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Jerry L. Sumney

How do you experience the world? Is it fair or unfair? Good or evil? Redeemable or beyond hope? You probably do not want to choose either alternative. Most people today find the truth somewhere in between these extremes. If that is the case for you, then apocalyptic writings will be somewhat foreign to your way of thinking. Though we do not often think about it, the theology each of us have has been influenced by our experience of the world. What we think about God, the world, and other humans (just to name a few things) is significantly affected by what has happened to us and how we interpret those events. If we are going to understand apocalyptic writings, we will need to know something about the ways the authors of such works think, so that we can begin to understand why they speak as they do about God, God’s people, and God’s enemies.

Apocalyptic writers usually view the world as completely captured by evil and as irredeemable without a catastrophic intervention of God. In their experience, there is something drastically wrong with the world. Apocalyptic writers are seeking a way to reconcile their belief in a good, powerful, and just God and their encounter with pervasive and successful evil.

In theological terms, one of the most basic issues apocalyptic thought wrestles with is theodicy: how does one explain injustice and evil in the world while holding to belief in a good and just God? This question is asked explicitly in several apocalyptic writings. In 2 Esdras,1 the leading character looks about himself and sees the great sinfulness of the Babylonians who have conquered Israel. His question is, “Are the deeds of those who inhabit Babylon any better [than those of Israel]?” (2 Esdras 3:28). Then he complains that no one can understand what God has done and that God has given no explanation (see 3:28—4:36).

Apocalyptic arises in situations where the questions of theodicy become acute. The problem of evil in the world is always with us, but it becomes more important for an individual or a group when it is brought home, when you are the good person who is suffering unjustly. Groups adopt an apocalyptic outlook in times of crisis, when it seems they are being overwhelmed by their enemies, enemies who are beyond their capacity to defeat. Apocalyptic helps such groups interpret their experience in a way that preserves and strengthens their faith in God. Examples of such groups from the ancient world include the inhabitants of Qumran (who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls), Jews living at the time of the Maccabean Revolt (see the discussion of the setting of Daniel in chapter 3 below), and Christians facing persecution. All of these groups faced overwhelming opposition or defeat while believing they were God’s people. All asked, “How can God allow this? How will God respond to this?” Apocalyptic thought addresses these questions.

Apocalyptic responds by pointing beyond history, by asserting that the ultimate answer to these questions lies in another realm. So, it gives a larger context in which to understand the events of the world. It argues that earthly events are only one part of a cosmic drama that involves forces most people are unaware of, but which are now being revealed to God’s people. It asserts that God will set things right in the end, that God’s justice will be exercised. This satisfaction of God’s justice includes both punishing the wicked and rewarding the group’s faithfulness. On a personal level, it says that the last word is not said when you die; rather, there are rewards for the faithful individual.

Some Common Characteristics of Apocalyptic Writings

To understand the apocalyptic material in the Bible, it is useful to look at some common characteristics of apocalyptic writings. Through recognizing these characteristics, apocalyptic texts will be more accessible and more profitable as sources for Christian thought about and response to the world we know.

Apocalyptic writings are usually pseudepigraphic, i.e., written by someone other than the person by whom the document claims to be written.2 While this sounds like plagiarism to us, it was a widespread practice in the ancient world. Writers were castigated if they were caught writing in the name of another person, but many thought it was worth the risk because the message they wanted to get across was so important. We find, for example, works that were written in the name of Socrates more than 300 years after he died. Writers often used this technique when they thought they represented the thought of the claimed writer and so could bring the earlier person’s insight to bear on the actual writer’s situation. Jewish and Christian apocalyptic writings often claim to be written by someone known from the Bible who lived long before the actual writing (e.g., Enoch, Ezra, Baruch, Abraham, etc.).

Apocalyptic writings claim that they contain a revelation from God that consists of knowledge that has been hidden from all but a very few people but is now revealed to the wider circle of the people of God because the end is near. They often contain information about angels, the ordering of the cosmos, or the nature of heavenly realms. This knowledge is usually given to the writer by an angelic mediator. The writer’s claim to authority comes primarily from the assertion that what is written is directly a revelation from God.

Connected with their pseudonymity, apocalyptic writings often include ex eventu prophecy. This means that they have their supposed writer predict something that is in the future for that figure but is a past event for the real author. When Enoch, who is taken from Genesis 5, has correctly predicted the history of the world from the Flood to the second century BCE (when it was actually written), the reader has good reason to think he will also be right about what is to come next. So ex eventu prophecy gives assurance to the reader that what the writer says is trustworthy. This sure word is precisely what those who are suffering need.

Finally, the most basic point apocalyptic writers want to establish is that God will make things right. All apocalyptic thought asserts that God will be true to God’s own nature by defeating evil and establishing justice for the faithful. God will establish a reign of justice and goodness which evil cannot overcome. The readers can take courage, even in the most dire circumstances, that this is the certain end and that they will be included in this victory of God. All the other characteristics of apocalyptic are intended to help establish this point.

Not all apocalyptic texts have all of these characteristics (e.g., Revelation has no ex eventu prophecy), but they give us a place to start as we investigate this material.

The Origins of Apocalyptic Thought

Our understanding of apocalyptic thought will also be enhanced if we know something about the origins of this type of thought. Two related questions bear on this issue: When did apocalyptic thought emerge? and What are its sources? We begin with the second question. There have been many suggestions about where the roots of apocalyptic thought are to be found. Some have argued that it only drew on Hebrew prophetic thought, others that it was derived solely from Wisdom traditions, and still others that the strongest influences came from Persian or Greek thought. Most interpreters think apocalyptic thought drew on all of these resources when facing certain types of social circumstances.

Most interpreters also agree that the primary source for apocalyptic is Hebrew prophecy. The faith of the Hebrew prophets always had an eschatological orientation. They believed in a God who worked in the world and who would bring about God’s own purposes, including establishing the triumphant rule of God. The prophets never doubted that God’s purposes would win out in the end. Apocalyptic thought refocuses this belief, giving more emphasis to the final conclusion. Given that the return from exile did not begin a period of national prominence in which God was clearly ruler of the world, and given the failure of other nationalistic hopes expressed by the prophets, apocalyptic thought relocated those hopes outside the realm of history. They began to look for their fulfillment in a more dramatic movement by God, an action which affected history but was brought in from another realm.

In addition to this stream of thought from the prophets, apocalyptic drew on characteristics often found in the Wisdom tradition. Daniel is an interpreter of dreams, a function usually associated with the Wisdom tradition rather than prophets. Daniel, the leading character in the apocalyptic book which bears his name, is even ranked among the “wise men” in Babylonia (Dan 4:68). Additionally, some of the determinism found in Wisdom thought was appropriated as apocalyptic thought developed. Apocalypticists are certain about the outcome of history and the main lines of the course of history. This is seen not only in its confidence that God’s reign will be established, but also in the foretelling of world history found in many apocalyptic texts. This certainty about the course of history and its ultimate outcome does not necessarily mean that human free will is diminished. In apocalyptic thought humans are free to make their own choices about whether they will be on God’s side or that of evil. So some events of history are determined, but it is up to the individual to respond to God appropriately. The importance of free will can also be seen in the apocalyptic writers’ belief that individuals will be judged by God.

The prophetic and wisdom traditions cannot, however, account for all one finds in apocalyptic. It seems clear that its dualism, its development of traditions about angels, and its cosmology are significantly influenced by Greek and Persian thought. Thus, many sources contributed to the kind of thought which is found in apocalyptic writings. Materials from these various traditions were combined and synthesized to create a way of thinking, a way of perceiving God, the world, and themselves that made sense of the addressed communities’ experience.

What finally brings all these influences together into what we recognize as apocalyptic thought are the circumstances of life faced by particular communities. While no one type of situation can be said to produce apocalyptic, it may be broadly characterized as crisis literature. It developed when communities were under great stress, stress that threatened their belief in the power, goodness, and justice of God. Sometimes this was a national crisis, other times it was simply a crisis for the group. The best terms to describe the situations in which apocalyptic thought did (and does) develop are relative deprivation and cognitive dissonance. In a situation that involves relative deprivation, the group is deprived of some status, position, authority, or other value that they believe they should have but do not, in fact, possess. So a comparatively well-off group could develop an apocalyptic mind-set if they were convinced they were being deprived of something of significant value because of their religious beliefs. This experience of opposition from those outside the group can arise from circumstances that are not historically significant but nevertheless have a great impact on the group affected. It is the experience of oppression that is important for the development of apocalyptic thought, not the historical significance of what causes the group to feel this way.

The term cognitive dissonance may also be appropriately applied to many such situations. This expression describes a situation in which there is significant disparity between what one thinks and what one experiences. Again, this does not have to be a circumstance that has a noticeable effect on world or even local history; it simply involves a perceived great difference between what one expects and thinks ought to be and what is felt to be the reality. In our cases, those who believe they are God’s people expect this identity to enhance their status but just the opposite seems to be happening. For the early church, becoming a member of the movement meant a person had begun to worship the only true God. Members gave up participation in other cults to be associated with this God. But instead of this leading to blessings and good fortune, it led to disadvantage and persecution. Such experiences could be interpreted as evidence that they had made the wrong choice. Apocalyptic thought tries to reconcile who the people of God know themselves to be and what they think that identity means with the ways they perceive their existence at that moment in time.

Whether seen more as cognitive dissonance or relative deprivation, apocalyptic develops in situations in which a group feels deprived and sees the world to be in a crisis. Things are not what they should be or, more importantly, what God wants them to be. Since the group is powerless to change the situation, the only solution is an act of God, an act in which God destroys the current world order and establishes an order in which justice and goodness are dominant.

The type of situation described here as that which provides fertile ground for the seeds of apocalyptic to grow was present in the second century BCE in Palestine. As the discussion of the historical context of Daniel in chapter three will show, this was a period in which people were persecuted and killed precisely because they were remaining faithful to God. This seems to be the moment when the various elements of the mix came together to form what we know as apocalyptic. It is at this point that belief in judgment after death and in the resurrection of the righteous take hold within Judaism. By this moment in history the Jews have had extensive exposure to Persian and Greek ideas and they have had to begin to reinterpret the messages of the prophets because their hopes for national prominence had not materialized. Thus, apocalyptic thought comes to prominence in the desperate struggle in Judea, probably between 200 and 150 BCE.

Some Important Aspects of Apocalyptic Thought

It will help us understand apocalyptic texts if we know something about how most apocalyptic writers think about God, the nature of humanity, and ethics. These are among some of the most important issues that these writings address.

The nature of God in apocalyptic thought

The topic of the nature of God is not a common one in apocalyptic writings, but some characteristics of God stand out as very important for this way of thinking. This topic is also important because maintaining belief in God is one of the primary functions of apocalyptic thought. As a means to help us understand apocalyptic, we will focus our attention on three other matters: God’s transcendence, sovereignty, and justice.

All apocalyptic writers agree that God is personal, powerful, and holy, but there is a debate among scholars over whether apocalyptic thought reflects a view of God that sees God as increasingly transcendent and so less immanent. Some scholars see the rise of a developed angelology (the study of angels and ranks of angels) as a sign that God is no longer as accessible as God had been when the prophets spoke of God as a parent. In some apocalyptic writings, angels seem to be the link between God and the world; occasionally angels even appear as mediators between God and people who pray.

However, in some of these same writings (e.g., 1 Enoch3) we find immediate acts of God performed with no mediation. Additionally, in books like Daniel the characters obviously have direct access to God in prayer and God acts directly throughout the stories. Other apocalyptic writings also teach that God acts directly among humans (e.g., 2 Esdras). What we find, then, is that apocalyptic works do not all agree on this matter, but those who think God is accessible only through intermediaries are a distinct minority. Furthermore, a developed angelology does not necessarily mean that God is thought to be distant. The War Scroll from Qumran has an extensively developed angelology, but it also has God “in our midst” in the final battle. What all of these apocalyptic writers do agree on is that God must be separated from the evil in the world. All of them see God’s holiness as inviolable. Thus, while God may be in direct contact with the world, God does not come into contact with evil.

Belief in the sovereignty of God is essential for apocalyptic. One of the main points of apocalyptic writings is to assure the readers that, in spite of evidence to the contrary, God is sovereign. We see this in the confidence these writers have that the plan of God is moving forward. It is further demonstrated in the extensive ex eventu prophecy found in some apocalyptic writings. These elements of apocalyptic discourse are evidence for a historical determinism. They show that these writers believe that history, at least its main outline and final outcome, has been ordained and arranged by God. The certainty of God’s final victory is central to apocalyptic thought. This theme stands out especially clearly in Daniel. In the story in which Nebuchadnezzar becomes like an animal, Daniel declares to the king three times (4:17, 25, 26) that God is sovereign, and the story ends with Nebuchadnezzar acknowledging this very point (4:34). God’s sovereignty is also a theme which runs through all the visions of Daniel 7.

This point is so important in apocalyptic writings because the writers and the readers seem to be living in a world that is ruled by evil, a world in which God is not sovereign. In fact, most apocalyptic thinkers are convinced that the world is not currently ruled by God. This is certainly the viewpoint of the New Testament writers. Though most Christians today are used to thinking that God is in control of our lives and our world, apocalypticists were (and are) convinced that this was not the case. They emphasize that the current domination of the world by evil is temporary. They assert that even though the world is presently ruled by the forces of evil, the true sovereign of the entire cosmos will soon act. The God who is the ultimate King will reclaim what rightfully belongs to God and will punish the usurpers along with their accomplices and will reward those who have been faithful to God. Without such a belief in the sovereignty of God, apocalyptic faith—indeed any Christian faith—cannot exist.

Apocalypticists are also convinced that God is just. Belief in the justice of God is another primary motivation for apocalyptic thought. That the world is ruled by evil and that the righteous are those who suffer most are only problems if one believes God is just. So apocalyptic seeks ways to show that God’s justice will be exercised and will be the final word. This belief is manifested in the development of the ideas of judgment after death and of the resurrection.

Judgment is a central characteristic of apocalyptic thought. At the heart of all apocalyptic speculation about judgment is the conviction that God will not let God’s people be destroyed by their enemies. Judgment is necessarily related to their belief in the justice of God, because for justice to reign, evil must be punished and good must be rewarded (see 1 Enoch 102:1; 103:18). This is a logically necessary element of belief in a just (i.e., fair) God. So in the face of persecution, the ethical faiths of Judaism and Christianity opted for the belief that God’s righteousness is exercised in a realm beyond earthly life. Judgment in apocalyptic is usually based on morality. In Judaism this meant faithfulness to the Law; in Christianity it meant adhering to Christian morality as understood in a particular community and not denying the faith in persecution.

It was also this belief in the justice of God which led to the belief in the resurrection of the dead within Judaism. The idea of an afterlife which offered more than fading away in Sheol had been growing within Judaism since about the fifth century BCE, but it was the events associated with the Maccabean Revolt (see below the introduction to Daniel) that finally resulted in a fairly widespread belief in the resurrection of at least some of the dead. Just before and during the time of this revolt, Jews were executed precisely for being faithful to God and the Torah (see the graphic story of the torture and execution of seven brothers and their mother in 4 Maccabees4). Such terrible events, of course, push the question of the justice of God to the forefront. How can God be just and allow people to be tortured to death for their faith? Since God did not rescue these martyrs as God rescued the faithful in the stories of Daniel, there must be some other way in which the justice of God is satisfied.

God’s justice demands that the righteousness and faithfulness of these martyrs be rewarded. Because of this divine necessity, belief in an afterlife for the righteous flowered in this period. At the beginning, only the extraordinarily righteous or martyrs and the extraordinarily wicked had an afterlife, but as time passed most Jews came to believe that all persons participated in the afterlife.5 So belief in a resurrection that included judgment grew out of the injustices experienced by communities that held firmly to their belief in a sovereign and just God.

We should not think, however, that judgment based on morality requires that apocalypticists be legalists. That is far from the case. Only a very few apocalyptic writings (e.g., 3 Baruch6) assert that judgment is based solely on one’s deserts. Most acknowledge that people are found righteous in judgment only through God’s grace and mercy. God’s grace does not impede the exercise of God’s justice; they are necessarily cooperative but each equally necessary. Again, judgment based on morality does not mean judgment without grace and it does not mean legalism. You can see this in the Qumran War Scroll (ch. 11) when it says that God delivers God’s people through God’s loving kindness and not according to their works. Similarly, 2 Esdras trusts that since humans cannot overcome their evil tendency, God will supply grace at judgment. When apocalypticists think of judgment, fear is not their first thought. Rather, this is the moment when retribution is meted out to their and God’s enemies. They certainly do not lose sight of the accountability judgment brings to them, but they trust God to fulfill God’s purposes and nature by bringing them into the place God has prepared for God’s people.

The idea of God being just in judgment makes modern people nervous. We are more ready to focus our attention on God’s love and mercy, thinking that these are the opposite of justice. But they are not. If God is not just, then God is unjust. The alternative to God being just is that God is unfair, that God plays favorites or is capricious. This unhappy alternative would mean we could never trust God. Furthermore, the justice of God is the basis for all Christian calls for justice in the world. Since Christian ethics is based on the character of God, we have no basis for working for justice, including equal rights for all people, unless we believe in the unshakable justice of God. So apocalyptic brings us back to a characteristic of God with which we are less than comfortable, but which is essential to who God is and to what makes God a God we can trust and a God who is worthy of worship.

Human nature in apocalyptic thought

To understand the view of human nature seen in our material we must begin with a survey of how human nature was seen in the Hebrew Bible. Instead of finding one consistent view of human nature in the Hebrew Scriptures, there is a development in thought within Israel about this matter. In the traditions found in the Pentateuch, the individual was not as important as the group. One’s family or tribe always took precedence over the individual. This emphasis on the group meant that the way one lived on after death was through what she or he had contributed to the well-being of the group. Thus, the afterlife for individuals was envisioned only to a very limited extent. When people died they went to Sheol, at least temporarily. This was not a pleasant place; it was a place where one is powerless, where one cannot even remember the goodness of Yahweh. There were no moral distinctions in Sheol and eventually you fade out of existence.

The prophets begin to give more place to the individual. The emphasis is still on the group and the reward of the righteous is primarily the good of Israel and of one’s descendants, but some ideas about the continuance of the individual emerge. The importance of the individual emerges especially clearly in Jeremiah and Ezekiel. In Ezekiel 18, the result of a person’s sin is to be visited on them alone rather than on their children (or by extension their nation). This separation of the fate of the individual from that of the group is a somewhat different perspective from what we see in the Pentateuch and is the sort of thought that prepares the way for the views we find in apocalyptic.

All apocalypticists believe that humans continue to exist after death. As we have already seen, the experiences of persecution and martyrdom seemed to require some avenue other than what happens in this world for the expression of God’s righteousness and justice. Clearly martyrs were not dealt with justly in this world. Outside the thought of apocalyptic, martyrs were sometimes seen as receiving the punishment due to the nation and thus paving the way for Israel’s restoration. But the continuing unfaithfulness of some in Israel seemed to make national restoration impossible. So personal rewards and punishments become the ways God responds to faithfulness and wickedness. Beyond this concern about justice, the desire for continued fellowship with God and with the fellow faithful pushed forward the belief in an afterlife with rewards and punishments. This belief could also be seen as a type of fulfillment of national hopes since the individual was not blessed in isolation, but with others who were faithful.

With the exception of a very few documents (most notably Jubilees7), apocalyptic writers (including the Apostle Paul) envisioned the afterlife as a resurrection of the body, not as the immortality of the soul. The idea of a resurrection of the body is consistent with the Hebrew idea that a human is a unitary psycho-physical unit. That is, they did not separate the body and soul, giving the soul a higher value, as the Greeks had done. Thus, a person cannot be complete or happy without both body and soul. Sheol had been a place where one had no body and such existence could only be temporary and could not be considered true life. So apocalyptic continues to see human personality as a unity rather than as a duality. Believing in the resurrection of the body did not mean that life was always conceived of as bound to material, earthy existence. Rather, they sometimes looked forward to the transformation of the body, a transformation which suited the body for life with God. A fairly extended explication of this notion is found in chapter 7 on 1 Corinthians 15.

Ethics in apocalyptic thought

In this section we turn our attention to what humans are held accountable for in apocalyptic thought. Only a very few scholars whose major field of research is apocalyptic have argued that apocalyptic has no concern for ethics because it has separated the kingdom of God from earthly realities. As this view has it, apocalyptic, rather than being socially responsible, becomes preoccupied with the damnation of the oppressor or with blessings in another realm. Though this is a common perception about apocalyptic thought among non-specialists, most scholars reject this interpretation and many assert that ethics is central to apocalyptic.

The expectation of judgment found in all apocalyptic implies that ethics is central even when it is not explicitly discussed. One of the primary reasons authors wrote apocalyptic texts was to encourage faithfulness to God and loyalty to the Law of God, even if it leads one to death. All apocalyptic is hortatory. Discourses that encourage ethical living and specify what that means are common in apocalyptic texts. Encouraging faithful (i.e., ethical) living was a primary goal of Daniel 1–6 and in 2 Esdras the sole characteristic of the saved is holiness. Another indicator of the importance of ethics in this way of thinking is the way life in the messianic future is described: it is in accordance with God’s Law.

In Jewish apocalypses the Law was the ethical ideal both now and in the age to come. The authors of these texts saw no antagonism between being required to keep the Law and eschatological confidence. As they saw them, both the Law and apocalyptic actions by God were expressions of God’s covenant with them and so were blessings.

Given the emphasis on judgment found in apocalyptic thought, it is not surprising that individual accountability is important. People are accountable before God for their transgressions of God’s Law and will. The unfaithful are accountable because they have refused the ways of God. Thus, the distinctions among those who have died are based on their conduct while on earth. Again, this does not mean apocalypticists were legalists; rather, most of them recognized that the only way anyone could stand before God was if God exercised mercy.

Some interpreters argue that the apocalyptic outlook leads to a passive ethic, an ethic that encourages people simply to submit to persecution. Some apocalyptic works (e.g., the Assumption of Moses8) do recommend quietism, but this seems to be against the general trend. The Jewish uprisings throughout the Roman period show that apocalyptic is often not passive because these revolts were often tied to apocalyptic hopes. Most of these many rebellions, and there were many, expected God to intervene to overthrow the Romans. At the same time, God would establish those who instigated the uprising, who identified themselves as God’s people, in positions of power. The War Scroll of Qumran offers us a specific example of this way of thinking. Its author expects the community to be active participants in the end time battle. Thus, many apocalyptic groups clearly thought they had an active role to play in God’s plan.

Though some have asserted that apocalyptic’s attention to the future world leads people not to be concerned about present conditions in this world, that is not necessarily the case. The Damascus Document, written for lay people who were associated with the Qumran community and so with an apocalyptic worldview, has a clear concern for social justice (see esp. ch. 1). Second Enoch also encourages social justice through its attention to issues involving money, the courts, and the poor. So apocalyptic does not entirely abandon the world to evil. The people of God are expected to act justly and to work for a more just world, even though the forces against them are overwhelming.

The Early Church and Apocalyptic

All of the authors of the books of the New Testament had an apocalyptic worldview. While they do not all write in the genre of apocalyptic texts, they all write from that perspective. The book of Revelation is the only New Testament book written fully in the style of apocalyptic, but other books have sections that adopt that style. We deal with some of them in this book.

Yet, there was a difference between the apocalyptic outlook of church members and other apocalyptic thinkers. The church was built on belief in the resurrection of Christ. The resurrection of Christ vindicated Jesus’ ministry and message, but it did much more. Apocalyptic writers see the resurrection of the dead as an event of the end. It is a sign that the end has come. The earliest church understood the resurrection of Christ as the beginning of the general resurrection of the dead. It meant that the last days were upon them. The earliest believers in Christ expected that general resurrection to come very soon. Of course, it did not.

As the church thought about the delay in the coming of the end, it also experienced the presence of God in new ways. Among the most notable was the giving of the Spirit. Acts 2 has Peter interpret the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost as a gift of the last days (2:17–21). It was clear that the fullness of the end had not come, that evil had not been defeated; the Romans were still in charge and they were still being persecuted for their faith. But still, they experienced a part—a foretaste—of that final victory of God through this experience of the Spirit. It was not the fullness of being in the very presence of God with all troubles overcome, but it was a new act of God in the world. This new presence of God is a sign that the end has begun. All of the time of the church is the end times because it comes after the resurrection of Christ that inaugurated the coming of God’s kingdom with its defeat of evil.

There is a sense, then, in which the church possesses gifts of the end, and a sense in which it does not. There is an “already” aspect of the church’s experience of the final state of all things (the presence of the Spirit in our lives), and a “not yet” aspect (we do not yet possess all God will give at the end). The idea that we possess an “already” part of the end-times blessings is often called a partially realized eschatology. If we believed that we possessed all of God’s gifts now, we would have a fully realized eschatology. New Testament writers regularly reject versions of a fully realized eschatology. They keep that tension between experiencing a beginning of blessings of the end and looking forward to the final consummation of God’s intentions for the world.

Our book is written with a partially realized eschatological outlook. With the New Testament writers, we think that the resurrection of Christ opened a new kind of presence of God in the world. In this time the Spirit strengthens the people of God to work for what God wants for the world. But we also hold the hope for a future act of God that will make all things conform to God’s will and character.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this brief introduction to apocalyptic thought will prepare the reader to understand better the texts we treat in the following parts of this book. The writings we will look at come from a variety of genres, yet they all participate in the thought world described here. These writings are all seeking ways to make sense of their belief in a good, powerful, and just God given their experience of the world as a place ruled by evil. They do this in large part by asserting that God will act soon in ways that decisively vindicate God’s nature as they understand it. At the same time, they also want to encourage their readers to remain faithful to God in very difficult circumstances.

1. This book is found in the Apocrypha.

2. Revelation is an exception. It seems to have been written by the person named in the greeting, John, a Jewish church member who addressed the churches and was revered as a prophet.

3. This writing is found in the Pseudepigrapha.

4. This writing is found in the Apocrypha.

5. The Sadducees are the exception to this trend. They seem not to have believed in an afterlife for anyone. They were also among those who did not adopt an apocalyptic outlook.

6 This is another work found in the Pseudepigrapha.

7. This writing is also part of the Pseudepigrapha.

8. Yet another writing among the Pseudepigrapha.