The Prophets in Icon, Relic, and Legend

The prophets are painted in a row across the iconostasis and honored at their reputed tombs — but most of what the Church “knows” of how and where the prophets died comes not from Scripture but from a single first-century (or later) pseudepigraphon, the Lives of the Prophets. This is the source-critical flagship of the collection: it sets out the prophet-row of the icon screen, and then pins the death-and-burial traditions to their sources, distinguishing Scripture from the Lives from the later synaxaria per METHODOLOGY §3.5.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Prophets’ Row of the Iconostasis

In the fully developed Russian iconostasis, the prophets have a tier of their own. Above the local, festal, and Deesis rows stands the prophets’ row (prorocheskiy chin): a rank of the Old Testament prophets, each holding a scroll bearing his prophecy and often the object of his foreshadowing, turned toward the center — where, at the heart of the row, is the icon of the Mother of God of the Sign (Znamenie), the Theotokos with the Christ-child in a medallion on her breast (Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, SVS Press, 1982, on the iconostasis and its rows; Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, SVS Press, 1978). The theological statement of the row is precise and beautiful: the prophets all point to the Incarnation, and so they are painted turning and gesturing toward the Virgin who bore the God they foretold. David holds the ark or the psalter, Solomon the temple, Isaiah the tongs and coal, Moses the tablets or the bush, Daniel the mountain-stone, Habakkuk his scroll, Gideon the fleece, Jeremiah, Ezekiel with the closed gate, Elijah — each with the emblem of his prophecy, all converging on the Christ in His Mother’s womb. The prophet-row is thus the iconographic form of this whole compendium’s argument: that the prophets are the choir of the Incarnation, and that their prophecies find their center in the Theotokos and her Son (the wider theology of the icon and the icon-screen is treated in Holy Icons; see also Icons and Iconoclasm).

The prophets appear elsewhere in the iconographic program too: in the Anastasis (the Descent into Hades, the Orthodox paschal icon), where the risen Christ raises Adam and Eve amid the kings and prophets — David and Solomon crowned, John the Forerunner, and the others who awaited Him below (see The Prophets as Saints of the Church); and in the dome and drum of the church, where the prophets are ranged beneath the Pantocrator as witnesses of the glory.

The Source-Critical Problem: Where Did the Prophets Die?

Here the collection reaches its methodological heart. The Church’s synaxaria give, for prophet after prophet, circumstantial accounts of how and where he died and was buried: Isaiah sawn in two under Manasseh and buried by the pool of Siloam; Jeremiah stoned to death by his own people at Tahpanhes in Egypt; Ezekiel killed by a Jewish leader in Babylon and buried in the tomb of Shem and Arphaxad; Amos beaten to death by the priest of Bethel; Micah thrown from a height; Zechariah son of Jehoiada slain between the temple and the altar; and so for the rest. The problem is that the canonical Old Testament records almost none of these deaths. Scripture tells us how Moses died (on Nebo, buried by God in an unknown grave, Deuteronomy 34) and that Elijah did not die but was taken up (2 Kings 2); of the deaths of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and nearly all the Twelve, the Bible says nothing. Where, then, does the dense martyrological and topographical tradition come from?

The answer, overwhelmingly, is a single non-canonical text: the Lives of the Prophets (Vitae Prophetarum), a short collection of biographical notices — birthplace, manner of death, place of burial, sometimes a miracle or sign — for the prophets and some other Old Testament figures. This text is the source of the received tradition of the prophets’ deaths and tombs, and per METHODOLOGY §3.5 it must be named and dated as an artifact, not treated as documented history.

The Lives of the Prophets: An Artifact Dated

The Lives of the Prophets is a Jewish (later Christianized) work of Late Antiquity, transmitted in Greek and in several other versions. Its date and character are contested along a wide range:

Charles Cutler Torrey, in the first modern critical edition, dated the Greek text to a Palestinian Jewish original of the first century AD (before 106 CE), read as a guide to the prophets’ tombs (Torrey, The Lives of the Prophets: Greek Text and Translation, JBL Monograph Series 1, Philadelphia: SBL, 1946).
Douglas R. A. Hare, in the standard English translation in Charlesworth’s Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, likewise placed the core in the first quarter of the first century AD, Jewish and Palestinian, while noting Christian interpolations in the transmission (Hare, “The Lives of the Prophets,” in James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 2, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985).
David Satran, in the most thorough recent reassessment, argued that the Lives in its present form cannot be securely dated before the fourth or fifth century and is fully intelligible only within the early Byzantine Christian culture of holy men, sacred sites, and the veneration of the saints — that is, that the received text belongs to the same world of relic-cult and pilgrimage that produced the veneration of the prophets’ tombs, and reflects it as much as it precedes it (David Satran, Biblical Prophets in Byzantine Palestine: Reassessing the Lives of the Prophets, Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigrapha 11, Leiden: Brill, 1995).

[Disputed: the date of the Lives of the Prophets. Torrey (1946) and Hare (in Charlesworth, OTP 2, 1985) place the Jewish core in the early first century AD; Satran (Biblical Prophets in Byzantine Palestine, Brill, 1995) argues the present form is a heavily redacted early-Byzantine (4th–5th c.) text, comprehensible only within the Christian cult of the saints and holy places. The range is thus from the first to the fifth century, and the transmission is Christian throughout. This collection reports the range and does not collapse it.]

Whatever its date, the decisive point for this collection is what the Lives can and cannot bear. It can establish that a rich tradition of the prophets’ deaths, tombs, and topography existed and was cultivated — indeed it is the primary witness to that tradition, and to the veneration of prophets’ tombs in Palestine and beyond. It cannot establish, as historical fact, how Isaiah or Jeremiah or Ezekiel actually died; these are traditions preserved (and very possibly generated) by the text, not archival records of events centuries older. The martyrdoms in particular follow a recognizable pattern — the true prophet rejected and killed by his own apostate people or their idolatrous rulers — that has as much to do with the theology of the rejected prophet (a theme the Gospel itself invokes: “which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? and they have slain them,” Acts 7:52; cf. Matthew 23:29–37) as with remembered fact.

Pinning the Traditions: Scripture, Lives, Synaxaria

The discipline this collection applies, extending the attestation model used elsewhere in the repository for hagiography (see the flagship treatment in St. Xenia: Hagiography vs. History, and the Herman four-class model behind it), is to grade each biographical claim about a prophet by its earliest source:

From Scripture (the firmest class). The prophecies themselves; the deaths that Scripture does record (Moses on Nebo, Deuteronomy 34; Elijah’s assumption, 2 Kings 2); the narrated events of the prophets’ ministries (Elijah on Carmel, Daniel in the lions’ den, Jonah and the fish). These are canonical and are read as the word of God — though even here the christological reading is the Church’s Spirit-given interpretation, not a datum of the letter.
From the Lives of the Prophets (a Second Temple–to–Byzantine pseudepigraphon). The manner and place of most of the prophets’ deaths and burials: Jeremiah stoned in Egypt; Ezekiel killed in Babylon and his tomb; Isaiah’s burial by Siloam; the tombs and signs of the Twelve. These are tradition preserved in a named, non-canonical text of uncertain date, and are to be reported as such — “the Lives of the Prophets relates that…,” not “Jeremiah was stoned.”
From the martyrdom pseudepigrapha. The sawing of Isaiah, whose fullest source is the Martyrdom/Ascension of Isaiah, possibly alluded to in Hebrews 11:37 (treated in The Vision and the Martyrdom of Isaiah).
From the later synaxaria and menaia (the latest and most elaborated class). The Byzantine service books gather, harmonize, and sometimes embroider the above, adding feast dates, physical descriptions, and further miracles. These fix the canonical liturgical form of the prophet’s memory; they are the least secure as history and the most secure as witness to the shape of the cult.

The reason to be this careful is not skepticism but honesty of veneration. As the repository’s hagiographic method holds, the Church in venerating a prophet-saint does not certify a biography; she receives and ratifies a cult — the tradition of the faithful that this holy one is a friend of God and an intercessor (the theology is stated in the Xenia flagship; see St. Xenia: Hagiography vs. History). The prophets’ prophecies, and their standing as saints, do not rest on the historicity of the Lives of the Prophets; they rest on Scripture and on the Church’s reception. So the tombs and martyrdoms can be honored as venerable tradition and named to their real source — the Lives and the synaxaria — without either discarding them or dressing them as documented history.

Icon and Tomb, Honestly Held

The prophet on the iconostasis and the prophet at his reputed tomb are two forms of one veneration, and both are best served by honesty about their sources. The icon-row states a theological truth that needs no archival defense: the prophets point to Christ and His Mother, and this the Church confesses on the authority of the Gospel and her own reading of Scripture. The tomb-traditions and martyrologies state something historically thinner: a rich, cultivated memory of how the prophets died and where they lie, preserved in the Lives of the Prophets and the synaxaria, of contested date and Christian transmission. Held in their proper relation — the icon on the firm ground of Scripture and dogma, the tombs on the softer ground of named tradition — the two together let the Church venerate the prophets truly: as saints who foretold the Christ, whose prophecies she sings and whose memory she keeps, without asking a first-century pilgrim’s guide to bear the weight of the Gospel.

References

Satran, David. Biblical Prophets in Byzantine Palestine: Reassessing the Lives of the Prophets. Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigrapha 11. Leiden: Brill, 1995. (The reassessment of the Lives; the early-Byzantine dating; the cult of holy men and sacred sites.)
Hare, Douglas R. A. “The Lives of the Prophets.” In The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 2, ed. James H. Charlesworth. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985. (The standard English translation; the first-century Palestinian Jewish dating of the core; the prophets’ deaths and tombs.)
Torrey, Charles Cutler. The Lives of the Prophets: Greek Text and Translation. Journal of Biblical Literature Monograph Series 1. Philadelphia: Society of Biblical Literature, 1946. (The critical edition; the pre-106 CE dating.)
Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1982; and Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon. Crestwood: SVS Press, 1978. (The iconostasis and the prophets’ row; the Mother of God of the Sign.)
The Holy Bible, KJV (Deuteronomy 34; 2 Kings 2; Acts 7:52; Matthew 23:29–37; Hebrews 11:37).
METHODOLOGY.md §3.5, this repository (attestation-pinning for hagiography).