Last fall, we were talking about messianic prophecy - about how prophecy was used by the authors of the New Testament to make their case that Jesus was the promised Messiah. For the next few weeks as we begin the winter session, I thought it would be interesting to look at the prophets themselves and about the nature of prophecy in general. What are prophets and what do they actually do? I think that there are a lot of misconceptions about prophets and prophecy that tend to dominate how people think about this subject. In very broad terms, for example, I suspect that if you asked the average person on the street what prophecy was, they would say that prophecy is predicting the future, and so, prophets are people who predict the future. I didn’t see much of this at the turn of the calendar a few weeks ago, but sometimes as one year passes into another the airwaves are filled with so-called prophets who make predictions about the year to come. But while that might be a popular unde...