Latter-day Scripture. Robert M. Price

hall was filled with delegates from countless local prayer groups, each with a prophet or two on hand for the festivities. Charismatic prophets can be expected to stand up and speak in the average Charismatic prayer session. But this one was so big, and the potential prophetic speakers such an unknown quantity, that the planners of the event had issued the regulation that anyone wishing to approach the microphone with a divine utterance had first to submit their oracle to a select magisterium seated in a bank of folding chairs called (with perfect leaden bureaucratic prose) the "Word Gifts Unit"! Paul was already beginning to rein in the spontaneity of the Spirit that bloweth where he listeth when he stipulated that each Corinthian prophet must speak in turn and then wait for the other prophets to give their reviews on his words. Prophecy is being domesticated by the establishment rule-makers in favor of their canon of established, traditional authority. It always happens.

      Some subsequent prophets will try to smuggle their own revelations into the community by putting the name of some old and venerable prophet on their own new prophecy, passing off their own revelation as a neglected and rediscovered revelation from the founder. If such a prophet succeeds in this, he may actually wind up causing real change within the established religion, as did a medieval Neo-Platonic mystic posing as Dionysius the Areopagite, a biblical character and convert of the Apostle Paul (Acts 17:34). Thanks to his pious fraud, something very much like nondualist Vedanta Hinduism was able to take root in Catholic Christianity, providing a safety zone for Christian mystics who would otherwise have been recognized as departing from the orthodox norm in a heretical direction. Heresy had been smuggled into the fortress of orthodoxy in the Trojan Horse of the Pseudo-Dionysius. In precisely the same fashion, Gnostic elements had infiltrated Judaism by means of pseudepigrapha attributed to ancient patriarchs of Israel (the Apocalypse of Adam, the Revelation of the Great Seth, etc.)

      But other prophets will dare to speak in their own names, believing that a real prophecy will ring true by its own authority, at least for those who have ears to hear. And since there will probably be precious few of such hearers, they will be forced out of the larger body with little choice but to set up shop on their own. And thus another new religion begins. And no sooner does the community lay the first wreath on the tomb of their own founding prophet than they start work on the construction of new tombs for any future prophets who may come along to stir up trouble.