Prophecy was ubiquitous in the ancient world, with diverse cultural flavours—Jewish, Greek, and Babylonian to name a few. David E. Aune’s Prophecy in the Early Christian and the Ancient Mediterranean World is a detailed survey of how ancient Near Eastern cultures practiced prophecy and specifically, how that led to the prophecy we see in the New Testament.

This book is essential to the field. It’s meticulously researched and full of references to primary sources. In fact, the 350 page book has 100 additional pages of endnotes—not to mention a lengthy bibliography.

Problematic in this study is Aune’s form criticism. Operating on the (fair) assumption that prophecy was practiced in the early church, Aune tries to isolate the prophetic speech from the New Testament literary contexts in which they’re situated. Arguing that “prophetic speech tends to retain its identity in the various literary contexts in which it incorporated,” Aune extracts prophecy from a long list of passages, only to then describe the “recurrent forms, formulas, patterns, and themes” (248) of these prophetic forms. The logic of this is circular.

Form critical issues aside, this is the most helpful book I’ve read on the cultural-historical background of prophecy. While it’s tempting to mine this work for research purposes, it’s well worth reading the entire work.

Aune, David E. Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World. 1983. Wipf and Stock, 2003.