testament. Well, I think Jonathan's the ex-person that. I think what I would say is that that by the time the Christians are using these texts, you can see

that the Hebrew Bible contains a number of different kinds of prophets, as Johnson's referred to, you've got your sort of court prophets, but you also have other figures. But by the time the Christians encounter it, they're using primarily a version of the Jewish Bible, which actually based on a Greek translation, which

there's a different ordering of the text, which gives a particular focus to prophecy. So when you open a Christian by them, look at the Christian Old Testament, you'll see it ends with Malachi, which ends as the expectation of the return of Elijah, a crucial prophet, and the day of the Lord, which is a crucial theme in prophecy. So in other words, the early Christians are encountering and make a great deal of this expectation,

whereas the ordering within the Hebrew Bible of the law, the prophets and the writings, consider rather different emphasis. Is there any sense in these older New Testaments in which the texts have been doctored in order for the prophecies to seem to come true? I think that's a very, very good point. I think a lot of scholars looking at these

would certainly think that that sort of thing goes on. And I think the classic, which is very important to the early Christians, is a book which is a bit problematic within the Jewish canon, which is the book of Daniel. I mean, it's there, but it's not a good. included amongst the prophets, whereas for the Christians, this is an important prophetic book. And Daniel's, Daniel looks as if it's probably written in about the second century BC, although it actually presents itself being written much earlier.

In other words, it looks like a text which to a certain extent is prophecy after the facts, as it were. And one of the reasons people think that is it seems to get a lot of its predictions right up to, you know, gets the predictions right. And then there's a fascinating point at which it then appears to start getting them wrong. In other words, that's the point to which the book is written. Jonathan referred to retrospective, making Moses retrospectively more significant once you knew. Is that happening as well? Oh, absolutely.

It's very important to think particularly again with a Christian use of these texts. These texts are very much living oracles. They, from a Christian point of view, approaching these texts. as I said, they're not so concerned with the original historical context. And so this material can be transformed and adapted and reworked. Is history really interested? Does history really interest them?

Or does Revelation interest them more? No, they're primarily interested in Revelation. I think that's extremely important. Their whole, you know, to use the term, that whole kind of hermeneutical perspective comes from, the whole way they read this material, comes from their belief that God has intervened in history in the person, the figure of Christ.

and then they read the text in the light of that. Sometimes in very surprising, controversial ways, which, of course, most Jews at a time wouldn't share their interpretations of the text. Mona, Monis Diki, how does Islam see these prophets from the Hebrew Bible? The Quran is quite, well, it has a double message. In some ways it confirms all the,

it makes reference to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. So we have reference to Abraham and Noah. and Jeremiah and various other prophets. But at the same time, there's a sense that the whole prophetic engagement by God with his creation is a long historical process. And so all these prophets have actually come with the same message. They may have come in their own time to a different people, but they've come with essentially the message of proclaiming,

not just saying to their people, but proclaiming the oneness of God. So on the one hand the Quran What do they mean about the oneness of God? That there is one God. There is one God and that people consistently and continuously throughout history stray away from that truth and everything that else of that truth implies

and brings with it. But that's not really, so that's to do with Revelation not with history because people had a great number of gods very often along the way, didn't it? Yes, but revelation within the Islamic, within the Abrahamic tradition generally is really about the oneness of God and seeing that oneness in different.

different ways. So on the one hand, it confirms all these past prophets. So there's a continuity. All these prophets are essentially saying the same thing. And that Muhammad's advent as a final prophet as he came to be seen in Islamic tradition is not a break from that past. He's not saying anything new. He's confirming what all the others said in their own ways. However, the Quranic, the later commentators understood that not only did he become the final prophet, But in some ways he was also alluding, or the Quran is alluding, to how Jews and Christians may have misunderstood the original message of their prophets. So it's playing this double role, confirming past scriptures and past prophets.

Scripture and prophecy go hand in hand in Islam. So the prophetic vocation, however much a prophet is ridiculed or considered less of a prophet, so they're soothsets, their poets, their magicians, they're countercultural, so they're always. seen with suspicion. But however much a prophet confirms past scriptures, there's a sense that Muhammad, in confirming past scriptures, the Quran in becoming the final revelation, is actually saying to everybody, go back to the

primordial truth. You've all kind of erred from that. You've strayed from that. So there is that ambivalence within the Quran itself. John Hesdakle, could you give us a specific example of a prominent prophet in the Hebrew Bible and the role he or two or three they pledge so we know more precisely what we're talking about. Of course. I'm going to start

with one prophet who is very much under-emphasized in tradition and also in the text itself but who I think is rather crucial and that is Hulder. Houlder is a female prophet who prophesite at the same time as Jeremiah and

when the sacred book in the renovation of the temple they find a sacred book and they want to know what this is and they send it to her in order to get a view on whether that's the real deal as it were, whether that is a divine message or not.

And she says, yes, this is the real deal. This book, because of what then happens, has been identified by scholarship as Deuteronomy or something very much like it. Traditionally, both Jews and Christian interpreters have interpreted the king's actions as why did he not go to Jeremiah, but rather to Hilda, as saying, oh, she's a woman, she's going to be kind and nice to me,

and she's going to just do what I want. But I think it's quite significant that she is the first person who sort of says that Deuteronomy is the proper law that has to be followed, and that the woman is very peculiar and unexpected from within the canon. but she is definitely a person who is in royal employ. She does help the king in making decisions. Isaiah similarly, when there is a crisis, he tells the king what is good and what is not good,

what he should do. As a very different example of what a prophet does, we could have Elijah and Elisha, who are sort of on the cusp between, they often refer to as man of God, They meander and walk through the countryside and they intervene in scenes. They use magic in order to get what they want.

They're morally ambiguous to say the least. I think at this stage it's fair to ask. Holder looks at these texts and let's say this all happened and let's say she had divined or knew about it. Anyway, there it is. And people think of a prophet as somebody who says what's going to happen in the future. Is there any clear example of what's going to happen,

and this is what's going to happen, said the Prophet, and it did happen, that we can look at and say, this was not doctored, this really did happen, because he said it would happen, or she said it would happen. That's always a difficult kind of thing to do, because we do not have any documents that we know are older than the thing that happens. Any of our biblical manuscripts, there's nothing that is physically older than the second century BCE,

so it's very difficult to see quite when something happens. But an example that is often chosen would be the prophet Amos, who predicts the end of the northern kingdom of Israel. And sure enough, it does happen. There is some debate on whether that is also prophecy after the fact influenced by the understanding of Deuteronomy that only that which is true prophecy comes true and if that was happened and the prophesite come true.

It is the message gets reinterpreted. Some scholars say that Amos should be understood as warning the king that unless he changes his ways, the end is going to come. Conditional proposition. Yes, exactly, conditional. And that is what it is in the ancient Near East and in most religions. They are like our economic advisors or scientific advisors. If you do this, that's going to happen. If you do not do this, that's going to happen.

Your choice, king. But, yeah, Amos would be at least traditionally. interpreted is a good example of the end is going to come and sure enough the end comes. Just to make it, are there any examples of profits getting it wrong and being punished for that? That's a good question. I'm sure there are. Jonathan,

do you think? Being punished. There certainly are the warnings that... You shook your head just so listeners know, right? I mean, there certainly are warnings about false profits being put to death. You're quite right. Sorry, can I just go back to In a way, Hananiah is a court prophet in the time of Jeremiah, and he says, oh, everything will be fine.

And he's one of the people who are explicitly mentioned as being killed. So in a way, he's punished by history for getting it wrong. But it's not explicitly so because he's prophesied wrongly. But it is understood that way. Yes. It seems to be made, anyway. Yeah. All right.

Justin, can you talk about the figure of Christ in terms of being a prophet, be a prophesied figure, first of all, and then himself a prophet. Well, on the prophesising, as I said, the early Christians are absolutely fixed on this idea that everything that happens in the life and death of Christ is in fulfillment of Scripture, and for them that means in fulfillment of a prophecy, although actually the early Christians, frankly, see everything in the Hebrew Bible, as potentially prophetic, so they're just as likely to quote from the Psalms as they are to quote from Isaiah. But as a prophet, well, certainly there's a tradition which most scholars think probably has some kind of historical value to it in which Jesus asked, well, who do people say that I am?

And the answers are quite interesting because they include the idea that he's... Jesus said what, I missed it. Who do people say that I am? And the answers are interesting because they include, for example, John the Baptist, who's a figure who we know was popularly thought to be a prophet at the time of Jesus. He's a figure attested in Jewish sources of the time, not just the new... Testament. But also they say, or Elijah, and Elijah is a crucial prophet I've mentioned in Malachi the expectation that he would return and proclaim the day of the Lord, and Jesus appears to be proclaiming the kingdom of God, and also Elijah is a healer as well, and a miracle worker in Jesus

is like that. So it looks like Jesus could look like a prophet to others, except the whole point, I think, of the early Christian text is that the category of profit is just one amongst the range of other possible labels to the figure of Jesus, none of which really fit. In fact, the one that probably goes back, has the most historical grounds for going back to the figure of Jesus is an expression, Son of Man, which is taken from the book of Daniel, which I mentioned earlier, Daniel 7, and is not a prophetic figure, but a kind of heavenly figure. So there's a conscious fabrication of Christ based on the, based on an understanding of the Old Testament, which is not historical?

No, I don't quite sure. You mean by fabrication? I would say that they're trying to articulate the life of... They're trying to express. And I think one thing we haven't really touched on yet about prophecy for those who've never read any of this stuff is the incredibly powerful language that's used.

A lot of it's a pretty impressive poetry even today. And it contains a lot of ideas. It's not just about predicting things. It's about saying how the world is or how the world should be. And these kinds of ideas are picked up and used to describe the figure of Jesus.

And it looks like, it's not historically unreasonable that Jesus may have used this sort of language himself. I mean, if you take the beginning of Luke's Gospel when he's meant to when he reads out of Isaiah and it's meant to be a kind of programmatic statement of what he's about which is giving sight to the blind, good news to the poor, releasing the oppressed.

You know, he's taking all the stuff from a Hebrew prophet and I think it probably fits roughly with the historical record this kind of way of thinking about things. So I wouldn't say fabricate it, although I think it's quite right to raise the point that they are so absolutely immersed

in prophecy and the idea that Jesus must be reflected in these texts that there are lots of details of the life and death of Jesus that yes, scholars have wondered whether frankly sometimes the narrative is being written to fit the prophecy rather than the prophecy being discovered

to demonstrate the truth of the narrative if you sort of mean. Mona, you mentioned Mohammed obviously already the first and foremost and the last prophet Muhammad how is he seen in comparison with the earlier Provedges that he completes the prophecies. Why, it's curious that he isn't foretold in the Old Testament, is it, or isn't it?

Well, that's an interesting point because actually much of the early polemics between Christians and Muslims from the 8th century right up to the medieval times was actually about, well, Christians would argue that Jesus was foretold in the Hebrew Bible. Of course, Jews would reject that, but that's how the Christians argued it.

But that where was Muhammad for? told and that some Christians had actually said that had he been foretold, we would have become Muslim. We would have bowed to his prophecy. Now, there were all kinds of ambiguities and contradictions within these conversations, but it became a source of polemics between these two communities, the foretelling and the fact that prophecies, people witness miracles being performed by prophets, genuine prophets, and Christ performed miracle, Jesus performed miracles. Where was Muhammad's miracle? And to, which later traditionists argued, Muhammad's miracle

is the Quran. This is the direct word of God. God has chosen not to reveal himself, but he has chosen Muhammad to whom he can send revelation. So this idea of foretelling... And there's a miracle in the receiving because we're told that Muhammad can't read. That's right, yes.

And he's in this cave and he says the first time the Christ, God offers him the Christ, I can't read, and then the third time I'm summary says read it and Muhammad reads it. And then on we go from there. And this is used by a Muslim commentators to argue that he couldn't have possibly fabricated this based on the stories, biblical stories. Because a lot of the arguments were that the Quran touches on all these biblical prophets. But actually, although the stories seem to converge, they go off in completely different directions.

So we have Joseph, we have Moses, we have Noah. And there are various parallels with the biblical narratives. But then the moral dimension of these stories differs. And it seems to me that maybe the one thing that all the prophets have, whether they're divinely guided, whether they're leaders, whether they're charismatic figures, is that not just to tell people of what might happen, but also to give them hope.

And I think definitely in the kind of major prophetic figures, they're also giving hope as well as fear that there is a kingdom beyond this one. And that these laws and that this message is really about you're fulfilling this, so that the life, after this life is going to be one of hope where you will be saved, where you will see God. So it's a wholly different dimension that's being promised to create humankind.

This is being used, I'm talking to be rather crudely about it, it's a threat. Unless you do this, you don't get the second life, the everlasting life. I think there is a sense that the law, however one argues for the law, is there as a way of a pathway to God. so that ultimately most theologians, I think, within all three traditions, have argued that God's grace will save and God's mercy will save and God's love will save and in the end God himself it decides who he will save. But that without this kind of ethical guidance that if you do this, this will happen.

If you don't do this, this will happen. We will not know. Now, of course, that sounds really stark as if it's all conditional. And as you say, if you don't do this, you'll be bound to hell for the rest of your life. but there were so many nuances within that that it became very difficult to read scripture as these are the conditions I have to meet and if I don't then I'm doomed.

Jonathan briefly how were prophets differentiated from priests? Hmm. That's quite a difficult thing. Most of the prophets whom we have recorded in the Hebrew Bible somewhere say something very negative about priests. They often also say something very negative about prophets presumably meaning other prophets and not themselves. And I think that is commonly understood as being oracles against leadership figures

who are not fulfilling their leadership role well. They're not leading the people in the right way. They are responsible for all the bad things that are happening. But prophets are portrayed as people who are independent of the temple, whereas priests are very much, of course, the physical manifestation. temples. Do, Justin, do prophets seem to have a shaping role in the way that general

policy is pursued in these states? Well, I think that's more of a kind of the Hebrew Bible sort of thing. They are certainly giving advice. In that sense, yes. But they can also be critics. I think it's very important. I mean, a classic

would be the story of Nathan and David. Even though Nathan is a kind of called Prophet, he still manages to tell a story. It's quite a famous one where David gets very wrapped up with the injustice of the story and rails against the injustice of the character in the story and then Nathan says, oh, it's you know, it's you, basically. So the prophets can both shape, but it can also be a critic

and a thorn in the side of the state, even when they're on the payroll. It's probably worth saying that, I mean, profits are not perfect. The idea of sinlessness and perfection came to be imposed on certain prophets later on. But within some of the traditions, they are not seen as sinless people, even though they're divinely elected. On the question of perfectness, I was under the impression that in Islam a prophet is defined as perfect.

I came across a funny Andalusian interpreter who interprets Mary as a prophet because she is said to be perfect. Yes. By perfection, I mean they're not sinless. They can commit errors. But the idea of sinlessness being attributed to prophets was a much later intervention by writers. because they had to get round. How can an ordinary mortal receive something divine?

How does Islam distinguish, the attitude to prophecy taken in Judaism and Christianity? Well, I think both in Judaism and Islam, though in varying ways, there's a sense that the prophetic message points to another eschatological reality and another frame of hope. But in Christianity,

the prophetic message isn't enough. God himself descends and in the incarnation we have the dissent of the sublime, as postmodern theorists put it. So therefore, the emphasis in Islam, and to some extent I would imagine Judaism, has always been that prophets do direct you to God, to the path, to right, to virtue, to the ethical framework, but they're not divine. And so prophecy has never been enough in Christianity. Early Christian writers, I would expect, always thought of Jesus as something more than just a human problem.

prophet. Yes, I absolutely agree. Absolutely agree Jesus is very much presented by the early Christians as something more than a prophet. But it's very important to understand Christianity, and this is a difference, certainly with the Islamic tradition. The prophecy is not in the early church restricted to the figure of Jesus. There is a notion that prophecy is something which the early Christians himself experienced quite regularly. So you get a proliferation, almost a kind of democratization of prophecy. prophecy in early Christianity. It's central to at least the first church's notion of what worship is, for example.

I mean, just on that, the idea of all prophets being divinely elected and being near to God and the requirement to venerate and revere them is quite intrinsic to Islam. So that even though the perception is that Muhammad is these ultimates, he becomes the prophet of Islam. But at least four other prophets, three other prophets, Abraham, Jesus and Moses have a special. affinity. They're given special names in the Quran. And when Muslims talk in popular piety, when they refer to any prophets, any messenger, and I think there's a distinction between a messenger and prophets, they always see upon him be peace, as I'm sure many people have heard. So in a kind of popular piety, there should be no distinction. But of course then Mohammed comes to symbolise the kind of culmination of all prophecies.

Mansion of Mary, I think she's the only woman mentioned in the Quran, isn't she? That's correct. Jonathan, you've already referred to Hulah and several other female prophets there are in the Old Testament. But not many, but they seem to be quite effective, don't they? They're from the beginning with Miriam. There are five women who are referred to as prophet in the Hebrew Bible. Rabbinic tradition knows seven women who are referred to as female prophets, and the two groups don't entirely overlap.

But yes, Miriam is, of course, Moses' sister, who's very famous, and she's called a prophet. Then Deborah, who is a bit of a warlord, one might call her, and she sings a rather famous and poetically impressive song. And there's a connection between female prophecy and poetry and music, but also prophecy more generally. There seems to be some form of a nexus there. Then there's Isaiah's partner who is called a prophet in the Hebrew Bible,

but not by the rabbis. they just ignore her. And a woman called Noah Dyer, who after the return from the exile, has a bit of a run-in with Nehemiah. She's mentioned in one verse as a prophet, but nobody knows anything about her. Justin, you want to say,

in the Christian tradition, again, with the early church, this is actually a really crucial part of the experience of the early church, because I think if you think of St. Paul, many people think of him as having a bit of a problem in relation to gender. But actually his letters to the Corinthians

refers to the fact that there are women who pray and prophesy in the churches. And there's this notion in Christianity that the early church saw the fulfillment of, again, a prophetic text, an expectation, Joel, that God would pour out God's spirit at the end of time, upon all flesh, and the text says, you know, and your sons and daughters will prophesy. And it says daughters. And this is very important, because one of the things about prophecy, I think a key thing about prophecy, is that if it is God that is speaking, then in a way the cultural assumptions about the limitations, of gender are transcended.

In other words, that women who may not be listened to as women would be listened to as profit. So you get even, you know, Paul, people say has a bit of a problem, but there's a character called Tatalian, who doesn't have kind of liberals and views about women in many ways. He writes a book about how, you know, women should be veiled and all the rest of an early Christian figure. But he joins a particular group called the Montanists

for whom women prophets are absolutely central. But they were wiped out, weren't they? From Mary Magland to the Montanists, Gregor just wiped the mark and didn't want them in the tradition. No, because one of the things about prophecy is that it is something which is potentially disruptive.

I mean, it's a claim to knowledge, it's a claim to authority, which is very difficult to fit within institutions. And the story of the early church is the story of the growth of institutions. And so prophets tend to get squeezed out. Rabbinic Judaism has a very neat and nice story about how prophecy is dangerous

in a debate between various rabbis. One rabbi keeps appealing to divine authority and miracles happen and then at the end God even speaks in his favor and the other rabbis just say no this is not admissible the Torah is the full revelation of God and God better stay out of our debate we decide now they have an issue with prophecy because it's uncontrollable I just I just wanted to touch on this distinction between which I didn't mention at the beginning between prophecy and messenger as I suppose prophet and apostrophe. that prophets speak for God, but they don't all receive something, whereas messengers, at least within the Islamic tradition, will be people who receive something from God, a revelation from God, whether it culminates in a book form or whatever.

And that somehow if there was a hierarchy, the messenger would be slightly higher. And therefore, there has been a debate within the Islamic tradition, was Mary a prophet? Because she was chaste and perfect and so humble and devoted herself to lifetime of worship and the virginal birth and her birth and her own. her immaculate conception are confirmed in the Quran. But people have argued she could be a prophet because she spoke the truth and God spoke to her, but she's not a messenger. Nothing was revealed to her.

Is there a sense in which prophet... When did prophecy fade away? Well, I mean, there's a traditional version of that, saying that prophecy's meant to end with sort of Ezra, but in the Hebrew Bible, roughly. But then we get evidence that there are still people referred to as prophets about the time of Jesus you get references in Josephus to Jewish prophets

but it's something that recurs again and again and I think it's important it might be bringing it up to today because of again within the Christian tradition because of this idea enshrined in the New Testament of the potential for prophecy that if you look at say the fastest growing version of Christianity today

it's sort of Pentecostalism so it starts from about zero in the year 1900 and now it's about half a billion and for them prophecy is an ongoing experience they have prophets within their churches. And so it's absolutely central. So when you say did it fade away, there have been points in history

when it certainly has been less significant, but it has recurred throughout history one way or another. Sorry, yes. Yeah, I mean, the traditional rabbinic saying on that would be that after Malachi, the Holy Spirit leaves Israel. In other words, anybody else who comes afterwards who claims to be a prophet must be wrong,

because Malachi is the last of the prophets. So I think rabbinic Judaism certainly is very scared. about anybody who tries to claim prophetic authority. But modern, I mean, the analogy here in some ways, or the reference would be to the concept of the imams in Shi' Islam, that they are not prophets, but they have a very close relationship to God, through whom God continuously guides people. But modern day concepts of prophecy is really more about reforming some other ideals,

some past ideal. So people may call themselves prophets, but they're very much seen as perhaps people who started were saying we want to reform this particular tradition because it's gone by the wayside because there's too much corruption in it and then later they evolve into kind of prophetic-like figures. Are there still disputes about who is

and who is not a prophet in these three different traditions? Yes. Is it a lively issue? Not massively so. Noah is a good example who in the Hebrew Bible is not called a prophet but in rabbinic texts then becomes a prophet, it's explicitly referred to.

And there are some figures like that, but it's not, say, a massive issue of debate. I think it's more the emphasis on what is a role of prophecy, however, defined and its centrality within the three traditions and how they've evolved over the years, and

how that message is still understood. And then, of course, although on a popular level, I think each religious tradition is associated with a figure like Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed, but there are huge differences within the three. Well, thank you very much, Mona Siddiqui. Sorry, Jonathan. Jonathan, Stakel, and Justin.

next week we'll be talking about the physiocrats, the 18th century French economists. Thanks for listening. Thank you. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.uk slash radio 4.