Apocalypses and Apocalyptic Literature in the Early Church

A version of this essay will appear in Lorenzo DiTommaso and Matthew J. Goff, eds. Re-Imagining Apocalypticism: Apocalypses, Apocalyptic Literature, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. SBLEJL. Atlanta: SBL, 2020. Apocalypses and Apocalyptic Literature in the Early Church Apocalypse and Apocalyptic as Rhizome This essay considers some of the sites of apocalyptic production, including their relation to Jewish apocalyptic in early Christianity, in the early church through to start of the Byzantine period, through an analysis of early Christian apocalyptic as an irreducible and creative hybrid cultural phenomenon.1 I use the phrase, “sites of 1 The phrase “the early church,” as well as the terms, “Jewish” and “Judaism,” is not intended to simplify an irreducibly complex period of origins; it is used broadly to refer to phenomena from the second to fifth century. There is no attempt to be encyclopedic as such a discussion, which, were it even possible, would stretch into hundreds of pages. My chief aim is to take up illustrative examples and uses of apocalypse and apocalyptic in the period under consideration. There are a variety of general studies, surveys, and collections of essays by experts, none of which systematically relate Jewish and Christian apocalyptic with one another across this period, but which are nevertheless useful for broad treatments. The most important include: Robert J. Daley, “Apocalypticism in Early Christian Theology,” in Bernard McGinn, ed., The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism. Volume 2. Apocalypticism in Western History and Culture (New York: Continuum, 1999), 3-48; Robert J. Daley, Apocalyptic Thought in Early Christianity (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009); The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Renato Uglione, “Millennium.” L’attesa della fine nei primi secoli cristiani. Torini 23-24 ottobre 2000. Atti delle III giornate patristiche Torinesi (Turin: CELID, 2000); John J. Collins, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Jerry L. Walls, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism, ed. by Catherine Wessinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Charles E. Hill, Regnum Caelorum: Patterns of Millennial Thought in Early Christianity, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001); Adela Yabro apocalyptic production,” to describe complex processes and forms of cultural creation and transmission incapable of easy summary or taxonomic description. While broad definitions, typological categorization, and taxonomies of kinds of apocalyptic literature furnish useful heuristic tools for analysis and comparison in many instances of the writings of the period, they can overlook the more complicated interrelations and influences of apocalyptic texts. The two definitions of “apocalypse” and “apocalyptic” by John J. Collins and Christopher Rowland, respectively, are useful in fixing attention on a particular body of literature conforming to their set parameters but lose their utility as one moves further afield.2 For example, while Collins’ and Rowland’s treatments work well for the Collins, ed., Early Christian Apocalypticism: Genre and Social Setting, Semeia 36 (1986); Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1982); David Frankfurter, Elijah in Upper Egypt: The Apocalypse of Elijah and Early Egyptian Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993); James C. VanderKam and William Adler, The Jewish Apocalyptic Heritage in Early Christianity. Compendia rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum 4 (Assen: Van Gorcum; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), as well as the two review essays by Lorenzo DiTommaso, “Apocalypses and Apocalypticism in Antiquity ( Part I),” Currents in Biblical Research 5.2 (2007): 235-86; “Apocalypses and Apocalypticism in Antiquity (Part II)”, Currents in Biblical Research 5.3 (2007): 367-432. For the Byzantine period from the 6th to the 8th century, not addressed in this essay, Hagit Amirav, Emmanuouela Grypeou and Guy Stroumsa, Apocalypticism and Eschatology in Late Antiquity: Encounters in Abrahamic Religions, 6th – 8th Centuries (Leuven: Peeters, 2017). 2 Thus John J. Collins, “Introduction: Towards the Morphology of A Genre,” Semeia 14 (1979): 1-19, at 9: “‘Apocalypse’ is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world” with a distinction between the “historical type” that concern themselves with the end of the world and that concerned with “otherworldly journeys” or visionary tours to the heavens or nether regions. “Apocalyptic eschatology” refers to the eschatology found in apocalypses and is centers on postmortem judgment (John J. Collins, “Apocalyptic Eschatology in the Ancient World,” in Jerry L. Walls, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (Oxford: Oxford study of a host of Christian apocalypses as of Jewish apocalypses and other intertestamental and later literature, they offer less insight (because their interests are not focused there) on the adoption, appropriation, textual transcription, translation, and motives of interpolation of Jewish apocalypses and apocalyptic materials by later redactors.3 We may speak, in this broader sense, of a vast set of writings that “Christianize” earlier Jewish apocalypses, that draw on earlier Jewish traditions, motifs, or figures such as in the Enoch traditions or two-ways ethical codes that suggest a common heritage or reworked received apocalyptic.4 Other University press), 46. Alternatively, Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1982) uses the terms more broadly to “concentrate on the theme of direct communication of the heavenly mysteries in all their diversity. With such an understanding one can attempt to do justice to all the elements of the apocalyptic literature” (14). In both understandings, A. Yarbro Collins states, in a programmatic essay that considers second century apocalypses with the help of John J. Collins’ typology, the literary function of the genre is “intended to interpret present, earthly circumstances in light of the supernatural world and of the future, and to influence both the understanding and the behavior of the audience by means of divine authority” (“Introduction: Early Christian Apocalypticism,” Semeia 36 [1986], 7). 3 For application to Christian second century apocalypses, see “The Early Christian Apocalypses,” Semeia 14 (1979): 61-121 as well as the essays edited by Adela Yarbro Collins in Early Christian Apocalypticism: Genre and Social Setting, Semeia 36 (1986). In “Christian Apocalypses” Yarbro Collins takes up and shows the usefulness of the definition (104-5, for a table of the literature treated) in the treatment of the Book of Revelation, Apocalypse of Peter, Apocalypse of Paul, Apocalypse of Elijah, Apocalypse of Thomas, Ascension of Isaiah 6-11, Sibylline Oracles 1-2,7,8, the Shepherd of Hermas, Did. 16, Test. of the Lord, Test. Adam, Test. Isaac 2-3a 5-6, Test Jacob 1-3a, 5-6, the Book of Elchasai, 5 Ezra 2.42-48, 6 Ezra, Questions of Bartholomew, the Mysteries of St. John the Apostle and the Holy Virgin, The Apocalypse of the Virgin Mary, Apocalypse of Esdras, The Apocalypse of James, the Brother of the Lord, The Mysteries of St, John the Apostle and Holy Virgin, Book of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ by Bartholomew the Apostle 8b-14a, 17b-19b, Apocalypse of Sedrach, Jacob’s Ladder, the Story of Zosimus. This is an extensive literature that will not be taken up here. My interest is rather in other instances of apocalypse and apocalyptic production as well as their settings and purposes. 4 The two-ways traditions which are represented by 1QS III, 13—IV,26, Testament of Asher 1.3-5, Barn. 18—20, Hermas Mand. 6.1-2, and Did. 1—6, book-ended by an apocalypses, such as 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, as well as the Apocalypse of Elijah in its Christian redaction, helped to shape belief in a literal messianic reign on earth, which translated into Christian chiliasm amongst many early Christians.5 In another appropriation of apocalyptic for Christian purposes, David Frankfurter analyses the role of fourth century Egyptian anchorites who drew on earlier Jewish apocalyptic writings to develop what he describes as “a kind of ‘institutionalized’ Christian apocalypticism” that had the effect of “effectively transforming apocalypticism into an indigenous system of discourse for the definition of authority and power.” 6 Treatment of early apocalyptic in the early church requires a more expansive perspective than the ones that can be used to define and interpret a discrete body of texts. The more widely one increases the scope of apocalypse and apocalyptic in nascent and then imperially sanctioned Christianity, the more complicated the terms become. In short, to borrow a concept from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri, early Christian apocalypse and apocalyptic literature is rhizomatic.7 Like a rhizome, it apocalyptic set of exhortations to be watchful at this the end of the age in ch. 16, represent a development of Jewish tradition, altered for new purposes, and are at home in apocalyptic where they refer to the influence of two powers, angels, or spirits, or where they are represented as heavenly revelations; for a general overview, Kurt Niederwimmer, The Didache. Hermeneia, trans. Linda Maloney. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1998, 59-63. For popular movements, see the discussion of chiliasm below. 5 For Jewish sources of Christian millennialism, Hill 45-67. 6 David Frankfurter, “The Legacy of Jewish Apocalypses in Early Christianity: Regional Trajectories,” in VanderKam and Adler, Jewish Apocalyptic, 185. 7 The term, appropriated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], 3-25), is drawn from botany to describe plants that reproduce by sending out shoots from interconnected root systems that break the reveals a complex root structure, whose tendrils move often just beneath the surface of ancient culture, which, when they break through, can be seen in variegated forms, hybrids, expressions, and historical situations. Liturgy, for example, furnished important Sitze im Leben for apocalyptic production. The obvious setting was the homily, where apocalyptic could be drawn upon for various ends; John Chrysostom championed the homiletical use of apocalyptic visions of Hell as a means to secure Christian obedience.8 In his Homily on Matthew 43.7, for example, he invites his listeners to “imagine how great the mockery, how great the condemnation” of those in Hell. Meghan Henning insightfully links Chrysostom’s preaching application the genre of tours of Hell apocalyptic as a means of moral persuasion and formation, including gender performativity.9 In the fifth century Christian west, Salvian of Marseilles, in his sermons against avarice, deploys ekphrastic accounts of Hell’s torments and the Paradise’s delights to motivate his surface of the soil as new plants. As the root system grows and spreads it generates other root systems and develops complex constellations of growth and generation. 8 For a review of the role of apocalyptic tours of hell in Christian paideia, Meghan Henning, Educating Early Christians through the Rhetoric of Hell: ‘Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth’ as Paideia in Matthew and the Early Church. WUNT 2.382 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2014), for Chrysostom’s homiletical applications 218-220. 18-20, for the influence of Matthew’s Gospel in the Apocalypse of Peter and of Matthew’s and Paul’s letters on the Apocalypse of Paul. 9 Henning, Rhetoric, 174-232; also “Lacerated Lips and Lush Landscapes: Constructing This-Worldly Theological Identities in the Otherworld,” in Tobias Nicklas, Candida R. Moss, et al., The Other Side: Apocryphal Perspectives on Ancient Christian ‘Orthodoxies,” Novum Testamentum et Orbis Antiquus 117 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), 99-116; for otherworldly tours and this-worldly gender construction, “Weeping and Bad Hair: The Bodily Suffering of Early Christian Hell as a Threat to Masculinity,” Kathleen M. Brian and James W. Trents, eds., Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 282-300. listeners to replace greed with charity.10 In the 7th century, Romanos the Melodist, produced a series of first-person hymns for liturgical use, one of them, On the Second Coming, the autobiographical account of a conscience-stricken sinner responding to the prophecy of the Last Judgment, whose ending models penitential prayer for mercy for its worshiping listeners.11 The hymn formed part of the Byzantine liturgy as part of the start of the penitential season before Lent. Georgia Frank detects the influence of tours of Hell apocalypses on liturgical celebrations of the Easter Vigil and baptismal rites in the Eastern Church.12 Differing sites giving rise to hybridized apocalyptic production for new life situations abound in the early Christianity and reveal that traditional typologies work only when apocalyptic is considered within a restrictive set of parameters. A further example of apocalyptic as rhizomatic can be seen in what we may call the “manuscript production habit” of early Christianity, through which writers adapted earlier apocalyptic traditions often originating in Jewish texts, thereby creating an unfolding history of apocalypse effects mediated and transformed by Christian scribes into new manuscripts designed for different purposes.13 Jewish apocalypses, for example, were read and used by Christians, but they were also altered, improvised, and even cannibalized to reflect new uses and needs, such as 10 For example, To the Church 2.10; 3.18. Derek Krueger, Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 33-36 for its liturgical use in the formation of the self. 12 Georgia Frank, “Christ’s Descent to the Underworld in Ancient Ritual and Legend,” in Daley, Apocalyptic, 211-26. 13 Hugo Lundhaug and Liv Ingeborg Lied, “Studying Snapshots: On Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology,” in Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology,” ed. by Hugo Lundhaug and Liv Ingeborg Lied (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), 1-19. 11 for example in public reading at worship in the form of lectionaries with portions from different apocalypses set alongside each other for reading at particular liturgical festivals.14 Other times, as manuscript traditions indicate, it is clear that Jewish apocalypses co-existed as part of a storehouse of literary production, used alongside expressly Christian material. For example, The Apocalypse of Zephaniah, originally in Greek and which reflects little if any expressly Christian redaction, is partially preserved only in two manuscripts, one Akhimic and the other Sahidic, from the Egyptian White Monastery of Shenuda near Sohag, reflecting its availability in a monastic setting.15 In another kind of apocalypse manuscript production, the Nag Hammadi apocalyptic literature found in Codex V (The Apocalypse of Paul, The First and Second Apocalypse of James, The Apocalypse of Adam and The Apocalypse of Peter) has been compellingly linked, together with the rest of the codices, with Egyptian, perhaps Pachomian, monastic practices, and suggests a use of their contents for ascetical devotion, whatever their esoteric, “gnostic” origins and 14 See the treatment, for example the discussion of variants of 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch in various textual transmissions by Liv Ingeborg Lied and Matthew Monger, “Look to the East: New and Forgotten Sources of 4 Ezra,” William Adler and Lorenzo DiTommaso, ed., The Embroidered Bible: Studies in Biblical Apocrypha and Pseudepipgrapha in Honour of Michael E. Stone (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 639-52. In “Transmission and Transformation of 2 Baruch: Challenges to Editors. (The Rest is Commentary, Yale, 28 April 2013)” (unpublished paper; https://www.academia.edu/4227179/Transmission_and_Transformation_of_2_Baruc h._Challenges_to_Editors._The_Rest_is_Commentary_Yale_28_April_2013_), Ingebord Lied argues that the manuscript tradition of 2 Baruch “witnesses to the complex set use and engagement with texts and works and with works and autonomously circulating excerpts, that defy our categorization of what a text ‘really is’ or ‘once was’” (11). 15 For the manuscript tradition, see O.S. Wintermute, “Apocalypse of Zephaniah: A New Translation and Introduction,” in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Volume 1. Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments, ed. by James H. Charlesworth (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 499. authorial intentions. “Those who read these books may well have been more interested in, for example, their allegorical interpretations of Scripture, and what they had to teach about demons, bodily passions, ascesis, prayer, visions, and heavenly ascents, the experience of the soul, and soteriological issues related to baptism, the Eucharist, and resurrection.”16 The collection of apocalypses brought together by a scribe into a single volume, prefaced by the Eugnostos the Blessed, an account of the order of the cosmos, marked by scribal colophons bringing them into a unity and each reflecting differing beliefs and cosmologies and religious traditions – pagan, Christian, and Jewish – may indicate a practice of inter-textual reading and uses for private devotion. Still again, material related to Enoch, as a complex of literary documents, concepts, and historical figure reveals itself in multiple situations, often under thinly veiled disguise, captured in new historical situations, manifested in various literary forms, and produced, alongside other Christian apocalypses, in monastic codices.17 Finally, we may draw attention to the Jewish- 16 Hugo Lundhaug and Lance Jenott, The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices STAC 97 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015); also, Emiliano Fiori, “Death and Judgment in the Apocalypse of Paul: Old Imagery and Monastic Reinvention” ZAC 20.1 (2016): 92-108. Nicola Denzey Lewis and Justine Ariel Blount, “Rethinking the Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices,” JBL 133.2 (2014): 399-419, at 412-19 argue alternatively that the texts were possibly grave artifacts used by literati to signify their wealth as well as a kind of vademecum for the afterlife, and hence represent a different use of apocalyptic far removed from the intentions of original authors. 17 For the uses of 1 Enoch, Enochic motifs, and Enoch as figure adapted for Christian uses in early Christian tradition, VanderKam, 33-101; Annette Yoshiko Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). G.W.E. Nickelsburg, “Two Enochic Manuscripts: Unstudied Evidence for Egyptian Christianity,” in H.W. Attridge et al., eds., Of Scribes and Scrolls: Studies on the Hebrew Bible, Intertestamental Judaism, and Christian Origins presented to John Strugnell on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday (Lanham, MD: University Press of American, 1990), 251-60, draws attention to the extracts from the Gospel of Peter, the Apocalypse of Christian apocalypse, the Shepherd of Hermas, one of the most widely read writings of the early church. The many fragments that constitute its non-continuous manuscript tradition attest a variety of uses of the text – prayer, liturgical use, and doctrinal applications, thus indicating the reproduction and utilization of an apocalyptic text in a diversity of manuscripts produced for applications that extended far beyond the intentions of its author and original setting.18 Jewish apocalypses and apocalyptic literature exhibited a lively history of effects in the early church. The Enochic literature exerted a wide influence, as the New Testament Jude 14-16 already attests. In Barnabas 16.3-6, the author adapts the Apocalypse of Weeks (1 Enoch 93.1-10; 91.11-17) in his forecasting of the deliverance “the sheep of his [God’s] pasture” and a rebuilt temple “when the week is ended,” (16.5,6), the latter of which echoes the Aramaic expectation of a new temple in 4QEng 1 iv 17-18 and the former of which is probably based on a conglomerate of Enoch passages.19 His conceptualization of history as 6,000 years Peter, and the Book of the Watchers in Greek, in the sixth century Codex Panopolitanus, from Akhmim in Egypt. 18P. Mich. Inv. 6427 was included in a prayer; Bodl. Ms. Gr. Liturgy c.3 (P)223 is part of the Deir-Bala’izah Papyrus, a liturgical text; arguably P. Oxy. I 5 cites Hermas as an authority on prophetic and apocalyptic issues. For discussion of these fragments and their Sitze im Leben, Dan Batovici, The Reception of the Shepherd of Hermas in Late Antiquity (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, forthcoming), 72-80. I am grateful to Dr. Batovici for allowing me access to his manuscript. 19 E. Rowe, “The Enochic Library of the Author of the Epistle of Barnabas,” in “NonCanonical” Religious Texts in Early Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. by L.M. McDonald and J.H. Charlesworth (London: T&T Clark, 2012), 88-102.James C. VanderKam, “1 Enoch, Enochic Motifs, and Enoch in Early Christian Literature,” in VanderKam and Adler, Jewish Apocalyptic, 33-101 at 40; J.T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrãn Cave 4 (Oxford: OUP, 1976), 47. For evidence of other Barnabas borrowing from other Jewish apocalyptic preserved at Qumran, namely the Apocryphon of Ezekiel, in 21.1 and 4.3, M. Kister, “Barnabas 12.1, 4.3 and 4Q Second Ezekiel,” Revue biblique 97 (1990) 63-67. with a final seventh 1000-year period of Sabbath rest on earth may also may reflect the influence of 2 Enoch 33.1-3.20 Analogous to Enoch literature are the Daniel apocrypha. Lorenzo DiTommaso identifies 27 of them, composed between the fourth and seventeenth century, 17 of which were created between the fourth and ninth century, known in Syriac, Armenian, Slavonic, Persian, Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew translations. 21 This diverse corpus indicates that Daniel was productive of manuscripts that contain the traces of its source text, but which take on a life of their own under new historical and cultural circumstances in which a text or a motif or the figure himself becomes a site of apocalyptic production. Daniel also proved productive of apocalyptically inspired material in other ways, specifically in commentary and in assessments of the best interpretation of the statement of 70 weeks in Dan. 9.24-27, which “are decreed for your people, and your holy city….” (v. 24), that included reference to “an anointed one” being cut off “after… sixty-two weeks” (v. 26) and his making “ a strong covenant with many for one week, and for half of the week” to “make sacrifice and offering cease,” replaced with “an abomination that desolates, until the decreed end is poured upon the desolator.” Outside of the New Testament, from at least Hippolytus on, largely in commentary, but also in church history and Christian chronicles, the passage invited a good deal of exposition and prediction, complete with precise identifications of the year when 20 Jean Danielou, “La typologie millenariste de la semaine dans le Christianisme primitive,” VC 2 (1948): 1-16 at 6-7. 21 Lorenzo DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and Apocryphal Daniel Literature. Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseuepigrapha 20 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 96-97, Table 1. the 70th week would end.22 One discovers an analogous site of Christian production in 4 Ezra.23 As attention to scribal activities would indicate and borrowing and “nativizing” apocalyptic materials in new literary settings attests, it is clear that there is no single social theory that can account for the production of apocalyptic in the early church. It is often theorized that apocalypticism, namely social movements in which apocalyptic expectations are central, are to be accounted for by reference to deprivation, (perceived) persecution, marginalization, and social turmoil and can be seen to reflect a pessimistic historical worldview.24 There is good evidence for this theory of generation in the early church. Cyprian the bishop of Carthage, faced with persecution in the church and an epidemic of disease in the empire, confirms 22 For discussion of the scheme in Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus, Julius Africanus, Eusebius of Caesarea, Apollinaris of Laodicea, and Jerome, Adler, 201-38; also the survey of Fredriksen, 151-83; Hippolytus, Commentary on Daniel 4.35; Julius Africanus, Chronographia, ANF 6, 130-138; Jerome, Commentary on Daniel 9.23; Eusebius, Demonstration of the Gospel 8.2; Ecclesiastical History 1.6.11; Prophetic Eclogues 3.45-46. The influence of the six thousand year intervals corresponding to the six days of creation, which works together with the 70 week scheme, 23 4 Ezra represents another complex case of translation and adaptation of a preexisting Jewish text; Theodore A. Bergren, “Christian Influence on the Transmission History of 4, 5, and 6 Ezra,” in VanderKam and Adler, Jewish Apocalyptic, 102-128. 24 Paul D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), 25-31; P. Vielhauer, “Introduction,” in Edgar Hennecke and Wilhelm Schneemelcher, eds., R. McLean Wilson, trans., New Testament Apocrypha. Volume 2. Writings Related to the Apostles; Apocalypses and Related Subjects (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964), 589; Anathea Portier-Young, Apocalypse Against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 3-48; for a discussion of the history of linking deprivation and suffering with apocalyptic and millennialism, Stephen L. Cook, Prophecy & Apocalypticism: The Postexilic Social Setting (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 1-45, together with historical examples where millennialism is not associated with deprivation. that the end of the world was at hand.25 Eusebius refers to a Christian historian named Jude, who “discoursing on the seventy weeks of Daniel extends his chronology down to the tenth year of Severus.” On the basis of calculations as well as “the agitation of persecution,” Jude taught “that the appearance of the Antichrist, so much in the mouths of men, was now fully at hand” (EH 6.7). The Nero redivivus legend found in the second century Sibylline Oracles (3.63-74; 5.25-35, 93-110, 21427, 361-85), the belief that Nero had either not died or that he was in a kind of “hot storage” awaiting the right time to rise from hell to persecute the church as Antichrist, blending of the anti-Christ of 1 Jn. 2.18 and the wounded head of the beast of Rev. 13.3, remained throughout antiquity all the way to the end of the Reformation a popular belief fuelled by bad times or poor government.26 Sulpicius Severus, for example, champions millennialism in Dialogues 2.14 when he records a conversation with Martin of Tours (316—397) in which Martin, reflecting anxieties about threats of incursions across the northern imperial frontier, told him that Nero redivivus, the anti-Christ, having been conceived by an evil spirit, had been born and 25 Cyprian, To Demetrius 5, where he interprets famine, death, and disease and “the human race … wasted by desolation” as the fulfillment of prophecy that “evils should be multiplied in the last times” due to failure to worship the true God. Cyprian goes on (6-7) to cite a series of Old Testament texts in support of his expectation of a swift end to the world on account of divine wrath against the ungodly. In Epistle 55, he exhorts the persecuted to martyrdom with the help of a variety of New Testament texts predicting the coming of persecution and tribulation (2-4), including the account of martyrdom brought by the Antichrist, equated with the Beast of Rev. 13 (7). The suffering of fiery furnace of Daniel 3.16-18 and the Maccabean brothers and their mother furnish Cyprian with a pattern for discipleship (6). In Ep. 58.7 he interprets the persecution of Valerian as the Antichrist: “Antichrist comes, but Christ is coming after him.” 26 Harry O. Maier, “Nero in Jewish and Christian Tradition from the First Century to the Reformation,” in Emma Buckley and Martin T. Dinter, eds., A Companion to the Neronian Age. Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 385-405. had achieved boyhood and that he would receive power upon reaching manhood.27 Augustine for his part was “astonished at the great presumption of those who venture such guesses” (City of God 20.19).28 Earlier in the fourth century Lactantius similarly described “some persons of extravagant imagination” (probably referring to the third century poet Commodian and his contemporary, the commentator on Revelation, Victorinus of Pettau) who believed that Nero would return “from the uttermost boundaries of earth” and conceived of him as “forerunner of the Antichrist” (On the Deaths of the Persecutors 2). Then, as now, thoughtful exegesis could not limit those armed with chapter and verse to speculate about the date of the end of the world. Lactantius nevertheless interpreted the injustices of his arch nemesis the persecuting emperor Diocletian with the help of Daniel passages, furnishing an excellent use of apocalyptic as a means of engaging oppressive imperial realities. Later writers, depending on the emperor, reached for apocalyptic to descry imperial regimes as fulfillment of end-time expectations.29 27 For a discussion of Sulpicius Severus and widespread apocalyptic expectation, S. Prete, “Sulpico Severo e il millenarismo,” Convivium 26 (1958): 394-404. 28 For a discussion of early Christian detractors of such popular expectations, usually associated with millennial expectations, Richard Landes, “Lest the Millennium be Fulfilled: Apocalyptic Expectations and the Pattern of Western Chronography 100-800 CE,” in The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, ed. by Werner Verbeke and D. Verhelst (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1988), 137-211. 29 The pro-Nicene Hilary of Poitiers pilloried the semi-Arian Constantius II as Antichrist (Against the Emperor Constantius 5); In Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum 49, an Arian commenatary on Matthew 24, the author targets the pro-Nicene Constantine, Theodosius I, particularly their control of the churches in Jerusalem, as the army of Antichrist and the desolating sacrilege of Mt. 24.15; the commentator expects an imminent advent of the Antichrist as part of the half week of tribulation foretold in Daniel 7.25, 9.26-27, and 12.7 and Revelation 11.2-3, 12.6,14, and 13.5. For Arians and Donatists and others using apocalyptic motifs to crititize their Pessimism and apocalyptic are only one half of the story, however. As Robert Daly has stated with respect to apocalyptic in the early church, “in early Christianity apocalyptic ideas were not heavily dominated by negative and terrifying ideas of a terrible fearsome event. Quite the contrary! By the end of the second century the early Christina writers were interpreting the Apocalypse a pointing not toward some awe-inspiring future event, but to the challenges of contemporary life in the church.”30 Augustine is an excellent example. As we will see, he championed a reading of biblical apocalyptic that acknowledged its future predictions while rendering it applicable to spiritual practices in everyday daily life. The literature associated with revelatory tours of heaven and hell shows (see below) a kind of persuasion not deployed to chronicle an imminent second coming of Jesus, but to secure awareness of the pressing inevitability of death and the consequences for sin. “Hell frightens usefully,” observed John Chrysostom on the teaching of Hell and apocalyptic judgment as a useful means of securing contrition for sin.31 The final complicating feature of apocalypse and apocalyptic in the early church is its ability to transmogrify into multiple forms of literature. Under the general heading “apocalyptic” from the second century there are variety of types of literature amongst which we can include: chiliasm or belief in a thousand year reign of Christ on earth before the second judgment; tours of heaven and hell; commentaries on Daniel and Revelation as well as apocalyptic sections of the canon; imperial opponents, Jesse A. Hoover, The Donatist Church in an Apocalyptic Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 65-115. 30 Robert J. Daly, “Preface,” in Apocalyptic Thought in Early Christianity, ed. Robert J. Daly (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 13. 31 On Penitence 7; cited by Henning, Paideia, 219. treatises of various kinds that deploy apocalyptic or are dedicated to the exposition of apocalyptic topics found in the Bible; handbooks for interpreting John’s apocalypse; visions and oracles; martyrologies; poetry; testaments of various biblical figures; letters; monastic apocalypses and monastic biographies and desert Christian apophthegmata; dialogues; and “gnostic” writings. Further, we should take into account cases where harmonies and syntheses of apocalyptic texts are created from texts found in a developing canon, of which Augustine’s City of God Book 20 is perhaps the most magnificent example. Nor can we ignore the generation of Christian iconography dedicated to visual representations of apocalyptic texts in scripture and tradition.32 This represents an explosion of material that cannot be easily summarized but which bears the imprint or influence of apocalyptic thought. Chiliasm and its Multiple Applications Chiliasm, the belief that following the second coming of Christ and the last judgment there would be a thousand year rule of Christ and his believers on earth, was a widely, but by no means universally held, belief of the nascent church.33 Charles Hill identifies the chief features of Christian chiliasm as: “the luxuriant superabundance of earth’s produce, the animal world’s mutual reconciliation and peaceful submission to mankind [sic], increased human longevity, a rebuilt 32 For an account with images, John Herrmann and Annewies van den Hoek, “Apocalyptic Themes in Monumental and Minor Art of Early Christianity” in Apocalyptic Thought in Early Christianity, ed. Robert J Daly Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009, 33-80. 33 Hill, Regnum, 75-208 for an extensive discussion of the chief second and third century non-chiliastic authors. Jerusalem, the servitude of the nations, and the return of the ten tribes.”34 He traces belief in a future earthly millennium and an intermediate state for the dead in the underworld to a broad range of Jewish apocalyptic influences, most importantly to 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra, two writings that developed proto-chiliastic themes found earlier Second Temple apocrypha and pseudepigrapha.35 For our purposes here in tracing the rhizomatic aspects of early apocalyptic, most notable in Hill’s patient detective work of the presence of chiliasm in and its influence on nascent Christian thought and life is that millennialism recurs in a variety of kinds of literature and social contexts that include polemic, apologetic, and commentary. We see polemical use in the second century bishop of Lugdunum Irenaeus’s refutation of Valentinian denial of the resurrection of the body and spiritualizing interpretation of biblical texts. Against Heresies furnishes an extended account of chiliastic expectation that by the time of writing had already become an established tradition, influenced in particular by Jewish notions of a creation comprised of seven 1,000 year long periods, the last one being an earthly millennium.36 Irenaeus champions belief in a physical, literal, worldwide thousandyear reign of Christ in a restored Jerusalem as the antidote to the “gnostic” spiritualizing exegesis and the belief that the creation is evil. He asserts the 34 Hill, Regnum, 237-38; also James D. Tabor, “Ancient Jewish and Early Christian Millennialism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism, ed. by Catherine Wessinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 252-66; Clementina Mazzucco, “Il millenarismo alle origini del cristianesmo (secc. II-III),” in “Millennium,” 145-82. 35 Hill, Regnum, 45-68; see also, Martin Erdmann, The Millennial Controversy in the Early Church (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005), 107-34. 36 Specifically 4 Ezra 7.26-44 and 2 Enoch 33.1-3. The longer chief rescension of 2 Enoch refers to a final 8 thousand unending year period: “the eighth thousand is the end, neither years nor months nor weeks nor days.” For the numerology in the preexisting tradition and its presence in the early church, Danielou, “La typologie,” 1-16. continuity of the incarnation and physical redemption with the creation story by reading history as an unfolding of weeks, with the Antichrist coming at the close of the 6,000th year (Against Heresies 5.23.2, 24.1—28.4). In 5.35.1—5.36.3 he harmonizes prophetic passages from the Hebrew Bible together with apocalyptic predictions found in Daniel, the Gospels, Paul’s letters, and the Book of Revelation to produce an account of a thousand year reign of Christ in a restored Jerusalem with a rebuilt temple, again with a view to championing the physical world. In keeping with a central theme of his refutation against heresy, he defends his teaching as originating in the public teaching of Jesus and the apostles, passed on publicly, and preserved through a succession of teachers. Thus, a critical plank of support for his belief is the teaching he heard from Papias (5.33.4), who, Irenaeus reports, passed on, via John, Jesus’s teaching concerning a superabundant future. Papias’s account bears such close resemblance to 2 Bar. 19.5-7 that literary influence cannot be excluded. Taken together, the trajectory from 2 Baruch, through Papias’s sources to Papias and thence to Irenaeus indicates the existence of an apocalyptic tradition of received teachings the bishop polemically deploys in Against Heresies. Irenaeus’s contemporary, the North African polemicist and apologist Tertullian, also deployed chiliastic belief strategically.37 He believed that “Antichrist was now close at hand” and that a violent end to the world was imminent, (On Flight in Persecution 12; Apology 32). In his treatise Against Marcion (3.24), he opposes Marcionite dualism through belief in a literal thousand year of Christ, shored up by a 37 For an account of the scattered references in Tertullian to the end of the world and the last judgment, Jaroslav Pelikan, “ The Eschatology of Tertullian,” Church History 21.2 (1952): 108-22. report he has received of the appearance of a vision before the Roman army of a vision of a city suspended in the sky everyday for forty days. Tertullian points to this vision as fulfillment of a Montantist prophecy – arguably but not conclusively another form of second-century Christian chiliasm -- that before the end a vision of heavenly Jerusalem would appear.38 As with other apologists, apocalyptic belief also served Tertullian to defend Christian belief and to assault its detractors.39 For example, against those who deny the resurrection of the body as nonsensical, he outlines belief in a punishment of reward of the departed as souls before the the general resurrection at the last judgment. Tertullian depicts Hades as a chamber with two regions for the departed, one for the good and other the bad, awaiting the last judgment (On the Soul 55-58), from which, at different intervals during the millennium, determined by their relative rewards, those in the good place will rise to eternal life (On the Soul 56). He instructs his readers that even before this there are torments and rewards relative to those who sinned before death and to those who did not, even as there will be fuller punishment and reward to come after the resurrection of the dead (On the Resurrection 17; 35; On the Soul 58). In these 38 Montanism as chiliastic, the predominant view of earlier 20th century scholarship, has been challenged with the view that Montanus was focused on eschatology in informed by visions, a view promoted by William Tabbernee in "Revelation 21 and the Montanist ‘New Jerusalem’,” Australian Biblical Review 37 (1989): 52-60; also Hill, Regnum, 143-59 with full literature. The discovery of Pepuza, however, by Tabernee and Peter Lampe in archaeological expeditions from 1998-2000, where, Montanists expected the new Jerusalem of Rev. 21 to descend, has led to a reassessment of the eschatological interpretation and the view that they were indeed millennialists; William Tabbernee, “Portals of the Montanist New Jerusalem: The Discovery of Pepouza and Tymion,” JECS 11.2 (2003): 87-93. 39 For a review of apocalyptic in second century apologists, Enrico dal Covolo, “Escatologia e apocalittica nei primi secoli cristiani: Il Regno di Dio e la sua attesta negli Apologisti greci del II secolo,” Salesianum 62 (2000): 625-43. interpretations, Tertullian is guided in part by his interpretation of the apocalyptic references to judgment in Matthew (for example Mt. 5.26, 10.28, 22.13; 25.30,46 in On the Resurrection 35), passages that were also, in part, inspiration for the apocalyptic tours of heaven and hell in roughly contemporary apocalypses.40 Lactantius (250—325), also a North African Christian apologist and polemicist, in The Divine Institutes, concludes his defense of Christianity and polemic against pagan belief with a discussion of the end of the Roman Empire (Inst. 7.14— 26) in which he chronicles the advent of thousand year reign of God in a renewed world (7.24). He weaves the belief in a 6,000-year human history (7.14.2-4), with a final thousand-year period of rest with an exegesis of Daniel and Revelation in which he cloaks Diocletian as the fourth beast of Daniel 7.23-25 (Inst. 7.16.3-4) and the emperor and Galerius as the two beasts of Rev. 13.11-17 (7.17.2-6).41 Lactantius represents the thousand-year reign of Christ as the triumph over the Roman Empire and uses Daniel and Revelation to read imperial events around him and to denounce the reign of Rome. In yet another polemical context, this time anti-Jewish, Justin Martyr similarly outlines chiliastic apocalyptic teaching in his Dialogue with Trypho, where he describes Christian teaching of thousand-year earthly reign of Christ from a rebuilt Jerusalem, where Christians will dwell. Justin shows John’s Revelation 40 Henning, Paideia, 138-73. Henning also notes the important influence of Greek and Latin as well as Jewish sources, 43-107, a point also emphasized by Jan Bremmer in “Descents to Hell and Ascents to Heaven in Apocalyptic Literature,” in Collins, Handbook, 340-57 (with an extensive bibliography) with a view to Greek and Latin tour literature, which he argues exerted an important influence on the Jewish and Christian accounts. 41 Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, The Making of a Christian Empire: Lactantius and Rome (New York: Cornell University Press, 2000), 19, 150 harmonizes with prophetic promises concerning Jerusalem, even as he warns the Jew Trypho against listening to false teachings from false Christians who deny a coming earthly millennium and teach that when Christians die they go immediately to heaven (Dialogue with Trypho 80-81). The fourth century Latin Christian poet Commodian, in his Carmen apologeticum, similarly uses apocalyptic for the purposes of anti-Jewish polemic.42 He dedicates the bulk of his poem to a chronicle of Israel’s disobedience and persecution of the prophet and concludes with a vivid chiliastic prediction of the end of the age. He deploys (ll. 785—1053) an elaborate version of the Nero redivivus legend as part of an elaborate apocalyptic timetable in which Jews and the returned tyrant join together to persecute the church before God vanquishes them and then establishes a thousand year reign with the saints on earth. In his Instructions, Commodian uses apocalyptic for a different end. Again, there is a description of a coming thousand-year reign of Christ amidst passages that describe a coming apocalyptic battle and torment of punishment (Inst. 2.1-4). The poems, however, take on a wider view, in as much as they are embedded in a series of refutations of pagan beliefs as well as admonitions against the wicked and exhortations to believers to pursue a life of virtue and good works in the church. He uses chiliastic teaching and speculation to exhort and admonish believers. The Commentary on the Book of Revelation by Victorinus of Pettau, probably written c. 260 CE shortly after the persecution of the emperor Valerian, represents both the earliest commentary on Revelation we possess as well as a chiliastic 42 For broader discussion of the Latin poetry of Commodian’s Christian contemporaries, Daley, Hope, 156-64. account of Jesus’ coming rule. Victorinus uses allegorical exegesis to affirm John’s Revelation as both an account of what is future, but also of what is true of the church in the present. He echoes earlier tradition in which each day of creation is a thousand year period, and interprets the sixth day as the millennium of Rev. 19 (Comm. 20.1-3).43 The thousand years are not literal years, but represent nevertheless a literal future period, which Victorinus numerologically interprets as a time when the church, freed from Satan’s temptation, unites obedience to the Decalogue (the number 10) with virginity (the number 100), that is pure in body and mind (Comm. 20.6). Thus allegory and numerology allow Victorinus to interpret the Apocalypse as both a prophecy of things to come and a revelation of what is true theologically of the church from its inception. Apocalyptic becomes a tool for instruction concerning the end of history as well as in Christian faith and the life of obedience inaugurated in baptism (for example Comm. 4.6-10). Yet another chiliast was the fourth century Methodius of Olympus who developed a scheme partially motivated by his opposition to the spiritualizing interpretations of Origen (see below). Like Origen he rejected a physical view of a millennium established somewhere on earth, but he promoted the idea that there would be a literal thousand year reign of rest without harvest, eating, drinking, or procreation, corresponding to the first Sabbath after creation (Symposium 9.1). The thousand years, the seventh millennium, takes place “on the first day of resurrection, 43 This was a schema that not all who interpreted the seven days as periods of thousand years shared. Hippolytus in his Commentary on Daniel (4.23-34), for example, which like Victorinus uses commentary on an apocalypse to form Christian belief in a more ethical and doctrinal form, adopts the cosmic-week theory, with embracing a chiliastic expectation of an earthly millennium and interregnum of Christ. Hill, Regnum, 161-65. which is the day of judgment” on which Methodius will “celebrate with Christ the millennium of rest” (Symposium 9.5). Methodius contemporary, Quintus Julius Hilarianus, in 397 CE, took a more literal and traditional view in his assessment that the world would end 101 later with the completion of 6,000 years, when Satan would be defeated with the Second Coming after which there would be a thousand year reign of the saints before the final battle (On the Progress of Time, 17-18). As the scope of this literary evidence attests, chiliastic thinking was a widespread phenomenon in the early church, with its roots in Jewish tradition, whether mediated through the Book of Revelation, or through other Jewish documents, and was used for various purposes that can hardly be contained within a single theory or interpretation. It is a clear example of the shape-shifting nature of what scholars today describe as apocalyptic and points to the importance of attending to the way the local and the occasional as well as strands of tradition unite together to transform into multiple shapes and sizes. No taxonomy or theory of origins or definition can contain such a diverse phenomenon without dramatically over-simplifying a diverse range of phenomena deployed and then redeployed for manifold purposes. As though the literary productions of the cognoscenti were not enough, it also was championed in less literate, popular contexts. Eusebius chronicles (E.H. 7.24.1-9) the opposition of Dionysius, the second century bishop of Alexandria, to popular millennialism taught by Nepos, the local bishop of Arsinoë in the Faiyum Oasis, and a prophet, Nepos. As David Frankfurter has argued, alongside the Book of Revelation, there were other literary sources for this Egyptian movement, attested by the circulation of a variety of millennial-leaning texts such as the Shepherd of Hermas, Apocalypse of Peter, Enochic literature, and a Christian redaction of the Apocalypse of Elijah, as well as monastic liturgical texts. Frankfurter links the popularity of North African millennialism to agricultural, economic, political and social disintegration, a seedbed for many apocalyptic movements.44 The End without End As we have seen, chiliasm had its detractors, as had those who ventured to predict too accurately the current state of affairs with reference to the end. Dionysius favoured an allegorical reading of Revelation as a means of appropriating apocalyptic for the church’s use. Others, in a non-polemical vein, also interpreted biblical apocalyptic in a non-chiliastic directions. Hippolytus (a name that proves to be more like a place holder than a simple single identity) in the Commentary on Daniel 4.23.3 deployed the scheme of a 6,000 year creation, which we have seen finds its origins in Jewish apocalyptic. He calculated the birth of Jesus at 5,500 years after the creation of Adam, thereby allotting another 500 years before the final Sabbath, which he regarded as unending, and thus ruling out any notion of an imminent end or a literal millennium. He did not however interpret this in a chiliastic sense; the seventh day is an unending age.45 Jerome and Ambrose (who, on 44 Frankfurter, Elijah, 241-78. For the place of Hippolytus’ scheme and the use of a 6000 year chronology in the early church, Richard Landes, “Lest the Millennium be Fulfilled: Apocalyptic Expectations and the Pattern of Western Chronography 100-800 CE,” in The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, ed. by Werner Verbeke and D, Verhelst (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1988), 137-211; for his non-chiliastic application, Hill, Regnum, 160-69 and for his tropological and ecclesiological reading of 45 account of the political calamities of the late fourth century, believed the end of the world was near) read biblical apocalyptic for what it might teach about an individual’s confrontation with death or about ascetical self-control.46 Eusebius of Caesarea did not accept the 6,000-year scheme, and while he believed that there would be an end of time and second judgment, he engaged in realized eschatological teaching by interpreting Constantine’s rule as an anticipation of the eternal kingdom.47 Augustine was arguably the most sophisticated reader of biblical apocalyptic of his age. He drew on the Rules of Tyconius, a handbook written by the Donatist North African Christian who resisted the literalistic apocalyptic interpretation of his rigorist community by furnishing an exegetical set of guidelines for interpreting the metaphors and symbols of Revelation prophetically and typologically.48 In part, Tyconius was motivated to resist literal interpretations of the Apocalypse fueling millennialism and circulating amongst militant apocalypticists circulating in his own Dontatist church.49 Augustine used Tyconius’s rules to read New Testament apocalyptic both inter-canonically and figuratively, without abandoning a futurist Revelation, “Bernard McGinn, “Turnings Points in Early Christian Apocalypse Exegesis,” in Daley, Apocalyptic, 81-105 at 93. 46 For the eschatology of Ambrose and Jerome, who focus on the last judgment and the afterlife and reject millennialism, Daley, Hope, 97-104. 47 For Eusebius’s political eschatology, Harry O. Maier, “Dominion from Sea to Sea: Eusebius of Caesarea, Constantine the Great, and the Exegesis of Empire,” in Mark Vessey, Sharen Betcher, et al., The Calling of the Nations: Exegesis, Ethnography, and Empire in a Biblical-Historic Present (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 149-299. 48 For Donatism and apocalyptic, Jesse A. Hoover, The Donatist Church in an Apocalyptic Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), for Tyconius’s alternative, 161-81. 49 Paula Fredriksen, “Apocalypse and Redemption in Early Christianity: From John of Patmos to Augustine of Hippo,” VC 45 (1991): 151-83. 157-60. eschatology. At the conclusion of the City of God, Augustine, who resisted a literal application of the Book of Revelation or other apocalyptic texts with his present context, expounds a reading of Revelation to imagine “the end without end” (22.30) of the coming age.50 But this end, for Augustine, can already be seen, even if only in a glass darkly; biblical apocalyptic for the Augustine of the City of God is a revelation of what is to come and of the usually invisible battle of Christians on earth with the flesh, sin, and the devil. Biblical apocalyptic is a disclosure of life between the past age of the full disclosure of God’s work in history as recorded in the canon and a timetable of an as yet indeterminate future, the signs of whose arrival one may provisionally adduce from the correct sequencing of New Testament apocalyptic texts. Augustine’s earlier contemporary, Cyril of Jerusalem (313—386), in his Catechetical Oration 15, similarly offered a harmony of New Testament apocalyptic scriptures to chronicle the coming end as part of instruction preparing catechumens for baptism and Christian life. Hippolytus’s Treatise on Christ and Antichrist is perhaps an earlier similar catechetical teaching; he addresses his harmonization of apocalyptic New Testament texts together with Daniel to “my beloved brother Theophilus, to be thoroughly informed on those topics which I put summarily before you” (1).51 Tyconius and Augustine offered one way to make sense of New Testament apocalyptic in a more prophetic and typological manner. Origen of Alexandria, like 50 For Augustine against the backdrop of applications of eschatology and apocalyptic to the Constantinian order, Robert A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 51 For catechesis Ceratto, 154-59; for a general discussion, Norelli, 43-65. Augustine, did not reject a historical and prophetic understanding of apocalyptic texts, but, like his fellow Alexandrian Dionysius, he offered another avenue of their interpretation with the help of allegory, translating their passages into moral and spiritual interpretations of theological and cosmological truths. For Origen there is a natural and narrative explanation for simple believers and a deeper meaning for advanced Christians. In this interpretation passages that refer to the second coming of Christ refer to his spiritual coming in the souls of those who prepare for his advent through contemplation and ascetical preparation. Origen interprets apocalyptic passages literally and then supplements his reading with allegorical interpretations. In his Commentary on Matthew’s Gospel 32-60, he moves beyond a simple literal reading of the apocalypse of Matthew 24.3-44 and other New Testament apocalyptic for those with deeper understanding, as descriptions of Christian maturity. The Antichrist, for example, is symbol for all false doctrine and improper ethical teaching (33); the plagues are the assaults of heretics (38); famine is the Christian’s hunger for the deeper truths hidden in Scripture (37). For Origen, the uses of apocalyptic for spiritual diagnosis are part of his larger account of the drama of creation as restoration and growth in unity with God, that continues in the life to come, which, in some passages, includes a purgative or remedial punishment of the soul after death for those who had not wholly purified their lives while in the body through contemplation, in the hope of a universal salvation.52 The Cappadocians, Basil, Gregory Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa, continue Origen’s tradition, either expressly, implicitly, or by way of correction of Origen, of 52 For Origen’s diverse accounts of Hell as remedial and his views of the afterlife, Daley, Hope, 55-59; for universal salvation Hom. in Lev. 7.2; Comm. on John 1.16.91. translation of apocalyptic into eschatological categories.53 Gregory of Nyssa represents the most thoroughgoing translation, with affirmation of an end to sin and evil and a universal salvation in the fulfillment of Paul’s eschatological timetable which “God will be all in all” (1 Cor. 15.28), the central theme of his treatise On the Soul and the Resurrection (for example, 7). Punishment after death is again purgative and remedial; the Christian life entails a preparation for the life to come through an ascetical discipline of separating the soul from the bodily desires (On Virginity 14, 31-32) as part of the exercise of a life of contemplation and the goal of becoming like God as possible (Catechetical Oration 5), a growth that will have no end. In the authors cited above, to use prevalent scholarly categories, apocalyptic is transformed into a futurist as well as realized eschatological framework. Hebrew Bible and New Testament apocalyptic texts are harmonized to create a timetable of the order of events to unfold at the conclusion of the world, often understood as the end of 6,000 years. In the meantime, they are conceived as revelations of the current spiritual life, its struggles with temptation, and its hope for the world to come. There is, however, another important way apocalyptic played a central role in the early church, in monastic contexts and in mystical theological paradigms. The literature associated with the desert Christianity, for example, is filled with references to monks seeing the heavens opened or to being transported heavenward to behold divine realities.54 These are non-systematic, anecdotal, and biographical accounts that reflect a larger tradition. It is in the mystical theology of 53 For a general overview with bibliography, Daley, Hope, 81-88. For example, sayings 6; 7; 27; 29; 33; 48 (enumerated in John Worley, trans, The Book of the Elders, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Systematic Collection, Cistercian Studies Series 240 (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2012). 54 ascetical theologians like Gregory of Nyssa that one finds the fullest disclosure of apocalyptic theology, in accounts of the soul’s vision of God through ascent. In these traditions, there is an attempt to recover the image of God in oneself through ascetical devotion and practice. Hieromonk Golitzin and April DeConick, in separate studies, insightfully speak of an interiorized or personal apocalypse in their accounts of mystical theology amongst Jews and Christians in the period under consideration here.55 Ann Conway-Jones, for example, has shown ways in which themes in the Jewish heavenly ascent literature found in texts such as the Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 14), Songs of Sabbath Sacrifice, the Similitudes of Enoch (1 Enoch 37-41), 2 Enoch 1-20, 3 Baruch, the Ascension of Isaiah 6-11, and the Testament of Levi 2.5-5.2 and 8.1-19 parallel Gregory of Nyssa’s account of the soul’s ascent and vision of the heavenly tabernacle of Ex. 25-28 and Ezekiel 1 in the Life of Moses and the tabernacle imagery of 2.170-201.56 In this sense apocalypse refers to the revelation of heavenly mysteries received through a heavenly journey. In Gregory’s treatise, Moses’ ascent to Mount Sinai where he beholds the tabernacle is an account of the soul’s eternal journey to God, which is simultaneously an ever- 55 Hieromonk Alexander Golitzen, “Heavenly Mysteries: Themes from Apocalyptic Literature in the Macarian Homilies and Selected Other Fourth-Century Ascetical Writers,” in Daly, Apocalyptic, 174-192, at 187; April D. De Conick, Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2006), 1-24, at 18. Daley, Hope, 69-71, with reference to the Apophthegmata patrum and the Life of Anthony and the Life of Pachomius similarly refers to the ascetical life and interior experiences of heaven or hell, brought by meditation and remembrance and through envisioning and anticipating one’s own death, judgment, hell and paradise; Matthias Binders, “Apocalyptic Thought Written for Monks? Some Texts and Motifs and Their Function in Greek and Syrian Antiquity,” in Amirav, Grypeou, and Strousma, Apocaypticism, 43-74 at 49. 56 Ann Conway-Jones, Gregory of Nyssa’s Doctrine of the Celestial Tabernacle in its Jewish and Christian Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). deeper journey into divine mystical doctrine and into the soul’s true self as the likeness of God. The mind leaves the worlds of senses and understanding behind to gain access to “the invisible and incomprehensible” and enters a reality where “seeing … consists in not seeing” and a “luminous darkness” (Life 2.163). Gregory’s contemporary, the eastern monastic writer associated with the Homilies of Macarius, offers an analogous model of ascent and revelation and reflects the influence of Merkavah mysticism. The Macarian homilist in the Fifty Spiritual Homilies celebrates Ezekiel’s chariot, ascent, and vision of the heavenly throne room ( Ezek. 1.1-28) as an account of a vision of the “mystery of the soul that is going to receive its Lord and become his throne of glory.” The soul, he states, “which has been illumined by the beauty of the ineffable glory after having prepared itself for him as a throne and dwelling-place, becomes all light, and all face, and all eye (Hom. 2.1.2). This passage is typical of the homilist’s repeated references to the soul as the throne room of God and the kabod of Lord as internal.57 Preparation refers to ascetical disciplines and illumination speaks to a journey that is both upward to God and inward to the soul’s true likeness, the Son after whose image and likeness it has been created. “With Christ,” Macarius states, “everything is within” (Hom. 3.8.1). In Hom. 2.1.2 he likens the four living creatures that carry the chariot heavenward as a type of the will, conscience, intellect and the power to love, the four governing faculties of the soul. 57 Andrei Orlov and Alexander Golitzin, “Many Lamps are Lighted from the One”: Paradigms of the Transformational Vision in Macarian Homilies,” VC 55 (2001): 281-98. A Seat at the Arena A widespread form of apocalyptic in the early church, adapted from both Jewish apocalyptic as well as Greek and Latin sources, took the form of vividly described tours of heaven and hell in which a seer is transported to the heaven or a place of punishment to receive graphic depictions and interpretations, often through an angelus interpres, of reward and punishment. The rich variety of these texts reflects complex literary relationships, evidence of several layers of redaction, and influence of Jewish texts on Christian ones and vice versa.58 These tours of heaven and hell emerged as a genre of literature in the early church, with roots that go back to Jewish apocalyptic. 1 Enoch 17—36, a section of the “Book of the Watchers,” describes two tours of Enoch, one of the earth (17—19), and the other of the cosmos (20—36). The Apocalypse of Zephaniah and portions of 4 Ezra represent other Jewish examples of tour apocalypses. Martha Himmelfarb has shown the way these texts comprise a genre of apocalyptic literature especially popular throughout late antiquity, as testified by the multiple translations and redactions of the Apocalypse of Paul and the works it, together with the Apocalypse of Peter, inspired, through the Byzantine period, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, the most famous of which is Dante’s Divine Comedy.59 In another vein, Meghan Henning considers the influence of New Testament apocalyptic, specifically references in 58 Martha Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1983); more recently, Bremmer, “Descents,” 340-57 (with an extensive bibliography).. 59 Martha Himmelfarb, The Apocalypse: A Brief History (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 103-4. Matthew’s Gospel to being cast out and suffering weeping and gnashing of teeth in Mt. 13.41-43 and 25.41-46h, or Paul’s ascent to a third heaven of 2 Cor. 10 as inspiration for this tour literature. 60 The apocalypse comes in vivid descriptions, especially of the torments of hell, a device that was rhetorically powerful, as Henning demonstrates in her discussion of the these texts as a means of the promotion of Christian paideia. These writings deploy vivid speech or ekphrasis as a form of rhetorical persuasion by helping audiences to imagine along with the narrator what is being disclosed and to awaken emotions connected with graphic depictions. The strategy proved to be a useful one in the application of apocalyptic to other situations. Tertullian, in his treatise, On the Shows, descries Christian attendance at the arena and the theatre. At the conclusion, he puts on his own show for his audience, by offering them a vivid tour of the last judgment. He invites his audience to imagine the spectacles that will be on display on Judgment Day when “this old world and all its generation shall be consumed in one fire” (33). He goes on to list the cast of characters lit on fire at the grand finale, emperors, magistrates, philosophers, poets, actors, charioteers, athletes, and those who abused Christ at his crucifixion. The imagination of these things brings “greater joy than circus, theatre, amphitheatre or any stadium.” On the heavenly side, the third century Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, although not a tour apocalypse, can be considered here with reference to another set of divinely given vivid visions (1.3; 2.3-4; 3.2; 4.1-3) that contain apocalyptic 60 Henning, Paideia, 218-20, for the influence of Matthew’s Gospel in the Apocalypse of Peter and of Matthew’s and Paul’s letters on the Apocalypse of Paul. elements and that resemble tour-like scenarios. In 1.3, fulfilling a promise to her brother to ask for a vision of heaven, Perpetua receives one, in which she climbs a vision of a ladder fastened with implements, reaching to heaven, under which is a crouching dragon. She ascends the top and sees a great garden, a large white-haired man dressed like a shepherd, milking sheep, and surrounded by “many thousand white-robed ones. ” In 2.3-4, Perpetua receives a vision in which, after praying for her predeceased brother Dinocrates, she sees him “going out from a gloomy place, where there were also several others, and he was parched and very thirsty, with a filthy countenance and pallid color, and the [cancerous] wound on his face which he had when he died.” Perpetua prays for him further and receives another vision in which gloom is replaced by light, and Dinocrates now “with a clean body and well clad was finding refreshment,” has his wound healed, and slakes his thirst at pool and then goes “to play joyously, after the manner of children.” In the second (4.1-3), Perpetua’s and Felicitas’s imprisoned companion, Saturus, relates a vision in which four angels bear him and Perpetua to a heavenly garden; they see companions previously martyred, and are led to a walls made of light with a gate that leads into the throne room described with motifs drawn from Revelation 4 and 5. The hortatory purpose of the apocalyptic vision becomes clear when Saturus reports that the bishop Optatus and the teacher-presbyter Aspasius are denied entrance through the gate, because of their quarrelsomeness and an angel instructs Optatus to rebuke his flock for its faction. Three of the visions attest the spiritual power of the martyrs and confessors; Perpetua’s brother instructs her that because of her imprisonment for her faith she is “in a position of great dignity” and that she may ask for a vision; prayer transports Dinocrates from a dirty, gloomy, sickly, and thirsty post-mortem existence to a clean, bright, healed and refreshing one; Saturus’ vision aims to end ecclesial faction. The Generative Apocalyptic Imagination Taken together the preceding discussion indicates that in the period under consideration here, terms “apocalypse” and “apocalyptic” describe a variety of phenomena that, like combinative DNA, joined together in processes of creative production. This makes apocalypse and apocalyptic in the early church impossible to summarize or to codify. The terms reveal creative application of received traditions and generation of new ones for different settings, audiences, and purposes, mediated through a variety of forms. Apocalyptic was used to imagine the future, whether on earth, in heaven, or under the earth. It could be marshaled as a guide for interpreting and forming the spiritual life. Apocalyptic in the early church generated ways of imagining the end of history in the sense of both its temporal conclusion sense and its teleological purpose, whether conceived broadly as global account, or individually as interior one. Apocalypse and apocalyptic furnished a boundless means generate new understandings of time and space in the varied contexts where early Christianity developed.