What are some other ways early Christian literature viewed these topics differently from how we do today?
There are communities today—perhaps not so much at Harvard, but elsewhere!—who still consider prophecies, dreams, and the like to be important. One difference, however, between how many of us view such phenomena and how those in antiquity viewed them is that in antiquity accounts and discussions of dreams and prophecy were considered pretty cutting-edge. For example, if you really wanted to be at the forefront of medical theory in antiquity (the way we might think of genetics today), you would want to think about dreams and how they work on the soul. One of the texts that my research dealt with was Tertullian’s De anima, a fascinating early third-century work from Carthage. Tertullian uses what we would consider to be a hodge-podge of materials to make arguments about what the soul looks like (literally, since he thinks the soul is a body!), how it can have visions and dreams from the divine, and why those can be authoritative in this community. He draws from medical literature of the
