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12 <strong>The</strong> <strong>Sabbatean</strong> <strong>Prophets</strong><br />
tions about prophecy, especially those of the Zohar and Rabbi Abraham<br />
Abulafia. 14<br />
<strong>The</strong> early modern period witnessed a great flowering of spiritual inspiration<br />
in many lands. Moving away from the academic debates and secret<br />
mystical rituals typical of medieval prophetic thought, the early moderns often<br />
declared the presence of divine inspiration among them publicly. Prophecy<br />
and messianic movements tend to appear in clusters, and the early modern<br />
period witnessed some of the most prominent of these. <strong>The</strong> late fifteenth<br />
and sixteenth centuries stimulated widespread messianism and prophecy<br />
in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam at the same time, a concurrence which<br />
may never have happened previously. <strong>The</strong> trend continued in various patterns<br />
through most of the seventeenth century. <strong>The</strong> reasons for this must be<br />
sought in the complex nexus of religious history and rapid change that characterized<br />
the period.<br />
Messianism and Prophecy in the Christian Tradition<br />
Christian messianism is often called millenarianism, referring to the New<br />
Testament prophecy of the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth in the future<br />
(Revelation 20:2–3). Christianity is saturated with messianic and apocalyptic<br />
ideas because it originated as a messianic sect of Judaism in the first<br />
century. Furthermore, Christianity is in an extended transitory state between<br />
halves of a messianic mission; and, having rejected biblical law, it is<br />
heavily concerned with doctrine. <strong>The</strong> Church Fathers Origen and Augustine<br />
attempted to suppress prophetic strains and acute Christian millenarianism,<br />
and this became doctrine; nevertheless a long series of Catholic millennial<br />
prophets came to the fore in the Middle Ages, both within the church hierarchy<br />
and at the popular level. 15 Some of these had direct or indirect effects<br />
on <strong>Sabbatean</strong> ideas.<br />
A very influential stream of prophetic millenarianism from within the<br />
church developed under the influence of the twelfth-century Calabrian<br />
abbot, Joachim of Fiore, who himself experienced divine revelations.<br />
Joachim’s emphasis was on the hidden messages within the text of Scripture<br />
that would reveal sacred patterns in history to the person possessing the<br />
keys of correct interpretation. One of these secrets, and a particularly significant<br />
one for the history of prophetic interpretation, was Joachim’s doctrine<br />
of the “concordance of testaments”—the idea that the Hebrew Bible,<br />
or Old Testament, is in fact a complex code for interpreting the New Testa-
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