In this chapter, I contextualize the discourse of orality as the privileged medium of revelation through three corpora; rabbinic idea of Oral Torah, the Manichaean claim that the Kephalaia contain Mani’s Oral Revelation not found in his Written Revelations, and the Pseudo-Clementine’s argument that only Orality (not vision) can guarantee prophetic truth. I ultimately argue that all three drew from a common fund of discursive tools to thematize orality as a privileged site of revelation. After a summary of contemporary discussions on rabbinic Oral Torah, I show how the Kephalaia itself emerged from an “Oral Performative” contexts that was largely independent of textual exegesis of Mani’s books. I argue that, like the rabbis, the Manichaeans privileged the orality because it allowed them to claim that they were simply continuing the revelation that Mani had begun. I then turn to the Ps.-Clementine Homilies and show it thematizes orality in ways that are surprisingly congruent with both the rabbis and the Manichaeans.

Here, I turn to the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and read it together with the Cologne Mani Codex. I argue that its anti-Pauline sentiment, which reaches its highest pitch when polemicizing against visionary forms of revelation, is responding to Mani’s claims to be the Apostle of Jesus Christ. I first show that the language of “seminal fluids and blood” of the two prophets in the Homilies is designed to show that the True Prophet cannot be human. The same holds for the cryptic passage about Jesus “changing forms and names,” since only a divine substance - and not a human being - can be the True Prophet. I then turn to the Homilies’ anti-Pauline critique of visionary forms of revelation. I place these together with the Cologne Mani Codex, which presents Mani as a “Second Paul” who acquires prognosis through visionary means. I ultimately argue that the Homilies’ “anti-Pauline” sentiment is directed against Mani (among others).

This chapter investigates the contours of prognosis itself. It begins by describing prognosis in the Neoplatonist Iamblichus’ De Mysteriis. It then “catches” Iamblichus in the act of inventing a new definition of prognosis in his response to Porphyry, shifting it away from discrete knowledge of particular events towards panoptic knowledge that emerges as an expression of divine substance. This chapter then shows how both the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and the Manichaeans were also theorizing prognosis along similar lines.