Discover more in these hand-picked books Tell me what you think; read what others say.  
Stuff you need to know before the POCM makes sense. Ideas, rituals and myths Christianity boosted from the Pagans. Some of the Pagan's dying-resurrected godmen The Triumph of Christianity Discover mainstream scholarship about Christianity's Pagan origins What did the Christians borrow? So what?
the ideas, myths and rituals christianity borrowed from the pagans Jesus saves -- Pagan Gods saved first gods whose dad was a god and whose mom was a mortal woman Christianity has baptism -- Paganism had it first Christians share a sacred meal with their God -- Pagans did it first Christians believe in eternal life -- but Paganism believed in it first
home > pagan origins > prophecy
Jesus did miracles -- Pagan Gods did them first Jesus fulfilled prophecy -- Pagan Gods fulfilled prophecy first God and the immortal soul -- Paganism had 'em first Christianity thinks it has monotheism -- Paganism had it first Jesus' God lives in Heaven on High -- Pagan Gods lived there first pagan dead went to the underworld Jesus made clever quips -- Pagan cynic philosophers made them first
Prophecy -- yep, just another common sense practice of the divine

Liver and onions, used by priests to disgust the masses.
Assyria,
18th century BC
Now in the British Pub

"What could be called more divine than the power of foreknowing and foretelling the future?"
[Celsus, quoted by Origen, Against Celsus, 4.96]

Was Christianity new?  Was Christianity unique? 
Pikachu once again shoots himself obligingly in the foot by using the quote above. It's not really that hard -- a proper god has better knowledge than we do; therefore, whether a real god or a false one, a god is expected to be able to tell the future successfully. Is it that hard to comprehend? Sheesh.

Another SPFYMLM Why so many Pagan prophecy-miracles? Sorry, it's not because Pagan faith was stronger than ours, and it isn't because of the ancient view of miracles (we covered that already).
It's because even as today, people want to know what will happen in the future. So they go looking to find out -- today it's from your local horoscope section and fortune tellers. Before it was with oracles. What's changed? Not a darned thing. We don't see the supernatural as "rare"; we just look for it in different and more "sophisticated" places. The astrology column isn't as messy as a liver augury, but it's still the same principle. We're left with the same old test that we have in Deuteronomy: Does the prophet validate themselves with accurate forecasts? Because of this -- and because Pikachu's repeated ignorance is frankly so tiresome -- there's no need to comment on every detail Pikachu offers on this subject. To make an issue of "pagans had prophecy first" is to make an issue out of a non-issue, as if the real Christian God is going to look down and say, "Darn. I can't have any prophets in my movement. Those guys in Assyria were already predicting the future with liver and onions and someone might think I got the idea from them." Good grief!

By the way, Fate is just a logical concept

Pikachu thinks (as usual) some logical universal is a big deal: Ancient civilization also had the notion of Fate: some stuff was gonna happen and there wasn't squat you could about it. Well, Zeus dang. That attitude is everywhere today, even among people who aren't religious. They don't call it "fate"; they call it LIFE, but the principle is little different.

  

What was going to happen next naturally involved what gods planned to do next (once you have gods interested in persons, that's a logical following concept), so of course the Pagan Gods and their prophets knew the future. And that would follow under any paradigm of theism. It's just common sense.

And despite Pikachu, it's just another exaggeration to say that ancient histories were chock-a-block with prophecy-miracles. They were part of the spiritual furniture, true, but they also were regarded as unusual, and were just as critically evaluated. Guaranteed.

There is one warning worth issuing: Watch out for some of Pikachu's cites, such as those of Apollonius and Pythagoras. The documentation for some of these seriously post-dates Christianity.