Anna the Prophetess

**Luke calls her προφῆτις, a prophetess, and the word is rarer than it looks.** In the whole New Testament it is applied to exactly two people: to Anna here, and at Revelation 2:20 to the woman called Jezebel — where it is an accusation. **Anna is therefore the only person in the New Testament to be given the title προφῆτις approvingly.**

That is worth setting against the near misses, because the distinction is easy to lose. The four daughters of Philip the Evangelist — whom this archive holds — are said to *prophesy*, προφητεύουσαι, at Acts 21:9, but are not called prophetesses; Agabus, also held here, is προφήτης, the masculine. Luke, who reports both, uses the feminine noun of her alone.

He gives her more detail than he gives most named men: a father, **Phanuel**; a tribe; a marriage of seven years; a long widowhood; an age of eighty-four; and a practice — she did not depart from the Temple, but served God **with fastings and prayers night and day**.

**Her tribe is a historical datum, not colour.** Asher was one of the northern tribes carried off by Assyria in the eighth century BC. That Luke can name a woman of Asher worshipping in the Second Temple is a small piece of evidence against the idea that the northern tribes simply disappeared — and it is the kind of incidental detail a writer inventing a figure has no reason to add.

**And what she does with the moment is different from what Simeon does.** Simeon’s words go upward and inward — to God, and then to Mary. Anna’s go outward: she gave thanks, and **“spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem.”** Hers are addressed to the city. With Simeon she is the first person in Jerusalem recorded as proclaiming the child, and she is the only one of the two recorded as telling anyone else.

Her feast is **3 February**, kept with Simeon. Nothing further about her is recorded and the archive adds nothing: no death, no burial, no relics, no later tradition worth the name.