Reading with the Faithful

How do you tell a true prophet from a false one? Origen, writing on the Gospel of John in the third century, put the puzzle neatly: a prophet prophesies, but not everyone who prophesies is a prophet. Seth Tarrer follows that question through the history of Christian interpretation, taking representative readings of Jeremiah and Ezekiel from the early church onward, with a Protestant focus from the sixteenth century. Along the way he acknowledges the debt that interpreters such as Jerome and Calvin owed to Jewish exegesis.

His central finding is clear and useful: pre-modern readers repeatedly linked Jeremiah 28, the prophet's clash with Hananiah, to the warnings about false prophets in Deuteronomy 13 and 18. It is a careful, focused scholarly monograph for students of the Old Testament, the history of biblical interpretation and theology.