This final chapter extends the argument in chapter five by investing the “Prince of Torah” section in the earliest Jewish mystical corpus known as the Hekhalot literature. It reads through the extended narrative of this text through the genre of a historiola, demonstrating that the rhetoric through which it separates between a “human, earthly” Torah and a “divine Torah” resonates with the manner in which Neoplatonists, Manichaeans, and “Jewish Christians” distinguished between “mere prognosis” and “divine prognosis” in chapter five. Not only does this text present the reader with a way of elevating his own learning faculties to be more like the angels, but Torah itself is conceptualized as something that is “instantly knowable” in a moment of divine comprehension.

In this chapter, I contextualize the discourse of orality as the privileged medium of revelation through three corpora; rabbinic idea of Oral Torah, the Manichaean claim that the Kephalaia contain Mani’s Oral Revelation not found in his Written Revelations, and the Pseudo-Clementine’s argument that only Orality (not vision) can guarantee prophetic truth. I ultimately argue that all three drew from a common fund of discursive tools to thematize orality as a privileged site of revelation. After a summary of contemporary discussions on rabbinic Oral Torah, I show how the Kephalaia itself emerged from an “Oral Performative” contexts that was largely independent of textual exegesis of Mani’s books. I argue that, like the rabbis, the Manichaeans privileged the orality because it allowed them to claim that they were simply continuing the revelation that Mani had begun. I then turn to the Ps.-Clementine Homilies and show it thematizes orality in ways that are surprisingly congruent with both the rabbis and the Manichaeans.

I turn to analyze three passages on prophethood from the two Manichaean codices known as the Kephalaia. I suggest that kephalaia are rhetorical-literary units and must be contextualized alongside other contemporary developments. I first turn to the “Introduction” to the Kephalaia, which features Mani recounting his travels around the Sasanian Empire. Rather than mining this for historical data, I argue that the whole point of this peculiar rendition of Mani’s life is to naturalize the form of the two codices of Kephalaia as anthologies, thus showing each kephalaion to be a discrete shard of Mani’s single revelation. I next argue that the so-called “Chain of Prophets” in the first kephalaion is an argument against prevailing Christian notions for a single glorious “Apostolic Age” in the past. Rather than a single Apostolic past, this kephalaion argues that God sends apostles regularly to provide humanity with a way to salvation. In the final section of this chapter, I show how another kephalaion is invested in Sasanian Imperial vision of geography and space, thus bridging the gap between the Sasanian Empire as an institution and the Manichaeans who live within it.

This book explores the shifting discourses of prophethood and prophecy in the late antique Near East. It rejects the “Cessation of Prophecy” metanarrative that frames prophecy as perpetually in decline, and charts instead a novel trajectory for understanding prophethood and prophecy as discourse. It does so by working through a number of texts from the late antique Near East, including Manichaean literature, the classical rabbinic corpus, early Jewish mystical literature, the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, and Neoplatonic literature. It argues that we should read these communities’ developing notions of prophethood and revelation alongside and against one another, on the one hand, and within broader developments in the late antique Near East, on the other.

Here, I turn to the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and read it together with the Cologne Mani Codex. I argue that its anti-Pauline sentiment, which reaches its highest pitch when polemicizing against visionary forms of revelation, is responding to Mani’s claims to be the Apostle of Jesus Christ. I first show that the language of “seminal fluids and blood” of the two prophets in the Homilies is designed to show that the True Prophet cannot be human. The same holds for the cryptic passage about Jesus “changing forms and names,” since only a divine substance - and not a human being - can be the True Prophet. I then turn to the Homilies’ anti-Pauline critique of visionary forms of revelation. I place these together with the Cologne Mani Codex, which presents Mani as a “Second Paul” who acquires prognosis through visionary means. I ultimately argue that the Homilies’ “anti-Pauline” sentiment is directed against Mani (among others).

This chapter investigates the contours of prognosis itself. It begins by describing prognosis in the Neoplatonist Iamblichus’ De Mysteriis. It then “catches” Iamblichus in the act of inventing a new definition of prognosis in his response to Porphyry, shifting it away from discrete knowledge of particular events towards panoptic knowledge that emerges as an expression of divine substance. This chapter then shows how both the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and the Manichaeans were also theorizing prognosis along similar lines.

In the next three chapters, I argue that conceptions of “prophethood” cannot be separated from the specific rhetorical contexts in which they are articulated. In this chapter, I argue that “prophethood” as found in Baraies the Teacher’s homily in the Cologne Mani Codex shows that “Manichaeism” had not yet “parted ways” from its earlier “Jewish Christian” and “Elchasaite roots” since Baraies invents a new concept of prophethood designed to graft Mani into an already existing Elchasaite history. I show that Baraies’ notion of prophethood is new because he is responding to a problem that never arose in Mani’s lifetime, and, he cites from Mani’s own books, but none of them say what Baraies wants him to say. If Baraies is trying to demonstrate to his opponents that Mani should be included in prior history, then we cannot yet say that the two religions had definitively parted ways, only that Mani continued to be a point of contention within an already-existing community. Prophethood is thus a rhetorical tool for Baraies to make his argument, which is ultimately over who are the stewards of Elchasaite history and its true spokespeople.

This book explores the shifting discourses of prophethood and prophecy in the late antique Near East. It rejects the “Cessation of Prophecy” metanarrative that frames prophecy as perpetually in decline, and charts instead a novel trajectory for understanding prophethood and prophecy as discourse. It does so by working through a number of texts from the late antique Near East, including Manichaean literature, the classical rabbinic corpus, early Jewish mystical literature, the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, and Neoplatonic literature. It argues that we should read these communities’ developing notions of prophethood and revelation alongside and against one another, on the one hand, and within broader developments in the late antique Near East, on the other.