Texts and Studies in Ancient JudaismTexte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum

Herausgegeben von / Edited by

Peter Schäfer (Princeton, NJ) Annette Y. Reed (Philadelphia, PA)

Seth Schwartz (New York, NY) Azzan Yadin-Israel (New Brunswick, NJ)

146

Revelation, Literature, and Community in Late Antiquity

Edited by

Philippa Townsend and Moulie Vidas

Mohr Siebeck

ISBN 978-3-16-150644-4 ISSN 0721-8753 (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism)

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbiblio-graphie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

© 2011 by Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, Germany.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to reproductions, translations, microfilms and storage and processing in electronic systems.

The book was typeset by Martin Fischer in Tübingen using Stempel Garamond and OdysseaU typeface, printed by Gulde-Druck in Tübingen on non-aging paper and bound by Buchbinderei Spinner in Ottersweier.

Printed in Germany.

Philippa Townsend, born 1975; Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Ursinus College, Pennsylvania.

Moulie Vidas, born 1983; Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis.

e-ISBN PDF 978-3-16-151859-1

Preface

This collection of articles grows from a conference held in Princeton Uni-versity in 2007, organized by the editors with Peter Schäfer. We thank Pro-fessor Schäfer for enabling this event and for his support of the project from its beginning to this book. We are also grateful to Martha Himmelfarb, John Gager, and Elaine Pagels for their participation in the workshop that led to the conference. Princeton’s Department of Religion, Graduate School, and Program in Judaic Studies provided generous funds for these events, and Baru Saul offered us indispensible administrative assistance.

We would like to thank all those who participated in the conference for their contribution to the conversation that produced this volume. We espe-cially want to note those participants whose papers were not, for various reasons, included in the book: Adam Jackson, Martin Jaffee, Lance Jenott, Robert Lamberton, Hindy Najman, and Laura Nasrallah.

The papers presented here by Michael Pregill, Annette Yoshiko Reed, Christine Trevett, Azzan Yadin-Israel, and Yuhan Vevaina were commis-sioned especially for this publication and were not part of the 2007 col-loquium.

Dr. Henning Ziebritzki from Mohr Siebeck oversaw the production of this volume with patient and welcoming professionalism; we thank him, as well as Ilse König, for realizing this project in print. We are grateful to Timothy DeBold for expertly preparing the indices. Our personal thanks go to Eduard Iricinschi, Carey Seal, and Kevin Wolfe for their friendship and for offering commentary and critique that has made this book better.

New York/Philadelphia, January 2011 Philippa Townsend Moulie Vidas

Table of Contents

Philippa Townsend and Moulie VidasIntroduction: Revelation, Literature, Community, and Late Antiquity 1

Annette Yoshiko ReedPseudepigraphy and/as Prophecy: Continuity and Transformation in the Formation and Reception of Early Enochic Writings . . . . . . . . . 25

Christine TrevettProphets, Economics, and the Rites of Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Pavlos AvlamisIsis and the People in the Life of Aesop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

John D. TurnerRevelation as the Path to Ignorance: The Sethian Platonizing Apocalypse Allogenes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

Gregory ShawThe Soul’s Innate Gnosis of the Gods: Revelation in Iamblichean Theurgy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

Daniel L. SchwartzKeeping Secrets and Making Christians: Catechesis and the Revelation of the Christian Mysteries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

Eduard IricinschiTam pretiosi codices vestri: Hebrew Scriptures and Persian Books in Augustine’s Anti-Manichaean Writings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

Azzan Yadin-IsraelRabbi Aqiva: Midrash and the Site of Revelation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

Martha HimmelfarbRevelation and Rabbinization in Sefer Zerubbabel and Sefer Eliyyahu 217

VIII Table of Contents

Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw VevainaMiscegenation, “Mixture,” and “Mixed Iron”: The Hermeneutics, Historiography, and Cultural Poesis of the “Four Ages” in Zoroastrianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

Michael E. PregillAhab, Bar Kokhba, Muhammad, and the Lying Spirit: Prophetic Discourse before and after the Rise of Islam . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

Patricia CroneAngels versus Humans as Messengers of God: The View of the Qur nic Pagans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315

List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337

Index of Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339Index of Modern Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361

Introduction

Revelation, Literature, Community, and Late Antiquity

Philippa Townsend and Moulie Vidas

The subject of this collection of essays reflects not only the prominence of the theme of revelation in late ancient texts, but also the centrality of dis-courses of revelation to both ancient and modern discussions of literature, community, and historical change in late antiquity. Authors from this period appealed to ideas, images, and experiences of revelation to understand and define the period in which they lived, the texts which they read and pro-duced, and the social interactions and structures in which they participated. In modern historiography too the discussion of revelation is used to distin-guish late antiquity from the period preceding it, to reconstruct its literary history, and to map and analyze its society.

One of the oldest and most pervasive ideas about revelation in late anti-quity is that by this period it had declined or ceased. This notion appears in Plutarch’s famous dialogue On the Failure of the Oracles as well as in sev-eral Jewish and Christian texts. As we shall see, variations on this idea have dominated modern scholarship too, even though expressed in new idioms; and while more recent scholarship has been critical of this narrative, the notion that revelation was essentially transformed in late antiquity persists. In both ancient and modern discussions, the cessation or transformation of revelation has been used to indicate or even define the essence of the period: it is a sign of the decline of Graeco-Roman cult, it is what ushers in the Christian era, it is what distinguishes the “Biblical” from the “Rabbinic,” it is what makes late antiquity “late.”

While a contrast between late antiquity and the age of revelation has structured much of the discussion, so too has the distinction between liter-ary art and revelatory experience. According to this contrast, the less art-fully designed, produced, or composed a text appears to be (and sometimes, the less intelligible it is), the more credible is the claim that it carries the message of God. This contrast exists already as early as the distinction Plato develops between divine inspiration and literary skill in his Ion, or in the Biblical tropes that prophecy is involuntary, comes from unexpected places, and can be misunderstood by its bearers. It is of particular importance, however, for the study of late antiquity because of the role it can play in the

Philippa Townsend and Moulie Vidas2

way scholars view the transformation or cessation of revelation, as they ask whether late ancient claims to revelation are a record of experience or part of a literary construct.

Revelation and literature intersected in practices of interpretation and reading in ways that shaped the religious cultures of late antiquity. For almost all ancient readers, the status of certain texts as revealed dictated dif-ferent rules of interpretation and understanding, often in ways that opened up innovative possibilities and enabled these texts’ continued relevance. Such special rules for reading revealed texts gained importance as the ex-egesis of such texts increasingly stood at the center of cultural production (in Christianity, Judaism, and even Graeco-Roman philosophy). Bound up with practices of reading revealed literature is the process of canonization, which, as we shall see, has played an important role in the construction of the narrative of revelation’s decline in late antiquity.

Revelation could also have its own style of composition, its own literary genre: Plutarch’s readers are troubled by the fact that the oracles at Delphi are no longer given in verse, and the rabbis could talk about the distinct style (signon) of each prophet, or debate about whether the Torah spoke in “hu-man language.” Modern scholars have observed conventions typical to texts which claim to be revealed, most notably those of the apocalyptic genre. Together with the contrast noted above between literary production and the revealed, these ideas have made revelation an important site for ancient and modern discussions of the nature of authorship and literary composition.

Revelation informed understandings of social structures, boundaries, and roles. The most familiar function of revelation to the historian of religion is that of authorizer: revelation legitimates or even charters acts and structures of power. Access to revealed knowledge often makes the difference between “insiders” and “outsiders” of a certain community, contributing to a sense of communal identity. It bears emphasis that revelation continued to serve these functions even among groups whose leadership defined itself in part by the absence of a claim to revelation – such as rabbinic Judaism or the “orthodox” early Church or Islam after Muhammad; after all, this absence itself shows us the role of the discussion about revelation in socio-political discourse.

Claims to revelation can even indicate a role within the community. The idea that claims to revelation are typical of marginal or at least anti-institutional figures or groups was formulated in modern studies of ancient societies, but it is also suggested by some representations of revelation in the ancient sources themselves (even if, as we shall see, these representations do not necessarily reflect actual social conditions). In some sociological accounts, “prophets” and “revealers” constitute a particular social type, often characterized by “charisma”; as we shall see below, already some an-

Introduction 3

cient sources take pains to define the prophet as a particular type of person distinguished from the community and subject to specific rules of social interaction.

In the following, we first offer a more detailed analysis of some of the scholarly debates on the history of revelation in late antiquity and its literary and social functions; we then proceed to explore the individual contribu-tions to this volume in the context of these debates.

Trajectories in Modern Scholarship

One of the most influential theories used to interpret the supposed decline of prophecy has been Max Weber’s model of charisma and institution-alization. In particular, Weber’s theory engaged the question of the social location of the prophet, and depicted him/her as an always marginal and in-dividualistic figure, embodying a charismatic power that was necessarily op-posed to established authority.1 Since Weber was particularly interested in the Israelite prophets, he perpetuated certain constructions that had already emerged in biblical scholarship, many of which were driven by theological interests.2 Perhaps the most famous is that of the nineteenth-century his-torian Julius Wellhausen, who saw the promulgation of the written Law as “the death of prophecy”;3 the post-exilic “theocratic” establishment had no place for the individualistic prophet, who relied on no external authority.4

1 Weber distinguished between three types of authority: rational (legal), traditional, and charismatic, and understood the prophet’s authority to be of the charismatic type (Max We-ber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Translation of Part 1 of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, New York: Oxford University Press, 1947, pp. 328–63). According to Weber, charisma in its pure form is inherently incompatible with rational and traditional authority (361), although it can become “routinized” (tradition-alized or rationalized) – and indeed must, if it is to be perpetuated: “Indeed in its pure form charismatic authority may be said to exist only in the process of originating” (364). Much of Weber’s Ancient Judaism concerns the Israelite prophets in particular; see esp. 380–82 on the demise of prophecy after the exile (see Max Weber, Ancient Judaism (translated and edited by H. H. Gerth and D. Martindale, Glencoe Ill.: Free Press, 1952).

2 For a discussion and qualified defense of Weber’s theories in more recent scholarship, see Joseph Blenkinsopp, A History of Prophecy in Israel, Revised and Enlarged (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox, 1996), 34–35.

3 Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel (translated from the German by J. Sutherland Black and A. Menzies; Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1885), 402.

4 Wellhausen, History of Israel, 398. “It belongs to the notion of prophecy, of true revela-tion, that Jehovah, overlooking all the media of ordinances and institutions, communicates himself to the individual … .” John Barton has criticized the value judgments invoked by theories such as that of Wellhausen, which posit a suppression and replacement of “the liv-ing voice of prophecy” by “the fixed and unalterable Law”: John Barton, Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1986), 111.

Philippa Townsend and Moulie Vidas4

This model often served to support the idea that Christianity was a revival of the true spirit of God, which had been lost by the legal and cultic Jewish establishment in the Second Temple period: Christ, then, was the true heir of the prophets.5 However, the notion of the demise of prophecy was not limited to theologically motivated Christians, since it fit well with certain Rabbinic constructions of the prophetic age as past, and more generally with a scholarly, as well as theological, neglect or devaluation of Second Temple Judaism.

Such narratives of atrophy and institutionalization, even when detached from the more strident theological motivations of previous generations, have had a lasting influence on how scholars have classified and interpreted revelation in antiquity. The idea that the authentic words of the prophets could  – and should  – be distinguished from secondary intellectualized, literary accounts frequently prompted attempts to filter out original pre-exilic oral prophecy from its preservation in the post-exilic texts of the canon. More recently, the practical difficulties, as well as the problematic methodological assumptions, involved in attempting to rescue some pure, pre-literary remnant of revelation from textual ossification have prompted some scholars to reverse their perspective, in the recognition that our image of pre-exilic prophecy comes mainly from post-exilic texts, and cannot be isolated from them.6

Indeed, issues of textualization and canonization have been central to both modern and ancient debates about prophecy and revelation.7 Canoni-zation is one process by which revelation may be “fixed” in the past, and the authority of later purported prophets challenged. Rather than viewing the process and effect of canonization as a linear trajectory from charisma to institutionalization, however, recent scholarship has emphasized the on-going diversity of claims to divine knowledge throughout Second Temple Judaism and beyond. Furthermore, the relationship of canonicity to the idea that the prophetic era is past is complex, as many scholars have recognized; David Aune and John Barton, for example, have both argued that the (in any case gradual) canonization of the Hebrew Bible was unrelated to notions of the cessation of prophecy in the Second Temple and rabbinic periods, since most Jews perceived no contradiction between a fixed set of authoritative texts and belief in ongoing divine revelation.8

5 Wellhausen, History of Israel, 398.6 Michael H. Floyd and Robert D. Haak, Prophets, Prophecy, and Prophetic Texts in Sec-

ond Temple Judaism (New York: T.&T. Clark International, 2006), 2–3.7 For a detailed discussion, see Floyd and Haak, Prophets, 6–14.8 David Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World

(Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1983), 106; Barton, Oracles of God, 113–15. Barton dedicates the first two chapters (pp. 13–95) of his study to a detailed and nuanced discussion of the relationship between prophecy and canon.

Introduction 5

Scholarly attempts to nuance the traditional narrative of decline tend to speak not of the cessation of revelation, but of its transformation, often in terms of a shift from direct revelation to the inspired interpretation of texts.9 Others locate the notion of the demise of prophecy in the development of an archaizing perspective among Second Temple writers themselves.10 Even those scholars who dispute these distinctions as perpetuating the margin-alization of Second Temple texts that do claim revealed knowledge perceive some sort of transformation in Jewish views of revelation after the exile.11 Hindy Najman has argued that the loss of the First Temple evoked a sense of alienation from the divine that was not assuaged even by the construction of the Second Temple, and that engendered new modes of attaining divine knowledge: “It was through learning how to mourn loss that these texts gained access to the divine in a different way.”12

These challenges to traditional historiographical narratives have also destabilized important conceptual categories; the distinction between prophecy and apocalyptic, in particular, which depends to some extent on the idea that apocalyptists were the marginalized successors of the prophets, has increasingly been questioned.13 Also undermining this distinction was the discovery of the Enochic fragments among the Dead Sea scrolls, which has demonstrated that the immanent eschatology typical of the canonical apocalypses was a later element absent in the earliest documents of the tradi-tion.14 A similar fate has befallen the distinction between the “wisdom” and “apocalyptic” traditions. For earlier scholarship, this distinction provided a key for mapping different social groups and roles – the former attributed to sober, established intellectuals preoccupied with scientific observations, scriptural exegesis, and moral instruction, the latter attributed to ecstatic and marginal visionaries.15 Contemporary scholarship has become skeptical

9 Blenkinsopp, History of Prophecy, 227–28; Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity, 103–106.

10 Barton, Oracles of God, 115: “Nostalgia, not theocracy, was the death of prophecy.”11 In addition to the studies noted below, see also the general study of Markus Bockmuehl,

Revelation and Mystery in Ancient Judaism and Pauline Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr Sie-beck, 1990); along with a very useful survey of revelation discourse in Jewish literature from the Second Temple and early rabbinic periods, Bockmuehl provides an additional example of a thesis of transformation which sees a rise rather than a decline in the importance of revelation.

12 Hindy Najman, “Reconsidering Jubilees: Prophecy and Exemplarity,” in Past Renew-als: Interpretative Authority, Renewed Revelation, and the Quest for Perfection in Jewish Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 193.

13 E. g. Barton, Oracles of God, 111. Barton wants to abolish the term “apocalyptic” al-together (201), while insisting that “post-exilic Judaism is radically discontinuous with the religion and culture of pre-exilic Israel” (268).

14 Michael E. Stone, Scriptures, Sects and Visions: A Profile of Judaism from Ezra to the Jewish Revolts (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), 37–47.

15 One of the most compelling accounts to this effect is in Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism (trans. J. Bowden; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), e. g. 202.

Philippa Townsend and Moulie Vidas6

of these boundaries, seeing the difference in literary conventions and topics as a reflection of difference among intellectual groups or even individuals in Jerusalem’s elite.16

This shift in the social location of the apocalypses also relates to the debate most pertinent to the narrative of revelation’s transformation in our period, that is, the debate on the literary or experiential nature of this tradition. Michael Stone has argued, against the decline narrative, that the apocalypses presented records of revelatory, mystical experiences.17 In con-trast, Martha Himmelfarb has placed the ascent apocalypses on a trajectory of the textualization of revelation, reading them as self-referential, fictional narratives about ascent driven in part by Biblical exegesis.18

The Dead Sea sectarian writings, with their claim to continued access to divine revelation, have brought to the forefront of scholarly interest the connection between such claims and the formation and maintenance of community boundaries in a number of traditions.19 Here too, however, scholars have debated whether the sect’s claim is a reference to visionary or auditory revelation experience or an almost metaphorical way to under-stand human intellectual discovery.20

As noted above, rabbinic texts claim that prophecy has ended; and while earlier scholarship focused on finding the actual literary or religious process to which this claim refers, more recent works content themselves with ex-plaining the central function of this claim for rabbinic self-definition.21 Yet

16 See e. g. Philip R. Davies, “The Social World of Apocalyptic Writings” in The World of Ancient Israel: Sociological, Anthropological and Political Perspectives (ed. R. E. Clements; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 251–271; Randal A. Argall, 1 Enoch and Sirach: A Comparative Literary and Conceptual Analysis of the Themes of Revelation, Crea-tion and Judgment (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995).

17 See Michael E. Stone, “Apocalyptic Literature” in Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period (ed. M. E. Stone; Assen: Van Gorcum, 1984) 383–441 (427–433).

18 Martha Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 95–114. To be sure, Himmelfarb herself does not conceptual-ize this as a “decline”; her tone is almost celebratory of this development.

19 George W. E. Nickelsburg, “The Nature and Function of Revelation in 1 Enoch, Ju-bilees, and Some Qumranic Documents” in Pseudepigraphical Perspectives: The Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls (ed. E. G. Chazon and M. E. Stone; Leiden: Brill, 1998), 91–120.

20 See e. g. Aharon Shemesh and Cana Werman, “Hidden Things and their Revelation,” Revue de Qumrân 18 (1998), 409–427.

21 The most frequently cited article on the cession of prophecy in rabbinic literature, Ur-bach’s “When did prophecy cease,” presents a middle ground between these developments: on the one hand, it certainly tries to identify what it is that precisely “ceased” with prophecy even outside the world of the rabbis; on the other hand, it contextualizes the specific form of the rabbis’ claim in a polemical context, especially with the early Christians. See Ephraim E. Urbach, “Matai pasqah ha-nevu’ah?” in The World of the Sages: Collected Studies (He-brew; Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1988; first published in 1945/6), 9–20. A more recent discussion is Isaiah M. Gafni, “Rabbinic Historiography and Representations of the Past,”

Introduction 7

scholars have also shown that even if “prophecy” ceased, the possibility of communication with the divine or access to divine knowledge informs cen-tral aspects of rabbinic literature. Sometimes, this access is obtained through means not altogether different from those of the Hebrew Bible: dreams, the heavenly voice, the holy spirit, and even visions.22

Scholarship on visions in rabbinic literature, in particular, has seen dra-matic shifts.23 Nineteenth-century scholars who were embarrassed by these visions’ “irrationality” either marginalized their role or interpreted them in a way that would please a “rational” student of the Enlightenment. Re-sponding to this tradition, Gershom Scholem asserted that the visionary and mystical elements were central to the classical rabbinic tradition.24 Key to this argument was the Hekhalot corpus of Jewish visionary and magical texts: Scholem dated this corpus to the early rabbinic period, arguing that it presents evidence of the rabbis’ interest in the visionary and that these interests were not expressed in other documents because of rabbinic esoteri-cism.25 While many scholars continue to hold views similar to Scholem’s,26 others have moved away from this model, dating the formative stages of the Hekhalot corpus to the late Talmudic and Geonic period, and positing a more complicated relationship between this corpus and classical rabbinic literature.27 As for the nature of revelation in the Hekhalot corpus itself,

The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (ed. M. S. Jaffee and C.E. Fonrobert; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 295–312 (303–304). On the complex possibilities even within the rabbinic cessation narrative, see Ishay Rosen-Zvi, “Can the Homilists Cross the Sea Again? Revelation in Mekilta Shirata” in The Significance of Sinai: Traditions About Sinai and Divine Revelation in Judaism (ed. G. J. Brooke et al.; Leiden: Brill, 2008), 217–245.

22 On dreams, see Galit Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 88–107; on the heavenly voice or Bat Qol, see Peter Kuhn, Offenbarungsstimmen im antiken Judentum: Untersuchungen zur Bat Qol und verwandten Phänomenen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989); on the Holy Spirit see Peter Schäfer, Die Vorstellung vom heiligen Geist in der rabbinischen Literatur (München: Kösel Verlag), 1972.

23 See in general “The Jewish Visionary Tradition in Rabbinic Literature,” in The Cam-bridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (ed. M. S. Jaffee and C.E. Fonrob-ert; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 198–221.

24 Gershom Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1965).

25 See, e. g., Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism2 (New York: Schocken, 1946), 41–43.

26 Important followers of Scholem on dating Hekhalot include Ithamar Gruenwald, Apocalyptic Literature and Merkavah Mysticism (Leiden: Brill, 1980); Joseph Dan, Ancient Jewish Mysticism (Tel Aviv: MOD Books, 1993); Rachel Elior, The Three Temples: On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism (Trans. D. Louvish; Oxford: Littman Library, 2004).

27 See most recently, Peter Schäfer, The Origins of Jewish Mysticism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 339–348; earlier contributions include Ephraim E. Urbach, “The Traditions on Merkavah Mysticism in the Tannaitic Period” (Heb.), in Studies in Mysticism and Religion (ed. E. E. Urbach, R. J. Weblowsky, Ch. Wirszubski; Magnes Press: Jerusalem, 1967), 1–28.

Philippa Townsend and Moulie Vidas8

here too, as with the Second Temple apocalypses, the distinction between mystical experience and literary artifact has informed the discussion.28

Perhaps the most unique and pervasive way in which revelation contin-ued to shape the rabbis’ world was the idea that in addition to the Written Torah there was an additional body of revealed material, the Oral Torah.29 As scholars from Gershom Scholem to Martin Jaffee have shown, this con-cept had powerful implications for the very nature of rabbinic literature: in some of its manifestations it accorded rabbinic interpretations, traditions, and texts the status of divine revelation, legitimating incredible creativity attributed to a timeless continuum that stretched from Sinai, and applying some of the techniques of Scriptural exegesis to rabbinic texts.30

Oral Torah also worked to solidify the rabbinic community within Jew-ish society and the Jewish community with respect to the gentiles. As Jaffee has shown, the idea that only oral rabbinic teaching provided full access to God’s revelation made the rabbis an embodiment of revelation in a way that not only contributed to their claim to leadership but also informed the emergence of a discipleship community around them.31 Following an explicit statement in a rabbinic midrash, students of Jewish-Christians rela-tions have shown that for the rabbis, Oral Torah was the divine knowledge that distinguished Israel from gentiles who were now reading the Bible.32 Finally, a focus on the rabbinic notion of Scripture as revealed literature al-lowed scholars of rabbinic exegesis to elucidate the ideological context and

28 See the account of the argument in James R. Davila, Descenders to the Chariot: The People Behind the Hekhalot Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 12–16, as well as Schäfer, ibid.

29 On the concept of Oral Torah in rabbinic literature see Martin S. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 B.C.E.–400 C.E. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), especially 3–12, 84–99 and the references there. Among important earlier treatments are Peter Schäfer, “Das Dogma von der Mündlichen Torah,” in idem, Studien zur Geschichte und Theologie des Rabbinischen Judentums (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 153–197; and Neusner’s studies, e. g., Jacob Neusner, What, Exactly, Did the Sages Mean by “the Oral Torah”? An Inductive Answer to the Question of Rabbinic Judaism (Atlanta: Scholars’ Press, 1999).

30 See the moving, powerful account in Gershom Scholem, “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism” (trans. H. Schwarzschild and M. A. Meyer), in The Mes-sianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1971), 282–303; a more incisive analysis of the development of these ideas is in Martin S. Jaffee, “Halakhah in Early Rabbinic Judaism: In-novation Beyond Exegesis, Tradition Before Oral Torah,” Innovation in Religious Traditions: Essays in the Interpretation of Religious Change (ed. M. Williams et al.; Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992), 109–142.

31 Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, 125–152.32 See e. g. Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs (trans. I. Abraham;

Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1979), 1.305; on Oral Torah as a site for polemic between Jews and Christians see e. g. Marcel Simon, Verus Israel (trans. H. McKeating; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 189–191.

Introduction 9

coherence of the rabbis’ conventions of readings, such as the “omnisignifi-cance” and “atomization” of Scripture so typical of midrash.33

As in studies of Judaism, Weberian theories of institutionalization have proved influential in scholarship on the early church as well. Laura Nasral-lah’s monograph on early Christian prophecy critiques previous models that had presented Pauline prophetic activity as standing at the charismatic origins of Christian revelation, and second-century Montanist prophecy as the anachronistic “last charismatic gasps” which challenged and were even-tually subdued by the organized church.34 Nasrallah emphasizes instead the continuing debates over the legitimacy of revelation, mapping out the rhetorical uses to which these claims were put in disputes over authority, and placing these debates within the wider Graeco-Roman context of dis-cussions about prophecy.

The role of claims to divine revelation in the construction of author-ity and identity has indeed long been recognized in scholarship on early Christianity. In her work on contested forms of leadership in the church, Elaine Pagels has shown how different conceptions of revelation informed varying models of authority among “apostolic” and “Gnostic” Christians in the centuries after Jesus’ death.35 While Pagels, among others, now ques-tions the usefulness of the category “Gnosticism,” its very existence (and persistence) in contemporary scholarship testifies to the importance that claims to divine knowledge (gnosis) had in the heresiological construc-tion of Christian identity.36 For Guy Stroumsa, indeed, the fight against Gnosticism, and a related “demoticization of religion” was central to the eventual exclusion of esoteric teachings from the church.37 Stroumsa also

33 These terms are taken from James Kugel’s work. See e. g. “Two Introductions to Mid-rash,” in Midrash and Literature (ed. G. H. Hartman and S. Budick; New Haven: Yale Uni-versity Press, 1986), 77–103. The connection between revelation and exegesis is so pervasive it is noted in almost any work on midrash; for a useful introduction, see Jay M. Harris, How Do We Know This?: Midrash and the Fragmentation of Modern Judaism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 7–23. An early work that is as foundational as it is controversial is Abraham J. Heschel, Heavenly Torah: As Refracted through the Generations (trans. G. Tucker; New York: Continuum, 2005).

34 Laura Nasrallah, An Ecstasy of Folly: Prophecy and Authority in Early Christianity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Theological Studies, Harvard Divinity School: Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2003), 3.

35 Elaine Pagels, “Visions, Appearances, and Apostolic Authority: Gnostic and Orthodox Traditions,” in Gnosis: Festschrift für Hans Jonas (ed. B. Aland; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978), 415–30.

36 For two distinct approaches to the problems of the category of “Gnosticism,” see Michael Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Cat-egory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) and Karen King, What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003).

37 Guy Stroumsa, Hidden Wisdom: Esoteric Traditions and the Roots of Christian Mysti-cism (Leiden: Brill, 1996), e. g. 145, 157.

Philippa Townsend and Moulie Vidas10

emphasizes that Christian esoteric traditions must be understood in terms of Christianity’s inheritance from Judaism, and particularly from apoca-lyptic literature.38 Similarly, David Frankfurter has explored what he sees as profound connections between Jewish apocalyptic literature, gnosis, and modes of revelatory authority in Christian communities continuing well into the seventh century C.E.39

It is generally difficult to separate the scholarship on revelation in Judaism and in Christianity, in part because Judaism has so often been studied as the precursor to Christianity, but also because scholars of both early Christian-ity and Second Temple Judaism now tend to recognize that their subjects of study overlap. Thus, David Aune dedicates much of his masterly volume on the form and function of prophecy in early Christianity to analyzing Bibli-cal and Second Temple Jewish texts, as well as evidence from the Graeco-Roman world more generally.40

Moreover, the study of revelation in other Graeco-Roman religions has never been divorced from attempts to understand the origins and develop-ment of early Christianity and Judaism. Plutarch’s first-century dialogue On the Failure of the Oracles and Julian’s admission of the silence of the oracles in the fourth century C.E., have often provided support for a fa-miliar narrative of decline in pagan revelation; but scholars have also noted that these declarations bookend an apparent flourishing of oracular activity and of new modes of divine revelation in the intervening period, which has consequently been described as one that “preferred revelation to reason.”41 The influential work of E. R. Dodds depicted it as an “age of anxiety,”42 and analyzed the “failure of Greek rationalism,”43 as he, and many others saw it, in the context of a refusal to take responsibility for the intellectual freedom offered by “an open society.”44 For Dodds, Post-Plotinian Neoplatonism, marked by the rise of theurgy and the influence of the Chaldean Oracles, was characteristic of this descent into irrationality, magic, and “spineless

38 Stroumsa, Hidden Wisdom, 56.39 David Frankfurter, “The Legacy of Jewish Apocalypses in Early Christianity: Regional

Trajectories,” in The Jewish Apocalyptic Heritage in Early Christianity (ed. J. VanderKam and W. Adler; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996).

40 Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity.41 Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1986), 196, charac-

terizing the view of E. R. Dodds and others, not his own. 42 E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1965).43 E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1951), 249; and see generally the chapter entitled “The Fear of Freedom,” 236–255.44 Greeks and the Irrational, 252; and see 255, n.1, for his definition of an open society

(with reference to Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, London: Routledge, 1945).

Introduction 11

syncretism.”45 The embrace of irrationalism could be construed as a sign of paganism’s degeneration, and as an explanation for its decline and usurpa-tion by more “rational” Christianity; but from a different perspective, it has been argued that such irrationalism is precisely what gave the Christian reli-gion, with its appeal to faith over reason, the opening it needed to succeed.

Such narratives of anxiety, degeneration, and triumphalism have, perhaps unsurprisingly, proved unsatisfactory to many later scholars.46 Notably, Robin Lane Fox has emphasized the continuity between classical Greek literary descriptions of interactions with the gods, and the accounts of per-sonal encounters with the divine evidenced in inscriptions, treatises, and lit-erature continuing throughout the third century C.E. Lane Fox argued that the “marketplace” of revelation never waned, but that particular revelatory forms flourished in different periods. Rather than attributing the shifting prominence of oracles to an emotional zeitgeist, he placed it in the context of specific political and social changes.47

Others have emphasized change over continuity in forms of revelation in pagan late antiquity. While welcoming Lane Fox’s “nuanced” corrective to the narratives of Dodds and others, Polymnia Athanassiadi has argued that, in a significant shift, divine authority came increasingly to rest on the figure of the Pythagorean sage, rather than on the sacred sites of the oracles.48 Athanassiadi sees the Pythagorean sage as the harbinger of the Christian holy man brought to life in Peter Brown’s hugely influential article on “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” in which he argued that this figure “trumped the oracle, by being both objective and trenchant in an idiom that was more consonant with the habits and expectations of a new, more intensely personal style of society.”49 Indeed, Brown has placed the issue of revelation at the heart of the “making of late antiquity,” argu-ing that to understand the religiosity of this period, we should look not to narratives of anxiety and decline, but to a slow and subtle process whereby access to the divine came to be concentrated increasingly on individual fig-ures, “the friends of God”: bishops, martyrs, and monks – and to a lesser

45 Greeks and the Irrational, 286. The purported degeneration of Greek rationalism was often blamed on “Oriental” influences, though Dodds himself was somewhat critical of such explanations (see Greeks and the Irrational, 249–50).

46 See Peter Brown’s brilliantly subtle review, “Approaches to the Religious Crisis of the Third Century A. D.” English Historical Review 83 (1968), 542–58; reprinted in his Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (London: Faber & Faber, 1972).

47 Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians; see especially the chapters on “Seeing the Gods” and “Language of the Gods” (102–261).

48 Polymnia Athanassiadi, “Philosophers and Oracles: Shifts of Authority in Late Pagan-ism,” Byzantion 62 (1992), 58; and for her verdict on Lane Fox’s analysis, 59 n.50a.

49 Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971), 100.

Philippa Townsend and Moulie Vidas12

extent, philosophers too.50 For Brown, perceptions of revelation mark a di-vide between Christians and non-Christians, but also between the religious sensibilities of the Antonine and post-Constantinian periods, as the tradi-tionally open access between gods and human society in the Graeco-Roman world became increasingly restricted.51

Such recognitions of the connections between developments in both Christian and non-Christian religiosity in late antiquity highlight once again the ways in which scholarly discussions of prophecy and revelation in different traditions of the ancient Mediterranean overlap and in fact are frequently inseparable. It is fitting then that our volume includes contribu-tions on a range of the religions of late antiquity, not only because these religions frequently shared the same social and geographical contexts, but because modern attempts to interpret revelation in these different traditions have so often intersected. The contributions in this volume approach many of the questions posed by previous scholarship, regarding debates about rationality, the periodization of history, the distinction between direct ex-perience and literary artifice, the construction of genres, the significance of shifts between inspired persons and inspired texts, and the social location of those for whom divine revelation is claimed.

The Present Volume

The scope of this collection of studies is a broad one. In the tradition of its predecessors in the series of colloquia and volumes on late ancient religion arranged by Princeton University’s Department of Religion, it examines a particular theme or problem across the different traditions of that period: Jewish, Christian, and Graeco-Roman;52 in this collection, we have also

50 Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978). In the Antonine period, according to Brown, oracles had still provided com-munal access to the gods, and expressed and resolved communal concerns; it is in this context, Brown argued, that we should understand the well-known part they played in persecutions of the Christians: “Whenever the oracles speak out against the Christians in Late Antiquity, we can be sure that we are dealing with groups that can still find a collective voice; just as, when they fall silent, it is because a community has, somehow, lost its common language” (Making of Late Antiquity, 38).

51 “The new heroes and leaders of the Christian church came to stand between heaven and an earth emptied of the gods,” Brown, Making of Late Antiquity, 101.

52 The previous volumes are: The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (ed. A. H. Becker and A. Y. Reed; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003); Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions (ed. R. S. Boustan and A. Y. Reed; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity (E. Iricinschi and H. M. Zellentin; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008); Anti-quity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Graeco-Roman World (ed. G. E. Gardner and K. L. Osterloh; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008).

Introduction 13

included papers on Islam and Zoroastrianism.53 The papers included here explore how these different traditions engage with a diverse range of con-cepts, discursive practices, social structures, historical developments and individual experiences premised on the idea that humankind has access to divine knowledge.

What unites these papers is not just the similarity of the ancient phenome-na they study, but also a series of interrelated methodological problems that they confront in contributing to our understanding of these phenomena. As we have already seen, many of these methodological problems stem from the ancient texts themselves: the authors we study are not just the subjects of our investigation but also our intellectual ancestors, and their understand-ings, prejudices, constructions, and insights inevitably inform ours.

This introduction examines the contributions presented in this volume in light of two such interactions of the ancient and modern discussion on revelation: the contrast between revelation and human artifact and the con-nection between revelation and historiography. The following discussion does not seek to impose a unified program or even a set of interests on a diverse group of papers; rather, it offers one way to explore the shared conversations and scholarly trajectories which these contributions present.

Revelation and the limits and possibilities of discourse

One manner of defining revelation that has appealed to authors both an-cient and modern is to contrast revelation with human artifact: revelation is what happens where human knowledge ends and divine wisdom begins; it is expressed in a language unconventional either in its magnificence or its mystery; it often possesses the mind of the recipient in an ecstasy that is said to overtake her normal cognition; the recipients of revealed knowledge may be the most unlikely to receive it – the deformed, the very young, the marginal – precisely because it is not obtained in normal ways. This contrast has been so central to some constructions of revelation, that it is preserved even when the revelation report or recipient is suspected and criticized: “bad” revealed content can be traced to misleading divinities (whether good or bad) just as it can be traced to calculated forgery; dubious prophets may be seen as madmen just as they can be seen as sophisticated pretenders.

As we have seen, this contrast between revelation and human artifact has haunted much of modern scholarship on revelation in antiquity. To be

53 As with the previous projects, we have maintained the broad chronological limits of late antiquity, taking it as the period between the conquests of Alexander the Great and the rise of Islam (see Boustan and Reed, Heavenly Realms, 1 n. 1). Most papers, however, focus primarily on materials from the more narrowly defined period of late antiquity between 200–800 C.E.

Philippa Townsend and Moulie Vidas14

sure, most modern scholars do not rely on a divinity to explain revelation. The contrast is maintained, however, by employing such distinctions as that between the experience of revelation and its fictional or intellectual exploration: the former is constructed as largely removed from deliberate, conscious human shaping, the latter as an imitation of the former, or else an attempt to interpret it.

This range of contrasts has informed the way scholars construe the his-torical development, social location, and literary negotiation of revelation in antiquity. As noted above, it has acquired a special significance in the field of late antiquity, as scholars took from the ancient sources the notion that prophecy ceased at some point in this period, and wove a modern narrative about the decline or transformation of “direct”/“experiential” revelation into a literary or intellectualized form. In the sociological reconstruction of revelation accounts, reports of ecstatic visions were attributed to people at the margins of society – disenfranchised groups, the uneducated, women, children – precisely because these accounts are supposedly removed from the convention or art typical of the higher strata of society. The distinction between experience and literary art has not only structured completely dif-ferent strategies in analyzing revelation accounts – it has also, just as impor-tantly, separated the study of these accounts from the study of discourses about revelation.

Several papers in this volume challenge these scholarly legacies, even as they contribute to a more accurate understanding of the ancient contrast that generated these legacies. Pavlos Avlamis’s paper on the Life of Aesop confronts one instance of the scholarly trope that revelation language im-plies a marginal social location. Previous scholarship on the Life used the work’s Isis epiphany to reconstruct the social location of its authors and au-dience: The work was classified as “popular literature”; the revealed nature of Aesop’s wisdom and his apparent offense against Apollo were contrasted with the traditional learning of the higher strata of society and with “elite culture.” Avlamis argues that “popular literature” is a modern anachronism and that the production of the text, its authorship and subsequent transmis-sion all must be confined in the social world of the pepaideumenoi or the literate.

The result is that the Isis epiphany is not an expression of its authors’ lack of traditional schooling or opposition to elite intellectual culture; rather, it is in conversation precisely with that schooling and that culture. The epiphany contributes to the work’s negotiation of what Avlamis terms the “literate individual’s double vision of everyday life”: the negotiation between, on the one hand, the “great,” literary tradition and the knowledge and experience it produces, and the “little,” local tradition and the knowledge and experi-ence it informs on the other. The implications for the study of revelation

Introduction 15

discourse in this instance are significant: it is not to be analyzed outside of the intellectual-literary tradition but in conversation with it; it does not give us a glimpse to some pure, “pre-literary” experience but rather shows us the diversity within the literary tradition.

The idea of a “double vision” in which discourse looks at itself from with-in and without is central to several of the authors studied in this volume. A similar dialectic lies at the heart of John Turner’s article on the Platonic, apocalyptic treatise Allogenes from the Nag Hammadi codices. Turner shows that Allogenes poses two levels of knowing. The first is character-ized by an “active and discursive” knowledge. In order to obtain further insight, this level must be abandoned for suppression not just of knowledge claims but also of any sort of mental activity, for a passivity of the mind. While Allogenes does place human artifact or discursive, active inquiry in a lower place than the passive abstention from it, it also poses the former as a necessary preamble to the latter and seems to be interested precisely in the juxtaposition of both stages.

Turner shows that this dual commitment is not limited to the epistemo-logical construction offered by the work but also informs its literary strate-gies: Allogenes legitimates itself not only by appeal to the “supernatural status of the revealers and their revelations,” but also by demonstrating its authors’ mastery of Platonic metaphysical philosophy. Perhaps most important for our purposes is Turner’s argument that Allogenes offers to its readers not revealed knowledge, not even a revelation technique to be rep-licated and through which some non-discursive revelation may be obtained; rather, it presents to its readers a possibility for spiritual progress, a literary role model – Allogenes – to be emulated by way of imagination.

An even sharper contrast between revealed knowledge and intellectual inquiry is the subject of Gregory Shaw’s paper on revelation in Iamblichus’s theurgy. The third-century philosopher rejects Porphyry’s investment in philosophy or logic as ways to true wisdom and advocates a theurgic ritual which is contrasted with the discursive: “even if it is unknowable to us,” Iamblichus writes on the ritual’s formulation, “this is its most sacred aspect: for it is too excellent to be divided into knowledge.” Only the revelation en-gendered by this ritual can realize what Shaw terms the “double reference” of the soul – human and divine, particular and universal, mortal and eternal.

Still Shaw describes what Iamblichus offers as an “art of reception, of utter passivity” (emphasis added), and argues that Iamblichus imagines the encounter with the divine precisely by emphasizing the human: since self-alienation is at the heart of this process, we can encounter the divine only by remaining human, by maintaining the duality of our nature. Also important for the purposes of this collection as a whole is the context Shaw offers for Iamblichus: a debate in philosophical circles about knowledge and

Philippa Townsend and Moulie Vidas16

religion. The position that the access to the divine is through revelation, that is, non-logical or non-discursive, is part of the same discourse in which the opposite claim is made.

Azzan Yadin-Israel’s contribution traces how Rabbi Aqiva came to be seen as a brilliant interpreter whose Scriptural exegesis is itself a process of divine revelation. Yadin-Israel shows that this image negotiated the tension that is produced when Aqiva’s readings of Scripture, originally intended to justify oral traditions, were re-interpreted in a later period as Scriptural exegesis. Since these readings did not confirm to the logic of rabbinic inter-pretation (a goal they were not designed to meet) – or perhaps not even any interpretation – they were now presented as acts of divination or revelation.

In this sense, the Talmudic narrative uses the idea of revelation in a way similar to its use in the Life of Aesop, Allogenes, and Iamblichus’s theurgy: in all these cases, revelation addresses a duality or even alienation between a certain type of reasoning and its other, between an intellectual pursuit and its limits. In the Life, a global literary tradition takes a look at the local, “little tradition” beyond it; in Allogenes and Iamblichus we see authors in the Platonic tradition reflecting on the boundaries of philosophy and its beyond; in the Talmudic narrative about Aqiva, revelation marks the sage’s reading of Scripture as going beyond the understandable, conventional logic of interpretation.

While in all these cases revelation marks a break with a certain discourse or learning, this marking itself is part of a discourse, a product of learning, a narrative device. It is an idea that comes to solve a certain tension or prob-lem in these authors’ intellectual worlds, even if the solution constructs or points to something beyond that world.

This discursive context of revelation is present even when we leave the scholarly worlds of Aqiva, Iamblichus and even Allogenes and Aesop to ex-amine late ancient prophets. Patricia Crone’s study on the Messenger in the Qur’ n, itself part of a greater effort to map the religious world to which the Qur’ nic prophecy is addressed, reconstructs a debate between Mu ammad and his opponents on the characteristics of legitimate revelation. The un-believers, Crone concludes, would only accept two kinds of messengers: a warning angel descending from heaven or a human prophet ascending to there, bringing revelation down. Mu ammad insists on the veracity of his prophecy even though he is proudly human, not even accompanied by an angel, and even though this prophecy does not itself rely on heavenly ascent. In fact, at certain moments the Qur’ n undermines the very ideas of past angelic messengers and heavenly journeys.

Thus Crone’s paper shows us how such important variables of prophecy as its mediating figure are determined by a wide-ranging conversation that involves the contested interpretation of past revelations as well as theologi-

Introduction 17

cal positions: the Qur’ n’s resistance to angelic messengers may relate to its criticism elsewhere of the unbelievers’ worship of beings lesser than God; its lack of appeal to a heavenly journey may be connected to its insistence that God is beyond vision.

By recording this conversation, the Qur’ n gives us a window into the formation of Mu ammad’s prophetic self-presentation, even self-concep-tion. One of the complaints of the unbelievers is that Mu ammad is just too much like them to be a messenger of God – their expectation that he would be a foreigner, a miracle-worker or at least have some social dis-tinction belongs to that “otherness” of revelation noted above. In a sense, Mu ammad’s ordinariness can be read as functioning in the same way that low social status, physical suffering and ineloquence function in Jewish and Christian revelation accounts: they vouch for revelation’s veracity precisely because the prophet is an unlikely recipient. At the same time, this sameness between Mu ammad and his non-prophetic interlocutors, the fact that he is not a marginal madman and the fact that he is thoroughly engaged in persua-sion, all make the formation of the prophet at least in part integrable into the study of the wider discursive practices of late ancient religion.

Christine Trevett’s paper on prophecy in early Christianity documents debates about prophecy similar to those at the center of Crone’s paper, though Trevett concentrates not on the mode of revelation but on the so-cial position of prophets and the economic system within which prophecy worked. Trevett examines different negotiations by early Christian com-munities and authors of the institutional role of prophets, the extent to which they ought to be given provisions, and the way such issues figure in discussions of the prophets’ legitimacy.

One can see in the conversation Trevett documents the recurring, con-tested definition of the social parameters of the prophet, the differentiation of this type from other offices such as the bishop, and the constant bound-ary-maintenance that such definition requires, motivated by anxieties on matters like self-gain by prophets and the institutionalization of prophecy. In other words these debates – which appeal not just to theological and exegetical writing but also, as Trevett shows, to general terms of Graeco-Roman political discourse such as public good, honor, and shame – produce the “prophet” as a unique type through which revelation is realized. This historicization of the distinctness of the charismatic and its concentration in a particular social type invites us to undo the legacies of these processes, to consider “charisma” and “prophecy” not as phenomena discrete from discourse which carry specific social forms (the charismatic, the prophet, the visionary) but as options within a wide range of claims to and about revela-tion (theoretical, exegetical, theological as well as experiential) by agents of diverse social position (the bishop, the rabbi, the philosopher).

Philippa Townsend and Moulie Vidas18

Revelation and the making of history

This broad approach to the study of revelation, specifically the integration of accounts of revelatory experiences or claims to direct revelation with discourses about revelation or claims about past revelation, is particularly important for the study of revelation in late antiquity, and not just because of the famous diversity of religion in this period. As we have seen above, already some of the ancient sources insist that revelation has disappeared or weakened in our period; this narrative of decline was then reinscribed as a trajectory in the natural history of religion by modern scholars. We have also seen that more recent studies challenge this history of revelation: they document the persistence of “charismatic” practices throughout late anti-quity, offer a broader variety of statements that should count as revelation, demonstrate that the ancient accounts of revelation’s disappearance served the political interests of particular groups, and recover different narratives of revelation from groups previously marginalized by ancients or mod-erns. Because they were designed as responses to the cessation narrative, these studies placed emphasis precisely on what was said to disappear, and therefore, at least in terms of their focus, some of the distinctions between “charisma” and “reason” or “experience” and “discourse” were maintained.

Collapsing these distinctions allows us to recover a broader discourse in which there were many co-existing and competing visions of what revela-tion is, what its work is, how it should be pursued, if at all. An account of a vision experience takes a position in a debate just as a philosophical treatise on its impossibility does. This view of the conversation on revelation al-lows us to appreciate the transformations of late antiquity not as a general, natural process of decline and institutionalization or a vague zeitgeist but as a group of conversing assertions, engagements with past and contemporary traditions, responses and practices.

Michael Pregill’s experimental paper on Mu ammad’s prophecy and the rise of Islam promises to do precisely this work, laying out powerful pos-sibilities for a reconsideration of a major event in the history of religion. Since scholarship on early Islam has assumed something like the cessation narrative described above, it has understood Mu ammad’s prophecy as the product of his contact with Scriptural models rather than as an integral part of his own, late ancient historical context. Pregill uses the newly docu-mented vibrancy of revelation and of claims to revelation in late antiquity to offer for consideration a new context for Mu ammad’s prophecy in the discourse of its period.

While Pregill does show a special interest in claims to prophecy contem-porary with Mu ammad’s, and while he does make a distinction between prophecy as a discursive object and prophecy as a living tradition, the heart

Introduction 19

of his argument relies on multiform instances of prophecy as a discursive-symbolic idiom. His consideration of Mu ammad’s prophecy as a late an-tique phenomenon appeals to the never-ceasing discussion and interest in prophecy among Jews and Christians in late antiquity, as it is manifested in the presence of prophets but also in philosophical debates or polemics on Biblical interpretation. If the decline narrative and some of its critics con-trasted discourse about prophecy with prophecy itself, Pregill’s paper asks us to consider how one can engender the other.

Almost any attempt to address the cessation of prophecy also addresses the continuities and discontinuities between Jewish revelatory writing of the Second Temple period, on the one hand, and Rabbinic Judaism, on the other. Martha Himmelfarb examines this issue directly through two important texts, Sefer Zerubbabel and Sefer Eliyyahu, the earliest Jewish apocalyptic works to have survived from the period after the rise of the rabbis. Him-melfarb concludes that these works do not try to imitate Second Temple apocalypses, and furthermore, that both works vary greatly from the earlier compositions in their approach to the process of revelation, reflecting the developments of the centuries that passed: the canonization of the Hebrew Bible is evident in the citation of Scriptural proofs for prophecies which in earlier times needed no such support; the rise of the rabbis is evident in the appeal to their authority, even at the expense of a revealing angel.

The differences that Himmelfarb detects between the two works them-selves indicate that the responses to these developments were far from uni-form: Sefer Zerubbabel draws on Ezekiel to present itself as prophecy and cites Scripture only occasionally; Sefer Eliyyahu cites Scripture frequently and even employs rabbinic literary forms. The fact that the former composi-tion gained much more popularity than the latter, more “rabbinized” work, also speaks against a monolithic understanding of the effects of rabbiniza-tion and canonization on the perception of revelation. The kind of conversa-tion in which both compositions partake – even as they do not engage each other directly or are even aware of one another – is in part a conversation about the role and manner of revelation in their time, and through their literary practices they offer different answers.

Yadin-Israel’s argument about Aqiva’s career, explored above, complicates the decline narrative from within the rabbinic tradition itself. It turns on its head the Weber-inspired story about revelation, charisma, tradition and rea-son. In the trajectory Yadin-Israel uncovers, revelation does not stand at the charismatic origin of the story only to decline as it is replaced by rationaliza-tion and tradition. On the contrary, revelation is attributed to Aqiva at a very late period, when he is no longer seen as an upholder of tradition but rather as an interpreter of exceptional capacities. While Yadin-Israel identifies the subject of his essay as the “scripturalization of divine revelation,” he also

Philippa Townsend and Moulie Vidas20

tells us of the opposite process: how revelation, now “scripturalized,” is read into moments of scriptural or traditional study in order to understand them.

It is interesting to look back, with these late documents in mind, to the corpus which is often seen as the beginning of the transformation of Jewish revelation – the Enochic tradition. Annette Yoshiko Reed’s contribution maps the diverse roles Enoch plays in the different stages of this tradition’s development and reception. The Astronomical Book replaces the traditional model of Israelite prophecy, in which divine message is received orally and proclaimed orally, with a new emphasis on writing. In the later Book of the Watchers the traditional procedure of orality is maintained, but this work too departs from the prophetic tradition: while Enoch is certainly distin-guished by his access to divine knowledge, he does not need to be a prophet to obtain this access; his scribal knowledge and expertise suffice. Enochic compositions from the second century B.C.E. attribute to Enoch both the prediction of the future and the authorship of specific documents that we can read and transmit. While the prophetic role of Enoch is abandoned in his Jewish career, in early Christianity this role gains new centrality and significance, since the books attributed to him, taken among the pre-Chris-tian literary heritage, are read as bearing the message of Christ’s arrival. The document we now know as 1 Enoch partakes in this “prophetization” through the very act of its compilation.

Much like Himmelfarb’s study, Reed’s contrast of the oral and scribal in the earliest Enoch writings shows us how different works continued or departed from previous representations of revelation. Authors had a variety of models available, and even if in hindsight certain representations reflect the trends that had triumphed, we should read them not as part of an inevi-table development but as the result of the particular purposes they served for their authors. As in Yadin’s essay, we see here both the “textualization of revelation” and its other side – the introduction of revelation imagery to the understanding of textual processes such as composition and transmis-sion. Reed also places the Christian “prophetization” of Enoch in some of the discursive contexts noted above: contributing to this process are the interpretive practice of pre-figuration, the Christian community’s project of legitimation and its understanding of its past.

These four papers are connected not just in the way that they complicate the cessation narrative, but also in the way they remind us that the con-nection between revelation and historiography is made in the ancient texts themselves: revelation is a theme through which ancient authors weave historical narratives of past and future, rise and decline, change and resist-ance to change. In the discussions about cessation the history produced is a history of revelation itself, but with the narrative about Rabbi Aqiva the his-toriographical move is broader and more ambitious as the rabbis confront

Introduction 21

the biblical past. The prediction of the future in general and eschatology in particular give revelation another set of tools to set past, contemporary, and future events in a particular narrative.

Revelation not only provides agents with tools to understand or con-struct change – it may also serve to realize change, both literary and social. Several of this volume’s contributors show the innovative possibilities that are generated by the claim that a text is revealed, whether this claim is made by the text itself or by its later interpreters. The process is by now very familiar to students of religion: revealed texts possess claims to veracity and significance that transcend literality and allow for powerful flexibility in interpretation and revision of former readings. Christian readings of both the Hebrew Bible and the Greek philosophical texts, for example, often appeal to the revealed nature of these texts in order to reassert their true di-vine meaning, intended for Christians, over the imperfect Jewish and Greek recipients of this revelation from which that meaning was hidden.

In addition to revisionist interpretation, revelation claims may realize social change through social critique and exhortation for reform. Scholars have commented on the revolutionary potential of claims to eschatological knowledge in particular, but it is applicable to revelation more generally: the function mentioned above of “double vision,” of pointing beyond a certain cognition, allows revelation claims a capacity for critical rhetoric. Mu ammad, Iamblichus, even the authors of Sefer Zerubbabel and the Life of Aesop can all be seen to use this critical potential. At the same time, revelation is a resource for resistance to change: the same Iamblichus who employs revelation to negotiate the limits of philosophy also appeals to revelation to defend the value of ritual, though both his appeal to change and his appeal to conserve stem from a critique of the present.

These threads  – revelation as historiography, social commentary, and literary innovation – come together in Yuhan Vevaina’s paper on the Zo-roastrian interpretation of the well-known four ages prophecy. Vevaina shows how the division of human history into four ages was used in Pahlavi apocalyptic literature as social critique, how it was used to understand the new historical situation in which Zoroastrians found themselves under oc-cupation, and how the literary trope itself was integrated into Zoroastrian scriptural and theological grammar.

Both the methodological problem Vevaina confronts and his solution to this problem relate to the mechanisms of interpretation informed by revela-tion. Previous treatments of the four ages prophecy focused on its original provenance, tracing its genealogy throughout the ancient world and mark-ing which culture “borrowed” from which. Vevaina follows methodologi-cal breakthroughs in other traditions in focusing not on the questions of origins but of function. He takes the interpretive elasticity enabled by the