Friday, March 24, 2017

Pagan oracles and Christian scriptures

CSCO BLOG: Scripture and the Oracles of God (Matthew Sharp).
... The first thing to acknowledge when bringing this comparison into the ancient world is that things are not nearly so clean-cut as the comparison suggests. Greek oracles, for instance, were not purely oral phenomena, but were often written down and brought into larger collections such as the Sibylline books at Rome, and other various collections attributed to seers of the legendary past, thus giving them a textual character more akin to a Jewish or Christian Bible.[2] It is also not as if early Christians were without their own prophets who operated alongside their reading of scriptural texts.

What I want to focus on is Parke’s point about function: Is the early Christian use of scripture analogous to the way oracles were used in the wider Mediterranean world?