Definitions

• Maimonides suggested that "prophecy is, in truth and reality, an emanation sent forth by Divine Being through the medium of the Active Intellect, in the first instance to man's rational faculty, and then to his imaginative faculty".
• The views of Maimonides closely relate to the definition by Al-Fârâbî, who developed the theory of prophecy in Islam.
• Much of the activity of Old Testament prophets involved conditional warnings rather than immutable futures. A summary of a standard Old Testament prophetic formula might run: Repent of sin X and turn to righteousness, otherwise consequence Y will occur.
• Saint Paul emphasizes edification, exhortation and comfort in a definition of prophesying.
• The Catholic Encyclopedia defines a Christian conception of prophecy as "understood in its strict sense, it means the foreknowledge of future events, though it may sometimes apply to past events of which there is no memory, and to present hidden things which cannot be known by the natural light of reason".
• According to Western esotericist Rosemary Guiley, clairvoyance has been usedby whom? as an adjunct to "divination, prophecy, and magic".
• From a skeptical point of view, a Latin maxim exists: "prophecy written after the fact" (vaticinium ex eventu). The Jewish Torah already deals with the topic of the false prophet (Deuteronomy 13:2-6, 18:20-22).