Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination
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This is, of course, not the only way powers in the present age are dealt with. In some of the more explicitly community-orientated and Yaḥad texts, liturgical curses are pronounced again against a chief angel (cf. 4QBerakot at 4Q286 7 II, 3, 7) and Belial (Serekh ha-Yaḥad at 1QS I, 1–III, 11; cf. Serekh ha-Milḥamah at 1QM XIV, 9–10 par. 4Q491=4QMa 8–10 I, 6–7 and 4QCatena A at 4Q177 III, 8). The pronouncements against and denunciations of Belial and his lot bring together and merge several evolving features that, in their specificity, are partly lost, yet whose conceptual framework is preserved within a new form. The eschatological framework found in earlier Enochic pronouncements of doom against the fallen angels, exorcisms (11Q11 V and 4Q560), and hymns of protection (Songs of the Maskil) is retained in the way the community deals with a chief demonic figure. In the Serekh ha-Yaḥad, curses against Belial adapt language from the Aaronic blessing (Num. 6:24–27) and should be understood in relation to the larger context of covenant blessings and curses found in Deuteronomy (cf. Deut. 28–30). If we may read the liturgy near the beginning of 1QS columns II–III in tandem with the hymn at the end at (columns X–XI), the way of dealing with Belial presupposes the community’s present communion with “the sons of heaven” (cf. 11Q XI, 6–8); already in “the council of the flesh,” God has granted them a participation in an eternal possession. Countermaneuvers against demonic power is less a matter of desperate measures than of calling into effect what the community’s privileged status represents.
Traditions that are pivotal in receiving Enochic tradition and paving the way for the Yaḥad way of dealing with Belial may be seen not only in the Songs of the Maskil, but also in Jubilees, to which I have referred above. The Book ofJubilees presents demonic activity as coming under the leadership of a certain Mastema, an ordering of evil powers that is held to be characteristic of this age until the final judgment (10:7–13; cf. 10:8—qedma kwennaneya, “until my judgment”). Thus, in Jubilees, not only do angels reveal remedies to Noah (and his progeny) for the warding off or neutralizing the effects of evil spirits (Jub. 10:10–13), but also, the patriarchs—Moses (1:19–20), Noah (10:1–6), and Abraham (12:19–20). These patriarchs, in turn, are made in the text to utter prayers of deliverance against malevolent spirits, so that those receiving the text can know themselves to be covered by them.[25] Recast in this way, tradition associated with the patriarchal narratives from the Torah guides a Jewish community along paths of faithful obedience in anticipation of an end, the outcome of which is already assured. The present is shaped by both an eschatological past and a future that loops back as an inclusio to bring God’s activity in history to its proper end.
Conclusion
The revealed worldview varied from text to text among Jewish apocalyptic writings. Though the notion of a final judgment is prominent in much of the literature, it does not proceed from a myopic hope that only in the future, in the transition from this world to the world to come, God will defeat evil. To a significant extent, eschatological hope is anchored in stories of past events, re-revealed out of tradition in a way that puts present evils, whether sin or suffering, into perspective. Whatever their circumstances, many Jews seeking to be faithful could receive stories about the past that have been re-interpreted for them by apocalyptic writers; those events have implications for life in the present. God’s people, whom the text regards as righteous, are covered by a prior defeat of evil powers that God once put into place. The texts leave audiences confident that this defeat will manifest itself, time and again, in anticipation of and proleptic to eschatological reality.
The re-telling, even proclamation, of the past may be thought to have done something for at least some apocalyptic circles. Recipients of both the widespread and influential traditions found in 1 Enoch and Jubilees, as well as in many of the Dead Sea documents, would have been confident that they themselves have been covered by the interpreted biblical traditions, as well as by the authority of and prayers against evil uttered by patriarchs on their behalf. They would have regarded demonic attack and danger—whether manifest through misdeeds, multiple forms of affliction, or sociopolitical oppression—as threats that cannot be expected to vanish entirely in the present, but that nevertheless can already be curbed or put into perspective by various means. Conditions associated with the eschaton, even if only provisionally, can already be put into effect.
I do not wish to deny that something extraordinarily new on the scene was introduced in early Christian tradition. Drawing on and interpreting traditions about Jesus, Paul was convinced that in the Christ-event, a new age had dawned. By contrast, when Jewish apocalyptic texts enter into discourse about a messianic figure, that figure is invariably one whose coming is anticipated in the future. However, in a number of prominent and influential apocalyptic writings, the presence of an agent of God at the conclusion of history is conspicuously absent. Accordingly, the definitive activity of God to defeat evil is not simply a matter for the future. If, for Paul, a new age had begun because the messiah had already come, in some Jewish apocalyptic traditions, conditions anticipating the new age have been inaugurated through the defeat of evil in the sacred past without requiring a messianic figure to do it.
Like the perspectives of many others during the Second Temple period, early Christian ideas represented criticisms of and departures from what other Jews were advocating as a way of responding to their contemporary world. Departures—they can be arguably seen, for example, in exclusivist claims regarding Jesus and a filtered understanding of God’s activity through Jesus’ death and resurrection, and the de-emphasis of Torah—should, however, not be confused with a flight from the whole, taking with it fundamental categories and structures of thought, such as that regarding time. Rather than introducing an “already” versus “not yet” tension that modified a doctrine of the two ages,[26] Paul, for example, is actually better thought to have taken such a framework from the Jewish apocalyptic world for granted. The proleptic defeat of evil makes a new, revealed way of thinking and acting possible, whether this has to do with the re-visioning of past events or claims that relate to the most recent past (as with Paul’s theology and some apocalyptic texts e.g., Animal Apocalypse of 1 En. 90:6–16; 1QpHab cols. ii and vii; 1QM xiv 9–10). Paul’s interpretation of the Christ-event as significant for how believers may live their lives grew out of the soil of an apocalyptic understanding of how God’s determinative activity on behalf of humanity and Israel in the past has a continuing impact on strategies for coping with evil in the present.
Although this chapter concludes with a point that proposes a corrective to a religious-historical question, more can be said that is subject to further argument. If there is any analogy between the structuring of time in Paul’s thought and those of apocalyptic Judaism described above, what is the significance of this continuity? In relation to evil, the most important point to make is that in the New Testament, no less so than in contemporary Jewish apocalyptic, the christological solution to the problem of sin and suffering, though presented as definitive, nevertheless remains provisional. No matter how central the Christ-event is to God’s plan for the world, as Paul’s thought abundantly claims, evil persists in all its forms, manifesting itself even within communities that strive to be faithful. Thus, categorical claims regarding God’s activity in the ministry of Jesus or through his death and resurrection may, in comparison to Jewish apocalyptic tradition, have intensified the conviction that evil’s destruction is certain, but they offer no basis to think that faith in itself can make any of it altogether disappear.
The reconsideration of time in apocalyptic thought that I have presented requires far more space than can be claimed here. In order to elicit the hermeneutical implications of the religious-historical comparison offered above, I close with two questions for reflection. Should the claim that God has uniquely acted through Jesus be necessarily bound up with a theological judgment that considers Christian tradition as a better or more effective approach than that of non-Chri
stian Second Temple religiosity to the vicissitudes of human experience? To what extent should Christian exegesis, when reflecting on the meaning of “apocalyptic” in Paul, deny Jewish tradition an efficaciousness that Christian tradition affirms?
A lot is gained when considering Pauline theology through the lens of apocalyptic. If in the process of interpreting Paul’s understanding of time, the Jewish matrix with which it may be compared is ignored or neglected, we are bereft of a perspective that lends a certain realism to claims about Christ, not only in Paul’s thought, but also in the New Testament as a whole.
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Martinus C. de Boer, The Defeat of Death: Apocalyptic Eschatology in 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5, JSNTSup 22 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1988). ↵
Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1982 [Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2002]). ↵
See John J. Collins, “Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre,” Semeia 14 (1979): 1–20, at 9; cf. idem, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 1–42 (esp. 9–11), for further refinement in light of criticisms and alternative definitions. ↵
It must be emphasized that the profile behind the early production and reception of Jewish apocalyptic literature was not static. If at any point, a socio-religious or political crisis gave rise to the need to appeal to a specially revealed form of otherworldly knowledge, one cannot assume that the same circumstances were existent each time the form was adapted and received again. While the production of such a genre might have been generated by crisis, one cannot infer the same circumstances behind the genre without close readings of a text. See further, Loren T. Stuckenbruck, Angel Veneration and Christology: A Study in Early Judaism and in the Christology of the Apocalypse of John, WUNT 2/70 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995), 39–40. ↵
To illustrate the point, it helps to mention several writings, which do not formally share the features of Collins’s definition, while few would argue that they do not, at the same time, reflect an “apocalyptic” worldview. (a) Epistle of Enoch (which, though part of the much larger collection of Enochic materials in 1 Enoch, largely consists of prophetic denunciations of the wicked and exhortations to the righteous, focusing on eschatological judgment at the time of their fulfillment); (b) Book of Jubilees (though a narrative mediated through an angel to a human recipient—Moses—it is the angel of the presence who speaks and, significantly, the form of the work retells sacred tradition found in Genesis and Exodus with a focus on calendrical and halakhic matters that are supported by eschatological and cosmological or spatial dimensions); and (c) War Scroll (the narrative is orientated to the eschaton, but does not present itself as mediated through an otherworldly being). As is well-known, it is this distinction between worldview and genre that makes it possible to speak of Paul as an apocalyptic thinker. ↵
This seems to be the case in the work of J. Louis Martyn, for whom, in taking Paul’s thought as the point of departure, “apocalyptic” refers to “the conviction that God has now given to the elect true perception both of present developments (the real world) and of a wondrous transformation in the near future,” and thus involves “a new way of knowing both present and future” (“Apocalyptic Antinomies in the Letter to the Galatians,” in Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997], 111–23, at 123). See further, Galatians: A New Translation and Commentary, AB 33A (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010 [1997]), 97–105. However, what Martyn, in my view, rightly regards as apocalyptic in relation to Paul is arguably not far removed from a perspective that can likewise be attributed to many Second Temple texts. ↵
Thus, despite the imprecision associated with the term, I am not at present an advocate for dispensing with it entirely. After his thorough review of twentieth-century scholarship on Paul, R. Barry Matlock joins a chorus of those who question the casual use of “apocalyptic” and counsels, where possible, against the use of the term at all; so Matlock, Unveiling the Apocalyptic Paul: Paul’s Interpreters and the Rhetoric of Criticism, JSNTSup 127 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996), 247–316. See also Philip R. Davies, “The Social World of the Apocalyptic Writings,” in The World of Ancient Israel: Sociological, Anthropological, and Political Perspectives, ed. Ronald E. Clements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 251–71. This critique, however justified, challenges us to focus more specifically on literature and texts that contain terms which, whether as verbs or substantives, claim to offer divine mediated “disclosure” or “revelation” of otherworldly reality to humanity. ↵
This point does not necessarily require an “apocalyptic” outlook to be a theological reflex of a crisis situation. ↵
Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013). ↵
See, e.g., Franzjosef Froitzheim, Christologie und Eschatologie bei Paulus, FB 35 (Würzburg: Echter, 1979); Andrew T. Lincoln, Paradise Now and Not Yet: Studies in the Role of the Heavenly Dimension in Paul’s Thought with Special Reference to His Eschatology, SNTSMS 43 (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Larry Kreitzer, Jesus and God in Paul’s Eschatology, JSNTSup 19 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1987); C. Marvin Pate, The End of the Age Has Come: The Theology of Paul (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995); Allan J. McNicol, Jesus’ Directions for the Future: A Source and Redaction-History Study of the Use of the Eschatological Traditions in Paul and in the Synoptic Accounts of Jesus’ Last Eschatological Discourse (Macon: Mercer, 1996); Robert S. Smith, Justification and Eschatology: A Dialogue with “the New Perspective on Paul,” RTRSup 1 (Doncaster, Australia: Reformed Theological Review, 2001); Joseph Plevnik, What are They Saying about Paul and the End Time?, Rev. ed. (New York: Paulist, 2009 [1986]). The study of de Boer, The Defeat of Death, offered a welcome attempt to recognize Paul as one who was negotiating in his correspondence between the idioms of “apocalyptic” cosmology and eschatology found in Second Temple literature, though they are, in fact, far more integrated than is generally recognized. ↵
Collins (The Apocalyptic Imagination, 11) has pointed out that the post-mortem judgment of individuals in compositions such as 3 Baruch and Apocalypse of Zephaniah is not accompanied by an account about the end of history per se. Nevertheless, it should be noted that these writings do not belong to earlier examples of apocalypses and may, given their influence by the latter, offer a selective presentation that presupposes awareness of a broader range of interrelated ideas. ↵
This is often done when contrasting the “prophetic” character of Jesus’ ministry with “apocalyptic” notions of time among Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries. Examples of this, which push the distinction too far, can be found in Werner Georg Kümmel, Promise and Fulfillment, trans. Dorothea M. Barton (Naperville: Alec R. Allenson, 1957), 105–40; George Eldon Ladd, Jesus and the Kingdom: The Eschatology of Biblical Realism (London: SPCK, 1966), 48–55 and 91–213; Leonhard Goppelt, Theology of the New Testament, Volume One: The Ministry of Jesus in Its Theological Significance, trans. John E. Alsup (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), 51–55; Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, Der historische Jesus, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), 221–55 (esp. the comparative table on p. 229). ↵
This distinction was underscored during the twentieth century by H. H. Rowley, The Relevance of Apocalyptic: A Study of Jewish and Christian Apocalypses from Daniel to the Revelation, 3rd ed. (New York: Association, 1963) and D. S. Russell, Apocalyptic: Ancient and Modern (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978). See the informative and critical discussion of Martinus de Boer, “Paul and Apocalyptic Eschatology,” in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, Volume 1: The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity, ed. John J. Collins (London: Continuum, 2000), 345–83. ↵
See note 12, above. ↵
The critique by Christopher Rowland of the one-dimensional eschatological reading of Jewish apocalyptic literature, even
if somewhat one-sided, remains valuable; see Rowland, The Open Heaven, 9–72. The disclosure of esoteric wisdom as emphasized by Rowland has not gone lost, for example, on de Boer, “Paul and Apocalyptic Eschatology,” 352–54 (with several points of critique), and Matlock, Unveiling the Apocalyptic Paul, esp. 258–62 and 282–87. ↵
A known proponent of this perspective is N. T. Wright (e.g., The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991]), for whom the Sin-Exile-Return framework enables a reading that regards Paul’s gospel as formulated to exhort Israel to return from a present state of being in “spiritual exile.” Wright handles Jesus tradition similarly in Jesus and the Victory of God (London: SPCK, 1996), e.g., 193–97, 226–29. ↵
The most important third- and second-century bce documents which draw on such a correspondence between beginning and end include the Enochic Book of Watchers (1 Enoch 1–36), the Dream Visions (1 Enoch 83–84 and 85–90), Apocalypse of Weeks (1 En. 93:1–10 and 91:1117), Exhortation (1 En. 91:1–10, 18–19), Birth of Noah (1 Enoch 106–107), Book of Parables (1 Enoch 37–71), Book of Giants, and Jubilees. Except for the Book of Parables, the impact of the perspectives upheld by these works in Second Temple literature (including writings among the Dead Sea Scrolls and Jewish literature composed in Greek) was significant. ↵