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.

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.