Acts 15:32

Acts 15:32. Judas and Silas being prophets. In the Church of the first days existed a certain number of men known as ‘prophets.' We hear of them, by chance it seems, but still frequently, in the varied writings of the New Testament. It seems in that age, when the foundation-stones of the mighty temple of Christianity were being laid in so many lands, that hundreds, it may possibly have been thousands of inspired men were helping forward the Master's work, and yet of most of these all record has disappeared. ‘Their voices smote the air, and did their work, and died away, and we catch but the faintest echoes of them. Their words were written on the sand, and the advancing waves of time have washed away all or nearly all the traces of what was once as awful as the handwriting on the wall' (Plumptre).

What now do we know of this strange gift of prophecy, so soon taken away from men? It was no mere power of foretelling future events; the chief characteristic feature of these prophets of early Christianity was that the prophets possessed a strange, winning power of words, which had a weighty effect on their hearers. They were, then, earnest , impassioned preachers, who possessed a supernatural insight into the hearts of men; they seemed to know what was in their minds, they read their most secret thoughts (1 Corinthians 14:24-25). With these mighty gifts they also were endowed in many cases with a power of foretelling future events (see Acts 11:27-30; Acts 21:4; Acts 21:10-11; Acts 20:23); but from the general tenor of the New Testament writings, this prophetic gift was apparently little exercised by these servants of the Lord. Among the influences at work in those first years of care and anxiety, when Christianity, struggling against the opposition of the whole world, still advanced and ever advanced with strange, resistless power, unaided by any human help, must be reckoned the Divine gift of prophecy in this extended sense; but few details of this power have been preserved, hardly any record of its use. Scattered notices only remain to tell us how numerous in the first days were those gifted men known as ‘prophets in the Church,' and how constantly they made use of the ‘talent' entrusted to them; but for us it is in fact a lost page in the history of the Apostolic Church. (For a more elaborate discussion on this interesting question, see Professor Plumptre's essay, in his Biblical Studies, on the prophets of the New Testament; and on the whole question of prophesying, Dean Stanley, Lectures XIX. XX., On the Jewish Church.)