Anti-Gnosticism: Prophetic Discourse

There’s a funny chapter in Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, which I’m going to share at length because I don’t believe in slicing ‘verses’ out of a text:

Pursue love and strive for the spiritual gifts and especially that you may prophesy. For those who speak in a tongue do not speak to other people but to God, for no one understands them, since they are speaking mysteries in the Spirit. But those who prophesy speak to other people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation. Those who speak in a tongue build up themselves, but those who prophesy build up the church. Now I would like all of you to speak in tongues but even more to prophesy. One who prophesies is greater than one who speaks in tongues, unless someone interprets, so that the church may be built up.

Now, brothers and sisters, if I come to you speaking in tongues, how will I benefit you unless I speak to you in some revelation or knowledge or prophecy or teaching? It is the same way with lifeless instruments that produce sound, such as the flute or the harp. If they do not give distinct notes, how will what is being played on the flute or harp be recognized? And if the bugle gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle? So with yourselves: If in a tongue you utter speech that is not intelligible, how will anyone know what is being said? For you will be speaking into the air. There are doubtless many different kinds of sounds in the world, and nothing is without sound. If then I do not know the meaning of a sound, I will be a foreigner to the speaker and the speaker a foreigner to me. So with yourselves: since you are striving after spiritual gifts, seek to excel in them for building up the church.

Therefore, one who speaks in a tongue should pray for the power to interpret. For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays but my mind is unproductive. What should I do then? I will pray with the spirit, but I will pray with the mind also; I will sing praise with the spirit, but I will sing praise with the mind also. Otherwise, if you say a blessing with the spirit, how can anyone in the position of an outsider say the “Amen” to your thanksgiving, since the outsider does not know what you are saying? For you may give thanks well enough, but the other person is not built up. I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you; nevertheless, in church I would rather speak five words with my mind, in order to instruct others also, than ten thousand words in a tongue.

Brothers and sisters, do not be children in your thinking; rather, be infants in evil, but in thinking be adults. In the law it is written,

By people of strange tongues
and by the lips of foreigners
I will speak to this people,
yet even then they will not listen to me,

says the Lord. Tongues, then, are a sign not for believers but for unbelievers, while prophecy is not for unbelievers but for believers. If, therefore, the entire church comes together and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are out of your mind? But if all prophesy, an unbeliever or outsider who enters is reproved by all and called to account by all. After the secrets of the unbeliever’s heart are disclosed, that person will bow down before God and worship, declaring, “God is really among you.”

1 Corinthians 14:1–25

What first stands out to me is that Paul seems to describe the speaking of tongues in a different way than in Acts 2, when the Holy Spirit comes down on the apostles and makes them sound like they are speaking in the language of whoever is listening: “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power” (Acts 2:9–11). Growing up, I often saw that passage in Acts deployed to criticize the practice of glossolalia in charismatic churches, but Paul in his letter reveals two interesting points: first, that speaking in tongues meant different things either in different communities or in different times (perhaps the practice qua glossolalia went out of fashion by the composition of Acts, whose author was maybe trying to reframe or rationalize it); second, even though Paul acknowledges the speaking of tongues qua glossolalia, he also softly criticizes it. One often reads Paul as a hard-ass, but I read him here as actually trying to avoid hurt feelings. “It’s great that y’all speak in tongues; like, by no means, keep doing that. I love speaking in tongues! I’m great at it! But it’s not particularly useful and it makes you look a little crazy. Can you keep it to yourself, and at church focus on communal and intellectual activities which build the community?” Namely, he advocates for prophesy:

What should be done then, my brothers and sisters? When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up. If anyone speaks in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three and each in turn, and let one interpret. But if there is no one to interpret, let them be silent in church and speak to themselves and to God. Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said. If someone sitting receives a revelation, let the first person be silent. For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all be encouraged (and the spirits of prophets are subject to the prophets, for God is a God not of disorder but of peace), as in all the churches of the saints. Or did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only ones it has reached?

Anyone who claims to be a prophet or spiritual must acknowledge that what I am writing to you is a command of the Lord. Anyone who does not recognize this is not to be recognized. So, my brothers and sisters, strive to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues, but all things should be done decently and in order.

1 Corinthians 14:26–40 (34–5 redacted)

Put in a pin in that redaction. Prophesy for Paul is a key function of the Church. Earlier he describes essentially a horizontal division of labor within the assembly, possibly a polemic against a vertical division, saying that not everyone has every ‘gift’, and every ‘gift’ should be honored even if they are perceived as inferior. “Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work powerful deeds? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret?” (1 Cor. 12:29–30). Simultaneously, Paul says that one should strive for the greater gifts—specifically prophecy—and that a gift is worthless if it is used without love (1 Cor. 13). That’s our approximate context.

So, what is prophesy? There’s a notion that prophets are exceptional sages, usually great men of a particular time and place, who communicate truth from on High to the masses. Paul not only seems to implicitly dispel that notion, but it does not even occur to him to explicitly dispel it. Prophesy is a function of multiple or even many members of a church, female or male (although Paul prescribes protections for women against getting assaulted by angels which, if you truly believe the Enochic literature, is fair enough; 1 Cor. 11:1–16). Prophets take turns speaking and when someone else has a revelation about what is said, the prophet passes the proverbial microphone. But what are they saying?

Prophesy is usually understood as foretelling the future. I’m not familiar with the Hebrew root n-b-’ (נ־ב־א), but the Greek prophḗtēs (προφήτης) contains a sort of etymological pun: the prophet both speaks for something, i.e. God in this case, and speaks prior to the event being spoken of. But I think the latter parsing, despite being truer to how we understand the nature of prophesy, is misleading about the actual content and practice of prophesies. Critics usually acknowledge a convention called the prophetic perfect tense: that events apparently foretold by prophets are often conjugated using the past tense despite not yet having occurred, in order to communicate the certainty of the event (as if, for God, it has already happened). I acknowledge that’s a possible rhetorical device, and that Hebrew as a language has some structural weirdness around the temporality of verbs which requires some working around, but (as a non-expert) I want to suggest an alternative reading: that prophets—who really wrote about events which were contemporaneous, were obviously forthcoming, or had outright occurred prior—did not prophesy under a pretense that they were predicting the future (or at least not necessarily). That is, I don’t think the prophets’ audience was surprised by what they proclaimed, and I don’t think the goal of a prophesy was to deceive the audience into believing something that happened was in fact foretold. Rather, I suggest that prophesy is a critical-interpretive discourse, which recontextualizes a recent past or looming event in cosmic symbology to spur its audience to action.

Why is this so important to Paul? Why was prophesy apparently attractive to outsiders? The early Church was an apocalyptic, messianic sect of Second Temple Judaism. Those terms describe the beliefs of the Church, but we tend to not think through the material implications or bases of those beliefs. I had a professor who laughed when I referred to the Church as an apocalypse cult despite meaning it totally seriously. Liberal millennial, obsessed with Harry Potter, must have thought I was on some epic atheist shit. No joke. Why was the Church apocalyptic? They anticipated the mass repression of Jewish politea as part and parcel with the intensifying antagonism between the Judaean people and the Roman Empire, and they considered existing Jewish establishments either incompetent or outright complacent. On a local level, churches served as alternate lifestyle communities and schools of apocalyptic thought; on a network level, they redistributed resources from the Jewish diaspora and from Gentile God-fearers to the assembly in Jerusalem. Prophesy thus motivated local membership and reinforced network cohesion. It’s the reason behind the entire enterprise of the Church. But prophesy is also useful, maybe even good, for its own sake. Although a prophesy is a catalyst, and it ceases to be a prophesy when it does not catalyze, it also provides a living hope that our present tribulations will one day pass—just check that your hope is a stimulant, not a depressant.

The Tanakh contains many examples of prophesy, and the New Testament of course has Patmos John’s wonderful Revelation, but there’s not much literature on how to prophesy except through the mystical lens of ascending (or descending) to Heaven and speaking to God or the angels. We don’t need to discount that as such, but it seems besides the point of prophesy being a critical interpretation of our historical circumstances. Thankfully, we have the late modern-day prophet Walter Benjamin to explain the function of prophesy in a particular discourse he characterizes as apocalyptic and messianic:

It is well-known that an automaton once existed, which was so constructed that it could counter any move of a chess-player with a counter-move, and thereby assure itself of victory in the match. A puppet in Turkish attire, water-pipe in mouth, sat before the chessboard, which rested on a broad table. Through a system of mirrors, the illusion was created that this table was transparent from all sides. In truth, a hunchbacked dwarf who was a master chess-player sat inside, controlling the hands of the puppet with strings. One can envision a corresponding object to this apparatus in philosophy. The puppet called “historical materialism” is always supposed to win. It can do this with no further ado against any opponent, so long as it employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight.

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. The danger threatens the stock of tradition as much as its recipients. For both it is one and the same: handing itself over as the tool of the ruling classes. In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it. For the Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-Christ. The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve. Not the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm. – The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.

And so on. I’ve seen Marxism or capital-C Communism referred to as a fourth Abrahamic religion, on account of the virtual religiosity of its members and teleology of its analysis—they’ll kill you if you say it—but, being good dialecticians, we can reflect that likeness back onto the actual Abrahamic religions themselves: that, at least prior to institutionalization, they are mass movements driven by a messianic (in the Benjaminian sense) reconstitution of contemporary circumstances, a shattering of history. This isn’t unique to the Abrahamic belief systems, and we should follow Lacan in identifying this as a function intrinsic to any discursive system. Still, it’s worth considering how prophesy as one particular mode of the so-called analyst’s discourse both functioned at the height of its practice, and how it is in continuity with analytical modes we readily acknowledge as such.

As for that pin, the notorious redacted text: "Women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is something they want to learn, let them ask their husbands at home" (1 Cor. 14:35–6). Doesn't the text flow more smoothly without that? It only "works" if you treat verses like a la carte sayings rather than segments of a larger work. I've seen critics of two minds: either that was an annotation which was eventually worked into the text by later scribes, or Paul is quoting and criticizing a saying from the Corinthians (which they say is signaled by the word translated as "Or" in 1 Cor. 14:37, which is supposedly more like a "What!?"). I believed the latter for a while, but even with that in mind it feels so out of place in the text. Regardless, it contract's Paul's earlier instructions about women prophesying so, whether or not it's original to the text, we shouldn't read it as Paul's own instructions (not that we should necessarily always go to bat for Paul; just in this case).