The Prophet Micaiah and Divine Deception

The Prophet Micaiah and Divine Deception January 16, 2025

I offer a column on themes of deception, false identity, and the utter unreliability of all forms of external authority, including (apparently) the divine.

I have been working on a truly odd text called the Gospel of Barnabas, which purports to be a secret gospel revealed to the early Christian figure of that name. The more I get into it, the more intriguing ideas and insights I find. Growing directly from that, I will explore one truly weird story from the Old Testament. The story really does exist, it really is canonical, but it raises all sorts of difficult questions that really are not addressed much elsewhere in the Bible. I am pretty confident that you have not often heard it preached on.

As it stands, the Gospel of Barnabas was put together around 1590 by a person or group deeply hostile to the most basic points of Christian orthodoxy. The work also incorporates earlier portions, possibly from quite ancient lost gospel texts. Possibly, but not necessarily, the authors were secret believers in some other faith who were forced to adopt orthodox Christianity, at least on the surface. They might have been crypto-Muslims; or else they were Christians of a highly skeptical/liberal strain who were presenting themselves that way. It’s complicated…

Whatever their actual identity, we are dealing with concealed believers, crypto-believers. In the language of the time, these were Nicodemites, drawing on the name of the distinguished Jewish leader who secretly followed Jesus, and visited him only by night. (We know him only from John’s gospel). Nicodemus himself  is a central figure in Barnabas, where he often serves as a channel for Jesus’s teachings. Not surprisingly given this context, much of the Barnabas Gospel concerns themes of deceit, concealment, duplicity, impersonation, and false or assumed identities. As I wrote in a recent piece in Christian Century, “Just imagine a gospel composed by Jorge Luis Borges, while Umberto Eco held his coat, and Neil Gaiman took notes.”

Let me be clear here. This is not just an author presenting false or deceptive material and hoping you won’t notice. Rather, he is telling you exactly as he goes that he is doing it, and how he is going about it. If you like, you can pay all the attention you want to the man behind the curtain. He wants you to.

Anyone interested in the Reformation era should find Barnabas of great interest, because it is engaged with so many of the religious and intellectual issues of the day. In particular, Barnabas offers a detailed and very hostile critique of Calvinism, and Jesus often denounces thinly disguised Calvinists as “Pharisees.” That again fits the Nicodemite origins of the work.

Hmm, “deceit, concealment, duplicity, impersonation, and false or assumed identities.” Where on earth would a writer find material like that? Certainly not in the Bible itself… well, actually, there is one Biblical passage that contains exactly those elements.

The Gospel’s “Barnabas” tells at length the story of the Old Testament prophet Micaiah, not to be confused with Micah. The story is found in 1 Kings 22. Jehoshaphat of Judah invites Ahab of Israel to join him in a military campaign, but first they have to consult the word of the Lord. Ahab asks his four hundred prophets, who assure him that he will indeed win the war, and seize Ramoth-Gilead. Jehoshaphat asks for a second opinion, so they turn to Micaiah, a faithful follower of Elijah. Micaiah originally gives a favorable response about coming victory, but then explains that this was a lie, or a parody of the truth. (“You’re going to win! Just kidding!”)

Micaiah then explains that he had had a vision of the heavenly court, and reports the discussion between YHWH and the host of heaven. The passage has obvious parallels to Job, and the interaction between God and Satan:

Therefore hear the word of the Lord:

I saw the Lord sitting on his throne with all the multitudes of heaven standing around him on his right and on his left. And the Lord said, ‘Who will entice Ahab into attacking Ramoth Gilead and going to his death there?’ “One suggested this, and another that. Finally, a spirit came forward, stood before the Lord and said, ‘I will entice him.’

“‘By what means?’ the Lord asked.

“‘I will go out and be a deceiving spirit in the mouths of all his prophets,’ he said.

“‘You will succeed in enticing him,’ said the Lord. ‘Go and do it.’ (19-22)

That lie was what inspired the original response by Ahab’s four hundred prophets. Ahab is naturally furious, but he is alarmed enough to enter battle very carefully. Nevertheless, as Micaiah alone prophesied, Ahab loses the war, and is killed – around 850 BC.

So why is this important? First, this seems to be the first account of the heavenly throne room, an image that would be of immense interest to later rabbinic scholars, and to Jewish mystics. But some Talmudic scholars asked an excellent question about the authority of what was recounted. Everything we know about heaven and its proceedings comes from Micaiah himself. So was he telling the divine truth himself? Or was he telling a story like this as a rhetorical strategy, to describe things that he was not claiming had actually happened? Was he an unreliable narrator? The Bible tells us not that Micaiah saw these things, but that Micaiah said that he had seen these things: big difference. The heavenly account begins with the words “Therefore hear the word of the Lord,” making it reported speech. It is an interesting, and shrewd, distinction.

John Calvin took Micaiah’s words at face value. He actually used the story to establish the point that God not merely permitted evil but, on occasion, actually directed it. Again, Barnabas is challenging one of Calvin’s doctrines.

Also, and critically, there is the theme of lying and deception, which so fascinated the author of Barnabas. And in this instance, lying and deception that seem to come from God himself, and his angels. There is no suggestion that the spirit is necessarily a devil or demon figure, and he operates entirely with God’s will and permission. In this instance, some prophecy in particular cases is not only wrong and inaccurate, but that falsehood is directly provoked by God himself, for the purpose of destroying an evil king. The bad prophets are not lying about what they have witnessed; they are not just making things up to please the king. They are doing what they have been divinely instructed to do, by God and Heaven. In this instance, revelation itself is deceptive.

For Barnabas, that idea is explosive, and raises the question of what other divine revelations might fall into that category. And how does anyone in the material world know that? How, in the context of that work, did one decide between the revelations of Jesus and Muhammad? How did you decide what prophets were truthful? Even more alarming, how many might be truthful as far as they knew themselves, but who might nevertheless be channeling the words of a lying spirit? And moreover, a lying spirit authorized by God.

I will briefly mention the even more unnerving text in Ezekiel 20, in which God seems to say that he very deliberately gave laws and commandments so blatantly outrageous that the people were not meant to obey them. (I have posted on this at some length elsewhere).

It’s not surprising why Micaiah’s story might appeal to Early Modern Nicodemites, who rejected the hope of absolute confidence in revelation, and who followed their own inner truths while offering outward conformity to the demands of state and church.

 

See Philip Jenkins “Gospel of Barnabas,” in J. Christopher Edwards, ed., Early New Testament Apocrypha Ancient Literature for New Testament Studies, volume 9 (Zondervan Academic 2022): 38-57; and Philip Jenkins, “A Gospel That Admits It’s A False Prophecy,” Christian Century, September 2023: 35-36.

For modern scholarship on the Micaiah story, see Ehud Ben Zvi, “A contribution to the intellectual history of Yehud: the story of Micaiah and its function within the discourse of Persian-period literati,” in Philip R. Davies and Diana V. Edelman, eds., The Historian and the Bible: Essays in Honour of Lester L. Grabbe (New York: T & T Clark International, 2010); and R.W. L. Moberly, “Does God Lie to His Prophets? The Story of Micaiah ben Imlah As a Test Case,” Harvard Theological Review 96(1)(2003) 1-23.

Micaiah’s reputation as a prophet who never spoke good to a king made him a byword for intransigent Puritan critics of the English monarchy, like the famous John Preston in the 1620s, who was called the “Micaiah” of his day. See Nick Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon: the Mayflower Pilgrims and their World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). As far as I can tell, the subversive point about God actively commanding false prophecy does not get much discussed in that era, but I might be wrong.

 

I am expanding this column from one I offered several years ago at this site.

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