Apocalyptic Literature in the New Testament

by Greg Carey, Warren Carter (Editor)

Overview

Every significant layer of the New Testament features the distinctive
concerns of apocalyptic literature, including the expectation of a
messiah, hope for a resurrection, expectation of a final judgment, and a
spiritual world that includes angels and demons. Yet many contemporary
readers shy away from things apocalyptic, especially the book of
Revelation.
This introduction considers the influence of
apocalyptic literature throughout the Gospels and Acts, Paul’s letters,
and Revelation. It argues that early Christian authors drew upon
apocalyptic topics to address an impressive array of situations and
concerns, and it demonstrates—example after example—how apocalyptic
discourse contributed to their ongoing work of contextual theology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781426771989
Publisher:	Abingdon Press
Publication date:	06/07/2016
Series:	Core Biblical Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	433 KB

About the Author

Greg Carey has taught at Lancaster Seminary since 1999, having previously taught at Rhodes College and Winthrop University. His publications include numerous studies on the Book of Revelation and ancient apocalyptic literature, rhetorical analysis of the New Testament, and investigations of early Christian self-definition. He is the author of five books, including The Gospel According to Luke: All Flesh Shall See God's Salvation and Sinners: Jesus and His Earliest Followers.

Warren Carter is Professor of New Testament at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, with a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary. Before moving to Brite in 2007, he taught for 17 years at Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City. His scholarly work has focused on the gospels of Matthew and John, and he has focused on the issue of the ways in which early Christians negotiated the Roman empire. In addition to numerous scholarly articles, he is the author of many books including The Roman Empire and the New Testament; What Does Revelation Reveal?; The New Testament: Methods and Meanings (with Amy-Jill Levine); and God in the New Testament published by Abingdon Press. He has also contributed to numerous church resources and publications and is a frequent speaker at scholarly and church conferences.

Read an Excerpt

Apocalyptic Literature in the New Testament

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By Greg Carey

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2016 Abingdon Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4267-7198-9

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CHAPTER 1

A Thought Experiment

This first chapter introduces several concepts that prepare us to study early Christian apocalyptic literature — terms like apocalypse and apocalypticism, among others; the emergence of apocalyptic discourse in ancient Judaism, including its presence among the Dead Sea Scrolls; and modern responses to apocalyptic thought among theologians and public thinkers.

But this chapter also aims to persuade you. Many readers assign apocalyptic literature a marginal space within the Bible. Finding apocalyptic ideas to be bizarre, judgmental, or violent, they assume that those ideas stand far removed from Jesus and his ministry. I once had a pastor invite me to lunch to ask, "What's the problem with Revelation?" Revelation surely represents the Bible's most intense expression of apocalyptic discourse; perhaps Revelation is so different from the rest of the New Testament that we should basically ignore it. Alternatively, some might question the relevance of apocalyptic literature: Does its focus on future deliverance encourage devotees to ignore injustice and violence in the present age? The hip-hop group Arrested Development offered this critique of popular religion: "The word 'cope' and the word 'change,' is directly opposite, not the same."

What if apocalyptic discourse stood not at the periphery of early Christianity but near its center? By reflecting on a thought experiment, an imaginary reader who works her way through the entire (Protestant) Bible from cover to cover, we will argue that apocalyptic topics provided essential resources for early Christian reflection. Moreover, these ideas and literary devices represented fairly new developments within ancient Judaism. They took recognizable shape not in the Jewish Scriptures, or Old Testament, but in the apocalyptic literature some Jews began to produce in the two or three centuries prior to Jesus's birth and career. Finally, these apocalyptic concepts were "fluid": people were still debating their value and meaning throughout the New Testament period — even within the New Testament itself. For that reason, early Christians could adapt apocalyptic discourse in diverse settings, and they could apply it to attain diverse ends.

Just Imagine ...

Let's imagine a first-time reader of the Bible. She is an unusual reader: she pays close attention, and she is especially smart. This reader remembers everything she reads, and she understands almost everything. Every once in a while she might perform an internet search or consult a reference dictionary — what's a Philistine, after all? — but let's imagine that she reads through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, understanding and remembering everything.

For the sake of our thought experiment we'll have to say a little more. She is reading a Protestant Bible. It doesn't matter much which translation she uses. Let's say she's reading the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), which is the most widely adopted for classroom use. It's far more important that she is using a Protestant Bible. It includes all the books that occur in the Jewish Bible, but in a different order. This Protestant Bible does not include the books we often identify as the Apocrypha: those books appear in Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Russian Orthodox Bibles. Different Christian communions have different Bibles.

So our reader finishes what we call the Old Testament. The NRSV called it "The Hebrew Scriptures Commonly Called the Old Testament." When she turns from Malachi, the last book of the Protestant Old Testament, she encounters a page, "The New Covenant Commonly Called the New Testament of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." Then she turns to Matthew.

Now we dwell on that transition to Matthew. Moving from Malachi to Matthew will confront our imaginary reader with several challenges. Matthew begins by introducing Jesus "the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham" (Matt 1:1 NRSV). Our reader recalls David and Abraham as major figures from earlier in the Bible, but what is a messiah?

It's common among some Christians to claim that the Hebrew prophets predicted a messiah, specifically that they predicted Jesus. But our reader finds herself surprised. She looks up "messiah" in a Bible dictionary and finds a fairly lengthy article. According to the article, "messiah" basically means one who is anointed, often kings and sometimes priests or prophets who receive anointing as a sign that one is favored by God for a particular role. She might learn that "the Messiah" (with the definite article) occurs in the New Testament but not in the Old Testament. She may also learn that the Greek word we translate "messiah", christos, is sometimes translated messiah and sometimes Christ.

In other words, Matthew calls Jesus "the Messiah," a concept that is never fully developed in the Jewish Scriptures. We might offer similar observations regarding other concepts our reader encounters in Matthew. In each case we find that a concept that appears scarcely or not at all in the Old Testament appears with far more definition in the New Testament. And in each case, our best evidence for that process of refinement and definition comes from outside the Bible — in the apocalyptic literature of ancient Judaism. Some of the most basic concepts in early Christian discourse are thoroughly grounded in apocalyptic literature. Messianic speculation emerged from Israel's hopes for a king like David, one who would inaugurate an age of righteousness and peace. Prominent passages include 2 Samuel 7:4-29; 1 Kings 3:6; 8:23-26; Psalms 2; 89; Isaiah 9; 11; 42; and 61. Later authors picked up on the depiction of "one like a Son of Man" in Daniel 7, an apocalypse, and we see the concept developing among some of the Dead Sea Scrolls and in apocalypses like 1 Enoch (especially chaps. 37–71), 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra.

On several occasions Matthew mentions Jesus's resurrection. But Matthew also includes a debate between Jesus and a group called the Sadducees concerning a general resurrection (Matt 22:23-33; see Mark 12:18-27). The first-century Jewish chronicler Josephus includes rejection of a resurrection and an afterlife among the Sadducees' defining characteristics, as does Acts 23:8. We rarely stop to think about it, but this debate reveals something significant: in Jesus's day the resurrection remained a fairly new and controversial idea.

A modern Bible reader might wonder: How can it be that an authoritative group within first-century Judaism rejected the idea of a resurrection? The answer is fairly simple. The Sadducees revered the Torah, the five books attributed to Moses, but not the other books that came to form the Hebrew Bible. The Torah never mentions resurrection. Nor do any of the other biblical books, at least not explicitly, with the exception of Daniel (though see Isa 26:19). Daniel 12:1-3 discusses a resurrection and a judgment. This is significant for two reasons. First, Daniel 7–12 constitutes one of our earliest literary apocalypses. We encounter the Bible's first clear reference to a resurrection in this classic apocalypse. And second, composed somewhere between 167 and 164 BCE, Daniel likely represents the "latest" book in our Old Testament. Once again we encounter a concept basic to early Christianity that crystalized in the apocalyptic literature of ancient Judaism.

Without belaboring the point, our reader finds two other surprises in Matthew: a personified group of demons headed by "the devil" or "Satan" and belief in a final judgment that separates righteous from unrighteous individuals. The concept of a supernatural "devil" (Greek: diabolos) is absent from the Septuagint, the Greek translations of the Old Testament that were popular in the ancient world. There's one exception: at 1 Chronicles 21:1 the Septuagint translates the Hebrew satan as "devil" when David is "incited" (CEB) to conduct a census of Israel. This figure, satan, shows up two other times in the Jewish Scriptures, obtaining divine permission to torment Job (Job 1–2) and opposing the high priest Joshua in Zechariah 3:1-2. But in Matthew the devil personally tests Jesus (Matt 4:1-11) and heads up a group of demons and wicked angels (Matt 9:34; 25:41). Moreover, while the Hebrew Bible once mentions an "evil spirit" sent by God to torment Saul (1 Sam 16:14), in Matthew demons and "unclean spirits" persecute unfortunate human beings in several cases (e.g., Matt 9:3234; 10:1; 15:22; 17:14-21). Having read the Old Testament, our reader is scarcely prepared for these menacing characters. However, wicked angels are common characters in the noncanonical apocalyptic literature.

Finally, the Hebrew Bible almost always depicts divine judgment as something that happens within the course of ordinary human events, often to nations and cities as much as to individuals. Again Daniel 12:13 provides the one clear exception, and it does not envision a dramatic judgment scene. But in Matthew our reader finds references to "the farthest darkness," a realm where people "will be weeping and grinding their teeth" (Matt 8:12; 22:13; 24:51; 25:30), as well as parables that depict the sorting of the righteous from the unrighteous (13:24-30, 36-43, 47-50; 25:31-46).

We have spent quite some time with our imaginary reader. Having finished the Protestant Old Testament, she encounters several challenging new ideas when she turns to Matthew. These ideas — a single messiah, the resurrection, a devil who leads demons and wicked angels, and a final judgment — prove basic to early Christian literature. But our reader's experience of the Old Testament has scarcely prepared her to understand these concepts. All of them found more definitive expression in the Jewish apocalyptic literature that emerged between the third century BCE and the career of Jesus.

Implications

Our thought experiment suggests several important lessons concerning apocalypticism's presence in the New Testament. First, we meet apoca-lyptic topics and literary forms all over the New Testament — not just in Revelation, but in the Gospels and epistles as well. When we think of biblical apocalyptic literature, our imaginations immediately conjure the book of Revelation. Indeed, Revelation stands as the Bible's classic expression of apocalyptic thought. This book devotes an entire chapter to Revelation. But apocalyptic discourse is everywhere. It is difficult to imagine early Christianity's formation apart from concepts like a messiah, a resurrection, and a final judgment. Satan and the demons are less prevalent, but they play prominent roles as well. Some early Christian texts are more or less "apocalyptic" than others. As we shall see, the Gospel of Thomas entirely rejects apocalyptic thought. But nearly all the earliest Christian writings reflect heavy apocalyptic influence.

Second, our thought experiment indicates the fluidity of apocalyptic discourse in ancient Judaism and earliest Christianity. By fluidity, we mean that apocalyptic ideas remained fairly new and unsettled in the texts we're considering. They had gained wide acceptance, along with some defi-nition. But things like afterlife hope and a final judgment still required work. For example, what happens to people when they die? We have seen Jesus's debate with the Sadducees concerning the resurrection. Within the New Testament itself we encounter diverse understandings of what lies beyond death. In 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 Paul expresses the conviction that the dead lie, well, dead until a final resurrection. Paul calls this "sleeping." We see the same idea in Matthew 27:52. But Luke envisions people entering other states immediately after death. For example, Jesus promises his crucified neighbor, "today you will be with me in paradise" (23:43; see 16:22-26).

Finally, we cannot overstate how important apocalyptic ideas were for early Christian reflection regarding Jesus and his significance. Even though the resurrection was a relatively new idea, Jesus's followers rapidly became convinced that God had raised Jesus from the dead. And if God indeed raised Jesus, that conviction empowered reflection concerning Jesus's identity as messiah. We will say more about this in later chapters, but Luke's Gospel may help us imagine how that process would have worked. After the crucifixion the risen Jesus "appears" beside two disciples as they walk — but "they were prevented from recognizing him" (Luke 24:16). They lament the news of Jesus's crucifixion: "we had hoped he was the one who would redeem Israel" (24:21). In other words, they thought Jesus might be the messiah or something similar. Some women who followed Jesus have reported that his tomb is empty and some angels announced his resurrection, but the disciples do not yet believe (24:22-24). As the conversation progresses, Jesus explains how these events relate to his identity: "Wasn't it necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and then enter into his glory?" (24:26). At this key moment in Luke, the concept of the resurrection reinforces claims concerning Jesus's messianic identity. Apart from apocalyptic discourse, this passage would scarcely make sense.

Concepts and Terminology

Until the 1970s interpreters tossed around the word "apocalyptic" without much attempt at serious definition or analytical precision. "Apocal-yptic" referred to the expectation that God would intervene dramatically in history, blessing the righteous and damning the wicked. This model basically took the two biblical apocalypses, Daniel and Revelation, as classic cases. Where other sources resembled Daniel and Revelation, they were considered "apocalyptic." When Jesus discussed the Son of Man's coming or "wars and reports of wars," that counted as apocalyptic. Paul's discourses on the resurrection were apocalyptic.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, however, interpreters began working alone and in teams to identify meaningful and consistent understandings of apocalyptic literature. Typically they began with the classic literary apocalypses — not just Daniel and Revelation, but noncanonical apocalypses such as 1 Enoch, 2 and 3 Baruch, and 4 Ezra along with the Shepherd of Hermas and the Apocalypse of Peter. What concepts and literary devices occurred consistently within this literature? And may we discern patterns within the literature that separate some texts from others? For example, all the apocalypses tell a story of a revelatory experience, in which a heavenly guide provides instructions and explanations to the visionary. At the same time, some apocalypses focus on the resolution of history, while others emphasize "tours" of heaven and hell and still others combine both features. Familiarity with the literary apocalypses' consistent features prepares us to appreciate the differences among them.

We should avoid making too much of definitions and technical terminology. Nevertheless, the distinctions presented here can prove helpful.

We begin with the term apocalypse, which refers to a group of literary works that share many common features. Apocalypse derives from the Greek apokalypsis, which simply means revelation or unveiling. Here an apocalypse means a narrative that relates a mystical revelation concerning otherworldly affairs. For example, Paul claims to have experienced apocalypses or revelations of his own, but he did not compose a literary apocalypse (2 Cor 12:1-10; Gal 1:12; 2:2). The Protestant canon includes two literary apocalypses, Daniel and Revelation; the name "apocalypse" derives from Revelation's very first word. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include 2 Esdras; we identify an apocalypse called 4 Ezra, which constitutes chapters 3–14 of 2 Esdras.

The tradition of great literary apocalypses includes quite a few noncanonical works. Most prominent among these is 1 Enoch, a composite Jewish apocalypse that contains at least five "books" within the larger work that may have been composed over a period as wide as four centuries. Enoch was so influential that it made its way into the Ethiopic Orthodox canon. More copies of Enoch appear among the Dead Sea Scrolls than of any other noncanonical work; moreover, the New Testament epistle of Jude quotes Enoch as prophecy (14-15), while Enoch influenced Matthew as well (compare 1 Enoch 98:3 with Matt 13:42, 50; and 1 Enoch 54:5-6 with Matt 25:41).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Apocalyptic Literature in the New Testament by Greg Carey. Copyright © 2016 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
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Table of Contents

Contents

"Preface",
"General Preface",
"Abbreviations",
"Chapter One — A Thought Experiment",
"Chapter Two — Apocalyptic Literature in Context",
"Chapter Three — The Pauline Epistles",
"Chapter Four — The Synoptic Take(s) on Jesus",
"Chapter Five — Beyond the Synoptic Gospels: Q, Thomas, John — and Jesus",
"Chapter Six — The Big Show: Revelation",
"Chapter Seven — Epilogue",
"Glossary",