Imagining the End: Visions of
Yüklə 4,01 Mb. Pdf görüntüsü
|
| Bahman
, but the importance attached to millennia in popular Christian eschatology seems to be a mistaken understanding of the millennium in the Book of Revelation. The Study of Modern Apocalypticism The modern study of Jewish and Christian apocalypticism dates from the early nineteenth century. 1 The first comprehensive study of the subject was published by Friedrich Lücke in
. 2 Significantly, Lücke’s study was pub- lished in connection with a study of the Book of Revelation. Other literature was recognized as ‘apocalyptic’ because it resembled the New Testament 70 Judaism, Christianity and Islam book. At the same time, the impetus for recognizing a category of apocalyptic literature came from the discovery of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch, which was edited and published by Richard Laurence in
. 3 Increasingly, Jewish apocalyptic literature came to be appreciated as a corpus with its own integrity, to the point where some scholars have disputed whether the Book of Revela- tion should be considered ‘apocalyptic’ at all. 4 Lücke’s corpus of Jewish apocalyptic writings consisted of Daniel, Enoch,
Ezra and the Sibylline Oracles . In the course of the nineteenth century this corpus was expanded by the discovery of such texts as and Baruch, Enoch, and the Apocalypse of Abraham . All of these apocalyptic writings belonged to the broader category of Jewish pseudepigrapha. They are os- tensibly revelations received by ancient worthies, who were not the actual authors. These texts had not been preserved in Jewish tradition or in Semitic languages, but by oriental Christian churches in Ethiopic ( Enoch), Syriac ( Baruch) or Old Slavonic ( Enoch,
Apocalypse of Abraham ). Most of the relevant texts were edited by R. H. Charles of Oxford and his collaborators and made available to the English-speaking world in his collection of The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in
. 5 For much of the twentieth century, however, the study of apocalypticism focused not on these pseudepigraphic texts, which were written in languages unfamiliar to most biblical scholars, but on the biblical corpus itself. Apoca- lypticism was generally seen as an outgrowth of biblical prophecy, 6 and the
category was extended to include parts of the books of Isaiah (especially chapters –
), Ezekiel and Zechariah. 7 The climax of this strand of scholar- ship may be represented by the work of Paul Hanson, who located ‘The Dawn of Apocalyptic’ in early post-exilic prophecy. 8 An alternative approach was advocated by Gerhard von Rad, in the context of his Theology of the Old Testament . 9 Von Rad saw the roots of apocalypticism in wisdom rather than in prophecy, but this view was widely seen as counter-intuitive, at least in the English-speaking world. In New Testament scholarship, ‘apocalyptic’ in- creasingly became a theological concept, quite independent of the ancient Jewish texts which were often dismissed as ‘abstruse and fantastic’. 10 A turning point in the modern study of apocalyptic literature was repres- ented by Klaus Koch’s polemical monograph Yüklə 4,01 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|