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1 results

  • Chapter 5 - ‘The Holiest Man Ever Born’: Sages, Theioi Andres, and the Shaping of Late Greek Prophecy

  • from Part II - Status, Role, and Functions of Human Intermediaries
  • Edited by Elsa Giovanna Simonetti, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, Claire Hall, University of Durham
  • Book:
    Divination and Revelation in Later Antiquity
    Published online:
    19 October 2023
    Print publication:
    02 November 2023, pp 99-119

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the idea of the prophetically able holy man, or theios anêr, and argues that the attribution of sagehood to prophets in the Hellenistic Jewish tradition paved the way to the creation of the idealised prophet-sage of the Greek theios anêr tradition. This process radically altered the way in which Greeks – including pagans, Jews, and Christians – conceptualised the role of the prophet. The merging of the rational-dialectical epistemic claims of the sage with the revelatory epistemology of the prophet in authors like Philo established a potentially universal scope to the prophet-sage’s knowledge; while both the prophet and sage had defined epistemologies and limits in traditional Greek and Jewish thought, the new-prophet sage understood nothing less than the ‘structure of the cosmos and the activity of the elements’.