Did Prophecy End in 400 B.C.?

A priest friend of mine reached out to me because one of the guys in his RCIA class had been persuaded by a book, Dr. Phillip Kayser’s The Canon of Scripture: A Presuppositional Study, in which he argues that there are only 66 books of the Bible, and that this can be known from the Bible itself, since “nothing beyond the Bible (whether traditions of men or claims to new revelation from God) can be used to settle doctrine or to authoritatively show how to glorify God in faith and life” (Kayser, p. 6). It’s always difficult in such a position to know where to begin: excluding appendices, the book is 455 pages long, and it’s riddled with factual errors, exaggerations, misstatements, logical leaps, and outright falsehoods. Proving any of that for even a few pages is laborious, and virtually impossible for an entire book. So what I’ve decided to do is to take just one section, show the problems with that, and then allow you to form an educated judgment of the quality of the rest of the book from this demonstration.

I chose his argument that “all prophecy ceased in 400 BC” and that “this was the standard Jewish view of Christ’s day.” since the argument is (a) weighty [if true, it would disqualify the seven books of the Deuterocanon, a.k.a. Apocrypha], (b) blatantly untrue, (c) contrary to Scripture alone, and (d) a topic that I already know something about. I have no particular reason to believe that this is substantially better or worse than any other parts of the book, but if it is a reflection on the book’s overall quality, you’re not missing out by not reading it. Without further ado…

All Prophecy Ceased in 400 B.C.?

“All prophecy ceased in 400 BC: This was the standard Jewish view of Christ’s day.”
(Kayser, p. 89)

The argument of Kayser’s that I want to take a close look at is this one:

It was an axiom among Jews that all Scripture was prophetic. Second, it was an axiom among Jews that the Scripture foretold the cessation of all prophecy from 400 BC until the Messiah should arise as the Great Prophet. If these two claims can be backed up by Scripture, then 100% of the apocrypha found in the Roman Catholic canon can be automatically ruled out. (Kayser, p. 86)

The argument here is in the form of a syllogism, but a misleading one. The first claim is that “it was an axiom among Jews that all Scripture was prophetic.” Whether or not it was an “axiom among the Jews” or not, I think we can safely grant that any orthodox Jew or Christian could affirm the prophetic dimension of Scripture. But Kayser is going to take “all Scripture was prophetic” as if it means “all Scripture was written by a Prophet,” and those aren’t really the same thing. Solomon is the traditionally-accepted author of multiple books of the Old Testament, and St. Luke is the author of one of the four Gospels, and several Psalms (cf. Ps. 42:1, e.g.) were penned by “the sons of Korah,” who served as gatekeepers for the Temple (1 Chr. 26:19), and helped to lead the people in praise (2 Chr. 20:19). But these aren’t normally the people we mean when we talk about “the Prophets.” We tend to mean people like Elijah and Elisha, who didn’t write any books. So watch out for that shift in the argument – from “Scripture is prophetic” to “all of the authors of Scripture were the Prophets.” It’s not a valid conclusion, but it’s critical to Kayser’s argument.

But I specifically want to focus on the second claim, that it “was an axiom among Jews that the Scripture foretold the cessation of all prophecy from 400 BC until the Messiah should arise as the Great Prophet.” As far as I can tell, Kayser is literally making this claim up. The sources that he cites don’t say this, and in fact, several of them directly contradict the claims he’s making.

The Arguments from Authority

In reading any kind of argument, it’s helpful to ask, “how do I know that this is true?” And we should be asking exactly that when we read claims like this one: “But did all prophecy cease between 400 BC and the coming of Christ? This was certainly the view of the Jews in the first century. As already stated, it was an axiomatic principle for Jews that prophecy ceased with the writing of Malachi and 2 Chronicles” (Kayser, p. 89). What’s the proof for this claim, that the Jews of the first century knew axiomatically that all prophecy had ceased 400 years before?

I originally much a much more-detailed analysis here, but it was a real slog to read through because I went through a lot of his footnotes and found that they didn’t really support his claims. But let me just summarize:

• To support this claim, Kayser doesn’t quote a single ancient Jewish source.
• Instead, he cites to a few other Protestants: namely, Milton C. Fisher’s “The Canon of the Old Testament,” from the Expositor’s Bible Commentary; George L. Robinson and R.K. Harrison’s “Canon of the Old Testament,” from the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia; David G. Dunbar’s “The Biblical Canon,” from Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon, by D.A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge.
• The first two of these sources rely on a single piece of evidence: a few lines in Josephus’ Against Apion, in which he says:
  • “For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from, and contradicting one another: [as the Greeks have:] but only twenty two books: which contain the records of all the past times: which are justly believed to be divine. (8) And of them five belong to Moses: which contain his laws, and the traditions of the origin of mankind, till his death. This interval of time was little short of three thousand years. But as to the time from the death of Moses, till the reign of Artaxerxes, King of Persia, who reigned after Xerxes, the Prophets, who were after Moses, wrote down what was done in their times, in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God; and precepts for the conduct of human life. ’Tis true, our history hath been written since Artaxerxes very particularly; but hath not been esteemed of the like authority with the former by our forefathers; because there hath not been an exact succession of Prophets since that time.”
• Significantly, Josephus doesn’t actually claim that “all prophecy ceased.” His argument was that the “exact succession of Prophets” had been interrupted, giving the later book an inferior authority. And there’s nothing in Josephus to support the idea that (a) this would only last until the time of the Messiah, or (b) this divine silence was predicted by Scripture. As far as I can tell, Kayser is making those bits up – I’m not finding them in any of his cited sources.
• Even though they’re relying on a single source (and not from the time period in question), Robinson and Harrison argue that “it was the uniform tradition of Josephus’ time that prophetic inspiration had ceased with Malachi.” How can they make such a sweeping claim? They don’t really support it except with an argument from silence: “[Josephus] does not pause to give any account of the closing of the canon; he simply assumes it, treating it as unnecessary.” But by their own admission, “Josephus’ statements concerning the antiquity of the Jewish canon is the language not of a careful historian, but of a partisan in debate.”
• In other words, Josephus is trying to show the superiority of Jewish culture over Greek culture on the basis that “we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from, and contradicting one another: [as the Greeks have:] but only twenty two books.” So it’s not hard to understand why he might pass over the well-known debates within Judaism, because these debates undermine his argument. (Analogy: imagine that you wrote about how Christianity is better than moral relativism because there’s a clear sense of right and wrong. In that argument, you might not include details about the amount of conflict within Christianity. And now imagine that this single piece of evidence was used to “prove” that Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants were all united on moral issues in the year 2020. That’s what’s happening with Josephus’ argument. )
• Did Josephus actually believe that all prophecy had ceased in 400 B.C.? He did not. In his historical account Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus makes clear that he believes that there continued to be prophets even after the time of Artaxerxes. For instance, he tells of an Essene named Judas “who never missed the truth in his predictions,” predicted the exact day on which Antigonus I Monophthalmus* would die in 301 B.C.. When the day was nearly over, right when it seemed that Judas would be proven to be a false prophet, the prophecy came true. Nevertheless, Josephus says, “this event put the prophet into a great disorder.” Whether or not you believe this account, it’s clear that Josephus did, and that he regarded Judas the Essene as an authentic prophet, despite it being 100 years into the alleged 400 years of divine silence.
• David Dunbar, the third of Kayser’s sources, doesn’t actually say (as Kayser claims) that the Jews before Christ were aware of some Scriptural argument about the end of prophecy, Dunbar says only that “at least a century before the Christian era, the Jews were conscious that prophecy in its classical form belonged to the past.” In fact, he relies on the Lutheran scholar David Aune for the proposition that while the term “prophet” was customarily used “only of the classical Israelite prophets or of the eschatological prophets who were expected to appear at the end of the age,” “various manifestations of prophecy continued among the Palestinian Jews throughout the Second Temple period” [516 B.C. – 70 A.D.], the exact period during which Kayser claims (on the basis of Dunbar!) that prophecy wasn’t continuing.

So to summarize: there’s one source, Josephus, writing in the year 100, claiming that the “exact succession of prophets” ended in 400 B.C., and that’s why books written after that are of inferior authority. There’s no evidence that this was a universal belief in 100, or in 1 A.D., or in 100 B.C., or even that anyone other than Josephus believed it. And Josephus’ own views include a belief that prophecy did continue in some form even after 400 B.C. Given this, it’s hard to take seriously the claim that “the view of the Jews in the first century” was that “all prophecy cease[d] between 400 BC and the coming of Christ.”

1st Argument from Scripture: Hosea 3:4-5

It’s equally difficult to take seriously Kayser’s claim that “it was an axiom among Jews that the Scripture foretold the cessation of all prophecy from 400 BC until the Messiah should arise as the Great Prophet” (Kayser, p. 86). Even Josephus doesn’t say anything about how “Scripture foretold” the closing of the canon or the end of prophecy. As near as I can tell, Kayser is making this part up himself, because there are parts of the Bible that he thinks support 400 years of divine silence. But to get there, he has to twist the meaning of the passages beyond recognition, and in a way totally contrary to how the ancient Jews and early Christians actually read them.

So what are the Scriptural arguments that Kayser finds so persuasive? The first is Hosea 3:4-5, which says that “the children of Israel shall abide many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred pillar, without ephod or teraphim. Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the LORD their God and David their king. They shall fear the LORD and His goodness in the latter days.”

The first thing to notice is that this is a passage about Israel being estranged from God, and without kings or Temple sacrifices. There’s no clear reference to prophets in this passage at all. That doesn’t phase Kayser as much as it should. He’s convinced that the ephod and teraphim were connected to divinization, and that therefore there’s an implicit reference to prophets. That is far from clear, because while we basically know what an ephod is (it’s a garment worn by the high priest: cf. Ex. 25:7, 28:4), it’s unclear what teraphim are. (If you want to know more about this, I recommend Karel van der Toorn’s “The Nature of the Biblical Teraphim in the Light of the Cuneiform Evidence”). We know that they were used in worship, especially cultic or temple worship, and possibly connected to foretelling the future. Judges 18:17 lists an apostate priest having “the graven image, the ephod, the teraphim, and the molten image” (Jdg. 18:17), so it is somehow distinct from a “graven image” or a “molten image,” but perhaps still related. Whatever they are, they are in King David’s own house (1 Sam. 19:11-13). So the best we can say is something like “religious image,” and so whether it’s good or evil probably depends on the context. In the context of Hosea 3:4, Hosea is clearly presenting it as bad that Israel is “without ephod or teraphim,” not yet fully reconciled to God. So it hardly makes sense to say that the prophet is lamenting that Israel doesn’t have her idols. Instead, the teraphim here are probably the Temple adornments, or even something related to the priest’s own vestments. That would explain why the Septuagint (again, around c. 250 – 150 B.C.) translated this passage as saying that “the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice, and without an altar, and without a priesthood, and without manifestations.”

Still, Kayser’s theory makes some sense in seeing prophetic implications. If he’s right, there are three sets of pairs:

King	“king or prince”
Priest	“sacrifice or pillar” [LXX: “sacrifice or altar”]
Prophet	“ephod or teraphim” [LXX: “priesthood or manifestations”]

He might well be right on this part, since the ephod is worn by the high priest’s breastplate, and is connected to “the oracle of judgment, Urim and Thummim” (Sirach 45:10; cf. Ex. 28:30, Lev. 8:8, Num. 27:21), and that teraphim were used to try to predict the future (Ezek.. 21:21, Zech. 10:2). Assuming that he’s right about this, then we’re looking at a time when Israel is without priests, prophets, or kings.

The obvious question is, when is this prophecy about? Kayser makes a circular argument that it must be the “intertestimental period,” even though the whole point of his argument was supposed to be proving that there even was such an “intertestamental period” in the first place. Here’s what he writes:

The fact that Zechariah (520BC and after) prophecies against people who use teraphim¹⁷ (Zech. 10:2), shows that the period being anticipated as without teraphim must be somewhat later than Zechariah’s prophecy. But was there a time when at least outwardly, the use of idols was completely rejected by Israel? Yes. The restored Israel did remain faithful to God for most of the time between 400 and 5/4 BC. So verse 4 has to occur some time after the post-exilic prophets and sometime before 5/4 BC (when Jesus was born). This window of time is what has been traditionally spoken of as the “four hundred years of silence.” (Kayser, pp. 91-92).

There’s an obvious, glaring difficulty with this. Even if you think (despite the Jewish evidence, and the Scriptural evidence which I’ll present below) that there were no prophets during this period, there were very clearly priests and sacrifices. But Kayser has an answer: Israel is without pagan sacrifices, and that’s why God references the “pillar,” a traditional image of pagan worship. If that seems far-fetched, here’s his defense of the idea:

Why would Jesus as the final Priest be contrasted with pagan worship rather than with the priests of Israel? I believe it is because these couplets are dealing with things that Israel was “without” in order to anticipate the need for a Messiah who would encompass all three offices. Since Israel was not without a priesthood from 400-5/4 BC, the only thing that could be contrasted with is pagan worship. That pagan worship is in view can be seen from the fact that the “sacred pillar” is always seen as idolatrous (Ex. 23:24; 34:13; Lev. 26:1; etc.) God is not denigrating the intertestimental Jews. They were foretold to be saints (Dan. 7:18) who would be mighty in exploits because they knew their God (Dan. 11:32). (Kayser, p. 94).

In other words, God wanted to use the priest-prophet-king image, but since Israel still had priests, He had to use pagan priests to make His point work. To hold this, Kayser has to say that it’s not bad that “the children of Israel shall dwell many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without ephod or teraphim.” According to him, it means that Israel is lacking six things, a random mixture of good and bad things. At this point, his argument is so convoluted that it’s worth charting it out:

Kings (Good)	Princes (Good)
Pagan Sacrifices (Bad)	Pagan Sacred Pillars (Bad)
Ephod (Good)	Teraphim (Bad)

This butchers the meaning of Hosea’s prophecy, in which Israel is compared to an adulterous woman who is eventually reconciled with her husband (Hosea 3:1-2). Likewise,

the children of Israel shall dwell many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without ephod or teraphim. Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God, and David their king; and they shall come in fear to the Lord and to his goodness in the latter days. (Hosea 3:4-5).

Very clearly, Israel has cut herself off from God in some important respects here, and needs to be reunited. She’s presented as willingly playing the adulteress, and she’s the one who needs to “return and seek the Lord.” Kayser captures none of that in his exegesis, in which it is God who separates Himself from Israel (but cutting off prophets for no apparent reason) and God who reunited Himself to Israel (through the Incarnation). As bizarre as this may be, Kayser’s exegesis would seem to make God the adulteress, not Israel.

It’s worth mentioning that, although Kayser claims that something like this was axiomatically held by the Jews, it wasn’t. Remember the Septuagint translation, in which they understood the passage as about being cut off from the Davidic line and Temple worship, only to be redeemed in the future. (The Talmud takes a different view, yet, but one that I think also fails to make sense of the passage).

But the clearest exegesis of the passage is from the early Christians. Origen suggests that it’s about the Jewish people after 70 A.D., as “since the overthrow of the temple, victims are neither offered, nor any altar found, nor any priesthood exists.” In other words, Kayser is right to see the passage as prophetic of Christ as Priest, Prophet, and King in some way. But it wasn’t about some 400 year “intertestamental period.” It’s about so many in Israel rejecting their Priest, Prophet, and King… and the eventual restoration whereby “all Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:26). St. Augustine likewise read it as meaning “that those carnal Israelites who are now unwilling to believe in Christ shall afterward believe, that is, their children shall (for they themselves, of course, shall go to their own place by dying).” This interpretation seemed so obvious to him that he asked, “Who does not see that the Jews are now thus?” before reminding us of the hope for the future. And once you hear this interpretation, and realize that it’s about the present, it is obvious. No need for the sort of mental gymnastics or exegetical absurdities that Kayser employs to try to cram this into the period from 400 B.C. to 5 B.C. (a time period when, again, Israel had a priesthood, and sometimes fell into idolatry, and basically looked very little like Hosea 3:4!).

2nd Argument from Scripture: Amos 8:11-14

The second Scriptural argument that Kayser proffers is from Amos 8:11-14. He claims that “Amos provides us clear instruction that completely rules out any form of prophecy whatsoever in the years 400-5/4 BC” (p. 96). I’ll let you decide for yourself. Here’s the text that he quotes, Amos 8:11-14:

‘Behold the days are coming,’ says the LORD GOD, ‘that I will send a famine on the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. They shall wander from sea to sea and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the LORD, but shall not find it.’

The crux of Kayser’s argument is that this must be about the cessation of prophecy because “it mentions a total absence of the word of the Lord,” “God Himself sends this absence of prophecy,” “the absence of prophecy is not because people fail to seek for it,” “the absence of prophecy is universal,” and “this particular cessation of prophecy is temporary and not final” (pp. 100 – 102). This last claim (on the temporary nature of the famine) isn’t because of anything within the text itself: it’s that he needs this to be true to justify his timeframe, since “prior to the time of Christ, revelation was not complete. God was preparing people to long for the coming of the Great Prophet, Jesus Christ” (p. 102).

Even a cursory read of the other instances in which Scripture speaks of hearing the word of the Lord shows what a strained interpretation Kayser is making. When God speaks of a famine for His word, why would that mean a lack of new revelation? Through the prophet Zechariah, God says to the faithful of Zion “Let your hands be strong, you who in these days have been hearing these words from the mouth of the prophets” (Zech. 8:9), and they’re contrasted with those who “made their hearts like adamant lest they should hear the law and the words which the Lord of hosts had sent by his Spirit through the former prophets” (Zech. 7:12). That’s not about people receiving or not receiving new revelation. It’s about what they do with the revelation that they’ve already received. Likewise, King Josiah gathered “all the people, both small and great; and he read in their hearing all the words of the book of the covenant which had been found in the house of the Lord” (2 Kings 23:2), calling the people back to their ancestral faith. And when God gave the people manna to remind them that “man does not live by bread alone, but that man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord” (Deut. 8:3), He wasn’t telling them to demand a new prophetic revelation every day. In Kayser’s view, the famine “of hearing the words of the Lord” is because the people have the Scriptures, but no new revelation.

As with his strange view of Hosea 3, in which God appears as the faithless adulterer, Kayser here views God as arbitrarily withholding His prophetic revelation, simply because He can:

God has the freedom to give or to not give revelation, and we cannot bind His hand if He has so chosen. The concept of cessation of prophecy is not a limitation of God. Rather it is God’s sovereign freedom to give or not to give. The question is not “What can God do?” but rather, “What has he chosen to do?” […] Some argue that the lack of prophecy is not because God is not speaking, but rather because we are not listening. But this passage clearly shows that their failure to receive revelation was because of God’s lack of giving (“I will send a famine”). (p. 100)

Kayser has to hold to this sort of arbitrary withdrawing of God’s revelation because he needs it for his timeline to make sense. His argument, after all, is that God was silent for 400 years, and that Israel did nothing to deserve this.

So what reasons do Kayser give to accept the idea that Amos 8 is a prophecy about the period from 400 B.C. to 5 B.C.? That “[Amos] 8:1-10 is 607 BC and 8:11-12 is after 607 BC,” and that “Samaria and the tribe of Dan were both still in existence” (p. 98). To say that these arguments are unpersuasive is too mild. They’re outright bizarre. First of all, the tribe of Dan didn’t exist at any point between 607 B.C. and 5 B.C. Dan was one of the ten northern tribes that broke away from Judea during Jeroboam’s Rebellion after the death of King Solomon (1 Kings 11:29-38). This northern kingdom became known as Samarian, and in 733 B.C., “the king of Assyria captured Samaria, and he carried the Israelites away to Assyria, and placed them in Halah, and on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes” (2 Kings 17:6). There’s no mention in the Bible as to what happened to most of these exiles, or whether they are related in any way other than name to the Samaritans who lived in the land at the time of Christ (and down to today). For this reason, these ten tribes are often called the “lost tribes” of Israel:

In postbiblical tradition, the deported northern Israelites are often referred to as the “ten lost tribes.” Given the lack of documentation relating to the fate of the northern exiles, later writers referred to those dispersed to obscure locations with the (former) Assyrian empire as “lost.” The number “ten” is given, because this number represented the traditional number of northern tribes (e.g., 1 Kgs 11:29-38). In the case of the later exiles of Judahites to Babylon (ca. 598 and 586 BCE), there is significant historical literature pertaining to the return or, more accurately, the returns of some Judahites back to their homeland in the centuries that followed. With one important exception, referring to the resettlement of exiles from Manasseh and Ephraim in Jerusalem (1 Chr 9:3; Knoppers 200b), there are no comparable biblical accounts of the exiled residents of the former northern kingdom.

The tribe of Dan was wiped off the map permanently during the lifetime of the prophet Amos, so it would be a mistake to take his line “As thy god lives, O Dan” (Amos 8:14) to be some kind of unfulfilled promise that the tribe would geographically exist at some later date. It didn’t, as a map of Israel at the time of Christ reveals. That’s what’s so peculiar about Kayser’s argument: a major part of the argument hinges on what appears to be a pretty basic geographical and historical error, akin to saying that something must have happened in 2016 rather than 2017 because the Thirteen Colonies were still around.

But getting the history of Israel wrong is understandable: a lot of Christians are fuzzy on the Twelve Tribes. What’s worse is Keysar’s claim that Amos 8:1-10 is describing 607 B.C., which (for some reason) makes Amos 8:11-12 about 400 – 5 B.C. The reason that’s troubling is that, in his eagerness to find something that will disprove the Deuterocanonical Books, he’s butchering a pretty explicit Messianic prophecy. Here’s the Amos prophecy back in its proper context, Amos 8:9-12:

“And on that day,” says the Lord God, “I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth upon all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day.

“Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord God, “when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.

Compare that to St. Luke’s account of the Crucifixion of Christ: “It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, while the sun’s light failed; and the curtain of the temple was torn in two” (Luke 23:44-45). The “sixth hour” is noon, so Luke could hardly be clearer in spelling this one out. He’s saying that Good Friday is the fulfillment of Amos 8.

While Kayser may have missed the obvious Christological meaning, the earliest Christians didn’t. St. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing in 180 A.D., explained that Amos 8:9-10 “plainly announced that obscuration of the sun which at the time of His crucifixion took place from the sixth hour onwards, and that after this event, those days which were their festivals according to the law, and their songs, should be changed into grief and lamentation when they were handed over to the Gentiles.” In other words, the famine of the word wasn’t some arbitrary caprice on the part of God. The people who rejected the Word of God, the Bread of Life, found themselves cut off from God, in a famine for the Word, and then quickly in a literal exile: the Diaspora of 70 A.D. Irenaeus connects these events to Jeremiah 15, in which God says to Jerusalem “you have rejected me” and warns that “she who bore seven has languished; she has swooned away; her sun went down while it was yet day; she has been shamed and disgraced. And the rest of them I will give to the sword before their enemies, says the Lord” (Jer. 15:6, 9). Similar observations were made by Tertullian (155-240 A.D.), St. Cyprian (200-258 A.D.), Lactantius (250-325 A.D.), and countless others.

In other words, Kayser’s error in interpreting Amos 8 is exactly the same as his error in interpreting Hosea 3. Both passages are about Jesus Christ, and the consequences for Israel of rejecting Him, and that’s how the early Christians understood both passages. Ignorant of, or indifferent to, two thousand years of clear Scriptural interpretation, Kayser reinterprets these passages to be, not about the rejection of Christ, but of God arbitrarily refusing to give His people prophets. Not only does nothing in the text require such an interpretation, but to support such an interpretation, Kayser has to reduce Hosea 3 to unintelligibility, while rediscovering the lost tribe of Dan to make his Amos 8 interpretation work.

At this point, we’ve seen that Kayser’s key arguments are false. When he claimed that it “was an axiom among Jews that the Scripture foretold the cessation of all prophecy from 400 BC until the Messiah should arise as the Great Prophet,” what he really meant seems to have been more like “my private interpretation of Amos 8 and Hosea 3, contradicting all of the ancient Jewish and Christian sources, lets me imagine Scriptural support for 400 years of divine silence.” But nevertheless, you might be wondering: is there a Scriptural argument against the theory 400 years of divine silence? The short answer: there is, but you’re probably exhausted from reading this long, so I’ll keep it brief.

The Biblical Case Against 400 Years of Divine Silence

The shift from the Old to the New Testament wasn’t a matter of God partially revealing Himself to Israel, going silent for 400 years, and then reemerging on the scene. Instead, it was a process of God’s continual revelation, culminating in the Incarnation. We can see this most clearly when we look at those Prophets right on the cusp between the Old and the New Covenant. For instance, Jesus describes John the Baptist as “a prophet” and “more than a prophet,” the messenger coming before God’s own arrival into history (Matt. 11:9-10). Yet there is a sense in which John is an Old Covenant prophet, as Jesus said (Matt. 11:11-14):

Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has risen no one greater than John the Baptist; yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and men of violence take it by force. For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John; and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come.

When Jesus says that “all the prophets and the law prophesied until John,” He’s declaring Old Covenant revelation closed … with John the Baptist. Things don’t stop suddenly and for no apparent reason in 400 B.C. They continue on until John, and they end then only because there’s nothing more to prepare. On one side is the Law and the Prophets, up until John. On the other side is Jesus and the Kingdom.

If you think of “Old Covenant” as “Old Testament,” that’s probably confusing. John’s in the wrong half of the book! And what’s more, he never wrote any Scripture. Throughout this piece, I’ve been working with Kayser’s assumption (ultimately, Josephus’ assumption) about the relationship between prophets and the writing of the books of the Bible. But it’s worth at least noting that some of the greatest Prophets in the Old Testament never wrote a word of Scripture. For instance, at the Transfiguration, we see Moses and Elijah, the embodiment (so to speak) of the Law and the Prophets, respectively. Yet the one associated with the “Prophets” isn’t the one associated with the writing of Scripture. So it’s not so strange that Jesus would see the revelation of the Old Covenant as continuing on, unbroken, right up until His own arrival.

The two other “pivotal” prophets, standing on the cusp of the two Covenants, are Simeon and Anna. Of Simeon, St. Luke says (Luke 2:25-32):

Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he should not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ.

And inspired by the Spirit he came into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him according to the custom of the law, he took him up in his arms and blessed God and said, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word; for mine eyes have seen thy salvation which thou hast prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to thy people Israel.”

Simeon is presented as someone who the Holy Spirit is upon, and who receives revelation from God. Doesn’t that make him a prophet, by definition? And doesn’t it mean that God is still speaking? It’s significant that he’s an old man, who is ready to pass away now that Christ has come. Commenting on Jeremiah 31, Hebrews 8:13 says that “in speaking of a new covenant [God] treats the first as obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.” It is fitting, then, that Simeon should serve as a sort of embodiment of the faithful prophets of the Old Covenant, patiently awaiting the coming of the Messiah.

The same is true of Anna, who also greets the baby Jesus at His Presentation. But here, the language is even more explicit both that she is a prophetess, and that she is old (Luke 2:36-37):

And there was a prophetess, Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher; she was of a great age, having lived with her husband seven years from her virginity, and as a widow till she was eighty-four. She did not depart from the temple, worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day

John the Baptist, barely older than Jesus, is a youthful herald of something new and exciting about to emerge on the scene. Anna and Simeon, meanwhile, are dual witnesses to the faithful prophetic tradition of Israel finally reaching its fulfillment.

It’s hard to square figures like Anna and Simeon with the idea that prophecy had disappeared from Israel until the birth of Jesus. When we find them at the Presentation, forty days after His birth, they seem to have been prophesying for some time. The whole point seems to be that they grew old waiting on the fulfillment of God, the “consolation of Israel,” but that they trusted, and kept waiting. In a way, it’s like the story Josephus told of the prophet Judas who foretold of the death of Antigonus in 301 B.C. The day came and almost went, and right when it looked like God’s word wouldn’t come true, the prophecy was fulfilled.

But it’s not just that there are these few prophets. Other people seem to be aware that there are still prophets and prophetesses. They aren’t presented as something weird, or even as something new or reemerged. How else to explain the lack of alarm on anyone’s part that a stranger comes up and takes the baby, and starts speaking of a sword going through His mother’s heart (Luke 2:34)? And how else do we account for how casually Luke mentions that Anna was a “prophetess,” a term never mentioned in the Old Testament?

In His preaching, Jesus can say ““He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives him who sent me. He who receives a prophet because he is a prophet shall receive a prophet’s reward, and he who receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward” (Matt. 10:40-41), and He doesn’t have to stop and add, “Oh, and by the way, ‘prophets’ are a thing again.” It’s true, the crowds see Jesus as different from folks like Simeon, saying that “one of the old prophets” has risen (Luke 9:8). But that recognition shouldn’t be taken to an extreme, as a rejection of what carried on down to Simeon and Anna and John. After the Pharisees think of the killing of the prophets as something that happened “in the days of our fathers,” Jesus responds by speaking of the persecution as ongoing, and continuing into the future (Matt. 23:30-36). He then laments the city of Jerusalem, saying, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you!” and there’s not a hint that he’s lamenting some long-ago sins from 400 years earlier, like the Pharisees imagined (Luke 13:34, Matt. 23:37).

And of course, there’s much more that can be said. The fact that the earliest Christians thought of some or all of the “Apocrypha” as inspired Scripture suggests that they certainly weren’t aware of any 400 year period of divine silence. The fact that the Talmud quotes one of these books, the Book of Sirach, as Scripture twice (here and here) suggests that the Jews also weren’t aware of any 400 year period of divine silence.

If there were actually 400 years of divine silence, I would expect to read about it in Scripture, but there’s no evidence of it. I would expect the Jews at the time of Christ to be talking about, what with the rise of prophets like John, Anna, Simeon, and of course, Jesus Himself. But nope, nothing: not even a stray objection like, “don’t you know that prophecy doesn’t exist anymore?” from Jesus’ enemies. And I would expect the early Christians to grapple with this 400 year period of silence, or use it as part of their argument that God did something radically new in Jesus Christ. But again, nothing. Instead, all of the evidence seems to point one way, in the direction of a continuous revelation without several centuries of unexplained divine silence.

And I don’t suppose that any of this is irrefutable. If you’re willing to engage in the kind of mental gymnastics that Kayser employs, willing to throw out two thousand (or more) years of Old Testament exegesis, willing to claim that “it was an axiom among Jews that the Scripture foretold the cessation of all prophecy from 400 BC until the Messiah should arise as the Great Prophet” on the basis of nothing but your own assertion, then I’m confident that you can believe anything you want to believe, and I can’t convince you otherwise. My point is simply that the New Testament consistently speaks as if some kind of prophetic ministry continues on (perhaps in a diminished form) up until the time of Christ, and that this is a view consistent with all of the Old and New Testament texts, without requiring us to engage in any forced or unnatural interpretations.

*His name means “Antigonus the One-Eyed,” which is sort of amazing.