Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered - The Preterist Archive

Chapter 2 - Prophets and Pseudo-Prophets
Jews in the Second Temple period and Christians thereafter never ceased believing in prophecy. God
had never stopped sending His heralds to call the people back to obedience. For Paul and the early
churches following him, the usage perhaps implied something a little different. In Antioch, it seems to
have been associated with teachers, the 'prophets and teachers' of Acts 13:1. Individuals like the
messengers sent down from Jerusalem by James to assess the situation in Antioch are also called
'prophets' in Acts 11:21, as are Philip's daughters in 21:10. Perhaps the paradigmatic 'prophet' of this
kind was Agabus who, 'seized by the Spirit' in Acts 11:22, predicted the famine and in like manner
later in 21:12, got hold of Paul's girdle to try to dissuade him from going to Jerusalem.
Most Jews at this time appear to have equated prophecy with prediction, and associated it with
soothsaying or fortune-telling. Josephus gives a number of examples, beginning, interestingly enough,
with Judas the Essene, who 'never missed the truth' in any of his prophecies (War 1.78ff.). Among
other things, he seems to have predicted the rise of Alexander Jannaeus, the Maccabean priest-king
who will figure so prominently in our texts. In fact, for Josephus these early 'Essenes' seem to have
constituted a species of fortune-tellers, hanging around the Temple and producing 'prophecies' to flatter
the vanity of some important personage. Later, self-proclaimed 'Pharisees' like Rabbi Yohanan ben
Zacchai in Talmudic literature, or even Josephus himself, seem to fulfill a similar role.
For the Jews of the Second Temple period, prophecy lived. A true prophet proved himself by
accurately predicting the future. What had ceased was the certain knowledge of just which prophets
carried on the succession. Josephus, contrasting the relatively small number of Jewish holy books with
the situation among the Greeks, also provides the following description: 'The prophets subsequent to
Moses wrote the history of the events of their own times in thirteen books ... From Artaxerxes (464-4
24 BC) to our own time the complete history has been inscribed, but it is not considered equally
trustworthy compared to the earlier records, because of the lapse of the exact succession of the
prophets' (Against Apion 1.40f.)
The door was open for false prophets and Josephus notes all the impostors and deceivers, pretending
divine inspiration, provoking revolutionary actions and driving the masses to madness. They led them
out to the wilderness, so that God would show them signs of impending freedom [from Rome]' (War
2.259). Actually, for Josephus, these kinds of impostors and deceivers' were in intent more dangerous
even than the bandits he so fulminates against, because they envisaged both revolutionary change and
religious innovation. This was a dangerous combination, and may, in fact, characterize some of the
works we have collected in this book.
When speaking of prophets in ancient Israel, scholars commonly distinguish two types: those who
wrote books, and those who did not. Like Elijah, the latter relied on charismatic qualities to gain an
audience. Both types of prophets are in evidence in the period of the Scrolls. Although the Qumran
texts by definition contain only the records of the first type, it would be rash to conclude that the
readers and writers of the Qumran materials were unaffected by the charismatic, miracle-working
prophets of the second. As we have seen, such individuals proliferated as the first century progressed
and the tensions with Rome grew.
The last participants in the tradition represented by the literature collected in this work almost certainly