Leaves a Mark has a great piece (first of three) on the role of the prophet. Will Shetterly posts some Woodie Guthrie lyrics that go right to the point of it.
What I want to know: Do prophets have a choice about being prophets? Jeremiah sure didn’t.
I can’t think of a single one who was called and got to say “no.”
Maybe we just lost that scroll. :???: Maybe the next dig will discover the only extant copy of The Book of Otis, the Almost Prophet. :wink:
I think I came across The Book of Otis on an obscure website I visited a while back. The problem is that it was about 2am and I was bleary-eyed from comparing translations of The Gospel of Thomas into Flemish and a little known minority language of Switzerland called Romansch, so I completely forgot how I came across that site. I have since cleared my history and cookies files, so I’m at a loss to say how to find it. I just remember that search engines are of no use. Anyway, the gist of The Book of Otis is that he severely takes the king to task for changing he mind so frequently. Only in the colloquial speech of the day he doesn’t complain that the king goes back and forth on his position, but rather up and down. :wink:
Thomas is a whole new book in Romansch, don’t you agree?
I did find this version of Otis, but it appears to be a corrupt (and severely abridged) derivation. Obviously incomplete.
Then there’s this version, but it has a transparently Mithraist origin (perhaps a cultic manual?). Too late a dating for Otis’ (almost) critiques of priestly collaboration with the Seleucids.
I think I’m hot on the trail! I detect in this otherwise unknown prophet an obvious Otisite influence. Here it is, in verse form: