Prophets after Jesus

[NextElement]

Just for clarification: Did Jesus or anyone else ever say there wouldn’t be another prophet AFTER Jesus/the messiah?

It’s confusing to me, because it seems that several prophets in the Bible claim that there will not be a prophet after them, only to be followed by another! So why would it be so impossible for Christians to accept that perhaps God sent Muhammad or Joseph Smith or Bahaullah to clarify his word?

 

[Celtic_Maiden]

Have you ever considered that there are some sick people out there that would proclaim anything. They are either sick, or want to make a lot of money and say they are a prophet.
Jesus was not a prophet he was the Son of God, a big difference.

The Mental Hospital is full of people who think they are someone else.

 

[IgnatianPhilo]

Christians don’t accept them because they contradict what we have received via Jesus and the Apostles, (principally in denying who Jesus is and what he accomplished on the cross). That isn’t to suggest there hasn’t been a prophet or prophets after Jesus, the book of acts mentions many prophets whom were in the ministry of the apostles.

 

[Spencerian]

Just for clarification: Did Jesus or anyone else ever say there wouldn’t be another prophet AFTER Jesus/the messiah?

It’s confusing to me, because it seems that several prophets in the Bible claim that there will not be a prophet after them, only to be followed by another! So why would it be so impossible for Christians to accept that perhaps God sent Muhammad or Joseph Smith or Bahaullah to clarify his word?

Regarding other prophets who note of no others after them: You’ll need to give the chapter and verse to help us answer that question.

As to Jesus: Christ is God, and completes the central prophecy of the coming of the Messiah. As God, He also completes and fulfills the Revelation of His plan to save humanity by his death on the cross, an infinite being capable of sacrifice for an infinite number of human sins.

As such, the prophetic message of the coming of the Messiah and the salvation of humanity is done. When God speaks as definitively as was done as Christ, the central message of the Messiah’s message: salvation, is complete. Why would God send a lesser messenger after God the Son Himself for this specific mission?

However, prophecy (and prophets) that aid in the clarification of hope and meaning behind the Revelation are possible. While no prophet after Christ can change or add on to what God has revealed in the New Testament, their messages can help clarify what’s been presented.

Catholics appreciate the positive tenets of other faiths but do not recognize their claims on additional revelations or clarifications to God’s teachings for various issues I cannot discuss in full here. Catholic teaching is ecumenical but not relativistic and so sees One Truth, One God, One Church.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, was interviewed in this subject. Read more about it at this link.

 

[steido01]

Just for clarification: Did Jesus or anyone else ever say there wouldn’t be another prophet AFTER Jesus/the messiah?

John 14:6 is pretty clear:

Jesus said to him, “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me."

Paul had this to add to those who would pervert the Gospel that Jesus brought (Gal. 1:8):

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.

It’s confusing to me, because it seems that several prophets in the Bible claim that there will not be a prophet after them, only to be followed by another! So why would it be so impossible for Christians to accept that perhaps God sent Muhammad or Joseph Smith or Bahaullah to clarify his word?

Where do you ever see this in the Bible? Those faithful in the bible either point forward to Christ’s coming, or back at what he did on the Cross.

 

[FathersKnowBest]

Just for clarification: Did Jesus or anyone else ever say there wouldn’t be another prophet AFTER Jesus/the messiah?

It’s confusing to me, because it seems that several prophets in the Bible claim that there will not be a prophet after them, only to be followed by another! So why would it be so impossible for Christians to accept that perhaps God sent Muhammad or Joseph Smith or Bahaullah to clarify his word?

I don’t know where you saw those claims; can you be more specific?

Yes, Jesus is a prophet, but also much more.

It is He of whom Moses prophesied:
De 18:15 "The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren–him you shall heed–
16 just as you desired of the LORD your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the LORD my God, or see this great fire any more, lest I die.’
17 And the LORD said to me, 'They have rightly said all that they have spoken.
18 I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brethren; and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.
19 And whoever will not give heed to my words which he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him.

The people recognized this:
Joh 6:14 When the people saw the sign which he had done, they said, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world!”

Joh 6:15 Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

St. Paul told us that there are indeed prophets in the Church:
1Co 12:28 And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, then healers, helpers, administrators, speakers in various kinds of tongues.

Remember, though, a “prophet” is not necessarily one who tells the future, only one who speaks for God.

 

[NextElement]

Okay, thanks for clearing that up. Another question:

What could’ve been lost in translation? This is one of the main problems I have with accepting the Bible. It was originally written in Hebrew (and the original copies we don’t have of course), and then translated into Greek, Latin, and ultimately English. How could we know that what we read in the Bible isn’t corrupted? How could we know that Jesus was using a metaphor when he said something, and we take it literally?

Also, the Vatican Council’s purpose was to compile the modern Catholic Bible we have today. How could we know these men weren’t under the influence of the devil, and tried purposefully to corrupt Jesus’ real teachings (and succeeded)? There’s just so many possibilities and so much doubt.

 

[dzheremi]

The idea that the Bible was originally written in one language and then translated into all others is untrue, and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Bible actually is. If you look at it historically, there were and are many different canons that correspond to different regional/national and attendant linguistic and cultural traditions. The version of the NT that pretty much every Christian recognizes was set down in the 39th festal letter of HH St. Athanasius, Pope of Alexandria, in 367 AD (to be accepted later by local councils in North Africa and elsewhere), but even that did not stop the daughter church of HH St. Athanasius’ Coptic Church, that of the Tewahedo in Ethiopia and Eritrea, from including books which were only preserved in the Ge’ez language of their own Axumite Empire, rather than the Coptic and Greek of Egypt (and indeed the earliest Bible translations we have to date are bilingual Coptic-Greek manuscripts dating from c.150). So the issue is not “what language was it originally written in” (though there are ongoing arguments by interested parties affiliated with the various Syriac Churches regarding a so-called “Aramaic primacy” – see for instance, George Lamsa – in other words, the belief that Aramaic sources should be given primacy primacy as sources for the hypothetical original Aramaic NT, which would’ve then been translated to Greek; I don’t know of any serious academic who believes this, though). The question is rather “in what language(s) was the book preserved”. That will go a long way toward explaining why there are different canons and why this does not mean corruption of any kind. It is a fallacy brought on basically by ahistorical “Bible only” Christians and Muslims that there is a mythical whole and complete Bible written in one language to be delivered unaltered to humanity. It was always meant to be translated and our fathers never saw that as “corruption”, as we need only look to the day of Pentecost, the baptism of the Church into the world, to see that the Holy Spirit came upon men of all nations and revealed to them the truth in their own languages. This is how it should be and historically how it was, and it would still be this way were it not for subsequent ideologies both inside Christianity (“Bible only” nuttery) and outside of it (Islam) that created new and irrelevant standards by which to judge the revelation of God to humanity, which after all we do not forget as Christians came in the Person of Jesus Christ and not in the words of a book. The New Testament church functioned for decades before the books of the NT had even begun being written (obviously you have to have some “acts” before you can write about them), but that’s okay because we are people of Christ, not people of a book, and Christ is the Word made flesh – not the Word made text. That’s other religions’ preoccupation.

 

[marywarfield]

Just for clarification: Did Jesus or anyone else ever say there wouldn’t be another prophet AFTER Jesus/the messiah?

It’s confusing to me, because it seems that several prophets in the Bible claim that there will not be a prophet after them, only to be followed by another! So why would it be so impossible for Christians to accept that perhaps God sent Muhammad or Joseph Smith or Bahaullah to clarify his word?

Because unlike the OT prophets:
Jesus IS God. And when God Himself says that’s
it finis, it is finished. Other prophets can state another
won’t come but when God says this is it until I come
again that’s the last word. This is how you know
Smith, Young, Muhammad are false prophets.
Because they make Jesus Christ, the Son of the
Holy Trinity, appear to be a liar. And God can’t lie.
Those that St. Paul speaks of have the gift of prophecy
yes but only to re-speak if you will what Christ already said.
No prophet St. Paul refers to actually change the
meaning or contradict what Christ said. Christ’s word
stands until HE comes again- not someone else.

 

[Tom_Baum]

Have you ever considered that there are some sick people out there that would proclaim anything. They are either sick, or want to make a lot of money and say they are a prophet.
Jesus was not a prophet he was the Son of God, a big difference.

The Mental Hospital is full of people who think they are someone else.

A prophet is a messenger and Jesus was a messenger and The Message.

Have you ever been in a “Mental Hospital”?

If not, you might be surprised since there are people there for many different reasons.

 

[NextElement]

How do we know that God intended Jesus to be his final message to humanity before his second coming, but then saw that the devil was purposefully disrupting and corrupting the original teaching, so sent Muhammad to clarify and affirm it?

 

[marywarfield]

How do we know that God intended Jesus to be his final message to humanity before his second coming, but then saw that the devil was purposefully disrupting and corrupting the original teaching, so sent Muhammad to clarify and affirm it?

Because Jesus Christ is God. God can’t have His plans
changed by mere creatures and Muhammad is a creature-
Not God. In fact You have Muhammad’s own testimony
that he himself is not Allah.

 

[openmind77]

How do we know that God intended Jesus to be his final message to humanity before his second coming, but then saw that the devil was purposefully disrupting and corrupting the original teaching, so sent Muhammad to clarify and affirm it?

God sends different messengers to different regions. The messages are slightly different so as to be appropriate to the culture and state of development (ie education, living conditions etc) of the locals. So it does not always mean that a later messenger supercedes the previous one. Muhammad no doubt was a Prophet who brought a new message to the Arabs, but his message does not supercede the teachings of Jesus, just as Jesus’s teachings do not supercede the teachings of the Buddha (they do complement them).

As was mentioned earlier, Muhammad was just a Prophet while Jesus was a Son of God (or in Hindu terms, an Avatar), so was the Buddha (although he never made such a claim).

Messengers like Jesus or the Buddha come only every 1000 or 2000 years, while someone like Muhammad (or Bahauallah) may appear every few hundred years.

Now that the whole world is globalized, I believe that the next messenger will be One sent for All people (not just for a specific region)

 

[MartinJordan]

Christians don’t accept them because they contradict what we have received via Jesus and the Apostles, (principally in denying who Jesus is and what he accomplished on the cross). That isn’t to suggest there hasn’t been a prophet or prophets after Jesus, the book of acts mentions many prophets whom were in the ministry of the apostles.

Amen

MJ

 

[Ontheway]

Just for clarification: Did Jesus or anyone else ever say there wouldn’t be another prophet AFTER Jesus/the messiah?

It’s confusing to me, because it seems that several prophets in the Bible claim that there will not be a prophet after them, only to be followed by another! So why would it be so impossible for Christians to accept that perhaps God sent Muhammad or Joseph Smith or Bahaullah to clarify his word?

We have the HOLY BIBLE. There is no need for another prophet.

The fellows you mention in your list address specific groups or communities. We are the UNIVERSAL church.

 

[Servant19]

We have the HOLY BIBLE. There is no need for another prophet.

The fellows you mention in your list address specific groups or communities. We are the UNIVERSAL church.

Actually Baha’u’llah addresses every single soul on the planet for at least the next 1000 years.

His Word is as valid and spiritually potent as Jesus’ Word

.

 

[Ontheway]

Why only 1000 years?

As for the validity of his word, it is an article of your faith, not ours.
We are not followers of your prophet. Sorry.

 

[Servant19]

Why only 1000 years?

As for the validity of his word, it is an article of your faith, not ours.
We are not followers of your prophet. Sorry.

You don’t have to follow Baha’u’llah dear friend, it doesn’t deny the truth of His reality either way

Baha’u’llah said His Revelation will be further fulfilled by another Revelation in a thousand years or so

The Bible does clearly indicate there will be further Prophets after Jesus…as also indicated by NextElements comments…

.

 

[Ontheway]

You don’t have to follow Baha’u’llah dear friend, it doesn’t deny the truth of His reality either way

Baha’u’llah said His Revelation will be further fulfilled by another Revelation in a thousand years or so

The Bible does clearly indicate there will be further Prophets after Jesus…as also indicated by NextElements comments…

.

Thank you for interpreting the Holy Bible to me, and for sharing your faith. Christ is followed only by the Holy Spirit, the third member of the Holy Trinity. The Holy Spirit is here with us now. There are no other prophets.

There is one truth and it needs to further “revelation”. It has been revealed once and forever.

I understand your words and I don’t share your enthusiasm for your prophet. This will not change.

 

[MartinJordan]

Ontheway…I think it’s time to mention Obi Wan’s wise adage “who’s more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him”

Or more importantly from the CCC: In giving us his Son, his only Word (for he possesses no other), he spoke everything to us at once in this sole Word - and he has no more to say. . . because what he spoke before to the prophets in parts, he has now spoken all at once by giving us the All Who is His Son. Any person questioning God or desiring some vision or revelation would be guilty not only of foolish behavior but also of offending him, by **not fixing his eyes entirely upon Christ ** and by living with the desire for some other novelty.
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MJ