Personal Prophecy (1)

Knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.  2 Peter 1:20-21  ESV

Someone’s own interpretation – Hendel, Martone, Orlinsky, Alter, Hoffman . . . the list goes on.  All raising questions about the transmission of the text.  What Bible do we actually have?  Is the Masoretic text really what was accepted in the first century?  What about the alternative Hebrew texts, the Dead Sea scrolls, the obvious assimilation of LXX readings?  How do we know what the vowels were?  What about Zornberg’s comment that every reading is an interpretation?  What do we do about Christine Hays’ analysis, or Lawrence Schiffman’s?  When we read a statement like Peter’s, are we convinced?  How is it possible for Peter to make this kind of claim when his religious world contained literature which clearly indicates human invention?  And what did he mean by prophēteía gráphēs?  What is prophecy?  Or even Scripture in his view?  We know what the Church teaches about these words thousands of years after they were written, but what did Peter think?  Is Jubilees Scripture?  Is The Testament of the Twelve, or 1 Enoch, or Sirach, or Baruch?  Is prophecy predictive, or prognostication, or preaching, or something else?  Given what we now know about the interplay of the ancient texts and their cultic dependency, how can Peter claim that “no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man”?  Frankly, if this text weren’t canonized, we would dismiss the claim as nothing more than religious hyperbole.

But it is canonized!  So, we’ll have to deal with it—seriously!

The first step is to determine what the two crucial words mean, i.e., prophecy and Scripture.  Prophēteía has an evolving character.  “ . . . it would seem that the original sense in Greek is ‘one who proclaims,’ although soon the idea of ‘one who predicts’ also occurs.”^[1]  “prophēteía denotes a. ‘ability to declare the divine will,’ b. ‘proclamation,’ and c. ‘prophetic office.’”^[2]  However, we must be careful to distinguish Greek concepts from Hebraic ones.  “. . . prophets in the Greek world are people who declare things imparted by the gods in direct inspiration or through signs, their task being one of interpretation.”^[3]  Unfortunately, in Hebrew thought prophecy and prophet are not so clear.

The picture of prophecy presented by the OT is by no means uniform, and to write a history of OT prophecy is difficult. The difficulty is even linguistic, for the common nāḇîʾ group covers only one side of prophecy. There also seem to be prophetic groups on the one side and independent individual prophets on the other, with only tenuous relationships between them.^[4]

If that weren’t difficult enough, the milieu of the first century is also influenced by Hellenism, and particularly by Hellenistic Jews like Philo of Alexandria.  He attempted to merge traditional Torah narrative with a Greek conception of transcendent law.  Accordingly,

Philo finds in the law the starting point of the salvation event and depicts the patriarchs and Moses as prophets. Moses is a bearer of revelation as ruler, lawgiver, priest, and prophet in one. He rules the people which, with Abraham as its father, is the people of the prophets and a priestly people for all nations. . . according to Scripture all sages have a prophetic gift. The righteous, too, bear the prophetic Spirit. The way to prophetic experience is that of ecstasy, . .^[5]

In addition, the first century saw the development of particular views of prophecy from the Pharisees, the Essenes, and last, but not least, the Messianic prophets.  In the apostolic writings, “The biblical prophet can predict the future (cf. Acts 11:28), can know the past (Jn. 4:19), and can look into the heart (Lk. 7:39), but is essentially a proclaimer of the word, not a magician or soothsayer.”^[6]  The essential difference between the Greek and Hebrew views is that the Hebrew idea of a prophet is someone who proclaims God’s message without the instigation of a personal inquiry, and who communicates directly to the people without an intermediary.  Furthermore, when predictive prophecy does occur, it is typically contingent, acting as a warning rather than a declaration of inevitability.

With all of this in mind, what can we make of Peter’s declaration concerning prophecy (we have yet to determine what he means by Scripture)?  Perhaps no more than this: When God actually speaks through men, His word is not their interpretation.  It is God’s using such men as vehicles of communication.  Of course, how we determine if God is actually speaking is another question, but in the event that He is, human interpretation is not at issue.  Accordingly, every trueprophetic utterance is not the result of human will but rather of divine agency.  Therefore, what Peter says is essentially a theological tautology, that is, his definition of prophecy is divine utterance via human agent.  He clarifies this by noting that true prophecy is the result of divine activity (“carried along by the spirit”), a sort of ecstasy found in examples in the Tanakh.  Peter says nothing about how to determine if the claim of prophecy is true or false.  He only says that when it is true, it is divinely initiated and communicated.  Furthermore, he makes no claim whatsoever about predictive consequences.

Now we need to know what he means by “Scripture.”  Next.

Topical Index: prophecy, Scripture, 2 Peter 1:20-21

^[1] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (p. 952). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Ibid.