A close look at apocalyptic literature written before Jesus (and with which he interacted), and long after him (including John’s book of Revelation).
In this fourth and final episode of our miniseries on “the End Times”, we talk to Dr. John J. Collins (Prof. Old Testament; Yale Divinity School) about ancient Apocalyptic literature … a large genre/category of literature which deals specifically with End Times thinking in various groups of people at various times in history. We learned that there were two waves of Apocalyptic writings in and around the Jewish and Christian communities two millennia ago.
One wave occurred two or three centuries before Christ, in response to the rise of the Greek Hellenic Empire which massively shifted world thinking, politics, science, philosophy, and religion at that time. This is also the period in which Daniel writes his book, and it is this wave of literature with which Jesus and other religious leaders of his era interacted (Jesus referring to the Son of Man and the coming of the Kingdom of God, being two great examples). But that literature had no mention of the rising of a personified Antichrist, or any “mark of the Beast”, or any “Rapturing” of believers. Nor did Jesus talk about these things.
A second wave of this kind of literature came out in response to the destruction of the Jewish Temple by the Roman Empire a few decades after the death of Christ. A whole new geopolitical situation … a whole new national enemy … and a whole new set of questions for Jews and Christians alike. This would be the wave in which we find John’s book of Revelation, and his VERY different view of “the End Times”. And Dr. Collins also told us a bit about why John’s writing is so full of violence and symbolism and metaphorical imagery.
And then, two thousand years later, Evangelical Christians with a very “high view” of scripture take this book of Revelation, read it very literally, and apply it all directly to their own geopolitical situation: the church struggling against a fully modern, Westernized, American, narcissistic and consumeristic worldview.
As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …
Find more information about Dr. John J. Collins at his faculty web-page at Yale.
If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like Episode #33, in which we talked quite a bit about predictions of the End of the World, including several made by Harold Camping. You may also enjoy a previous one in which Kerry Noble gave his dramatic personal story of being completely immersed into an Apocalyptic Evangelical paramilitary group who thought they needed to prepare for the Second Coming through guns and bombs (Episode #92).
Episode image by Enrique Meseguer from Pixabay.
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