William Klingshirn: "Reclaiming the possibility of a Christian divination"

One of the most persistent themes in the apologetic literature of the second and third centuries, well illustrated in Origen's Contra Celsum, is the Christian reliance on prophecy for belief in Jesus and his message. But distinguishing true from false revelation posed a serious problem in cultures as pervasively divinatory as those of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. One solution, already evident in the Pentateuch (Deut. 18) and greatly assisted by a skeptical philosophical tradition going back to Carneades, was to reject divination as untrue, base. or fraudulent, while accepting prophecy as divine. This distinction between prophecy and divination persists in large areas of modern scholarship despite obvious continuities between the two. This paper argues that reclaiming the possibility of a Christian divination, hinted at in some early Christian writings and increasingly accepted by scholars of divination, can help to explain the Christian reshaping of divination in late antiquity at the same time as it accounts for differences in scope, motivation, and authority in the wide variety of practices we label as divinatory.