"By an Immediate Revelation": Studies in Apocalypticism, its Origins and Effects 3161597869, 9783161597862

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Acknowledgements
Table of Contents
Abbreviations
By an Immediate Revelation: Studies in Apocalypticism, Its Origins and Effects. Rationale and Retrospect
Section One: The Nature of Apocalypticism
1. The Visions of God in Apocalyptic Literature
2. Apocalyptic Literature and Scripture
3. Apocalyptic: The Disclosure of Heavenly Knowledge
4. ‘A Man Clothed in White Linen’: Daniel 10:6ff. and Jewish Angelology
5. The Book of Daniel and the Radical Critique of Empire: An Essay in Apocalyptic Hermeneutics
6. ‘A door opened in heaven’: A Comparative Study of the Character of Visionary Experience in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (with Patricia Gibbons and Vicente Dobroruka)
7. Apocalyptic Literature
8. Mysticism Recorded: Text, Scripture and Parascripture
9. ‘The heavens were opened and I saw visions of God’: The Open Heaven – Nearly Four Decades on
Section Two: Apocalyptic, Eschatological and Related Themes in the New Testament
10. The Vision of the Risen Christ in Revelation 1:13ff.: The Debt of an Early Christology to an Aspect of Jewish Angelology
11. Apocalyptic Visions and the Exaltation of Christ in the Letter to the Colossians
12. John 1:51, Jewish Apocalyptic and Targumic Tradition
13. Keeping Alive the Dangerous Vision of a World of Peace and Justice
14. The Parting of the Ways: The Evidence of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic and Mystical Material
15. Apocalyptic, the Poor and the Gospel of Matthew
16. Apocalyptic, Mysticism and the New Testament
17. The Lamb and the Beast, the Sheep and the Goats: ‘The Mystery of Salvation’ in Revelation
18. Apocalypse, Prophecy and the New Testament
19. The Temple in the New Testament
20. Prophecy and the New Testament
21. ‘Intimations of Apocalyptic’: The Perspective of the History of Interpretation
22. Joachim of Fiore and the Theology of the New Testament
23. The Apocalypse: Sensitivity and Outsiders
24. The Book of Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ
25. Paul as an Apocalyptist
26. ‘Eschatology properly understood, and acted on’: A Perspective on Eschatology in Honour of Andrew Chester
27. Why Albert Schweitzer’s Writing on the New Testament Is So Important
28. ‘Diversely and in many ways God spoke by the Prophets’: The Perspectives of the New Testament and the Texts and Images of William Blake on the ‘Prophetic Word’
Section Three: The Reception of Apocalypticism and Its Significance
29. Apocalypse and Violence: The Evidence from the Reception History of the Book of Revelation
30. English Radicals and the Exegesis of the Apocalypse
31. Imagining the Apocalypse
32. Tyconius and Bede on Violent Texts in the Apocalypse (with Ian Boxall)
33. ‘By an immediate revelation … by the voice of his own spirit to my soul’: A Perspective from Reception History on the New Testament and Antinomianism
34. The Reception of the Book of Revelation: An Overview
35. British Interpretation of the Apocalypse: A Historical Perspective
36. ‘Pride & Vanity of the imagination, That disdains to follow this World’s Fashion’: Apocalypticism in the Age of Reason
Section Four: William Blake, Apocalyptic Poet and Painter
37. Blake and the Bible: Biblical Exegesis in the Work of William Blake
38. William Blake and Ezekiel’s merkabah
39. ‘Mr Blake, apo- or rather ana-calyptic Poet, and Painter’: Apocalyptic Hermeneutics in Action
40. Blake: Text and Image
41. William Blake and the Apocalypse
42. Blake, Enoch and Emerging Biblical Criticism
Section Five: Coda
43. ‘Open thy mouth for the dumb’: A Task for the Exegete of Holy Scripture
44. The Visionary Prophetic Performance of Scripture: A Tribute to Nicholas Lash (1934–2020), Norris–Hulse Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge, 1978–1999
Particulars of First Publication
List of Illustrations
Bibliography
Index of Ancient Sources
Index of Modern Persons

Citation preview

Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Herausgeber / Editor Jörg Frey (Zürich) Mitherausgeber / Associate Editors Markus Bockmuehl (Oxford) · James A. Kelhoffer (Uppsala) Tobias Nicklas (Regensburg) · Janet Spittler (Charlottesville, VA) J. Ross Wagner (Durham, NC)

473

Christopher Rowland

“By an Immediate Revelation” Studies in Apocalypticism, its Origins and Effects

Mohr Siebeck

Christopher Rowland, born 1947; 1966 –74 undergraduate and doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge; 1974 –79 Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne; 1979 –91 Dean of Jesus College Cambridge; 1983–91 University Lecturer in Theology; 1991– 2014 Dean Ireland Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford until his retirement. orcid.org/0000-0002-0639-4181

ISBN 978-3-16-159786-2 / eISBN 978-3-16-159787-9 DOI 10.1628/978-3-16-159787-9 ISSN 0512-1604 / eISSN 2568-7476 (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen ­Testament) The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2022 Mohr Siebeck Tübingen, Germany. www.mohrsiebeck.com This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to reproductions, translations and storage and processing in electronic systems. The book was, printed on non-aging paper by Gulde Druck in Tübingen and bound by Buch­ binderei Spinner in Ottersweier. Printed in Germany.

Acknowledgements I owe a debt of gratitude to many people for assistance with this book. First of all, I am deeply grateful to Ian Boxall for permission to include a coauthored article on Tyconius. Without him the piece would be a shadow of what is now included in the volume. I am grateful to Patricia Gibbons and Vicente Dobroruka for being willing to contribute their learning to item 6 in this volume. Markus Bockmuehl not only suggested that I collect my published pieces but also helped greatly with scanning, and generally enabling the process leading up to publication, not least his encouragement and confidence in the project. His generous assistance from the genesis of this project to its completion has been inestimable. As a result of Markus’s mediation I had the indispensable assistance from Oxford doctoral students Mateusz Kusio who carefully checked all the scans and Andrew Cowan who helped me with formatting issues. Without them this book would not have seen the light of day. Throughout, Catherine, my wife, has applied her considerable copy editing skills to checking the whole book. Members of the editorial board of ‘Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament’, particularly Markus Bockmuehl, Jörg Frey and Tobias Nicklas have been very supportive as this project evolved, as also has Dr Henning Ziebritzki, now director of Mohr Siebeck. I am very grateful to Elena Müller for her patience and understanding during the editorial stage of my book when prolonged ill-health, culminating in my hospitalisation, prevented my giving this project the attention it deserved. During this period, my friends and colleagues, Catrin Williams and Ian Boxall, assisted me greatly by checking references. Queen’s College, Oxford helped me to defray the editorial costs in the final stages of preparation for publication by the award of an emeritus grant for which I am very grateful. I am grateful to the following for permission to include previously published articles and essays in this volume: Bloomsbury, Brill, Cambridge University Press, Edinburgh University Press, Fortress Press, Hymns Ancient and Modern, Katholisches Bibelwerk Stuttgart, Macmillan, Mohr Siebeck, Oxford University Press, Rowman & Littlefield, Sage Publications, The Schweitzer Institute UK, Sheffield Academic Press, Taylor & Francis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Yale Center for International and Area Studies, and Wiley.

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Acknowledgements

A special word of thanks is due to the Yale Center for British Art, which has afforded me easy access to their wonderful collection of images of the illuminated texts and paintings of William Blake. It is a boon to any student of Blake’s work. The book is dedicated first of all to the many students over the last fifty years, mainly in the Universities of Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge and Oxford, but also in Liverpool, Sheffield and elsewhere, who have expanded my intellectual horizons in different ways by their research and writing, and also to the Vice Chancellor and colleagues at Liverpool Hope University for the great honour of the award of an honorary doctorate. Cambridge and Oxford, May 2021

Christopher Rowland

Table of Contents Acknowledgements .......................................................................................V Abbreviations .............................................................................................. XI By an Immediate Revelation: Studies in Apocalypticism, Its Origins and Effects. Rationale and Retrospect...............................................1 Section One

The Nature of Apocalypticism 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

The Visions of God in Apocalyptic Literature.........................................29 Apocalyptic Literature and Scripture.......................................................46 Apocalyptic: The Disclosure of Heavenly Knowledge ............................64 ‘A Man Clothed in White Linen’: Daniel 10:6ff. and Jewish Angelology.....................................................85 The Book of Daniel and the Radical Critique of Empire: An Essay in Apocalyptic Hermeneutics...................................................97 ‘A door opened in heaven’: A Comparative Study of the Character of Visionary Experience in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (with Patricia Gibbons and Vicente Dobroruka) ....................................114 Apocalyptic Literature ..........................................................................131 Mysticism Recorded: Text, Scripture and Parascripture ........................151 ‘The heavens were opened and I saw visions of God’: The Open Heaven – Nearly Four Decades on ........................................166 Section Two

Apocalyptic, Eschatological and Related Themes in the New Testament 10. The Vision of the Risen Christ in Revelation 1:13ff.: The Debt of an Early Christology to an Aspect of Jewish Angelology ...185

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11. Apocalyptic Visions and the Exaltation of Christ in the Letter to the Colossians ...............................................................195 12. John 1:51, Jewish Apocalyptic and Targumic Tradition ........................204 13. Keeping Alive the Dangerous Vision of a World of Peace and Justice ............................................................215 14. The Parting of the Ways: The Evidence of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic and Mystical Material..................................226 15. Apocalyptic, the Poor and the Gospel of Matthew.................................252 16. Apocalyptic, Mysticism and the New Testament ...............................266 17. The Lamb and the Beast, the Sheep and the Goats: ‘The Mystery of Salvation’ in Revelation..............................................290 18. Apocalypse, Prophecy and the New Testament .....................................300 19. The Temple in the New Testament........................................................316 20. Prophecy and the New Testament .........................................................331 21. ‘Intimations of Apocalyptic’: The Perspective of the History of Interpretation....................................350 22. Joachim of Fiore and the Theology of the New Testament ....................364 23. The Apocalypse: Sensitivity and Outsiders ...........................................381 24. The Book of Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ .....................396 25. Paul as an Apocalyptist .........................................................................412 26. ‘Eschatology properly understood, and acted on’: A Perspective on Eschatology in Honour of Andrew Chester................436 27. Why Albert Schweitzer’s Writing on the New Testament Is So Important .....................................................................................449 28. ‘Diversely and in many ways God spoke by the Prophets’: The Perspectives of the New Testament and the Texts and Images of William Blake on the ‘Prophetic Word’ .........................461 Section Three

The Reception of Apocalypticism and Its Significance 29. Apocalypse and Violence: The Evidence from the Reception History of the Book of Revelation ........................................477 30. English Radicals and the Exegesis of the Apocalypse ...........................493 31. Imagining the Apocalypse.....................................................................510 32. Tyconius and Bede on Violent Texts in the Apocalypse (with Ian Boxall) ...................................................................................529 33. ‘By an immediate revelation … by the voice of his own spirit to my soul’: A Perspective from Reception History on the New Testament and Antinomianism ...........................................547 34. The Reception of the Book of Revelation: An Overview.......................570

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35. British Interpretation of the Apocalypse: A Historical Perspective........593 36. ‘Pride & Vanity of the imagination, That disdains to follow this World’s Fashion’: Apocalypticism in the Age of Reason ...................................................612 Section Four

William Blake, Apocalyptic Poet and Painter 37. Blake and the Bible: Biblical Exegesis in the Work of William Blake ...................................631 38. William Blake and Ezekiel’s merkabah ................................................645 39. ‘Mr Blake, apo- or rather ana-calyptic Poet, and Painter’: Apocalyptic Hermeneutics in Action.....................................................661 40. Blake: Text and Image ..........................................................................681 41. William Blake and the Apocalypse .......................................................703 42. Blake, Enoch and Emerging Biblical Criticism .....................................720 Section Five

Coda 43. ‘Open thy mouth for the dumb’: A Task for the Exegete of Holy Scripture..............................................741 44. The Visionary Prophetic Performance of Scripture: A Tribute to Nicholas Lash (1934–2020), Norris–Hulse Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge, 1978–1999 ................................757

Particulars of First Publication ...................................................................775 List of Illustrations .....................................................................................781 Bibliography...............................................................................................783 Index of Ancient Sources ...........................................................................823 Index of Modern Persons............................................................................853

Abbreviations For the use of B, CHL, E and K to denote collections of Gerrard Winstanley’s and William Blake’s works, see below, p. 783. AB AGJU AGSU ALGHJ ANRW II

AOS ATA BGBE BHT BJRL BK BNTC BWANT BZAW BZNW CBQ CBQMS CCSL ConBNT CRINT EBR EKK ETL EvT FKDG FRLANT Hermeneia HNT HTS

The Anchor Bible Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums Arbeiten zur Geschichte des späteren Judentums (Spätjudentums) und Urchristentums Arbeiten zur Literatur und Geschichte des hellenistischen Judentums Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt. II: Principat. Edited by Hildegard Temporini and Wolfgang Haase. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1974ff. American Oriental Series Alttestamentliche Abhandlungen Beiträge zur Geschichte der biblischen Exegese Beiträge zur historischen Theologie Bulletin of the John Rylands Library Biblischer Kommentar Black’s New Testament Commentaries Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom Alten und Neuen Testament Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft The Catholic Biblical Quarterly The Catholic Biblical Quarterly. Monograph Series Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina Coniectanea neotestamentica/Coniectanea biblica: New Testament Series Compendia Rerum Judaicarum ad Novum Testamentum Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception. Edited by Hans-Josef Klauck et al. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1.2009ff Evangelisch-Katholischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses Evangelische Theologie Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments Hermeneia – A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible Handbuch zum Neuen Testament Harvard Theological Studies

XII HTR ICC IDBSup

IOS JBL JSJ JSNTSup JSOT JSOTSup JSQ JSS JTS KEK KJV LD LHBOTS LNTS NHS NIB NIGTC NKZ NRSV NTOA NTS OECT OTL PAAJR PL PTS PVTG RGVV RSV RB RTL SBLDS SBLSCS SBLSS SBLTT SBM SBS SBT SHR SJLA SNTSMS SR

Abbreviations Harvard Theological Review International Critical Commentary of the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible: Supplementary Volume. Edited by Georg Arthur Buttrick and Keith R. Crim. New York: Abingdon, 1976 Israel Oriental Studies Journal of Biblical Literature Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period Journal for the Study of the New Testament. Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. Supplement Series Jewish Studies Quarterly Journal of Semitic Studies Journal of Theological Studies Kritisch-exegetischer Kommentar über das Neue Testament King James Version Lectio divina Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies Library of New Testament Studies Nag Hammadi Studies The New Interpreter’s Bible The New International Greek Testament Commentary Neue kirchliche Zeitschrift New Revised Standard Version Novum Testamentum et orbis antiquus New Testament Studies Oxford Early Christian Texts Old Testament Library Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research Patrologia Latina Patristische Texte und Studien Pseudepigrapha veteris testamenti graece Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten Revised Standard Version Revue biblique Revue théologique de Louvain Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series Society of Biblical Literature Septuagint and Cognate Studies Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series Society of Biblical Literature Texts and Translations Stuttgarter biblische Monographien Stuttgarter Bibelstudien Studies in Biblical Theology Studies in the History of Religions Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity Society for New Testament Studies: Monograph Series Studies in Religion

Abbreviations ST STDJ StJ StPatr StPB StUNT SVTP TANZ TDNT

TEH ThWAT

TLZ TS TSAJ TU TynBul TZ VC VTSup WBC WMANT WUNT ZKT ZNW ZTK

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Studia theologica Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah Studia Judaica Studia Patristica Studia post-biblica Studien zur Umwelt des Neuen Testaments Studia in Veteris Testamenti pseudepigrapha Texte und Arbeiten zum neutestamentlichen Zeitalter Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Edited by Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. 10 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964–1976 Theologische Existenz heute Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Alten Testament. Edited by Gerhard Johannes Botterweck and Helmer Ringgren. 10 vols. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1973–2000 Theologische Literaturzeitung Texts and Studies Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism/Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum Texte und Untersuchungen zur altchristlichen Literatur Tyndale Bulletin Theologische Zeitschrift (Basel) Vigiliae Christianae Vetus Testamentum Supplements Word Biblical Commentary Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche

By an Immediate Revelation: Studies in Apocalypticism, Its Origins and Effects. Rationale and Retrospect My adult intellectual life had three distinct, though overlapping phases. To begin with, after school, there was my undergraduate degree at Cambridge, after which I continued with graduate study. That culminated in my doctoral dissertation submitted in 1974 on the New Testament and Jewish mysticism. Secondly, the impact of my various visits to Latin America, especially Brazil, the first of which was in 1983 and was life-changing. The final, and most recent phase, is characterised by a growing interest in the reception history of the Bible and particularly the Apocalypse. The character of ancient apocalypticism and the reception history of apocalypticism, particularly the Book of Revelation, as well as radical Christian writings, ancient and modern, have dominated my research and writing. Writings on the nature of apocalypticism and its reception history have governed the contents of this volume, though the effects of what I learnt in Brazil opened my eyes to the rich reception history of the Apocalypse, in particular, two of the greatest apocalyptic interpreters of the Bible, William Blake (1757–1827) and Gerrard Winstanley (1609–1676), a figure whose texts and images have occupied my attention in the latest stage of my research and writing. Much of the latter’s writings arose when he was part of a movement, which began to ‘dig the common land’ as a prophetic sign that the earth was ‘a common treasury’ in the aftermath of the end of monarchy. His mission is said to have been ‘shewed us by Voice in Trance, and out of Trance, which words were these, “Work together, Eat Bread together, Declare this all abroad”’.1 ‘Performing the Scriptures’ (see essay no. 44) is an apt way of describing his social activism. Similarly, the engagement with the texts of the Bible among the groups influenced by liberation theology had praxis as the key to their hermeneutics. Also, the importance attached to the land is as much an issue for many in Brazil in the twentieth and the twentyfirst centuries as it was for Winstanley in the seventeenth century. The 1 T. Corns, A. Hughes and D. Loewenstein, eds., The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2:14–15 (abbreviated in this volume as CHL).

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Apocalypse and its visions of hope have provided a crucial part of the social critique of liberation theology and the apocalyptic epistemology which pervades their pedagogy, where experience and the Bible often converge to offer ‘apocalyptic moments’ (in my preferred understanding of the word ‘apocalyptic’!) about self and the world. All these elements of my work have complemented each other, mutually informing the significant role of the apocalyptic and eschatological as formative themes in Christian intellectual and ethical history.

1. The Genesis and Evolution of My Intellectual Journey 1. The Genesis and Evolution of My Intellectual Journey

My introduction to the subject matter of my research came in two ways. First of all, through John Bowker’s Cambridge lectures on ‘The Jewish Background to the New Testament’, which included a couple of remarkable lectures about merkabah mysticism and its possible impact on Paul.2 Later, I was asked by William Horbury to write an essay on the cosmology of the New Testament Letter to the Ephesians, when I was taking a graduate course in New Testament (Part III, a course which no longer exists). As a result, I immersed myself in the work of Gershom Scholem, the great pioneer of the study of Jewish mysticism down the centuries, and for many years professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Hugo Odeberg, professor of Theology at Lund, who wrote a short essay on the cosmology of the Letter to the Ephesians as well as edited a Jewish mystical text which he called 3 Enoch. But it was Gershom Scholem who introduced me to merkabah mysticism and the origins of the Kabbalah. But there was much more, the claims to heavenly ascents, the formulae needed to achieve celestial bliss, the angelic attendants and their names, the seven heavens through which the mystic ascends, the qualities needed to engage in such dangerous religious activity, and above all else, the vision of the anthropomorphic deity. After reading Scholem, especially I recall Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism and Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition with its chapter on 2 Cor. 12:2–4, the New Testament has never seemed the same again – and never will. It became obvious that what had opened up for me had wider ramifications than just the cosmology of Ephesians and Colossians, and the Letter to the Hebrews, for it determined my view of the apocalyptic milieu from which Revelation arose. This acquaintance with early Jewish mysticism rather than immersion in the study of ‘apocalyptic in biblical scholarship’, coloured my subsequent reading of apocalyptic texts. During my undergraduate career, the Book of Revelation featured less than might have been expected. This is 2

173.

E.g. J.W. Bowker, ‘“Merkabah” Visions and the Visions of Paul’, JSS 16 (1971): 157–

1. The Genesis and Evolution of My Intellectual Journey

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strange given that my supervisor in New Testament throughout my time as an undergraduate, John Sweet, was at that time in the middle of writing a commentary on Revelation.3 In my doctoral dissertation the focus on Revelation was only extended to those parts influenced by Ezek. 1, hence discussions of the vision of Christ in Rev. 1 and the vision of the heavenly throne and its environs in Rev. 4–5. From the start of my graduate career, what I now know as reception history has been a thread running through so much of what I have read, researched and written about. My doctoral thesis supervised by Ernst Bammel (The Influence of the First Chapter of Ezekiel on Jewish and Early Christian Literature4) was never published in its original form, though it inspired The Open Heaven and some of it is reflected much later in The Mystery of God.5 Several of the articles in this book arise directly out of the doctoral thesis and were published before, or shortly after, The Open Heaven (e.g. essays no. 1, 4, 10, 11). The pervasiveness of apocalyptic and mystical elements in the New Testament, and the possible link with the major source of the early Jewish mystical tradition, the first chapter of Ezekiel, formed the central part of my doctoral research. The discrete parts of it are: a detailed study of the account of Enoch’s heavenly ascent in 1 En. 14, and related texts, such as the Apocalypse of Abraham, the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, and Rev. 4; a consideration of the possible connections between Ezekiel’s vision of the one that resembled a human figure on the throne of glory in Ezek. 1:26–27 and Jewish angelology and angel Christology; a detailed study of rabbinic traditions about R. Yohanan ben Zakkai and Eleazar ben Arak’s exposition of the merkabah chapter of Ezekiel, and the Four who entered pardes; and finally a consideration of the possibility that the problem combatted in the Epistle to the Colossians had much to do with the preparation for visionary experience and communion with the angels. While challenges have been made to Scholem’s thesis that there is an unbroken mystical tradition linking the apocalypses of the Second Temple period and the mystical interests of the tannaitic and amoraic periods to the Hekaloth literature in the work of Urbach, Schäfer, Halperin and others, an apocalypse like Revelation is, I believe, a prime testimony to such visionary appropriation. It is, of course, possible that Revelation is itself a fiction, a deliberate attempt to exploit the apocalyptic genre in order to offer a veneer of authority. Such a possibility cannot be excluded; I cannot prove that Revelation’s claim that it offers a visionary report is credible. But, notwith3

J.P.M. Sweet, Revelation (London: SCM, 1979). C. Rowland, The Influence of the First Chapter of Ezekiel on Jewish and Early Christian Literature (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 1975). 5 C. Rowland and C.R.A. Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament, CRINT 12 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 4

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standing the occasional evidence of reflection in the text itself (e.g. 4:5 and 17:9–14), I continue to believe that this text, which ended up in the Christian canon, offers at least one example of Ezekiel’s words inspiring a later visionary appropriation – what David Halperin has characterised as follows: ‘When the apocalyptic visionary “sees” something … we may assume that he is seeing the … vision as he has persuaded himself it really was, as [the prophet] would have seen it, had he been inspired wholly and not in part’.6 A simple distinction between scriptural exegesis and visionary experience, which I presupposed when I wrote both The Open Heaven and The Mystery of God, I now doubt. A decade or so ago I discovered the work of Mary Carruthers on memory and rhetoric in the medieval period and in antiquity, which showed me how the exercise of imagination, including visualisation, has been an important part of the engagement with Scripture.7 Ezekiel’s vision and the way in which it affected early Christian seers, who in their turn passed on that ‘visionary mode’8 to their successors, is a consistent thread of interest which continues through to my more recent work, influencing my understanding of ‘apocalyptic’ and explaining the interest in the texts and images of William Blake. Ever since reading Gershom Scholem’s work I have been convinced that there was a visionary experiential dimension to engaging with biblical visionary texts, which persisted for centuries. Whatever one makes of Scholem’s hypothesis, that there was a vibrant tradition of visionary experience in ancient Judaism based on Ezekiel’s merkabah, the rabbinic tradition indicates that there was great suspicion of the negative theological, psychological and physical effects that engagement with this chapter could engender (e.g. m.Hag. 2:1 and b.Hag. 13a–16a). Nevertheless, engage with it they did. In the rabbinic passage already mentioned (see also t.Hag. 2:2) Eleazar ben Arak expounds the merkabah before Rabban Yohanan b. Zakkai, the great teacher of the late first century CE. What Eleazar says evokes praise from Yohanan for ‘performing the scripture’ well (‘Eleazar ben Arak expounds well and performs well’, further essay no. 44). Indeed, in other versions of the story Yohanan’s approbation seems to be confirmed by the presence of the angels who have come to listen to the divine mysteries from Eleazar’s lips. That winding thread links my original research concerning the influence of Jewish mysticism on the New Testament and my most recent writing on the

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D.J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988), 71. 7 E.g. M.J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 8 M. Lieb, The Visionary Mode: Biblical Prophecy, Hermeneutics, and Cultural Change (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991).

1. The Genesis and Evolution of My Intellectual Journey

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English visionary, artist and poet, William Blake (1757–1827). Not only do visions play an important part in Blake’s output, but also he was inspired by the first chapter of Ezekiel in both his art and his writing. Indeed, he implied that John on Patmos already saw the kinds of things that feature in Blake’s illuminated books The Four Zoas (Night 8:597–620, E385–3869). Elsewhere, in one of the versions of his early works, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, over the words ‘As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent’,10 Blake has written ‘1790’ immediately above the words ‘new heaven’, which, because of the words ‘it is now thirty-three years since its advent’ in all probability draws attention to the year 1757, the year of Blake’s birth. If this is correct, for Blake it is the moment when there is opened up ‘the return of Adam into Paradise’ (Marriage of Heaven and Hell 3, E34) and the eschatological age is initiated, just as for Jesus after his call and testing (Mark 1:15), ‘the time (καιρός) is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand’ (cf. John 13:1; 7:6). Such prophetic actualisation is found throughout the New Testament, and this seems to be the way in which Blake sees his own role. In the New Testament, Jesus is the eschatological Son of Man, John the Baptist is Elijah who is to come, Paul believes himself to be the messiah’s agent of salvation to the nations in the Last Days, and John on Patmos saw in his day the heavens opened, just as Ezekiel had seen by the rivers of Babylon. Co-directing a research project (The Prophecy Project in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oxford) for ten years with Jane Shaw (now Principal of Harris Manchester College, Oxford) during the last decade of my time in Oxford (1991–2014) acquainted me with an important period of English history significant in the annals of apocalypticism.11 The project’s focus was the remarkable archive of The Panacea Society in Bedford (as the charity was originally called, now it is The Panacea Charitable Trust). The archive was a veritable treasure-trove for the simple reason that members of The Panacea Society never threw anything away and knowledge of the varied movements, which the life of Joanna Southcott (1750–1814) set in train, had never been catalogued! The founder of the Society, Mabel Barltrop, otherwise known as Octavia because she was the eighth and final member of a prophetic line, looked back to the extraordinary life of Joanna Southcott who believed herself to be the ‘Woman Clothed with the Sun’ of Rev. 12 and was 9 E plus page number(s) in this volume refers to D.V. Erdman’s edition of Blake’s works: The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, newly rev. edn. by D.V. Erdman, with a new foreword and commentary by H. Bloom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 10 W. Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 3 (E34), in Copy F, Pierpont Morgan Library, 1794. 11 J.F.C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780–1850 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).

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convinced that she was pregnant with the messiah (whom she named Shiloh, cf. Gen. 49:10 in the King James Version, ‘The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh comes’). She died in the course of her pregnancy.12 Joanna was one of a number of prophets held in esteem by the Society. For example, Richard Brothers (1757–1824) saw himself with Shiloh in Gen. 49:10 and the nasiʾ, the ‘prince’, mentioned in the prophecy of Ezekiel (chs. 37, 44 and 45). A younger contemporary of Brothers, Southcott and Blake was John Ward, alias ‘Zion’ Ward (1781– 1837). ‘Zion’ was a follower of Joanna Southcott who believed himself to be her successor. He claimed that Southcott had visited him in a vision and given instructions to pass on to her surviving followers that they should accept him as their leader. He asserted that God was present in himself as he identified himself with the messianic child born to Southcott in 1814.13 Octavia (Mabel Barltrop) also believed that she was the messianic figure promised by Joanna. She attracted adherents to Bedford and on a daily basis received divine communications which were shared with the small community. My primary task on the project was less to engage in research in the archives myself but more to oversee a research project consisting of devoted and able young scholars, who focused on different aspects of this remarkable archive, and the movements to which they bear witness. They and my codirector colleague, Jane Shaw, have published the results of what they have discovered.14 The many opportunities to talk with researchers on the project about the millenarian and apocalyptic ideas, offered an important backdrop to my apocalyptic research.

2. Defining ‘Apocalyptic’ 2. Defining ‘Apocalyptic’

As already indicated, acquaintance with the study of Jewish mysticism, rather than the study of apocalypticism, had been my entry point for the study of the 12

J.K. Hopkins, A Woman to Deliver Hher People: Joanna Southcott and English Millenarianism in an Era of Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 20, 33; S. Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 246–258. 13 P. Lockley, Visionary Religion and Radicalism in Early Industrial England: From Southcott to Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 14 J. Shaw, Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and Her Followers (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011); Lockley, Visionary Religion and Radicalism; D. Madden, The Paddington Prophet: Richard Brothers’s Journey to Jerusalem (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); M. Niblett, Prophecy and the Politics of Salvation in Late Georgian England: The Theology and Apocalyptic Vision of Joanna Southcott (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015); J. Shaw and P. Lockley, The History of a Modern Millennial Movement: The Southcottians (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017).

2. Defining ‘Apocalyptic’

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apocalypses including Revelation. It will come as no surprise that from an early stage I had found one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of ‘mystic’ as one which helped me to understand not only the mystical but also apocalyptic: a mystic is ‘one who believes in the possibility of the spiritual apprehension of truths that are inaccessible to the understanding’. That definition and the importance of the opening word of Revelation as an apocalypse, in other words a writing whose form is revelatory, have been important for me throughout my study. Over the last two hundred years commentators have pointed to the way in which ‘apocalyptic’ was taken up and used to describe a particular development of prophetic eschatology at the beginning of the nineteenth century. As Michael Stone and others have reminded us, when we cast our net wider in the literature of antiquity, we find an emphasis on a revelatory idea of wisdom, which embraces eschatology as well as protology, and much else. ‘Apocalyptic’ is widely seen as a particular development of prophetic eschatology.15 This understanding of ‘Apokalyptik’ was characterised by the following: imminent expectation, contrast between present and future, the hope for another world breaking into and overtaking this world, the doctrines of angels and demons, as well as complex visionary imagery.16 In the light of the apocalypses from antiquity, John Collins offered a concise definition of ‘apocalypse’, which embraced both their form and their content and the apocalyptic and the eschatological: ‘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.17

This definition has become a reference point for scholarship and is one with which I agree. The definition gives full recognition to that aspect of the apocalypses that concerns revelations of the heavenly world as well as the 15 J.M. Schmidt, Die jüdische Apokalyptik: Die Geschichte ihrer Erforschung von den Anfängen bis zu den Textfunden von Qumran (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1969). 16 Succinctly outlined e.g. in P. Vielhauer, ‘Apocalyptic in Early Christianity’, in New Testament Apocrypha, eds. E. Hennecke et al., vol. II: Writings Relating to the Apostles, Apocalypses and Related Subjects (London: SCM, 1965), 608–642 17 J.J. Collins, ‘Introduction: Toward the Morphology of a Genre’, in Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre = Semeia 14 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979): 1–20; cf. D. Hellholm, ed., Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Apocalypticism, Uppsala, August 12–17, 1979, 2nd edn. (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1989); M.E. Stone, ‘Lists of Revealed Things in the Apocalyptic Literature’, in Magnalia Dei, the Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, eds. F.M. Cross et al. (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 414–452; Rowland, The Open Heaven.

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eschatological aspect, which may be transcendent in that it transcends the present state of the world in this age but is not necessarily otherworldly (I am grateful to Richard Bauckham for this construal). But I remain convinced that the eschatological elements in apocalyptic texts, whether transcendent or otherwise, are not the determining feature of what constitutes apocalyptic. Nevertheless I do understand why it is that ‘apocalyptic’ is used as a generic term, because of the character of the contents of the Book of Revelation. But that needs to be complemented by an understanding of apocalyptic which attends to the revelatory form of apocalyptic texts such as Revelation and any visionary experience to which it bears witness.

3. The Relationship of the Present Book to My Other Books 3. The Relationship of the Present Book to My Other Books

This collection of articles and lectures indicates the ongoing apocalyptic dimension of my research and writing over the years, most of which has found its way into books, which have been the major vehicle for the dissemination of my views. Three books relate to biblical apocalypticism and eschatology.18 There are three commentaries on Revelation. The first was written for preachers and includes half tone images relating to the Apocalypse specially created for the volume by the Cambridge master printer and artist, Kip Gresham; then there was a more conventional commentary in The New Interpreters Bible Volume XII (1998) and finally an explicitly reception historical commentary on Revelation, written with Judith Kovacs (2004). The two books on liberation theology contain material on apocalypticism,19 and there are chapters in books on Christian radicalism which manifest the importance of apocalypticism.20 Two of the volumes presented to me on my retirement explicitly focused on apocalypticism.21 A third, on Christian radicalism includes significant essays on apocalypticism in the context of a discussion of Christian 18 Rowland, The Open Heaven; idem, Christian Origins: The Setting and Character of the Most Important Messianic Sect of Judaism (London: SPCK, 1985 [rev. edn. 2002]); and Rowland and Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God. 19 C. Rowland and M. Corner, Liberating Exegesis: The Challenge of Liberation Theology to Biblical Studies (London: SPCK, 1990); and C. Rowland, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [rev. edn. 2007]). 20 C. Rowland, Radical Christianity: A Reading of Recovery (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988); idem and A. Bradstock, eds., Radical Christian Writings: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); and Z. Bennett and idem, In a Glass Darkly: The Bible, Reflection and Everyday Life (London: SCM, 2016). 21 J. Ashton, ed., Revealed Wisdom: Studies in Apocalyptic in Honour of Christopher Rowland (Leiden: Brill, 2014); J. Knight and K. Sullivan, The Open Mind: Essays in Honour of Christopher Rowland, LNTS 522 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

3. The Relationship of the Present Book to My Other Books

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radicalism.22 As essays in this volume indicate, my growing interest in Christian radicalism has always gone along hand in hand with, and indeed has in many ways been dependent on, my more long-standing interest in apocalypticism; the one fed the other. This is best exemplified in my most recent book, which, as already indicated, embraces many of the themes of essays contained in this collection.23 As already mentioned, Scholem’s work inspired my approach to apocalypticism. He pointed to the New Testament but it was to Paul, and the strange allusive account of his heavenly ascent in 2 Cor. 12:2–4. But from that day to this Scholem’s description of Jewish mystical tradition suggested to me that it was Revelation to which I should turn as well as the contemporary Jewish apocalypses. That was the start of a long journey of discovery, which has occupied my attention for the last fifty years. The Open Heaven is my first book and the major outcome of my doctoral dissertation.24 It is a study of Jewish and early Christian apocalypticism, which extended the research of my doctoral dissertation into the study of apocalypticism. The Open Heaven has a simple thesis, which in many ways mirrors Michael Stone’s work25 and is in effect an extended exposition of Martin Hengel’s brilliant encapsulation of apocalyptic as ‘higher wisdom through revelation’.26 The 1982 volume is characterised by two major strands within the Bible, vision and hope, and the primacy given to experience, from which visions of hope emerge. When I wrote The Open Heaven, part of what I wanted to achieve was to bring together all I had learnt from Scholem about Jewish mysticism with the discussion of apocalypticism. My contribution to The Mystery of God in many respects represented a sequel to The Open Heaven, tying up loose ends in the earlier book, seeking to keep to the survey character of the earlier volumes of the ‘Compendia Rerum Judaicarum ad Novum Testamentum’ series, and including material from my unpublished doctoral dissertation on the Letter to the Colossians. Underlying the book is the conviction that the Jewish apocalyptic and mystical writings have much to offer to the interpretation of the New Testament. What I tried to do was to offer a survey of the impact of apocalyptic ideas (using my preferred way of using the word ‘apocalyptic’) on New Testament texts, with an occasional glance in the direction of later Jewish mystical sources. My approach was 22 Z. Bennett and D. Gowler, eds., Radical Christian Voices and Practice: Essays in Honour of Christopher Rowland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 23 C. Rowland, Radical Prophet: The Mystics, Subversives, and Visionaries who Strove for Heaven on Earth (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017). 24 Rowland, The Open Heaven. 25 E.g. Stone, ‘Lists of Revealed Things’. 26 M. Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine During the Early Hellenistic Period, trans. J. Bowden, 2 vols. (London: SCM, 1974), 1:210.

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more synthetic in its attempt to sketch a New Testament theology viewed through the lens of apocalypses written roughly speaking contemporaneously with the New Testament. A significant part of the survey in The Mystery of God concerned the visionary elements in the New Testament, particularly the Book of Revelation, and the extent to which its distinctive elements have echoes in other parts of the early Christian literature. There is also interest in the ways in which the divine is mediated to the world in human lives and the contribution of the cosmological ideas of the visionary texts to the developing theology of early Christianity, as well as the visionary or apocalyptic elements. There is a direct link between my graduate study and doctoral research and my writing on apocalypticism in The Open Heaven and The Mystery of God. The Open Heaven has a simple thesis which I would summarise as follows: it challenged the notion that apocalypse/apocalypticism was about the end of the world; and that the way in which the term ‘apocalyptic’ may be understood by reference to the confusion between a definition of ‘apocalyptic’ which concentrates on the revelatory form of the Book of Revelation and one which concentrates on its awesome contents (e.g. cataclysmic events, angelic beings, the symbolism, numerology and pre-determined series of disasters which had to precede the new age). Such a re-appraisal not only enabled a link between that which had hitherto been categorised as apocalyptic, that is a particular form of eschatology, and that categorised as mystical. In the process, I also questioned whether apocalyptic texts were primarily about eschatology and should rather be considered a peculiar form of theological epistemology alongside other ways of discerning the divine will. Despite my approach to apocalypticism I have never ignored the fact that for many, then and still, apocalyptic and eschatology are closely related. By the time I wrote Christian Origins I had immersed myself in the study of early Christian eschatology and its Jewish antecedents, so ably expounded by my friend, Andrew Chester27 and accepted Schweitzer’s and indeed Martin Werner’s expanded theses that eschatology (and indeed angel Christology) were the motor of early Christian intellectual thought, and without it one could not comprehend Christian origins or the succeeding development in Christian theology. I have always questioned Scholem’s differentiation between Jewish and Christian messianism on the grounds of its political character.28 The more I explored Christian texts, the more convinced I became of the political importance of Christian hope. 27

A. Chester, Future Hope and Present Reality, Vol. 1: Eschatology and Transformation in the Hebrew Bible, WUNT 293 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012). 28 Cf. J. Taubes, ‘The Price of Messianism’, in Essential Papers on Messianic Movements and Personalities in Jewish History, ed. M. Saperstein (New York and London: New York University Press, 1992), 551–558; Rowland, Radical Prophet.

3. The Relationship of the Present Book to My Other Books

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At first sight Christian Origins seems to be a reversion to a more mainstream approach to the study of the New Testament. But the work that I had done on apocalyptic texts is carried over and informs the discussion of eschatology. This is crucial to understand the book. At the heart of what is a wide-ranging study is the thesis that the apocalyptic element was the mode by which key figures in early Christianity came to understand and validate their eschatological convictions. So, while the conviction that the eschatological events were beginning is crucial to early Christian identity, the means whereby that was comprehended was not, at least according to the texts which have come down to us, the result of study of the sacred texts leading to that conclusion but was a result of visionary experience. Hope for the future (eschatology) and the visionary mode (apocalypticism) overlap but should be distinguished. Interest in radicalism had its genesis in visits to Brazil and Central America, the first time in 1983. That was one of the consequences of a lifechanging visit to Brazil and Mexico in 1983, which opened up a different perspective on the Christian tradition. This visit led to the writing of Radical Christianity: A Reading of Recovery.29 Its thesis has affinities with the book of Jacob Taubes and to some extent with Rosemary Radford Ruether’s book on messianic hope, but, interestingly, it was Taubes who stressed the potentially subversive power of apocalypticism in Christian intellectual history rather than myself.30 A significant difference between the books is that more space is given in Radical Christianity to liberation theology. The political theology from mid-seventeenth century England features in ‘English Radicals and the Exegesis of the Apocalypse’ (essay no. 30). Related to Radical Christianity was my co-operation with Andrew Bradstock on the reader of radical Christian writings which complemented that.31 Radical Prophet: The Mystics, Subversives and Visionaries who Strove for Heaven on Earth (2017) followed a similar path to the book Radical Christianity. This book was informed by further trips to Brazil, to Nicaragua and El Salvador in 1988 and 1990 and also attempts to integrate all that I had learnt about the history of apocalypticism which impinged on the theme of Christian radicalism. The 1990 visit to Brazil enabled me to witness the preparation of popular education material, pictures of which are included and discussed in the book. It was during the interview for my first job that I was first introduced to reception history (or history of interpretation) when my soon to be colleague, John Sawyer, asked me about it. As one brought up on a very narrow form of 29

Rowland, Radical Christianity. J. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); R. Radford Ruether, The Radical Kingdom: The Western Experience of Messianic Hope (New York: Harper and Row, 1970). 31 Rowland and Bradstock, Radical Christian Writings. 30

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diachronicity, in which the meaning of the text for its author and first readers was all that was of interest, or how it was that New Testament writers used the Old Testament, the matter seemed to be a curiosity rather than central to study. How things have changed! What I did not see at the time was that I had spent four years doing exactly that, studying one of the most fascinating examples of reception history offered by the Bible in the form of the emergence of engagement with Ezekiel’s merkabah vision by ancient Jews and Christians. Membership of the editorial team which launched the Blackwell Bible Commentaries series, of which the commentary on Revelation by Judith Kovacs and myself was one of the two introductory volumes (2004), immersed me not only in a fascinating historical story of the effects and of this often neglected text on Christian thought but also the remarkable iconographic legacy it engendered. The Blackwell Bible Commentaries series was set up to be devoted to the history of effects and foreswore any concern with the original context and meaning except in so far as discussion of these issues were part of the history of interpretation. The assumption was that music, art and literature would all play their part in the discussion. As such it differed from other commentary series in the making at the time such as EvangelischKatholischer Kommentar and the Ancient Christian Library, which either had reception history as optional extra or focused on one particular group of authors (in the case of the later patristic writers). The parameters of my concern gradually opened up, however, not only to explore the apocalyptic and eschatological aspects of the New Testament but also the reception of one of the key carriers of the apocalyptic tradition of ancient Judaism into early Christianity, the Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse of Jesus Christ. If my concern had been the neglect of the apocalyptic dimension of the New Testament, I gradually became more aware of the task that needed to be done in opening the neglected story of the reception history of the Apocalypse itself and the extent of its influence on Christian theology. One important figure in this is Joachim of Fiore. Acquaintance with his reading of Revelation and the theological revolution his exegesis prompted in the later Middle Ages helped me to understand so much about the genesis of early modern theology. The great student of medieval prophecy Marjorie Reeves, whom I was privileged to have as a guide to the theology of Joachim and his successors, opened my eyes to the richness of this tradition.32 The opportunity to contribute to the volume in her memory enabled me to articulate what immersion in reception history was allowing me to see afresh about the contents of the New Testament.

32

E.g. M. Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism, rev. edn. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).

3. The Relationship of the Present Book to My Other Books

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As already indicated, both Ezekiel, and the merkabah, and the Book of Revelation were crucially important, imaginative stimuli for John, as were other visionary passages in the Bible. It was fitting that I devoted a monograph to Blake and the Bible (2010) only to find, as I dug deeper, that his ideas were formed too by the two biblical books, which had loomed so large in my work, Ezekiel and Revelation. The visionary mode of apocalypticism, (which I understand by reference to the revelatory form of the apocalypses), and eschatological issues (by which I understand the hope for a new, messianic age on earth such as we find in Jewish and early Christian hopes for the future) are key components of many of the apocalypses and set the agenda for my research and writing thereafter. I can now see in retrospect that a significant thread running through my research has been the reception history of apocalypticism. Much of my work in all areas has been in one form or another an engagement, more often implicit than explicit, with the nature of tradition, and how it is that later writers and thinkers engaged with antecedent texts, more often than not resisting it and reformulating it and being inspired by what they received in equal measure. Blake slotted into my interest in the reception history of the Apocalypse, awakened by his importance in some of the historical movements I had studied and into my interest in Christian radicalism. At the time I was beginning to embark on the Blackwell commentary I was asked to examine a doctoral thesis at the University of Glasgow. Not only did reading that thesis33 open my eyes to the possibilities of the history of the interpretation of the Apocalypse, but the trip to Glasgow for the viva enabled me to see for the first time, at first hand, one of Blake’s illuminated books, Europe a Prophecy, which is in the Glasgow University Library. The effect of a morning with that extraordinary artistic creation, now reproduced in the Blake Trust/Tate Gallery edition of the illuminated books, made a profound impression on me. That day in Glasgow convinced me of the importance of William Blake for my apocalyptic studies. Blake in many ways is the consummate radical. His was not a political activism, but a ‘mental fight’ through his own peculiar pedagogy to build ‘Jerusalem’ in his own land. It was the use of his art, skills and insight, which were put to use in the interests of a radical politics and religion. Radicalism and its problems and possibilities continued to be the very stuff of his literary and artistic expression. Above all, as a result of my work on the reception history of the Book of Revelation, I began to engage with the texts and images of William Blake. Blake’s grasp of the reasons why the Christian tradition contains within it the seeds of radicalism and the critique of received wisdom is nowhere better exemplified than in his texts and images. His inclusion in 33

C. Burdon, The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unravelling, 1700–1834 (London: Macmillan, 1997).

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this book contributed greatly to its argument. I deepened my understanding of the hermeneutics of radicalism as a result of studying Blake, as I had earlier the writings of Gerrard Winstanley. In 2016 I wrote a jointly authored book in collaboration with Zoë Bennett on the Bible, criticism and everyday life.34 Working on the latter book with Zoë also reminded me not only how much I have been indebted to joint authorship over the years but also (as in Radical Prophet) to the biblical hermeneutics of Rosemary Radford Ruether.

4. The Present Book 4. The Present Book

The genre of a book such as this is the disparate elements of the contents of essays written on different subjects and the consequent inevitability of certain themes recurring. The choice of topics in the book has been determined by the theme of apocalypticism and so, as indicated, is not intended to be a comprehensive collection of published essays and articles on my research and writing over the years. But within the area of apocalypticism familiar themes certainly recur throughout. Indeed, as I read through the collection, there is also repetition of themes and choice of passages to illuminate those themes within the consideration of subjects, which reminds me of a musical Rondo. The alternative finale of Mozart’s Fifth Piano Concerto (KV 382) often came to mind as I read through the book and the same themes were repeated in different times and in guises albeit without the winsomeness of Mozart’s creative skill! The major theme running through these pieces may be summarised by quoting Anne Hutchinson’s phrase in her trial in Boston, ‘immediate revelation’ (‘So to me by an immediate revelation’ … ‘By the voice of his own spirit to my soul’) and Blake’s contrast between ‘Inspiration and ‘Memory’ (‘the Daughters of Memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration’). The nature of apocalypticism is to be understood as a claim to ‘immediate revelation’, which qualifies appeals to ‘Memory’ and convention and prioritises ‘Inspiration’ as the basic datum of theological epistemology, thereby subordinating authoritative appeals to scripture tradition and convention (‘Memory’). That said, many of the ancient apocalypses retain elements of convention, precedent, and textual reception. Apocalypticism embraces the meaning of history that is revealed, the hope for the future and even a concern for the relationship between the divine purposes and apparent misfortune. But the fundamental point is that the means whereby such insights are discerned come not through appeal to precedent or authority so much as to inspired wisdom, which comes through dream, vision or some other means of apprehending in a more immediate way the mystery of the divine will. This forms one 34

Bennett and Rowland, In a Glass Darkly.

4. The Present Book

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of the main themes of Radical Prophet and one of the latest items included in this collection. The quotation in the title of this book derives from Anne Hutchinson’s testimony, which itself echoes that of Jesus in the Gospel of John whose authority is dependent on what he has heard from God. The first two sections consider the nature of apocalypticism and its importance for the exegesis of the New Testament. The earliest pieces are to be found largely in these sections. These are followed by two sections on reception history. The first is more wide-ranging and is closely linked with my work on the reception history of the Apocalypse; the second concentrates on the texts and images of William Blake, whom Samuel Taylor Coleridge described as an apocalyptic poet and artist. Within these sections I have oscillated about the appropriate ordering, whether it should be according to theme or chronologically. In the end I opted for the former. The items in Section One relate to the nature of the visions in apocalyptic texts, general outlines of the apocalyptic texts and the understanding of their significance, and particular theological features concluding with a retrospective essay on The Open Heaven nearly four decades after its publication. This section contains various detailed studies illuminating the basic thesis not only of my doctoral study but also The Open Heaven. For example, ‘Visions of God’ (no. 1) is a catalogue of early literary connections between Ezek. 1 and later texts.35 It also includes consideration of apocalyptic texts and their implications for Christology, a subject which was an important component of my doctoral research and was touched on briefly in The Open Heaven. The pieces in Section 2 on Rev. 1:13, the Letter to the Colossians and Dan. 10 are also examples of subjects which linked with my doctoral study (discussed in The Open Heaven in a section ‘The Development of an Exalted Angel in Apocalyptic Literature’,36 which is related to the chapter ‘The Use of the Human Figure of Ezek. 1:26–27 in Jewish and Christian Literature’). They touch on an issue which fascinated me at the time, the importance of what may loosely be termed ‘angel christology’ and its contribution to the beginnings of Christian theology. It raises issues of a binitarian streak in ancient Jewish theology, explored by Jarl Fossum,37 though since subjected to

35 Considered also by others like C. Newsom, ‘Merkabah Exegesis in the Qumran Sabbath Shirot’, JJS 38 (1987): 11–30; and L. Schiffman, ‘Merkavah Speculation at Qumran: The 4QSerekh Shirot “ʿOlat ha-Shabbat”’, in Mystics, Philosophers, and Politicians: Essays in Jewish Intellectual History in Honour of Alexander Altmann, ed. J. Reinharz et al. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1982), 15–47. 36 Rowland, The Open Heaven, 94–112. 37 E.g. J.E. Fossum, The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord: Samaritan and Jewish Concepts of Intermediation and the Origin of Gnosticism, WUNT 36 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1985).

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critical scrutiny by Larry Hurtado.38 This is a subject to which I have not returned, though I was interested to note that Blake picked up on biblical references to the Angel of the Lord as part of his exploitation of multiplicity and diversity in divinity. That forms such a central part of his thought as part of his exploration of the contraries in divinity.39 The other items in Section Two are more diverse and include apocalyptic, eschatological, as well as wider theological themes in the New Testament. There are those which relate to visionary texts or possible reference to visionary experience, and distinct themes in which a prophetic text like Revelation finds analogues elsewhere in the New Testament and discrete themes in the Book of Revelation. Less obviously related to the nature of apocalypticism is the essay on ‘The Temple in the New Testament’ (no. 19), but given that part of it is devoted to Stephen’s speech in Acts 7, which culminates with the report of an apocalyptic, vindicatory, vision, and also the absence of the Temple from the New Jerusalem in Revelation, that exploration has its place as a related theme to the apocalyptic and eschatological. The Third Section relates to reception history and focuses almost entirely on the Book of Revelation. The overview of the reception history of the Apocalypse is the most recent of three articles which I have written since 2000. Other essays touch on the issue of violence, images of Revelation, and individual interpreters, as well as apocalypticism and antinomianism. Themes from both Ezekiel and Revelation pervade Blake’s work (Section Four). For example, in Revelation, the Lamb, the Lake of Fire, the Beast and Babylon, to name but a few, appear in Blake’s texts and images. The indebtedness to Ezekiel, though not neglecting his vision of a New Jerusalem, is more the dramatic call vision and the four living creatures and the four faces which provide the inspiration for Blake’s exploration of human psychology, and the idiosyncratic mythology which is derived from it. This is expounded in detail in his unfinished The Four Zoas, also known as Vala (‘veil’, cf. 2 Cor. 3:12–18) and graphically depicted in the image of Ezekiel’s Chariot vision (Ezek. 1), where a four-faced human figure steps out of the picture to meet the viewer, with God looking down from his throne.40 The final pieces in the book (Section Five) offer a coda to the whole collection, echoing themes with which the introduction to this volume started. The first represents an attempt at the outset of my time in Oxford as Dean 38 L.W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (London: SCM, 1988); cf. C.B. Kaiser, Seeing the Lord’s Glory: Kyriocentric Visions and the Dilemma of Early Christology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014). 39 C. Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 74–78. 40 ‘Ezekiel’s Wheels’, Boston Museum of Fine Art; and see the front cover of Bennett and Gowler, Radical Christian Voices; also Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 19, 107, 141, 144, 224.

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Ireland Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture to offer an outline of the character of my intellectual journey at what was the halfway point of my career in university theological education. At that stage I had not embarked to any great extent on my study of the reception history of the Apocalypse, though some key intellectual ingredients do inform the lecture. The title of the inaugural lecture is a quotation from Prov. 31:8, which Dietrich Bonhoeffer used in the 1930s to describe the task of the church in raising its voice on behalf of the Jews. Being a ‘voice for the voiceless’ was a theme which I often came across in Brazil. The year I gave the inaugural lecture marked the centenary of the publication of Johannes Weiss’s epoch-making book about Jesus’ eschatological message and enabled me to mark the central role of eschatology and apocalyptic in New Testament studies. Since that lecture in 1992, over the last two decades, I have become as interested in the reception history of the Book of Revelation as I was when I first set out on my doctoral research when I began to explore the reception history of Ezek. 1 in all its variety and its impact on Christianity, as well as Judaism. Of course, in 1969–1970 I did not realise that the research in which I had embarked, on the effects of Gen. 5:24 and Ezek. 1, might be called reception history!

5. A Preview of the Essays in the Present Book 5. A Preview of the Essays in the Present Book

There follow brief outlines of the contents of the essays: Section One: The Nature of Apocalypticism 1. ‘The Visions of God in Apocalyptic Literature’. The diversity of appropriation in the texts examined suggests a speculative interest in Ezekiel’s throne-chariot vision. Also, the Book of Revelation is shown to be a key witness to the origins of merkabah mysticism. 2. ‘Apocalyptic Literature and Scripture’. This essay on the influence of texts from the Hebrew Bible on ancient apocalypses concentrates on the important role that the opening chapter of the prophecy of Ezekiel and Daniel’s vision of the human figure and the judgement of the beasts in Dan. 7 play. The final section considers some of the ways in which apocalyptic texts are related to earlier revelation particularly that vouchsafed to Moses on Sinai. 3. ‘Apocalyptic: The Disclosure of Heavenly Knowledge’. This survey article on apocalypticism complements another article in the Cambridge History of Judaism which regards apocalypticism as an evolution of the eschatology of the prophetic texts. By reference to early rabbinic engagement with Ezekiel, an attempt to define apocalyptic as access to divine wisdom through revelation is put forward. There is a survey of the texts and also assessment of the relationship between apocalypticism and gnosticism.

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4. ‘A Man Clothed in White Linen: Daniel 10:6ff. and Jewish Angelology’. This article is related to that on Rev. 1:13 (no. 10) and extends the discussion to include texts like Joseph and Asenath, the Apocalypse of Abraham and suggests the extent of the influence of the angelophany in Dan. 10. 5. ‘The Book of Daniel and the Radical Critique of Empire: An Essay in Apocalyptic Hermeneutics’. The contribution of Daniel to political critique is considered, and the writings of Thomas Müntzer, Gerrard Winstanley and William Blake are discussed. 6. ‘“A door opened in heaven”: A Comparative Study of the Character of Visionary Experience in Ancient Judaism and Christianity’. The purpose here is to make a case for considering that visionary experience lies behind at least some apocalyptic texts. Analogues with visionary texts from other cultures, religions and periods are used. Two former doctoral students who were working on this also contributed. 7. ‘Apocalyptic Literature’: The use of Scripture in apocalyptic texts suggests an indirect relationship to the originals. This survey in an encyclopaedia of the Bible and literature covers the biblical origins of apocalyptic themes and their reception, as well as giving consideration to important texts such as 1 Enoch and 2 Esdras, which in different parts of the Christian church have achieved canonical status. In addition there is also a section on the impact of apocalyptic ideas on English literature. 8. ‘Mysticism Recorded: Text, Scripture and Parascripture’. This essay explores the relationship between texts and imaginative interpretative engagement utilising the historical insights of Mary Carruthers (see also no. 30). There is a consideration of the hypothesis that there could have been a selfinvolving imaginative engagement with the text which at times could have unforeseen effects on the one practising this kind of engagement. 9. ‘“The heavens were opened and I saw visions of God”: The Open Heaven – Nearly Four Decades On’. This offers a retrospect on the thesis of The Open Heaven written nearly forty years ago. Its themes pervade the form and contents of this book. It also includes a section on apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls drawing on the work of John Ashton. Section Two: Apocalyptic, Eschatological and Related Themes in the New Testament 10. ‘The Vision of the Risen Christ in Rev. 1:13ff.: The Debt of an Early Christology to an Aspect of Jewish Angelology’. This article explores the indebtedness of the vision of the human figure in Rev. 1 to Jewish angelology, specifically Dan. 10. A trend is identified which suggests the separation of the human figure of Ezek. 1:26–27 from the throne of glory and the theological potential for emerging Christology which resulted from this.

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11. ‘Apocalyptic Visions and the Exaltation of Christ in the Letter to the Colossians’. This concerns the social problem dealt with in the Letter to the Colossians and it is argued that these included ascetic practice and a conviction about communion with the angels, which threatened the primacy of communion with Christ. 12. ‘John 1:51, Jewish Apocalyptic and Targumic Tradition’. This consideration of John 1:51 in the light of the targumic tradition of Gen. 28 leads to the suggestion that Jesus is the goal of the heavenly ascent and descent of the angels who come to see in him the mystery of God. 13. ‘Keeping Alive the Dangerous Vision of a World of Peace and Justice’. This short essay explores the function of apocalyptic and eschatological imagery and touches on the contrasting contemporary appropriations of these texts and the challenge they offer the reader. 14. ‘The Parting of the Ways: The Evidence of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic and Mystical Material’. In the uncertainties of life after the Fall of Jerusalem the apocalypses serve as less the satisfaction of curiosity and are more about the encouragement of ethical rigour. 15. ‘Apocalyptic, the Poor and the Gospel of Matthew’. This essay considers the indebtedness of the Gospel of Matthew to the Jewish apocalyptic tradition, themes which are taken up in my inaugural lecture at Oxford (cf. no. 43). 16. ‘Apocalyptic, Mysticism and the New Testament’. The themes explored in essay no. 1 are here related more explicitly to the New Testament, including Pauline texts, the Gospel of Matthew and Revelation. 17. ‘The Lamb and the Beast, the Sheep and the Goats: “The Mystery of Salvation” in Revelation’. This article (along with no. 23) explores the theme of inclusivity and suggests that Revelation is a text which does not encourage complacency but moral rigour. 18. ‘Apocalypse, Prophecy and the New Testament’. This is a piece (cf. no. 8) seeking to demonstrate the importance of the prophetic and apocalyptic strands in New Testament and includes a concluding discussion of hermeneutical issues. 19. ‘The Temple in the New Testament’. This was one of two papers produced for the Old Testament seminar in Oxford (see next essay) on a subject, which is very much at the heart of key New Testament texts and so a dominant feature of New Testament theology. It surveys all parts of the New Testament, but especially the Gospels, Acts, Hebrews and Revelation. 20. ‘Prophecy and the New Testament’. This was the second of two papers produced for the Old Testament seminar in Oxford (cf. previous essay). It indicates that prophecy’s centrality in the New Testament is a key to the comprehending of the diversity contained within it. 21. ‘“Intimations of Apocalyptic”: The Perspective of the History of Interpretation’. This contribution to a collection of essays which explores the

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implications for the study of the Gospel of John offered by John Ashton’s description of the Gospel as ‘an apocalypse – in reverse’ is to suggest that William Blake had also reached this conclusion in his Illustrations of the Book of Job. 22. ‘Joachim of Fiore and the Theology of the New Testament’. By reference to the apocalyptic writings and figures of Joachim of Fiore this article seeks to point to significant analogues with New Testament theology and the figures to whom the writings bear witness. 23. ‘The Apocalypse: Sensitivity and Outsiders’ (cf. No. XVII). Revelation does not have a consistent position on the theme of inclusivity. Instead, it offers a vision of a different kind of world, and the upheavals required to reach it. Revelation (like the Gospel of Matthew) is less interested in churches and more in what is required to exercise the prophetic vocation. By reference to the apocalyptic hermeneutics of the early Christian exegete Tyconius, this essay seeks to show that Revelation offers a visionary challenge and problematises assumptions about the identity of the ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. 24. ‘The Book of Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ’. This introduction to the Book of Revelation surveys the book in the context of related first century writings and in the light of its reception. It explores its significance for political theology, Christian eschatology and the ways in which it has inspired artists down the centuries. 25. ‘Paul as an Apocalyptist’. This perspective on the apocalyptic Paul focuses on the visionary heart of Paul’s life, which commenced with his ‘apocalypse of Jesus Christ’ and his call to be a divine agent. It also looks at the ways in which Paul managed and indeed ‘routinised the charisma’ of the apocalyptic legacy in the communities he established. 26. ‘“Eschatology properly understood, and acted on”: A Perspective on Eschatology in Honour of Andrew Chester’. This essay takes as its starting point Andrew’s book on eschatology and in particular his discussion of the work of Ernst Bloch and relates it to the studies of both Jacob Taubes and Walter Benjamin. 27. ‘Why Albert Schweitzer’s Writing on the New Testament Is So Important’. This personal tribute to Albert Schweitzer considers his contribution to the exegesis of the New Testament and also his willingness to integrate this with his life and Christian commitment. The focus of the piece is mainly Schweitzer’s advocacy of the primacy of eschatology for Christian origins. 28. ‘“Diversely and in many ways God spoke by the prophets”: The Perspectives of the New Testament and the Texts and Images of William Blake on the “Prophetic Word”’. This contribution to a conference on the prophetic word juxtaposes New Testament texts, particularly the Gospel of John, with the texts and images of William Blake, to stress the importance of the lived embodiment of the prophetic word.

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Section Three: The Reception of Apocalypticism and Its Significance 29. ‘Apocalypse and Violence: The Evidence from the Reception History of the Book of Revelation’. A contrast is offered between those who used prophetic and apocalyptic texts in their support for the eschatological war of the saints (e.g. Thomas Müntzer) with writers and activists who used the Book of Revelation to read the signs of the times and promote a peaceable kingdom (Gerrard Winstanley, Anne Wentworth and William Blake) 30. ‘English Radicals and the Exegesis of the Apocalypse’. This essay (like no. 29) explores the contrasting apocalyptic interpretation of seventeenth-century writers (a Fifth Monarchist, a woman prophet of the same period and two pacifists). There is a section on William Blake concluding with some hermeneutical reflections. 31. ‘Imagining the Apocalypse’. This was given as a plenary paper in Barcelona at the annual conference of Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas 2004. It draws on the preparatory work done for the 2004 commentary on Revelation for the Blackwell Bible Commentary series and considers the art in the Trier Apocalypse, also that of van Eyck, Dürer, Botticelli, the figurae of Joachim of Fiore, and William Blake. 32. ‘Tyconius and Bede on Violent Texts in the Apocalypse’. This piece in a book on violent texts offered me, and a colleague, Professor Ian Boxall, an opportunity to look more closely at the hermeneutic of Tyconius and his hermeneutical legacy, exemplified by the Venerable Bede, and to acknowledge the pervasiveness of the impact of Tyconian hermeneutics. 33. ‘“By an immediate revelation … by the voice of his own spirit to my soul”: A Perspective from Reception History on the New Testament and Antinomianism’. This is an attempt to show the important role that apocalyptic experience had as a superior source of authority as compared with received wisdom. Figures who are considered include Anne Hutchinson, Gerrard Winstanley and William Blake as well as key New Testament texts. 34. ‘The Reception of the Book of Revelation: An Overview’. This is the latest of my three surveys of the reception history of the Book of Revelation (the earliest being in 2000, and the second in the introduction to the 2004 commentary). It covers, literary, artistic, and hermeneutical issues. 35. ‘British Interpretation of the Apocalypse: A Historical Perspective’. Little known interpreters of the Book of Revelation complement mainstream exegesis in a collection put together by British-based New Testament scholars. It includes consideration of the work of Winstanley (covering an interpretation of Revelation not considered elsewhere in this volume), Jane Lead as well as William Blake. 36. ‘“Pride & Vanity of the imagination, That disdains to follow this World’s Fashion”: Apocalypticism in the Age of Reason’. The quotation from William Blake’s ‘Everlasting Gospel’ indicates emergence of a hege-

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monic rationalism, which was suspicious of the ongoing apocalyptic visionary tradition. Section Four: William Blake, Apocalyptic Poet and Painter 37. ‘Blake and the Bible: Biblical Exegesis in the Work of William Blake’. This is one of several survey articles on Blake and the Bible, focusing on Blake’s biblical exegesis, and his theological challenge and the way in which his work deliberately sets up ways of involving the viewers/readers of his work. 38. ‘William Blake and Ezekiel’s merkabah’. A brief introduction to merkabah mysticism paves the way to a consideration of the importance of Ezekiel’s merkabah mysticism for Blake’s thought, particularly his sense of Ezekiel as a living figure in his imaginative world and in his prophecy. Analogues with Jewish and Christian texts from the ancient and medieval periods are considered. 39. ‘“Mr. Blake, Apo- or Rather Ana-calyptic Poet, and Painter”: Apocalyptic Hermeneutics in Action’. Taking the hermeneutical typology used in my 2004 commentary on Revelation this essay considers Blake’s apocalyptic hermeneutics and contrasts them with self-proclaimed prophets of his own day (cf. no. 42). It supports S.T. Coleridge’s view that Blake was an ‘apo- or ana-calyptic Poet and Painter’. 40. ‘Blake: Text and Image’. This contribution to a multi-authored project on the Bible and the arts explores the way in which Blake used text and images together as a way of (as he put it) ‘rouzing the faculties to act’ thus stimulating the imagination of the viewer/reader. 41. ‘William Blake and the Apocalypse’. This introductory survey to the works of William Blake explores the character of his apocalyptic hermeneutics (cf. no. 42). 42. ‘Blake, Enoch and Emerging Biblical Criticism’. This piece was originally written in a volume in honour of John Collins. Contrasting an English and German view of the meaning of ‘apocalyptic’ are the background of this article on Blake and emerging biblical criticism and the importance of the publication of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch in that process. It also considers Blake’s role as one of the earliest commentators on the book in his sketches. Section Five: Coda 43. ‘“Open thy mouth for the dumb”: A Task for the Exegete of Holy Scripture’. My inaugural lecture as Dean Ireland Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture drew on words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and passages from the Gospel of Matthew (ch. 15), which had been part of the subject matter of my first lecture series in Oxford, to make the case for the importance of apocalyptic hermeneutics and the role of the socially committed exegete.

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44. ‘The Visionary Prophetic Performance of Scripture: A Tribute to Nicholas Lash (1934–2020), Norris–Hulse Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge, 1978–1999’. This essay here published for the first time is a tribute to Nicholas Lash. It has its origin in a lecture given at a conference to mark Nicholas’s retirement as Norris–Hulse Professor at Cambridge in 1999. His essay on the ‘performance of scripture’ is a brilliant exposition of the ‘self-involving’, performative, character of biblical exegesis, which seems to me to be an apt summary of the subject-matter of many of the essays in this volume.

6. Reflections 6. Reflections

It was part of the exegetical culture in which I was raised to want to illuminate the Bible by being able to relate documents and individual verses to particular ‘parallel’ texts. This was the motor behind the method I learnt. So, it mattered greatly to demonstrate that, for example, later rabbinic mystical texts reflect earlier ideas, which could have influenced the New Testament. When I wrote The Open Heaven, and at the start of writing The Mystery of God I was more interested in being able to trace genetic relationships between ancient Jewish and Christian texts, even if, as is the case with many Jewish texts, these came from centuries later than the Christian texts. I do not want to turn my back on this method. Indeed, I am still convinced that there was a visionary-experiential practice in parts of Second Temple Judaism, which might have made an impact on early Christianity, particularly evident in the Book of Revelation. Analogues may from time to time illuminate even if we cannot be sure of dependence of one author on another. Such a method has distinguished supporters from a previous era of biblical studies, as John Ashton has shown.41 An analogical method has proved indispensable in informing ourselves about these. What the analogical method offers is a ‘heuristic device’, which has in my experience thrown new light on the way familiar texts are construed. The extent to which visionary experience is reflected in apocalyptic and mystical texts of ancient Judaism, for example, is a much debated area, but analogues may help tease out what was going on when an application of the genealogical method leads too far from secure conclusions.42 For example, I cannot demonstrate that there was a visionary ecstatic tradition in Second Temple Judaism, though Revelation and indeed various Pauline texts suggest that this

41 J. Ashton, The Religion of Paul the Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 6–22. 42 For its importance in my work, see Bennett and Gowler, Radical Christian Voices, 5– 6.

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may have been the case, but the suggestive, illuminating, hints offered by an analogical method are probably the best we can do in finding parallels which will assist our understanding. Interpretation in its totality, however, is the telling of a story about what the text means. Included in that task is the history of interpretation. There has been a gradual recognition that the history of the influence of the biblical text has a crucial part to play in the understanding of Christian exegesis of the Bible. Wirkungsgeschichte is an attempt to be truly diachronic and appreciate the history of texts through time as a crucial part of their interpretation and an awareness of the effects the text has had on literary as well as visual, artistic exegesis. The modern period has witnessed a significant shift with the rise of the historical method at the end of the eighteenth century. If one examines postEnlightenment hermeneutics, a tradition of interpretation, based on the received wisdom of the Christian tradition through time, was replaced with a form of interpretation which either sat loose to that tradition of interpretation or rejected it completely. In its place there emerged an interpretation in which the exegesis of biblical texts was based on the relationship with texts, which were contemporaneous with them rather than on the history of the way those texts had been interpreted down the centuries. In fact, strictly speaking, it was a synchronic approach to the biblical texts, for they were set in the context of that which was contemporary with those texts rather than that which followed after them. Of course, the historical method as applied to the Bible has not eschewed an interest in the genesis of ideas and the influence of contexts, religious and literary on the biblical texts, which are a key feature of modern historical study. But the diachronicity is limited to the immediate antecedents and context of the biblical texts themselves. The emerging historicism meant a significant caesura with earlier patterns of interpretation. If one pleads for a more comprehensive diachronicity, it is not an appeal to return to the authoritative received wisdom of the Christian (or Jewish) tradition as the way in which the texts should be understood. Other understandings are needed of what constitutes the traditum. So my interest has moved over the years to a different kind of diachronic perspective, which concentrates less on historical antecedents and more on effects, whether or not such effects set in train a tradition of interpretation. But Harold Bloom was right to warn that creative interpretation may often mean a significant departure from that which is received, as those whom he calls ‘strong poets’ create imaginative space for themselves;43 there are few better examples of this than Blake, and certain of others who espoused an apocalyptic mode. But even in those situations, where an apocalyptic frame43

H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5.

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work is not used to maintain the status quo but to subvert it, we find the paradoxical situation of the fresh revelation often re-inscribing and so to some extent verifying the old, albeit in a form which differs from that which has been received and in which it was articulated. Indeed, we cannot understand the origins of Christianity without this kind of process in mind. In modernity, the writings of liberation theologians are a good example of fresh revelation re-inscribing and verifying the old. The radical challenge is accompanied by a return to the roots, repristinating that which had been lost.44 But this differs from the kind of heavenly endorsement given in 4 Ezra, where the angelic, apocalyptic, demand is for obedience to the particulars of that which has been received, not any reformulation of it. As already indicated, my growing interest in reception history has taken me back to where I started as a graduate student, when I was interested to explore how far early Christian texts were a part of the Wirkungsgeschichte of the merkabah, though I did not at that time see it in those terms! This story, as Michael Lieb has shown, from the Apocalypse via Dante to Boehme and Blake is in its way every bit as fascinating as elucidating the history of merkabah mysticism.45 The history of the study of ‘Apocalyptic’, and indeed of ‘Mysticism’, and ‘Eschatology’, in all their variety and complexity deserves elucidation. In that, as Gadamer stressed, ‘the real meaning of a text, as it speaks to an interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author and his original audience. … For it is always co-determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter’.46 Blake’s treatment of Ezekiel’s merkabah, for example, confirms Gadamer’s point. The hermeneutical task involves recognising the extent to which traditions of historical scholarship are themselves bound by their diachronic determinants.47 The task of each generation is not so much to be free of them but to be aware of the character and the probable all-pervasiveness of their influence. The title of this collection indicates the thread which runs from what I discovered in Scholem about the influence of Ezekiel’s merkabah vision and the stimulus it gave to later visionaries to the central theme in the writings of William Blake, the priority of ‘Inspiration’ over ‘Memory’.48 There is a wonderful window in the South Transept of Chartres Cathedral depicting the four evangelists each seated on the shoulders of one of the biblical prophets, Matthew on the shoulders of Isaiah, Mark on the shoulders of Daniel, Luke 44 Cf. D. Dawson, Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 45 Lieb, The Visionary Mode. 46 H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn. (London: Sheed and Ward, 1989), 296. 47 H. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974). 48 Rowland, Radical Prophet.

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on the shoulders of Jeremiah and John on the shoulders of Ezekiel (John the Evangelist and John the Seer are obviously deemed to be the same person, so it is not surprising given the importance of the prophecy of Ezekiel in John’s Apocalypse that this link should have been made). With regard to the Chartres window if John sits on Ezekiel’s shoulders, William Blake sits on the shoulders of both Ezekiel and John! The dialectic between ‘Inspiration’ and ‘Memory’, paralleling that between the ‘Now’ and the ‘Not Yet’, is a prominent theme in the New Testament, without which one is not going to understand the nature of its intellectual and theological contribution. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the Gospel of John. The Johannine Jesus claims a higher authority than the Law of Moses in what he has seen and heard from the Father. Indeed, the Gospel of John is a narrative of the power struggle over ‘immediate revelation’ as the basis for Jesus’ claim to be God’s agent in contrast with those who saw themselves as disciples of the Mosaic tradition (John 9:28). Apocalyptic was the impetus whereby the eschatological convictions were endorsed and was the mode of understanding their mysteries. The secret and hidden wisdom of God about the messiah (1 Cor. 2:7) and the nature of his coming is that to which the New Testament claims to bear witness and gives this collection their distinctive place among the writings from a Jewish provenance from antiquity and explains their continuing effective history.

Section One

The Nature of Apocalypticism

1. The Visions of God in Apocalyptic Literature* In recent years apocalyptic has once again assumed a much more important position in the study of the origins of Christianity, and so much more attention is being devoted to the apocalyptic literature of Judaism. Nevertheless all too frequently the use of apocalyptic material both from Jewish and Christian sources, especially in recent New Testament study, has tended to concentrate more on the eschatological elements of apocalyptic than to appreciate the apocalyptic phenomenon in its entirety. Indeed, it is common to find apocalyptic being used as a reference to a particular brand of eschatology, which includes characteristic elements like the distinction between the two ages and the cataclysmic intervention of God in history.1 As a result we have reached the stage where the significance of apocalyptic is at times almost totally dominated by its eschatological element. But it hardly needs to be pointed out that the eschatological features form only one part of the literature which we refer to generally by the term apocalyptic. Indeed, if we examine the best known of the non-canonical apocalypses, 1 Enoch, we find that only a relatively small section of this extremely diverse work is concerned with specifically eschatological themes. Much of what is contained in it can, however, with some considerable justification, be categorised as apocalyptic, for Enoch is frequently shown glimpses of things which are normally hidden from human perception, like the secrets of astronomy, the glories of the heavenly world, as well, of course, as the unveiling of the secrets of future history. Unfortunately concentration on this last mentioned subject has given a very one-sided view of the character of apocalyptic and its place within Jewish religion. Also it has blurred the extent of its relationship with movements like gnosticism with

* A paper originally delivered at the annual meeting of the British Association of Jewish Studies in Durham, July 19–20, 1976. 1 E.g. E. Käsemann who defines apocalyptic in the following way: ‘… I speak of primitive Christian apocalyptic to denote the expectation of an imminent Parousia’ (‘On the Subject of Christian Apocalyptic’, in idem, New Testament Questions of Today, trans. W.J. Montague [London: SCM, 1969], 109, n. 1). See also the criticisms of Käsemann by W.G. Rollins in ‘The New Testament and Apocalyptic’, NTS 17.4 (1971): 458ff. W. Schmithals in his book The Apocalyptic Movement: Introduction and Interpretation, trans. J.E. Steely (Nashville: Abingdon, 1975), tends to concentrate on the historical element in apocalyptic at the expense of other features. See e.g. ibid., 31.

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which it has been frequently contrasted.2 It seems to be the case that we are so used to thinking of apocalyptic in terms of the imminent winding up of the present world-order and the establishment of a new age that we miss the repeated emphasis in much apocalyptic literature on the revelation of things as they actually are in the heavenly world. Hence in certain parts of apocalyptic it is not so much the description of the last stages of the historical process which is to the fore but a mystical insight into another world and the perception of its secrets. Such elements point to apocalyptic being not merely a movement which was concerned primarily with the future of the world but with the world above, its secrets and its glory. Appreciation of this particular feature of much apocalyptic will enable us to discern an essentially noneschatological character to parts of the apocalyptic corpus.3 The material examined in this article falls into this category. One question it poses is whether a rigid distinction can be maintained any longer between apocalyptic and the early rabbinic esoteric tradition.4 The possibility of some kind of connection between certain facets of apocalyptic and the earliest form of mystical speculation in tannaitic circles would, of course, enable us to throw light on a rather obscure area of early rabbinic thought. The material from rabbinic sources concerning the maʿaseh merka2

There is evidence that some sort of relationship exists between some gnostic texts and the early Jewish merkabah traditions. This is apparent in The Excerpta ex Theodoto of Clement of Alexandria, ed. R.P. Casey (London: Christophers, 1934), section 38, a link noted by G. Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1960), 34. A link between gnosticism and merkabah mysticism has been suggested by others who have worked on the Nag Hammadi documents. See A. Böhlig, ‘Der jüdische Hintergrund in gnostischen Texten von Nag Hammadi’, in idem, Mysterion und Wahrheit, AGSU 6 (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 81–82; R.A. Bullard, The Hypostasis of the Archons, PTS 10 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1970), 111; J. Doresse, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics (London: Hollis & Carter, 1960), 285ff.; G.W. MacRae, Some Elements of Jewish Apocalyptic and Mystical Tradition and their Relation to Gnostic Literature, 2 vols. (PhD Diss., Cambridge, 1966); and O. Hofius, Der Vorhang vor dem Thron Gottes, WUNT 14 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1972). 3 This particular dimension of apocalyptic and later Jewish mystical writings has been especially relevant for the study of the Epistle to the Hebrews. See Hofius, Vorhang, and earlier C.K. Barrett, ‘The Eschatology of the Epistle to the Hebrews’, in The Background of the New Testament and its Eschatology: In Honour of Charles Harold Dodd, eds. W.D. Davies and D. Daube (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 363–393, especially 374ff. 4 On this link see especially G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 3rd rev. edn. (London: Thames & Hudson, 1955), 43; idem, Jewish Gnosticism; J. Maier, Vom Kultus zur Gnosis: Studien zur Vor- und Frühgeschichte der “jüdischen Gnosis”, Bundeslade, Gottesthron und Märkabāh (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1964); and idem, ‘Das Gefährdungsmotiv bei der Himmelsreise in der jüdischen Apokalyptik und Gnosis’, Kairos 5 (1963): 18–40.

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bah, for example, is beset with problems because of the small amount of evidence available, and any contribution which could be made by study of the apocalyptic material would be important. The passages on the earliest rabbinic speculation on the merkabah by R. Yohanan b. Zakkai and his circle are tantalisingly brief, and the information about R. Akiba and his contemporaries is even more difficult to evaluate. We cannot ascertain, for example, whether there was a fixed exposition of the biblical text of Ezekiel or whether a degree of freedom was permitted, to allow full rein to the speculation of the mystic.5 Any hope of shedding light on questions like these lies at present, at least for the earliest period, in the detailed study of parts of Jewish apocalyptic which deal with the subjects of special interest to the mystic, like the first chapters of Genesis and Ezekiel. That is not to suggest that we are in a position at the present time to say with any confidence anything about the kind of situation in which the visions of God, now preserved in the various apocalypses, were first formulated and handed down. At least we are able to compare the various visions of God and his heavenly court both with each other as well as with biblical examples and note if any changes and developments were taking place and thereby ascertain whether interest of a speculative kind goes back to an early period. Already in the first half of the second century BC Ezekiel’s vision of God gave him a place in the list of Israel’s heroes in Sir. 49:8. The Greek version simply records the fact that Ezekiel saw a vision of glory ‘which God showed to him on a chariot of cherubim’. In the Hebrew, however, we read that ‘Ezekiel saw a vision and spoke about the various qualities of the chariot’ (wygd zny mrkbh).6 Of much greater importance, however, is the earliest description of God’s heavenly court outside the Bible which is also to be dated in the first half of the second century BC or even earlier.7 In 1 En. 14:8ff. we 5 For a detailed analysis of the early rabbinic material see E.E. Urbach, ‘Ha-mesorot ʿal torat ha-sod bitequpat ha-tannaim’ (‘The Traditions about Merkabah Mysticism in the Tannatic Period’), in Studies in Mysticism and Religion: Presented to Gershom Scholem on his Seventieth Birthday by Pupils, Colleagues and Friends, eds. idem et al. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1967), 1–30; also J. Neusner, The Development of a Legend: Studies on the Traditions concerning Yohanan ben Zakkai, StPB 16 (Leiden: Brill, 1970), especially 249– 250; A. Goldberg, ‘Der Vortrag des Maʿasse Merkawa: Eine Vermutung zur frühen Merkawamystik’, Judaica 29 (1973): 4–23; and J.W. Bowker, ‘“Merkabah” Visions and the Visions of Paul’, JSS 16 (1971): 157–173. 6 zn (‫ )ז ן‬in 2 Chron. 16:14 is used in connection with the various kinds of spices used at Asa’s burial. 7 So Scholem, Major Trends, 44; and K. Schubert, Die Religion des nachbiblischen Judentums (Wien and Freiburg: Herder, 1955), 89. L. Rost, Einleitung in die alttestamentlichen Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1971), 104, thinks it dates from the first half of the second century BC. Precise dating of this passage depends to a large extent on its relationship with Dan. 7, with which it shares several elements in common, see H.H. Rowley, The Relevance of Apocalyptic: A Study of Jewish and Chris-

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have an extended account of Enoch’s ascent into heaven and the revelation of the mysteries of the heavenly world. It occurs in the context of Enoch’s mediation on behalf of the Watchers, who are seeking God’s forgiveness for their many sins committed after their descent into the world. In the process of his mediatorial activity Enoch is taken up to heaven, and, besides receiving God’s answer to the Watchers’ plea for mercy, he is shown in some detail the glories of God’s heavenly abode. There are clear indications that the description owes some of its ingredients to Ezek. 1 and Isa. 6. The reference to the wheel (1 En. 14:18) is perhaps the clearest evidence of the influence of Ezekiel, and the reference to the throne (ibid.) is almost identical to the Septuagint of Isa. 6:1.8 In the description of God there is continuation of the suggestive, if veiled, anthropomorphism of Ezek. 1:27 (1 En. 14:20), and the reference to God’s garment is most probably derived from Isa. 6:1. Yet despite the links with these biblical passages there are clear differences emerging in the vision of 1 En. 14. Unlike Ezek. 1 there is no mention whatsoever of the living creatures which play such a prominent part in that chapter (though cherubim are referred to briefly in vv. 11 and 18), and the concern of Ezek. 1 with the movement of the chariot has vanished completely. Much attention is now devoted to the heavenly abode which Enoch enters, its walls, its roof as well as its inhabitants. It is a place which is divided into two parts (vv. 10 and 15), a division which has suggested to some that a strong priestly influence has been at work on this particular vision, because of the division of the main part of the Temple into two sections.9 But apart from the fact that God’s dwelling consists of two parts, there is hardly enough similarity in detail to justify any but the assumption that the basic outline of the Temple would have been taken by many apocalypticists as a reflection of the court of God in heaven. Returning briefly to the question of the relationship with Ezek. 1, perhaps the major difference which we notice when comparing 1 En. 14 and Ezek. 1 (and one which is a feature of two of the other texts which we shall be examining) is the fact that now Enoch has to undertake an ascent into heaven before he can gaze upon the glories surrounding God. tian Apocalypses from Daniel to the Revelation, 2nd edn. (London: Lutterworth, 1947), 77ff., and J.A. Emerton, ‘The Origin of the Son of Man Imagery’, JTS 9 (1958): 225–242, and T.F. Glasson, ‘The Son of Man Imagery: Enoch xiv and Daniel vii’, NTS 23.1 (1976): 82–90. 8 The garment of God played a part in later Jewish mystical speculation, see Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, 56ff., and R. Loewe, ‘The Divine Garment and the Shiʿur Qomah’, HTR 58.1 (1965): 153–160. 9 See especially J. Maier, Kultus, 127, and idem, ‘Gefährdungsmotiv’, 18ff. There are several differences between 1 En. 14 and the arrangement of the Temple. For example, the cherubim seem to be in a different part of the heavenly palace from God. Enoch sees them early on in his vision (14:11).

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Moving on to a consideration of some aspects of the vision itself, we need to consider the following points. First of all we should note the brief description which is given of the way in which the heavenly world affected Enoch.10 In v. 13 he speaks of entering that house ‘which was as hot as fire and as cold as snow’. This is a strangely superfluous remark, especially when we consider that the vision itself is apparently merely part of a much larger story dealing with Enoch’s mediatorial activity. A similar comment relating to the experience of the visionary as he enters heaven appears in the Apocalypse of Abraham 17, where the patriarch describes his loss of balance as he approached God. The second point to note is the contrast between the description of God himself (the Great Glory) in 1 En. 14:20 with the restrained description of the figure on the throne in Ezek. 1:27. The qualifying nouns mrʾh and dmwt of Ezek. 1:26 are dropped, and, despite the fact that Enoch is said to be prostrate at the time, he manages to give a brief description of God, which, like similar passages in Dan. 7:9 and 1 En. 71:10, includes mention of his clothing. In addition, 1 En. 14:21 clearly indicates that God resembled human form despite the fact that the angels were unable to look upon him. In the later Slavonic Enoch the description of God is much more explicit than 1 En. 14:20, and we see a movement here towards the extravagance of the later shiʿur qomah. In this work we find that when Enoch returns to his sons he speaks in the following way about the glory of God: Vous, mes enfants, vous voyez mon visage à moi, homme créé semblable à vous, moi j’ai vu le visage du Seigneur comme un fer chauffé au feu, jetant des étincelles. Car vous, vous regardez les yeux d’un homme créé égal à vous, moi j’ai regardé les yeux du Seigneur comme les rayons du soleil qui luit, terrifiant les yeux de l’homme. Vous, mes enfants, vous voyez qui vous fait signe ma droite à moi, homme fait pareil vous, moi j’ai vu qui me faisait signe la droite du Seigneur, emplissant le ciel. Vous, vous voyez l’étendue de mon corps semblable au vôtre, moi j’ai vu l’étendue du Seigneur sans mesure et sans comparaison, qui n’a pas de fin.11

This catalogue of details about God’s person is clearly an advance on any of the early material and contrasts markedly with tendencies which we shall have reason to note later in other apocalyptic visions of God. 10 In later Christian mysticism the mystic sometimes comments on a sensation of heat, e.g. St. Philip Neri according to M. Trevor, Apostle of Rome: A Life of Philip Neri, 1515– 1595 (London: Macmillan, 1966), 40–41: ‘When Philip was intensely absorbed in prayer, he was subject to a trembling or shaking so powerful that it shook the bed he was sitting or lying on’ … ‘he could not control another effect of prayer, which was a sensation of heat, often excessive, in the chest and associated with the heart’. Cf. Catherine of Genoa’s experience mentioned in F. von Hügel, The Mystical Element of Religion, 2 vols., 2nd edn. (London: Dent, 1923), 1:178. 11 From A. Vaillant’s Livre des Secrets d’Hénoch (Paris: Institut d’études slaves, 1952), 37, noted by Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, 130. On the shiʿur qomah speculation see Scholem, Major Trends, 63ff.

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Another development as compared with Ezek. 1, and one which becomes a distinctive feature of several of the apocalyptic visions of God, is the inclusion of the rivers of fire (1 En. 14:19) which flow from under God’s throne.12 The origin of this imagery is by no means clear, but probably passages like Ezek. 1:13, 47:1, Exod. 19:16 and Zech. 14:18 have contributed to the origin of this particular element, which is to be found also in the theophany in Dan. 7:10 (‘The throne was fiery flames, its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and came forth from before him’). So it is apparent that in one of the earliest pieces of extra-canonical evidence of the vision of God there is no mere repetition of the scriptural exemplars, but there is definite development of interest in certain subjects which were only mentioned briefly in the biblical visions as well as the inclusion of elements which did not feature at all in them. In this it is probably justifiable to consider the possibility very carefully of the beginnings of a speculative interest in passages like Ezek. 1, even at this early stage. Among the texts discovered in Cave 4 at Qumran there is a brief and fragmentary description of the divine throne-chariot and its angelic attendants, dated by J. Strugnell, who first published it, in the first half of the first century BC.13 In it there is even clearer evidence than there was in 1 En. 14 of the influence of Ezek. 1. The reference to the chariot, its wheels, the firmament, the comparison of the rivers of fire to ḥšml and the frequent use of the noun mrʾh all indicate indebtedness to Ezek. 1.14 Indeed, some of the dominant interests of that chapter reappear, one example being the movement of the chariot and its wheels (line 3, cf. Ezek. 1:17). The cultic influence which made only a superficial impression on 1 En. 14 is much more prominent in this brief passage. If we accept Strugnell’s reconstruction of the first line of the text (and one has to admit that some of the readings are very conjectural), it would appear that the events described take place in the heavenly tabernacle. The cherubim feature more prominently here than in 1 En. 14, where they are mentioned in passing but not linked at all closely with God’s immediate presence. According to line 2 of the Qumran fragment, however, the cherubim are in close proximity to God’s throne (cf. 1 Kgs. 6:23), as, unlike Ezek. 1:22 and 10:1, where the firmament is above their heads, the

12 On this feature of Jewish uranology see further H. Bietenhard, Die himmlische Welt im Urchristentum und Spätjudentum, WUNT 2 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1951), 75. 13 J. Strugnell, ‘The Angelic Liturgy at Qumran – 4Q SEREK ŠÎRÔT ʿÔLAT HAŠŠABBĀT’, in Congress Volume Oxford 1959, VTSup 7 (Leiden: Brill, 1960), 318–345. References to the merkabah fragment follow the lines of the Hebrew text. 14 The use of rqmh (line 5), though derived from Judg. 5:30, may betray the influence of Ezek. 1:27. It may well have been inspired by the reference there to the rainbow which is not mentioned in the extant fragments of our text.

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cherubim are placed near the throne-chariot above the firmament.15 Also the reference to the throne-chariot itself in line 2 is probably influenced by the description of the cherubim-chariot in the Temple mentioned in 1 Chron. 28:18. We may compare 1 Chronicles’ tbnyt hmrkbh hkrwbym with the Qumran fragment’s tbnyt ksʾ mrkbh. Nevertheless, while there is clear influence from Ezek. 1 this passage too shows traces of independent ideas. For example, we find that once again the rivers of fire feature in the theophany (line 4), and, as we have already noted, the description of them uses the word ḥšml. This is suggested either by Ezek. 1:27, where it is used to describe the glory of the human figure seated upon the throne, or, more likely, by Ezek. 1:4 where it portrays the brightness of the fire flashing from the cloud. What is most noticeable about the fragments of this work which are now extant is that there is no trace whatsoever of the veiled anthropomorphism of Ezek. 1 and the fractionally more explicit descriptions of God’s form in 1 En. 14 and Dan. 7:9. Even though we are not in a position to be certain about the significance of this omission, it is worthy of note that the reference to the throne is not immediately followed by the description of the figure upon it, unlike the parallel passages in 1 En. 14 and Rev. 4, both of which follow Ezek. 1:26 in mentioning a figure on the throne. In later descriptions of God’s heavenly court we find that the various parts of the throne-chariot have achieved the status of angelic beings. This is most obvious in Hebrew or 3 Enoch where the ophannim have become an angelic band but is also apparent in the earlier vision of God contained in 1 En. 71:7 (‘And round about were cherubin, seraphin and ophannin and these are they who sleep not and guard the throne of his glory’). In line 3 it is quite clear that there is a definite parallelism between the movement of the wheels and that of the angels.16 The fact that this can already be found in Ezek. 1:19 and 10:16, where there is parallelism between the movement of the creatures and the wheels, might indicate nothing more than a borrowing from that source. The possibility that the ophannim have become more than merely part of the chariot becomes more likely when we compare the wording of line 3 (‘And as the wheels move the most holy angels return’) with Ezek. 1:19 (‘And when the living creatures move, the wheels move beside them’). In comparison with the passage from Ezekiel the ophannim in the Qumran fragment have 15 Strugnell, ‘Angelic Liturgy’, 337, rightly translates ‘the structure of the chariot-throne do the cherubim bless from above the firmament’, cf. G. Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962): ‘the cherubim bless the image of the thronechariot above the firmament’. In a passage like 2 En. 8 (Vaillant’s edn.) we find that the cherubim are situated in the sixth heaven, whereas God is in the seventh. 16 Strugnell, ‘Angelic Liturgy’, 339–340, is less enthusiastic about the possibility that the wheels of the chariot mentioned in this passage have become an angelic band but he does concede that they ‘may be on their way to becoming more than merely parts of the chariot’.

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taken the place of the living creatures in the first part of the sentence, and it is not, therefore, impossible that in the mind of the author of this text they cease to be merely parts of the chariot and now participate as a class of heavenly beings in their own right in the drama of the heavenly worship. Two other features which appear in later mystical material and which are to be found also in this text should be noted. The first is the use of words like dgl and mḥnh to describe the groups of angels around God in lines 7 and 8. In a work like 3 Enoch we read that ‘506,000 myriads of camps (mḥnwt) has the Holy One’ (35:1) and ‘all the angels and divisions (dglym) tremble with pain as they prepare to sing the qedushah’ (19:6). Secondly we should note that of the two occurrences of the word mrkbh one of these is to be found in a plural form (line 5). In Strugnell’s opinion this expression is certainly singular in meaning as it ‘is nothing more than an elative expression, the plural of majesty’.17 Admittedly we do have the singular form used in the first reference in line 2, but it is not absolutely necessary to suppose that this is a reference to the same chariot already mentioned, especially as the multiplicity of divine throne-chariots is a theme which is dwelt upon in some later texts. In 3 En. 24, for example, we find a series of scriptural passages intended to show that God had many chariots, and in the Visions of Ezekiel we read that: ‘R. Meir said that the Holy One created seven heavens, and there are seven chariots in them.’18 This is almost exactly the same kind of cosmology as in the Jewish-Christian Ascension of Isaiah which speaks of a series of seven heavens, in the lowest five of which thrones are placed. If we accept Strugnell’s view with regard to the significance of this plural form, it will not be possible to read anything more developed into the text, but it is a point which does deserve consideration especially as far as the later mystical material is concerned.19 This brief consideration of an important text suggests yet again but an increase in detail about the nature of God and his throne without any slavish dependence on the scriptural exemplars. The source of the imagery is never in doubt, but the use made of it indicates a clear willingness to develop views about the heavenly world in a highly idiosyncratic fashion. In the New Testament the best example of a vision of God and his heavenly court is to be found in Rev. 4. This chapter itself shows no evidence whatsoever of Christian influence, and, treated in isolation, it is quite clear that it

17

Strugnell, ‘Angelic Liturgy’, 328, n. 4; cf. J. Maier, Kultus, 135, and idem, ‘Gefährdungsmotiv’, 23ff. 18 From S.A. Wertheimer, Bate midrashot, vol. 11 (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1955), 130. 19 Cf. Wisd. 9:4: ‘Give me wisdom who sits beside your thrones’ (δός µοι τὴν τῶν σῶν θρόνων πάρεδρον σοφίαν) and a Hekaloth text (MS Oxford 1531), 56a (bottom): wʿl hmrkbwt ʿzk tthdr.

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is entirely Jewish in its inspiration. Indeed, the author obviously intends a deliberate contrast between the description of the divine court in Rev. 4 and the transformation which takes place as the result of the exaltation of the slaughtered lamb. This creature is then permitted to open the heavenly scroll, an act which ushers in the eschaton. In Rev. 4 there are obvious omissions as compared with Ezek. 1. Thus, for example, there is no mention made of the wheels of the chariot, but the links with that chapter are never in doubt with the inclusion of the rainbow as well as a detailed description of the living creatures which owes much to Ezek. 1 but contains some differences.20 Firstly it will be noticed that each living creature has been identified with one of the four faces of the creatures of Ezekiel (4:7). The description, therefore, is considerably simplified by having four different creatures in Revelation each with one face as compared with Ezekiel where, of course, there are four creatures each having four different faces. Secondly, in Ezek. 1:18 it is the rims of the wheels of the chariot which are full of eyes, but this particular feature is now transferred to the creatures themselves, a transference which can also be seen in the description of the angel Kerubiel in 3 En. 22:8 (cf. Rev. 5:6). Thirdly, the order in which the creatures are mentioned in Revelation differs from Ezek. 1 (Revelation: lion, ox, man and eagle; Ezekiel: man, lion, ox and eagle). Having noted the indebtedness of Rev. 4 to Ezek. 1 (and, it should be noted, to Isa. 6 in 4:8) let us move on to consider some of the details of the vision itself. As with Enoch, John of Patmos finds himself taken up to heaven,21 and the first thing which he notices there is a throne, mentioned without any attempt to describe it further.22 As in the Qumran fragment there is no explicit description of the figure on the throne, but the one seated upon it is said to resemble ‘jasper and carnelian’, words which occur in successive lines in Ezek. 28:13 in the description of the Urmensch. The fact that this 20 For a detailed study of the creatures in Revelation see J. Michl, Die Engelvorstellungen in der Apokalypse des hl. Johannes (München: Max Hueber, 1937), 5ff. 21 The New English Bible is probably right to paraphrase ἐγενόµην έν πνεύµατι, as ‘At once I was caught up by the spirit’, see R.H. Charles, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Revelation of St. John, 2 vols., ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1920), 1:111, and cf. the fragment of the Apocalypse of Zephaniah preserved in Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 5.21 (A.-M. Denis, Apocalypsis Henochi Graece: Fragmenta Pseudepigraphorum quae supersunt Graece, PVTG 3 [Leiden: Brill, 1970], 129): καὶ ἀνέλαβέν µε πνεῦµα καὶ ἀνήνεγκέν µε εἰς οὐρανὸν πέµπτον. On the door in heaven cf. Test. Levi 5:1 (and the material cited by Charles, Revelation of St. John, 1:107) and note the significant parallel in A. Dieterich, ed., Eine Mithrasliturgie (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1903): εἶτα ἄνοιξον ὀφθαλµοὺς καὶ ὄψει ἀνεῳγυίας τὰς θύρας καὶ τὸν κόσµον τῶν θεῶν. 22 This is typical of most of the early texts, e.g. Ezek. 1:26 dmwt ksʾ; Dan. 7:9 krswn rmyw; 4QŠiroth Šabbat ha-ʿolam 1 tbnyt ksʾ mrkbh; Apoc. Abr. 18:12: ‘over the wheels was a throne … this was covered with fire’. The only possible exception is 1 En. 14:18: θρόνον ὑψηλὸν καὶ τὸ εἶδος αὐτοῦ ὡσεὶ κρυστάλλινον.

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verse seems to have influenced the imprecise description of the one sitting on the throne suggests that the lack of anthropomorphic terminology is only superficial, and the use of these two words betrays the author’s acceptance of the anthropomorphism of Ezek. 1:26–27, even though it is subtly disguised by the imagery borrowed from Ezek. 28:13. Mention of a rainbow (4:3) is obviously influenced by Ezek. 1:28 though its resemblance to an emerald may once again indicate the influence of Ezek. 28:13. This possibility, together with the fact that the rainbow is here very closely linked with the throne itself, is probably an indication that, as far as John was concerned, the concluding words of Ezek. 1 (‘Like the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud on the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness round about’) applied not to the chapter as a whole, but specifically to the description of the throne and the figure on it with which it finishes. In God’s immediate presence there are other thrones (4:4), as in the Ascension of Isaiah (9:9), where, in the seventh heaven, the righteous are clad in garments of glory and have thrones and crowns. The origin of the number of the elders, a peculiar feature of Revelation, is not clear, but many have suggested with some plausibility that it is derived from the twenty-four priestly orders of 1 Chron. 24:7–18. In the light of the cultic influence which we have noted in other visions this explanation seems to be the most likely.23 Of course, the surrounding of God with his heavenly retinue is a familiar one from the Bible, e.g. Job 1–2 and Ps. 82:1. From God’s throne proceed lightnings, voices and thunderings, but there is no mention of the stream of fire which we noticed in the first two texts which we examined. Nevertheless Revelation probably does reflect this particular feature of the tradition, because we find that in Rev. 22:1 ‘a river of living water as clear as crystal’ comes out of God’s throne. Despite the pastoral setting in Paradise there is little doubt that, whatever the influence from Ezek. 47:1 and Zech. 14:8, the river is to be connected with the fiery stream because of the very close links with the throne of God. The seven lamps (4:5) go back to Ezek. 1:13 (cf. Exod. 26:35) where the burning fires in the middle of the living creatures are compared to torches (cf. 2 Chron. 4:7), though influence from Zech. 4:2 is certain also, not least because the interpretation of the seven lamps as the seven spirits of God resembles the pattern of Zech. 4:2 and 10, where the seven lamps too are interpreted in this case as being symbolic of the seven eyes of the Lord. It is worth noting also that in 3 En. 15:2 the angel Metatron is said to have on his right hand ‘divisions of fiery flames’ and on his left hand ‘fire-brands were burning’.

23

See the discussion in Charles, Revelation of St. John, 1:128ff. and Bietenhard, Die himmlische Welt, 57–58.

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Perhaps the most distinctive feature about the vision of God in Rev. 4 is the reference to the sea of glass (4:6). Unlike Test. Levi 2:7 (‘And I entered from the first heaven and saw a huge sea hanging there’), 2 En. 3:3 (‘They placed me on the first heaven and showed me a very great sea, greater than the earthly sea’) and Test. Abr. Rec. B 8 (‘And Michael went out and took Abraham in the body on a cloud and lifted him up to the river Ocean’), in all of which water is said to be in heaven, Revelation merely indicates that in the immediate vicinity of God’s presence there was something which appeared to resemble a sea. The influence of cultic ideas is not to be ruled out, for we know that in Solomon’s Temple a molten sea was to be found (1 Kgs. 7:23, cf. Josephus, Antiquities 8.79). The more likely origin, however, is probably Ezek. 1:22 where the firmament which separates the creatures from God is likened to crystal, as is the sea in Rev. 4:6. In addition we should not omit to mention Gen. 1:7 which speaks of the upper and lower waters in heaven which are separated by a firmament. Indeed the link between the water and the firmament here could explain the resemblance of the sea in Rev. 4 to crystal, for the juxtaposition of water and the firmament in Genesis could easily have led to the comparison of the firmament to crystal found in Ezek. 1:22. We know that Gen. 1:7 played its part in the early rabbinic meditation on creation (maʿaseh bereshith), for we read of Simeon Ben Zoma gazing upon the space between the upper and lower waters (t.Hag. 2:5 and parallels in b.Hag. 13a, y.Hag. 77b and Ber.R. 2:4).24 Some traces of this kind of interest can still probably be found in Revelation and may be another indication of the importance of apocalyptic literature for the study of the beginnings of Jewish mysticism. The reference to something which appeared to be a sea of glass appears again in Rev. 13:2. This time it is said to be mingled with fire, and from the context it is clear that it is compared to the Red Sea over which Israel crossed in triumph and was delivered from the hand of Pharaoh. Its fiery appearance presents a threatening aspect to the enemies of God who would wish to cross over it.25 Those who have remained faithful to God, 24 It is striking that the conclusion of Ben Zoma’s speculation about the extent of the gap between the waters is similar to the width of the molten sea in Solomon’s Temple. Cf. 1 Kgs. 7:26: ‘Its thickness was a handbreadth’, and b.Hag. 15a: ‘there is only a bare three fingers’ (breadth) between them (šlš ʾṣbʿwt blbd). The influence of Gen. 1:7 is also discernible in Cenez’s vision in Pseudo-Philo’s Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum 28, edited by G. Kisch (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1949), 149: ‘Et dum factum esset fundamentum, vidi de vena illa excitabatur quasi spuma ebulliens, et ecce demutavit se quasi in aliud fundamentum. Inter medium autem fundamentum superioris et inferioris, de lumine invisibili advenerunt quasi imagines hominum, et perambulabant.’ See also J.M. Ford, Revelation, AB 38 (New York: Doubleday, 1975), 73–74. 25 Charles, Revelation of St. John, 2:33, and H. Kraft, Die Offenbarung des Johannes, HNT 16a (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1974), 201.

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however, are permitted to cross over the sea and gain access to God’s presence. After crossing they sing a song of deliverance just as the Israel of old had done (Rev. 15:3, cf. Exod. 15:1). The significance of this particular reference to the sea, which offers a threatening aspect to those who would draw near God, can be illustrated by a famous passage which occurs in later rabbinic mystical texts. In it problems confront the mystic in his ascent to heaven when he may be confronted with something which may appear to be water in heaven but is in fact something quite different. In the longest version of the story of the Four who entered pardes, in b.Hag. 14b, Akiba warns his companions about a particular hazard when they come to the place of the pure marble plates, at which point they may be tempted to cry ‘Water, water’. He tells them not to be deceived by such an experience, because such a case of mistaken identity will not be tolerated in heaven.26 The inclusion of the sea of glass with its threatening aspect in Rev. 15 may well be an earlier recollection of a danger facing visionaries as they seek to identify the different contents of the heavenly world. The threat in this case does not manifest itself against those who have a mistaken view of heaven so much as against those who lack faithfulness at times of persecution (15:2). Compared with the first two texts which we examined the extent to which the description of God and his court in Rev. 4 moves away from the two most important biblical exemplars is nothing like as great. Yet here again we do not find mere repetition of biblical phraseology but the introduction of new ideas together with the omission of features which were more prominent in the originals. What is especially noteworthy about Rev. 4, certainly as compared with the Qumran fragment, is that Isa. 6 has a much more prominent role to play and is freely combined with Ezek. 1 (Rev. 4:8). Once again it is worth pointing out that this very brief passage with its distinctive features is incidental to the overriding purpose of the work as a whole, which is a

26

Shorter versions of this story without any reference to this particular incident are to be found in t.Hag. 2:3, y.Hag. 77b and Shir ha-Shirim R. 1:4, see further Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, 14ff.; J. Maier, ‘Gefährdungsmotiv’, 28ff.; and H.L. Strack and P. Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch, 4 vols. (München: Beck, 1922–1928), 3:798–799. A similar case of mistaken identity to that in the story in the Babylonian Talmud is to be found in the story of the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon in the Quran, Sura 27:44, noted also by W. Bousset, Die Offenbarung Johannis, KEK 16 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1906), 248–249: ‘Her false gods have led her astray because she comes from an unbelieving nation. She was bidden to enter the palace, and when she saw it, she thought it was a pool of water and bared her legs. But Solomon said, “It is a palace paved with glass.” “Lord”, she said, “I have sinned against my own soul. Now I submit with Solomon to Allah, Lord of all creation.”’ The queen is here deceived by the appearance of Solomon’s palace into thinking that some of it consists of water. This looks like a garbled version of a story which originally referred to the Temple where there was an object which was called a sea but which was in fact made of metal.

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message of hope and a warning to the churches in Asia Minor. When the communication of details about God and his heavenly court is not the purpose of the wider context in which the vision of God is placed, the differences and developments have greater significance than would have been the case if the overall purpose of the work was the revelation of heavenly secrets. The last example of a vision of God from apocalyptic literature is taken from the Apocalypse of Abraham (chs. 17–19), a work which is difficult to date with certainty but probably comes from the end of the first century CE.27 What small traces there are of Christian influence in this work (ch. 29) are not to be found in the section which directly concerns us. After preparing his sacrifice Abraham is taken up to the seventh heaven by means of the birds which are part of his offering.28 After his arrival in heaven Abraham sings the celestial song and is shown the throne of God, its environs and is given a glimpse into the future. The description of God’s throne stands even closer to Ezek. 1 than the three passages considered so far, with several parallels, e.g. the sound of many waters (17:1, cf. Ezek. 1:24),29 the living creatures (18:3) and the chariot and its wheels (18:11). As in Ezek. 1 each of the four creatures is said to have four heads (faces in Ezekiel), and like that chapter the wheels are said to be full of eyes (18:11, cf. Ezek. 1:18). This is a detail which is often omitted from descriptions of the throne-chariot, or, as in Rev. 4, transferred to the living creatures. The influence of Isa. 6 which we noticed in both 1 En. 14 and Rev. 4 is clearly discernible in 18:6 where Isa. 6 is once again combined with Ezek. 1 in the description of the wings of the creatures,30 but the passage is not without its distinctive features. One of the most unusual of these is the way in which the creatures threaten each other and the necessity for the angel who accompanies Abraham to go and prevent an attack of the creatures on each other (18:8–9). The threatening appearance of the creatures appears in 3 En. 1:

27

See A.-M. Denis, Introduction aux pseudépigraphes grecs d’Ancien Testament, SVTP 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 37; G.H. Box, The Apocalypse of Abraham (London: SPCK, 1918). 28 From other sources we know that it was thought that God had given Abraham a vision of the future on this particular occasion, see Fragment Targum on Gen. 15:17 and Targum Jonathan on Isa. 43:12. 29 Verse references are according to the translation in P. Rießler, Altjüdisches Schrifttum außerhalb der Bibel, 2nd edn. (Heidelberg: Kerle, 1966). 30 The problems of the relationship between Isa. 6 and Ezek. 1 are discussed in b.Hag. 13a: ‘One verse says, “Each one had six wings” and another verse says, “And everyone of them had four faces and everyone of them had four wings”. There is no contradiction; the one refers to the time when the Temple was no longer standing, as it were the wings of the living creatures were diminished. … Raba said, “All that Ezekiel saw, Isaiah saw. What does Ezekiel resemble? A villager who saw a king. And what does Isaiah resemble? A townsman who saw a king”.’ (Translation from the Soncino version)

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As soon as the princes of the merkabah and the flaming seraphim perceived me, they fixed their eyes upon me … I fell down and was benumbed by the radiant image of their eyes and the splendid appearance of their faces.

In this passage the creatures show their hostility against any intruder into God’s dwelling. Also in 3 En. 20 we find a reference to an angel (Ḥayyiel) who is set over the living creatures, and, like Jaoel, has the responsibility of directing their praise towards God. In the Apocalypse of Abraham Jaoel turns the heads of the creatures away from each other (18:9) and teaches them the song of peace. In 3 Enoch the angel smites the creatures with lashes of fire but glorifies them when they give praise to God. As far as the character of God himself is concerned, the trend which we noted in the Qumran fragment and Revelation is taken even further here, for, unlike Ezek. 1, no mention is made whatsoever of any human form sitting on the throne of glory. The omission must be considered a point of some significance,31 not least in the light of the extensive dependence on Ezek. 1 which is found throughout this section. All that the patriarch speaks of above the throne is ‘the power of invisible glory’ (19:5). Abraham stresses that he saw no other being there apart from the angels.32 There is no doubt that God’s presence is located within the most holy part of heaven above the throne-chariot itself, but every trace of anthropomorphism has been removed. There is not even the hint of it which we found in Rev. 4. This characteristic may have been the result of cultic influence, for in the Holy of Holies there was, of course, no physical representation of the deity,33 but one should not exclude the possibility that a deliberate attempt was made to exclude the anthropomorphism which plays a significant part in Ezek. 1:26–27 and other later reworkings of that chapter. After his ascent to heaven Abraham is taught to sing the celestial hymn of praise to God (Apoc. Abr. 17:7ff.). It is a hymn which Scholem considers to be a text ‘that more closely resembles a merkabah text than any other in Jewish apocalyptic’.34 As he points out, hymns like this one played an 31

One wonders if the stress on the emptiness of heaven is polemic against those whose view of God was too anthropomorphic, cf. A. Marmorstein, The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), 2:48ff. The invisibility of God is stressed in passages like Exod. 33:20, John 1:18 and Col. 1:15, cf. the Apocalypse of Zephaniah (see n. 21), where the angels praise the θεὸν ἄρρητον. 32 Another sign of the tendency towards spiritualisation in the Apocalypse of Abraham is that the angels in the sixth firmament are said to be ‘without bodies and of a pure spirit’. 33 Cf. Josephus’s description of the Holy of Holies in War 5.219: ‘The innermost recess … was screened in like manner from the outer portion by a veil. In this stood nothing whatever; unapproachable, inviolable, invisible to all, it was called the Holy of Holies.’ 34 Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, 23. There seem to be indications that Job’s daughters may have been uttering such heavenly hymns at the departure of their father according to Test. Job 48 (Testamentum Iobi, ed. S.P. Brock, PVTG 2 [Leiden: Brill, 1967]).

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important part in the preparation of the mystic to behold the glories of the merkabah, as well as being part of the songs which were sung in honour of God by the heavenly host.35 A cursory glance at some of the Hekaloth texts shows how frequent these hymnic passages are. Like the hymn in the Apocalypse of Abraham and the short hymnic passages which occur throughout the Book of Revelation (e.g. 4:8 and 11) they include an extensive recital of the attributes of God and his merkabah.36 Although in the Apocalypse of Abraham the recital of the hymn does not seem to be a necessary prelude to acceptance into the divine presence, it may be no coincidence that we are told that Abraham learnt to recite it before he came into the presence of God.37 After this survey of some visions of God in the apocalyptic literature what points can be made in conclusion? (i) The diversity in the usage of the first chapter of Ezekiel suggests that within the apocalyptic tradition there was an interest in this chapter for its own sake, and, despite the present context of the visions the very variety is an indication that the vision was more than merely a backdrop to the more important revelation of eschatological mysteries. The differences which emerge between the various texts themselves as well as compared with the biblical exemplars point to a continuing speculative interest rather than a strictly ordered and well-defined exposition.38 The way in which other biblical imagery merges into the production of the various visions may all point to a setting in which a free meditation took place on the chariot-chapter, so that, as in Revelation, the visionary’s own experience could make an important contribution to the ‘seeing again’ of Ezekiel’s vision. (ii) We cannot assume that, because cultic influence can be so frequently detected, the visions must have arisen within priestly circles. The degree of influence of cultic language varies between the different works, and some influence from this particular area is inevitable because the Temple was the place where, above all others, God’s presence dwelt, and the characteristics of that building would inevitably colour the descriptions of heaven. (iii) In the first three works which we have considered there was little trace of the developed cosmology of, for example, b.Hag. 12b and the Ascension of 35 See the examples of this material in Hekaloth Zutarti (MS Oxford 1531) and Hekaloth Rabbati 24 in A. Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch, 6 vols. (repr., Jerusalem: Wahrmann, 1967), 3:100. 36 On the hymnic passages in Revelation see R. Deichgräber, Gotteshymnus und Christushymnus in der frühen Christenheit, StUNT 5 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967), 44ff. 37 Participation in the heavenly worship precedes Isaiah’s description of the descent of the Redeemer in Asc. Isa. 9:27ff. 38 A set pattern of exposition of the merkabah-chapter seems to be presupposed by b.Hag. 13a (and by the words šnh ly prq ʾḥd bmʿsh mrkbh in b.Hag. 14b), where exposition seems to be divided up into fixed sections following the order of the biblical text.

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Isaiah. This type of cosmology is apparent, however, in the Apocalypse of Abraham, almost certainly the latest work which we have examined. Nevertheless there were already clear traces in 1 Enoch of a tendency to separate heaven into different parts through which Enoch has to journey before he can finally reach God’s presence. It is hardly surprising, therefore, to find, as cosmological speculation developed, that there was the need of a heavenly ascent before the visionary could gaze upon God’s throne. (iv) We have noted a tendency in our examination of the various passages to move away from anthropomorphic conceptions to the position in the Apocalypse of Abraham (and in all likelihood the Qumran fragment) where there is no suggestion whatsoever that a figure was seated upon the throne of glory. Alongside this development there is an interesting phenomenon emerging in the last two works examined. The reluctance to use anthropomorphic terminology is matched by the development of an interest in an exalted angelic figure with divine attributes, who is, of course, given the form of a man. In the Apocalypse of Abraham we find that the angel Jaoel is said to have God’s name dwelling in him, and in Rev. 1:13ff. the description of the glorified Christ derives in part from the description of the angel who appears to Daniel in Dan. 10:6, but he is also given attributes of God himself derived from Dan. 7:9. Thus it would appear that the interest in God’s form on the throne of glory which plays a small, but significant, role in Ezek. 1 and 1 En. 14 is now fulfilled, to some extent at least, by the reference to a glorious angelic being endowed with divine attributes. (v) The appearance of certain merkabah traditions in the recently published gnostic texts from Nag Hammadi suggests that parts, at least, of the apocalyptic tradition may have had a role in the formation of gnostic religion.39 The tendency to separate apocalyptic and gnosticism as different kinds of spirituality must be questioned. Apocalyptic must be recognised as an important, indeed invaluable, source for the reconstruction of the origins of Jewish mysticism, even if at present we are not in a position to ascertain whether it is the parent of the kind of meditation which was practised among the rabbis and, for that matter, the predecessors of the rabbis who flourished before the fall of Jerusalem.40 39

See above, note 2. In addition to the works already mentioned perhaps the clearest evidence of influence from the merkabah traditions of Jewish apocalyptic occurs in the socalled Titleless Work from Nag Hammadi (A. Böhlig and P. Labib, eds., Die koptischgnostische Schrift ohne Titel aus Codex II von Nag Hammadi im Koptischen Museum zu Alt-Kairo [Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1962]). 40 For the suggestion that apocalyptic is merely the esoteric tradition of the scribal schools see J. Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, trans. F.H. and C.H. Cave (London: SCM, 1969), 239. Doubt must be cast upon the arbitrary division between the apocalyptic and early rabbinic experiences suggested by J. Maier, Kultus, 17, and idem, ‘Gefährdungsmotiv’, 28; cf. also M. Smith, ‘Observations on Hekaloth Rabbati’, in Biblical and Other

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Whatever its precise background this material from the apocalyptic literature offers us a much needed means of ascertaining the character of the earliest meditation on Ezekiel and the important role it played in the Jewish religion of the period.41

Studies, ed. A. Altmann (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 142–160, at 155. It cannot be doubted that human initiative did play just as important a role in the apocalypticist’s experience as it did in rabbinic tradition. The problem of being found acceptable was just as important in apocalyptic, see, for example, Asc. Isa. 9:1–3 and Dan. 10:1ff. 41 On this see particularly I. Gruenwald, ‘Knowledge and Vision’, IOS 3 (1973): 63ff., and idem, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, AGJU 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1980). On the essence of apocalyptic see e.g. M.E. Stone, ‘Lists of Revealed Things in the Apocalyptic Literature’, in Magnalia Dei, the Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, eds. F.M. Cross et al. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976), 414ff., and the essays in Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre, ed. J.J. Collins, Semeia 14 (Missoula: SBL, 1979). Among other works published recently relevant to the subject of this article mention should be made of G.A. Wewers, Geheimnis und Geheimhaltung im rabbinischen Judentum, RGVV 35 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975); and F.T. Fallon, The Enthronement of Sabaoth: Jewish Elements in Gnostic Creation Myths, NHS 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1978).

2. Apocalyptic Literature and Scripture The fact that Scripture is quoted explicitly so infrequently in the apocalypses should not lead us to suppose that the whole process of scriptural interpretation was a matter of little or no concern to the writers of the apocalypses and the unknown visionaries concealed behind them. Those who have studied the Book of Revelation will know that, while it may be true to say that Scripture is not formally cited by the author, allusion to the Bible is to be found in virtually every verse. The extant Jewish apocalypses do not set out to make obvious connections with particular biblical passages.1 However, the absence of such clear-cut connections should not lead us to suppose that the material has only tenuous links with the Scriptures, for the apocalypses do not set out to be in the first instance biblical commentaries. The links that there are will frequently be allusive and indirect. Thus an analysis of the way in which Scripture is used needs to follow a more subtle approach, allowing full weight to the often allusive character of reference to Scripture and the complexity of the relationship. But first it is necessary to specify which works will be considered as examples of apocalypses. There has been much discussion recently about the genre of the apocalypse, from which there has emerged a surprising amount of agreement on which works should be included within the corpus of apocalyptic literature.2 There has been debate about the status of the Sibylline Oracles and the Book of Jubilees. The latter will be considered here because, in formal terms at least, it claims to belong to the category of revelatory literature. The works which will be given particular consideration are as follows: 1 Enoch, 2 Enoch, 4 Ezra, Syriac Baruch, the Apocalypse of Abraham, the Testament of Abraham, Jubilees, the Testament of Levi, Daniel and Greek Baruch. All of them were written in the period ca 300 BC to AD 100, though the places of origin are probably diverse (2 Enoch and the Testament of Abraham probably being products of Egyptian Judaism).3 1

M.E. Stone, ‘Apocalyptic Literature’, in Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period, ed. idem, CRINT 2.2 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1984), 390. 2 See J.J. Collins, ed., Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre = Semeia 14 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979); and C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982). 3 See J.J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora (New York: Crossroad, 1983).

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The first two sections of this study will deal with explicit quotations of Scripture, concentrating on those passages from Ezekiel and Daniel which give some indication of the character of the interpretative process which was going on. The third section will focus more particularly on what one may term the distinctive use of Scripture in the apocalypses, a feature which sets the apocalypses apart from the other extant literature of the Second Temple period. Analysis of the use of Scripture in the works mentioned here would be too large a task to cover in the space available in this essay. The aim is a much more modest one: to confirm that we are dealing with works where the use of Scripture (by whatever means) is an essential ingredient of their character; and to analyse some of the key passages of Scripture which have contributed to the outlook of the apocalypses. It is most important that we recognise that in considering the use of Scripture in the apocalypses we do not expect the kind of explicit midrashic activity which is to be found, say, in a rabbinic commentary or a retelling of the biblical narrative such as we find in the Biblical Antiquities of Pseudo-Philo.4 Detailed examination of the apocalypses has indicated how much these are indebted to parts of the prophetic books of the Bible.5 The emergence of a hope for the future in the period of the Second Temple is a subject which demands more detailed consideration than is possible here, taking fuller account of the varied circumstances in which the different works emerged. While we must always recognise the variety of eschatological belief, there does appear to have emerged a certain degree of uniformity in the expectation of a restored Israel as the centre of a new world order of peace and righteousness following a period of disaster and cataclysm which would affect the whole of humankind. In the emergence of these ideas certain key passages seem to have played their part. Thus we find that the extended description of the messianic age in Isa. 11 has contributed to the future hope in passages like 1 En. 62:2; 4 Ezra 13:10, cf. Ps. Sol. 17:27. Also, the doctrine of the so-called messianic woes, which has its origins in the prophetic predictions of disaster for Israel and Judah (e.g. Isa. 13:10; 34:4; Jer. 4:12; 21:7; Ezek. 13:11) emerges in passages like Dan. 12:1, and Syr. Bar. 25ff., where it finds its most systematic presentation outside the Book of Revelation (chs. 6 and 16). Similarly, while it may not be easy to pinpoint with exactitude which scriptural passages have contributed to specific messianic doctrines in these works, the general contours of the belief are to be derived from the central importance of 2 Sam. 7:14 and Deut. 18:15 as an impetus for future hope in later periods (e.g. Ps. 89 and 132; Ps. Sol. 17).

4

Stone, ‘Apocalyptic Literature’, 391. L. Hartman, Prophecy Interpreted: The Formation of Some Jewish Apocalyptic Texts and of the Eschatological Discourse, Mark 13 par., ConBNT 1 (Lund: Gleerup, 1966). 5

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This underlying indebtedness to Scripture needs to be stressed because a superficial glance at the eschatological material in the apocalypses would give an impression of having little contact with Scripture. Such an impression would, in all likelihood, be the result of the particular forms in which such future hopes are couched. Thus, the visions of the cedar and the vine and the black and bright waters in Syriac Baruch, the man rising from the sea and the eagle in 4 Ezra, the vision of the ram and the he-goat in Dan. 8, and the Animal Apocalypse and the Apocalypse of Weeks in 1 Enoch couch their eschatological hope in the distinctive imagery which characterises the dream visions of the apocalypses. This imagery in itself is in essential continuity with some of the more exotic prophetic texts like Ezekiel, where prophetic symbolism is evident, and the early chapters of Zechariah (1–8), where scholars have recognised antecedents to apocalyptic symbolism. But behind the particular forms of the symbolism, which is highly idiosyncratic and may only with difficulty be related to specific scriptural archetypes, there lies an outline of a common doctrine of the future hope which concentrates on the twin items of disaster followed by a this-worldly age of peace and righteousness. The particular form (and extent) of messianic doctrine differs between the various documents. Thus, for example, the participation of gentiles is not universally mentioned. There is, however, sufficient uniformity of eschatology and connection with Scripture to find here a logical extension of the biblical archetypes in a different age, and an outlook which the apocalypses share with other Jewish texts mediating the biblical tradition in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. In this essay I shall seek to explore some of the distinctive patterns of biblical interpretation, which are to be found in the Jewish apocalypses of the Second Temple period and the years immediately following the destruction of the Temple. No attempt will be made to offer a complete survey of all the references and allusions to Scripture found in these texts. The goal is a much more modest one. It consists of laying bare the character of the scriptural usage by focusing on the influence of certain key passages and on the peculiar relationship which this revelatory literature has with the paradigmatic revelation of God to Moses on Sinai.

2.1. The Impact of Ezekiel 1 on the Apocalypses First of all, I want briefly to go over ground which I have covered elsewhere, namely, the way in which the first chapter of Ezekiel has contributed to the way in which the immediate environs of God are described in those apocalypses, which speak of a heavenly ascent to the throne of God.6 It is now 6 C. Rowland, ‘The Visions of God in Apocalyptic Literature’, JSJ 10 (1979): 137–154 = above, pp. 29–45; cf. I. Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, AGJU 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1980).

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widely recognised that these descriptions of the divine throne owe their inspiration principally to the first chapter of Ezekiel, though it is apparent that Isa. 6 has also been incorporated (e.g. 1 En. 14; Dan. 7 and 9; Apoc. Abr. 17; Test. Abr. 11; Rev. 4; 4QŠiroth Šabbat ha-ʿolam; 2 En. 22). These passages are widely regarded as important pieces of evidence for the character of the Jewish mystical tradition in the Second Temple period and are in all probability the starting point for that tradition which developed via the Hekaloth texts of the early centuries of the Christian era to the medieval Kabbalah.7 There has been much debate recently about the character of that tradition, with the earliest rabbinic texts related to the first chapters of Ezekiel and Genesis being subjected to detailed scrutiny. On the one hand there are those who consider that the evidence indicates that the study of Ezekiel involved a seeing again of Ezekiel’s vision by the apocalyptists and rabbinic mystics.8 On the other hand there are those who argue that the material (particularly the rabbinic sources) will not bear the weight of such an interpretation and prefer to see the references as indicating a midrashic activity connected with these chapters, which did not differ substantially in the earliest period from that connected with other parts of Scripture.9 No doubt the debate about the precise setting in which Ezekiel was used and interpreted in these texts will continue to be a subject for debate and elucidation. Nevertheless there can be little doubt that what we have in this use of Ezek. 1 is clear evidence of variant expansions of the chapter, in which various elements are either expanded or ignored, and where the very variety of usage indicates the versatility of the interpretative process even if the ultimate inspiration of the texts is not in doubt. Particularly worthy of note is the fact that in the apocalyptic texts the vision of the merkabah is preceded by an ascent to heaven. This is a notable development as compared with the biblical exemplars. Although Isaiah believes that he can be part of the heavenly court during the course of his callvision in the Temple (Isa. 6, cf. 1 Kgs. 22:16), there is no suggestion that this involves an ascent to the heavenly world. We probably have no way of knowing whether the descriptions of God’s throne in the apocalypses with their amalgam of various biblical passages are the product of conventional exegetical activity carried on in the confines of scribal activity. But the possibility should not be ignored that in the study of Scripture creative imagination could have been a potent means of encouraging the belief that the biblical

7

Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism; G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 3rd rev. edn. (London: Thames & Hudson, 1955). 8 Scholem, Major Trends; idem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition, 2nd edn. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1965); Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism; and Rowland, The Open Heaven. 9 D.J. Halperin, The Merkabah in Rabbinic Literature, AOS 62 (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1980).

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passages were not merely written records of past events but vehicles of contemporary manifestations of the divine. That, of course, is precisely what the writer of the New Testament Apocalypse asserts in speaking about being ‘in the spirit’ (Rev. 4:2, cf. 1:9). Such indications, when taken together with the obvious absence of the kind of orderly exegetical activity which we find in contemporary biblical commentaries, should make us wary of ruling out the possibility of the biblical text being in the imaginations of the apocalyptic visionaries; a door of perception in which the text could become a living reality as its details merged with parallel passages to form the distinctive visions of heaven now found in some of the apocalypses. A related creative use of the prophecy of Ezekiel can also be discerned in the way in which certain aspects of its theophany have been taken up in the Book of Daniel and have contributed to an emerging angelomorphic tradition in Judaism. While one needs to recognise that the stock of biblical angelomorphic categories which could be used by the apocalyptic visionaries was strictly limited and that the common features in various angelophanies could in part be explained in this way, there seems to be sufficient evidence to suppose that various texts do owe their inspiration to an often complex tradition whose origin is ultimately Ezek. 1 and 8 but to which passages like Dan. 7 and 10:5 have contributed.10 The impact of Scripture is also apparent in another area of the apocalypses: those stories of biblical heroes, which so often provide a framework (usually at the start of apocalypses) for the revelations of divine secrets which follow. In the earliest apocalyptic material in 1 Enoch, the story of the sin of the sons of God is linked with the emerging Enoch saga, to provide an extended account of the sin of the angels, their rejection by God, their pleas for repentance, and Enoch’s intercession and their final condemnation.11 Elsewhere the sacrifice of Abraham in Gen. 15 offers the basis of an account of Abraham’s ascent to heaven in which the sacrificial victims provide the means of ascent for the patriarch and the angel Jaoel. The closely related 4 Ezra and Syriac Baruch, which were written in the aftermath of the fall of Jerusalem,12 have been placed in a similar environment in Israel’s previous history. Syriac 10 C. Rowland, Christian Origins: An Account of the Setting and Character of the Most Important Messianic Sect of Judaism (London: SPCK, 1985; rev. edn. 2002); J.E. Fossum, The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord: Samaritan and Jewish Concepts of Intermediation and the Origin of Gnosticism, WUNT 36 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1985). 11 J.C. VanderKam, Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition, CBQMS 16 (Washington: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1984); P.D. Hanson, ‘Rebellion in Heaven, Azazel and Euhemeristic Heroes in 1 Enoch 6–11’, JBL 96 (1977): 195–233; G.W.E. Nickelsburg, ‘Apocalyptic and Myth in 1 Enoch 6–11’, JBL 96 (1977): 383–405. 12 W. Harnisch, Verhängnis und Verheißung der Geschichte, FRLANT 97 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969).

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Baruch is set in the period immediately preceding and following the destruction of the city and 4 Ezra, somewhat awkwardly connected with the period of Ezra the scribe, reflects the situation after the destruction. There has been much discussion about the precise literary genre of the Book of Jubilees.13 It is frequently (and with some justification) linked with the retelling of Israel's history as is to be found in Pseudo-Philo and the Genesis Apocryphon. But the revelatory framework is not in doubt: the work is said to be a revelation by an angel to Moses. It is placed on a similar level to the Torah itself as divine revelation and in this respect resembles the Temple Scroll (11QT). Other apocalyptic works like Slavonic Enoch and the Testament of Levi utilise the testament form and incorporate the visionary material into deathbed pronouncements by the patriarch.14 Much of the material we find in the apocalypses seems to have only a tenuous relationship to specific Old Testament passages with indirect connections emerging via common use of scriptural material from the common stock of belief and practice as it had emerged over the centuries. But when specific passages are subjected to minute examination, as has been carried out, for example, by Hartman and Knibb, the contribution of various scriptural passages becomes apparent.15 Knibb has investigated the way in which the Books of Job and Genesis and Daniel (treated briefly below) have influenced 4 Ezra. Thus he notes the way in which Job 38, (as well as other aspects of the wisdom tradition) underlies 4 Ezra 4:7–8, and the common dialogue form in both works. Elsewhere he notes that 4 Ezra 3:4ff. and 6:38ff. are dependent on the early chapters of Genesis, and 7:32ff. may be a midrash on Exod. 34:6–7. While the vision of the eagle and the lion and the man from the sea in chs. 12 and 13 take their inspiration from Dan. 7, other Old Testament passages have in Knibb’s view played their part, e.g. Ps. 46:6, 97:5, Mic. 1:4 in 13:4; Isa. 11:4, Ps. 18:8 and 13 in 13:10; and Isa. 66:20 in 13:13. Knibb reminds us that the wide range of this material serves as a … warning against the attempt to tie the apocalyptic writings, or at least this particular apocalypse, down to a single stream of tradition within the Old Testament. … As a kind of interpretative writing, 4 Ezra takes its place alongside other forms of interpretative literature.16

These comments about 4 Ezra are a timely reminder that we are not dealing in the apocalypses with a phenomenon fundamentally opposed to the outlook of the Torah. Those who find in the apocalypses a religious stream, which is 13

Rowland, The Open Heaven, 51. E. von Nordheim, Die Lehre der Alten, ALGHJ 13 (Leiden: Brill, 1980). 15 Hartman, Prophecy Interpreted; idem, Asking for Meaning: A Study of 1 Enoch 1–5, ConBNT 12 (Lund: Gleerup, 1979); M.A. Knibb, ‘Apocalyptic and Wisdom in 4 Ezra’, JSJ 13 (1982): 56–74. 16 Knibb, ‘Apocalyptic and Wisdom in 4 Ezra’, 73. 14

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somehow opposed to the Torah, have to ignore the indebtedness which commentators like Knibb have noted. To make the apocalypses a vehicle of salvation history among those circles opposed to the legal concerns of the scribes and proto-rabbis is to play down the importance of the apocalyptic tradition for rabbinic Judaism and to relegate the importance of the Torah in the apocalypses.17

2.2. The Importance of Daniel 7 Recent study has indicated that the apocalyptic texts themselves are in part the exposition of Scripture. Nowhere is this process better exemplified than in the case of the Book of Daniel, and, in particular, its seventh chapter, which has had a significant impact on a variety of later writings both Christian and Jewish.18 But it has also contributed both explicitly and implicitly to several of the apocalypses, notably 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra, in the latter case involving an explicit attempt to reinterpret the meaning of the text by reference to angelic revelation (4 Ezra 12). There is every likelihood that Dan. 7 itself forms part of a longer tradition of interpretation in which biblical and possibly much older Semitic sources have contributed to the stock of images now contained in it. With regard to the latter there have been those who have found clear affinities with the Ugaritic material.19 But there are biblical passages which have also been pointed out as possible resources for the distinctive imagery contained in this chapter.20 There have been those who have wanted to find a resurgence of messianism stemming from Ps. 2 and its picture of the victory of the Lord’s anointed over his enemies. But much closer to hand are the affinities with the merkabah tradition already alluded to earlier in this chapter. The connections with Ezek. 1:26–27 have often been noted with the throne, fire and human figure in 7:9 and 7:13. But we cannot ignore the superficial contacts which 17 See A. Nissen, ‘Tora und Geschichte im Spätjudentum’, NovT 9 (1967): 241–277; cf. D. Rössler, Gesetz und Geschichte: Untersuchungen zur Theologie der jüdischen Apokalyptik und der pharisäischen Orthodoxie, WMANT 3 (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1960). 18 M. Casey, Son of Man: The Interpretation and Influence of Daniel 7 (London: SPCK, 1979); G.K. Beale, The Use of Daniel in Jewish Apocalyptic Literature and in the Revelation of John (Lanham: University Press of America, 1984); Hartman, Prophecy Interpreted; idem, Asking for Meaning; and R. Kearns, Vorfragen zur Christologie 2: Überlieferungsgeschichte und rezeptionsgeschichtliche Studie zur Vorgeschichte eines christologischen Hoheitstitels (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1980). 19 J. Day, God’s Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea: Echoes of a Canaanite Myth in the Old Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and earlier C. Colpe, ‘ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου’, TDNT 8 (1972): 408–420. 20 S. Niditch, The Symbolic Vision in Biblical Tradition (Diss. Harvard, 1977).

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are to be found in the major preoccupation of both chapters with the four beasts/creatures, which in Ezekiel have four faces (man, lion, ox and eagle), whereas in Daniel the four beasts are identified as a lion with eagle’s wings to which the mind of a man was given, a bear, a leopard and the terrible strong beast with horns. Whether in the visionary imagination the creatures of Ezekiel might have been the raw material for the vision of Dan. 7:1–8 we cannot be certain, but the similarity deserves to be noted. Because of its importance for early christology, Dan. 7 has been the subject of detailed examination over the recent decades, and it is superfluous to go over the ground in detail once again. Nevertheless there is some point in indicating how the exegetical possibilities, which have dominated and polarised study of this chapter among contemporary exegetes, are in no small part the result of the ambiguities of the chapter itself, not least in the place which the Son of Man figure has within the structure of the chapter as a whole. The contrast between the two major positions is well put by Moule: The apocalyptic use of the phrase Son of Man, exemplified by the Similitudes, 1 Enoch 37–71, is not necessarily a reliable guide to that of the Synoptic Gospels, for which, rather, Dan. 7 is the proximate antecedent. … The human figure of Dan. 7 need not have been understood by Jesus … as an essentially supernatural figure. In Dan. 7 itself, it simply represents or symbolises the persecuted loyalists, no doubt of Maccabean days, in their ultimate vindication in the court of heaven. 21

The other side in this debate (of which the present writer is a member) argues that we have in Dan. 7 a description of the ‘coronation’ of a heavenly being, one who is, in Moule’s words, a permanent supernatural member of the heavenly court, probably the archangel Michael.22 As I have indicated, the significant fact about this chapter (and one which makes it important for the study of exegesis) is that the rival interpretations offered by modern commentators illustrate an ambiguity, which is already picked up by ancient users of the chapter. But first let me outline the common ground which exists between the two approaches. (i) In Dan. 7 we have an apocalyptic visionary form, which, in outline at least, is familiar to us from other sources.23 In it the vision is followed by an interpretation given by an angelic interpreter. In one respect the form of the vision seems to differ from those of a similar type (e.g. Dan. 8 and Rev. 17 and the vision of the black and bright waters in Syriac Baruch). In the latter there is no question of any part of the vision being a glimpse of supernatural 21

C.F.D. Moule, Essays in New Testament Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 76. 22 J.J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Vision of the Book of Daniel, HSM 16 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977); and Day, God’s Conflict. 23 Collins, ed., Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre.

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realities in the world above; the symbols have no real existence outside the context of the vision. As we shall see, in due course, it could be argued that we have in Dan. 7 a mixture of visionary types: the symbolic vision, in which the items merely symbolise earthly persons or events; and the heavenly vision in which the participants are actually believed to have an independent existence in the world above. This leads me to my second point. (ii) Part of the vision (Dan. 7:9–10 at least) concerns a scene in the heavenly world in which God is enthroned in the celestial court. As we have seen, the description of God’s throne is derived from the merkabah tradition deriving from the first chapter of Ezekiel and evident in other apocalyptic texts. (iii) In the interpretation of the vision it is apparent that there is a close link between the human figure and the saints. Just as the human figure receives the kingdom in v. 14, so also the saints are said to receive the same according to the interpretation (vv. 18, 22, 27). (iv) It is plausible that some ancient interpreters could have regarded the Son of Man figure as a symbol of the vindication of the saints. Indeed, there is evidence in Jewish tradition of a bifurcating tradition of interpretation. The Similitudes of Enoch offer evidence of a tradition of interpretation which views the Son of Man figure as an angelic being seated on God’s throne. In another passage indebted to Dan. 7, 4 Ezra 13, the man in the vision seems to be merely a symbol of the messiah and is not a heavenly being. It is true that the evidence of 4 Ezra on the messiah is rather confusing.24 Thus 7:28 seems to describe the messiah as a mortal man, whereas in 14:9 he is pre-existent. In 4 Ezra 13 with its pattern of symbolic vision and interpretation it would appear from v. 26 that the man from the sea is merely a symbol of the messiah whom the Most High has been keeping for many ages. What takes place in the vision is not in this case a glimpse of heavenly realities but is a vivid visionary account of the eschatological events to take place on earth in the new age. There is a possibility, therefore, that, whatever the original meaning of Dan. 7, the interpretation in the Gospels could be that part of the interpretative tradition which regards the son of man figure merely as a symbol, 4 Ezra 13 being an example of the interpretative possibilities exploited by one apocalyptic writer. The interpretative contrast can be exemplified by two other texts: Rev. 5 and 1QM 17:5–8. Many commentators on Dan. 7 are prepared to accept that a heavenly scene is described in Dan. 7:9–10; but whereas God, the Ancient of Days, is regarded as a permanent member of the heavenly

24 M.E. Stone, ‘The Concept of the Messiah in IV Ezra’, in Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, ed. J. Neusner, SHR 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 295–312.

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world, the human figure is merely a symbol of God’s righteous people. Thus the pattern in Dan. 7 of a heavenly throne scene juxtaposed with apocalyptic symbolic vision corresponds to Rev. 5. In this chapter we have the continuation of the heavenly throne vision of Rev. 4 with the account of the exaltation of a lamb. The lamb is manifestly a symbol of the crucified messiah. Such a juxtaposition of heavenly vision and symbolic vision has few parallels in the apocalypses. Not only is it a telling pointer to the distinctive theological message of the Apocalypse but it is also indicative of the way in which the heavenly throne scene similar to Daniel could have been used in a way strikingly different from the use in the Similitudes of Enoch, exploiting the possible juxtaposition of heavenly and symbolic visionary types. The other text relevant to the ongoing interpretation of Dan. 7 is 1QM 17:7: God will raise up the Kingdom of Michael in the midst of the gods, and the realm of Israel in the midst of all flesh.

Here Michael’s triumph in the heavenly world is paralleled on earth by the triumph of Israel. Similarly Dan. 7 may have provided the means whereby an ancient commentator viewed Dan. 7:13–14 as a picture of the exaltation of a heavenly being and the triumph of the saints on earth. The reference to Michael in this passage from the War Scroll reminds us that Michael, leader of the heavenly host, is spoken of as the great prince who has charge of God’s people in Dan. 12:1, suggesting that he is an obvious candidate when it comes to identifying the human figure in Dan. 7:13. The resemblance to a man coincides with the angelophanies elsewhere in Daniel (3:25; 8:15; 10:5–6). The close link between Michael and the people of God (as well as the heavenly host) thus explains the parallelism between the receipt of the kingdom by the human figure and the receipt of the kingdom by the saints. The triumph of the human figure in the heavenly court is a guarantee of the ultimate vindication of the saints in the lower realms. Also the identification of the human figure with the archangel Michael maintains a consistency of visionary type in Dan. 7:9 and 7:13. In the heavenly court the supernatural figures, God and his angels and the angelic representative of the saints of the Most High, are described. But as we have seen, it is quite likely that consistency of visionary type was not necessarily noted by all the apocalyptic authors who made use of this chapter. An important question has to be asked about the beasts: do they merely symbolise earthly kings? If so, we can see reasons why there might have been confusion over the identity of the human figure (though in contrast with the beasts nothing is said explicitly in the interpretation of the vision about any identification between the saints of the Most High and the Son of Man). Some understood the human figure after the manner of the beasts; others viewed him as a permanent member of the heavenly world, if, that is,

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we are justified in supposing that the beasts are not to be regarded as heavenly (demonic) beings. It might be argued that, just as in other apocalypses, where the lower parts of heaven are populated by demonic beings, so here too the beasts (whatever the raw material drawn on by the apocalyptist may have been) are heavenly beings in some sense opposed to God. A few words need to be said about Dan. 7:21–22. In the interpretation of the vision Daniel approaches a participant in the vision and is given a brief interpretation (v. 17). After that he expresses his desire to know the truth about the fourth beast. This leads to a return to the vision (v. 21), where the horn is seen to make war on the saints and to prevail over them until the Ancient of Days comes and judgement is given for the saints, and the saints receive the kingdom. Then in v. 23 there is a return to the explanation, this time concerning the fourth beast and the horns, concluding in v. 25 with a reference to the king, who will speak words against the Most High. But even his dominion will be short lived, for the significance of the judgement of the court is that the kingdom and dominion will be given to the people of the saints of the Most High. Dan. 7:21–22 presents problems to all interpreters. In the text, as it stands, we must assume that the evil treatment of the saints, judgement against the beast and for the saints, the receipt of the kingdom by the human figure and the consequent receipt of the kingdom by the saints are all separate parts of the same vision. We might have expected reference to the human figure in a visionary context; but these verses concentrate on the fate of the saints and need not exclude the possibility that the saints receive the kingdom because of the triumph of their heavenly representative. The confusion between earth and heaven, particularly with regard to the identity of the saints (are they angels or human beings?), which these verses engender, is well exemplified by the belief of the Qumran sect that it had communion with angels (1QH 3:20ff.; 11:13–14; 1QS 11:7–8). Such a close relationship between angels and the holy people makes confusion between angels and the righteous explicable. Whether or not such a link derives directly from Dan. 7 we cannot be certain, but it is clearly important to recognise that it is not wise to distinguish too clearly between the two, either in Dan. 7 or elsewhere. I hope that this focus on an important chapter has served to indicate how much room there is for legitimate disagreement in interpreting Dan. 7. Particular note should be taken of the visionary material itself as the basis for variant interpretations at an early stage, for the Jewish imagination was capable of exploiting to the full the ambiguities of a text. This would have been particularly the case when/if visionary material came into being in the context of the full exercise of the apocalyptic visionary imagination. It is no surprise that in the twentieth century those who still puzzle over this remarkable chapter should find themselves split into interpretative traditions not too dissimilar to those found in the world of ancient Jewish apocalyptic.

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2.3. The Distinctive Use of Scripture in the Apocalypses One of the dangers of discussing the use of Scripture in the apocalypses is that the treatment of this body of literature can so easily be like that given to any other Jewish literature from this period. But this would be to minimise the significance of the distinctive literary form of the apocalypses. The fact is that we are dealing here with revelatory literature, which has many affinities with certain similar passages in the prophetic corpus in the Bible, but is found in this distinctive literary form because of its production within the Hellenistic age. With all revelatory literature the question may immediately be asked: what basis does the idea of revelation (which in theory could be novel in content) have to do with the tradition embedded in the Scriptures? The simple answer is that the process of innovation inherent in the apocalyptic genre is itself rooted in tradition. We have already had reason to question the view of those who find very little evidence of any extensive use and connection with Scripture in the apocalypses. Such a view hardly recognises the intense indebtedness to scriptural inspiration and precedents in the concept of apocalypse itself. The idea of revelation may bring with it connotations of novelty and a radical break with tradition; but there is very little evidence that the actual content of the revelations in the apocalypses themselves gives much warrant for supposing that such a thing did go on, even if the potential for it was in fact there. It is important to recognise that the concept of revelation is itself firmly rooted in Scripture, which provides the impetus for its use in later generations. As is well known, the biblical call visions with their descriptions of God and the heavenly court provided a potent resource for the later apocalyptic visions. Even if it is not entirely clear what the precise relationship was between the contents of the revelation and the details of particular parts of Scripture, the apparent lack of midrashic precision should not blind us to the clear scriptural archetype which undergirds the apocalyptic framework of the revelations. Revelation is after all at the heart of the Jewish religion: the manifestation of God’s will to Moses on Mount Sinai. Nothing could be more characteristic of the kernel of Scripture than to claim continuity with the character of that original revelation, albeit in different circumstances and with a different process of authorisation at a later stage in Jewish history. To speak in this way is not to suggest that we are supposing anything distinctive in the way Scripture is being used. After all, in the rabbinic tradition itself the ascent of Moses up the holy mountain was understood (at least in later midrash) as an ascent to heaven, where the lawgiver received the whole gamut of Scripture and tradition.25

25

See e.g. J.W. Bowker, The Targums and Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 41, n. 3.

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The fact that the Book of Jubilees and the Temple Scroll can set their particular and often distinctive revelations in the context of the revelation to God on Sinai inevitably raises the question of the relationship of that original revelation of God, and from God to the claims to revelation made by subsequent generations. This would have been a problem for the prophets in their day, and the evidence suggests that it continued to be so for those who maintained the banner of the prophetic tradition after the exile.26 Of course, the fact that all the Jewish apocalypses are themselves pseudonymous is a significant pointer to the problem posed by the fact that the revelations of the past have become Scripture. While we cannot be certain of all the reasons which led to the employment of pseudonymity by the apocalyptists, not least because it was a widespread phenomenon in the Hellenistic world,27 we may conjecture that the attribution of apocalypses to heroes of Israel’s past reflects the need to give authority to the revelations by linking them with a biblical hero. Indeed, the use of pre-Mosaic figures like Enoch and Abraham may in itself testify to the sensitivity of the apocalyptists to ground their revelation in an older (and superior?) revelation of God.28 The emergence of a classic period of revelation when God spoke to Moses and the prophets, and which came to an end with Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi (t.Sotah 13:2), threw the ongoing prophetic claims into sharp relief and effectively outlawed (or at best marginalised) those who asserted that God still spoke to his people in ways similar to the way in which he spoke in the past to Moses and the prophets. The character of divine revelation gives the apocalypses their distinctive view of the communication of God’s will. Unless we grasp the high view of authority inherent in these texts, we shall not fully appreciate the potentially exclusive view of the value and content of the revelations. After all, what the apocalypses purport to offer is not the mere opinion of the expositor but a divine revelation emanating either from the throne of God or from an angelic intermediary commissioned by God for that purpose. Such a conviction is not arbitrary, that is to say based entirely on innovation. The implications of all this for our understanding of the attitude to Scripture within the apocalypses is important. While it is clear that only rarely can it be said that they manifest a concern to contradict Scripture or tradition, that factor is occasionally present, and the potential for radical contradiction is readily apparent. Certainly 26 P.D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975); O. Plöger, Theocracy and Eschatology, trans. S. Rudman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968). 27 M. Hengel, ‘Anonymität, Pseudepigraphie und “literarische Fälschung” in der jüdischhellenistischen Literatur’, in Pseudepigrapha I: Pseudopythagorica – Lettres de Platon, Littérature pseudépigraphique juive, ed. K. von Fritz (Vandœuvres-Genève: Fondation Hardt, 1972), 231–308. 28 M. Barker, The Older Testament: The Survival of Themes from the Ancient Royal Cult in Sectarian Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1987).

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the Book of Jubilees and certain portions of 1 Enoch use the apocalyptic framework to justify and support a method of calendrical calculation, which differs significantly from what we know to have been the dominant view on such matters in the Second Temple period. The problem became particularly acute towards the end of the first century CE. Some primitive Christians, Paul in particular, justified particular attitudes towards, and interpretations of, the Torah by the conviction, based on apocalyptic awareness that the messiah had come.29 The problem is found in its most acute form in the gnostic apocalypses of the second century and later. Here the revelatory form is used to give authority to understandings of Scripture, which completely subvert the character and obvious meaning of the text, by arguing for a theological dualism and a complete denigration of the God of Israel. It is easy to dismiss such developments as the rogue use of the biblical tradition in the service of a rampant anti-Judaism. Such an assessment hardly does justice to the obvious indebtedness to the Bible and the evidence of exegesis, hardly the preoccupations of those who totally despised the Jewish heritage. The fact is that the apocalyptic framework could offer the basis for radical steps in religion. Radical in content the apocalypses may not be; all the evidence indicates that they repeat in various forms the common assumptions of most Jews. But it is the framework within which such information is communicated which is most significant. Who was to gainsay the authoritative visionary, particularly when the revelations also had the imprimatur of some biblical hero, as was the case with all the Jewish apocalypses of the Hellenistic period? The ground here was laid for those who wished to claim ultimate authority for belief and practice, which was entirely inconsistent with the ‘plain’ meaning of the text of Scripture. As the Bible itself indicates, the issue of false prophecy always remained a problem (Deut. 13; Jer. 23; Zech. 13). When claims were made which seemed to be authenticated by God himself, in which current belief and practice were challenged, the difficulties are readily apparent. There is a sense in which the solution to the theological problem offered by the gnostics in their apocalypses was the fulfilment of this. In addition, in the eyes of those Jews who were implacably opposed to them, the early Christian use of Scripture, with its justification of the rejection of certain key commandments on the basis of revelation, must have had all the hallmarks of false prophecy and led to precisely that type of suspicion of charismatic authority with which the New Testament and early Christian

29

W.D. Davies, Jewish and Pauline Studies (London: SPCK, 1984); and Rowland, Christian Origins.

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life (such as the problem posed by figures like Elchesai, Cerinthus, Montanus, and later, of course, Muhammed) is replete.30 While there are certainly features of apocalyptic which make a link with gnosticism likely,31 there is an essential epistemological difference between the two. We should recognise that while both apocalyptic and gnosticism lay claim to revelation as in varying degrees salvific, in the gnostic apocalypses the content of the revelation is itself salvific, whereas in the Jewish apocalypses to know the content of the revelation may be an important, even indispensable, means of achieving salvation. The Jewish apocalypses always seek to affirm the basic thrust of the tradition (however subtly they may change its content and emphasis, as we find, say, in the interpretation of Jeremiah in Dan. 9), while the gnostic apocalypses use the revelation to demean or subvert the Old Testament material.32 As we have already noted, one of the mistakes made in the discussion of the relationship between apocalyptic and tradition is the polarisation which many have attempted to make between the form and the content of the apocalypses and other samples of Jewish literature. While it would be wrong to play down the distinctive form of the apocalypses, there is the real danger of making too much out of this and erecting divisions within the history of ideas which were probably nothing like so clear-cut in reality. The fact is that the evidence of the apocalypses themselves indicates that indebtedness to tradition (albeit a highly selective reading of it) is to be found throughout this literature. The conclusion of 4 Ezra 14 leaves us in no doubt that the writer of this apocalypse is just as interested in the canon of Scripture as in his revelations, even if he considers that those revelations are of more significance than the books already published (14:46). The problem is that we have accepted that the rhetoric of innovation and radical newness characterises the prophetic and charismatic, as compared with the scribal, to such an extent that we can easily miss the essential contribution that the tradition has contributed to the innovations of doctrine or practice. The apocalypses are no exception to this rule. The utilisation of an apocalyptic outlook in the history of both Judaism and Christianity is ample testimony to the deep-rooted nature 30 G. Widengren, The Ascension of the Apostle and the Heavenly Book (Uppsala: Lundequistska Bokhandeln, 1950). 31 B. Layton, ed., The Rediscovery of Gnosticism, SHR 41 (Leiden: Brill, 1980); I. Gruenwald, ‘Jewish Merkabah Mysticism and Gnosticism’, in Studies in Jewish Mysticism, eds. J. Dan and F. Talmage (Cambridge, Mass.: Association for Jewish Studies, 1982), 41–55; O. Wintermute, ‘A Study of Gnostic Exegesis of the Old Testament’, in The Use of the Old Testament in the New and Other Essays, ed. J.M. Efird (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1972), 241–270. 32 See further B.A. Pearson, ‘Jewish sources in Gnostic Literature’, in Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period, ed. M.E. Stone, CRINT 2.2 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1984), 443–481.

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of this outlook within the tradition itself. What is more, the validation of particular interpretations of tradition by recourse to visionary experience is itself merely a radical attempt to vindicate the kind of innovatory activity which is endemic within any vital religious culture. Scribal activity no less than the visions of the apocalyptists was embarking on that difficult exploration of the integration of text and social setting which is at the heart of any vital hermeneutical enterprise. The authors of the apocalypses may have been claiming more for their interpretations than some of their contemporaries were wont to do (at least in the literary guise in which we find them). Nevertheless such an activity is itself part of that one wrestling with the resources and variety of a religious tradition in a context where its meaning and value appear to be under severe threat. In the use made of Scripture in all the literature of the Hellenistic age we find an exploitation of what Frank Kermode has called the ‘excess’ of the text. The full resources of syntax, words and phrases are exploited so as to draw out all the hidden meanings. In this respect there is little to choose between the method of the apocalyptist and the ingenuity of the rabbinic expositor. Indeed, we find their methods converging in the ‘apocalyptic’ character of the Habakkuk Commentary (1QpHab) at Qumran.33 But for the rabbis there was an infinite treasure of meaning within the text which exegetical ingenuity could exploit to the full. In contrast, the claim in the Habakkuk Commentary that the Teacher of Righteousness had been given the true meaning of the words of the prophets (1QpHab 7:1ff.) actually has the effect of cutting short the infinite character of that resource of meaning by limiting it to the ‘final’, and authoritative exposition by the emissary of God. In a similar vein Ephraim Urbach has pointed out how apocalyptic functioned in a similar way to curtail exegetical debate in a passage from the Babylonian Talmud (b.San. 97b). This passage deals with the issue of the dependence of the coming of the final redemption on Israel’s repentance. In it R. Eliezer and R. Joshua maintain their positions by citing various passages from Scripture in their support. The discussion is brought to a dramatic conclusion when R. Joshua quoted Dan. 12:7, a revelation from an angelic intermediary. When Joshua sought support for his argument from an apocalyptic vision, Eliezer saw no further possibility for continuing the argument. The last word had been said on the subject by a divine emissary; the authoritative pronouncement had been made on the matter.34 That is not to suggest that the use of Scripture in apocalyptic necessarily means the closure of the text of Scripture as a resource of meaning; indeed, the evidence of the apocalypses themselves indicates what a wide variety of 33 M.P. Horgan, Pesharim: Qumran Interpretation of Biblical Books, CBQMS 8 (Washington: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1979). 34 E.E. Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1975).

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usage of particular passages is to be found there. Rather, the quest for authoritative revelation, when it is specifically related to the meaning of a text, can have the effect of preventing further innovation once the true meaning has been offered, as we find, for example, in the Habakkuk Commentary. It may be tempting to suppose that the social context in which apocalyptic flourished in ancient Judaism was fairly uniform: a situation of despair characterised by political subjection of the Jewish people and the social marginalisation of the writer and his group. It has become something of a commonplace in studies of apocalyptic at the beginning of the Christian era to accept such views without qualification. Some of us have severe reservations whether apocalyptic does actually function in this way, even if there are reasons to suppose that, on other grounds, the claim to direct revelation serves the purpose of validating traditional beliefs and practices when they come under question from the circumstances of history. But the evidence suggests that apocalypses were not merely written by the marginalised.35 The apocalyptic tradition is not tied to one particular social stratum. The claim to direct revelation is used just as much by those who control the levers of religious power as those who do not. Indeed, there are many indications which support the view that works like 4 Ezra and Syriac Baruch were written in circles not far removed from the group which gained hegemony in Judaism.36 1 Enoch (at least in part) may resemble the views of those who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, in that it exhibits a reliance on a calendar which deviates quite markedly from what was widely accepted.37 It can, therefore, be argued that in such a work the pseudonymous attribution to Enoch and the revelatory framework give the contents of the disclosure an authority which the peripheral nature of the groups which produced them would hardly support.38 Nevertheless the somewhat different revelatory form in 4 Ezra serves a rather different purpose: to enable the apocalyptic seer and his group to wrestle with the profoundest problems of theodicy within a framework where a definitive (if unsatisfactory) answer is given to the severe human questioning of God’s righteousness.39 Such an uncompromising response could only be supported by an apocalyptic framework, as it makes no concessions to the demands of human wisdom for rational argument in support of the position it asserts. There has been a tendency to contrast apocalyptic with other streams in ancient Judaism, notably the interpretation of the Torah familiar to us in the rabbinic literature. The latter, we are often told, breathes the spirit of prag35

A point noted by P.D. Hanson in Dawn of Apocalyptic. Knibb, ‘Apocalyptic and Wisdom’. 37 Stone, ‘Apocalyptic Literature’, 403. 38 See Rowland, The Open Heaven. 39 Stone, ‘Apocalyptic Literature’, 412. 36

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matism and offers those who follow its precepts a practicable programme, which will enable the righteous to walk in the ways of God. In contrast, the concentration of the apocalypses either on the world above or the world to come engenders unrealisable expectations which are liable to lead both to profound disappointment at the lack of evidence of their fulfilment and an unstable social environment as the result of the juxtaposition of a radically different view of the world order. Despite its wide currency there are many reasons for supposing that this contrast actually distorts the role of apocalyptic within ancient Judaism, not least the function of an apocalyptic outlook with relation to Scripture itself. If the rabbinic tradition is anything to go by, a realistic acceptance of the constraints placed upon the implementation of the holy environment by no means excluded a passionate attachment not only to dreams of a cosmic holiness in a new age but also a recognition that the holy space on earth, created by the people of God, was an extension of that wider holiness of God in the world above, accessible to those whose lives were particularly pure. Thus apocalyptic could be said to undergird the commitment to a limited goal for the people of God in the present age, because it offered a cause for hope and a retreat in adversity, precisely through those gateways into heaven which Scripture offered, in its occasional and daring glimpses of the transcendent God. The pessimistic realism of Qoheleth could not sustain attachment to the tradition. Indeed, there is a sense in which apocalyptic is a response of a sufficiently radical kind to precisely the kind of pessimism we find in that book. By its appeal to revelation and its stress on the need to pierce behind appearances to the realities which explain the incoherent jumble of history, apocalyptic supports continued attachment to Scripture and tradition. No doubt there were pious souls who found that faith in the unseen world of God and unrealised world of promise was difficult to sustain indefinitely. What became of them the traditions allow us only a tantalising glimpse. But for most Jews in the ancient world apocalyptic provided an indispensable resource which enabled them to continue to find in the Scriptures a resource, which deserved adherence, even when such commitment stretched human reason to its very limits.

3. Apocalyptic: The Disclosure of Heavenly Knowledge 3.1. Defining Apocalyptic Much of the material in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha is concerned with what is referred to as apocalyptic. This is an aspect of Judaism over which there has been much dispute as to its interpretation and significance, and it is appropriate at this point in the history of interpretation to attempt to assess it. This is not because, as has sometimes been erroneously asserted, apocalyptic became a spent force after the Roman period: it continued, and broke out with volcanic intensity in the Sabbatianism of the seventeenth century and is still alive. An assessment is necessary here for another reason. The increasingly dominant rabbinic form of Judaism, which gained ascendancy after the collapse of the revolts against Rome in the first century, overshadowed apocalyptic, sometimes aggressively rejected it and often came to regard concentration upon it as a menace. Perhaps particularly under the vast influence of the great work of G.F. Moore, who had reacted against what he considered an over-concentration on apocalyptic to the neglect of rabbinic sources, the view became common that, like Seventh Day Adventism, for example, within contemporary Christianity, apocalyptic belonged to the fringes of Judaism. As a result it was urged that apocalyptic materials should not be taken as representative of essential Judaism: this distinction was reserved for more strictly rabbinic sources. This view was contested by W.D. Davies and others who rejected any sharp distinction between Pharisaic or Rabbinic Judaism and apocalyptic. And in recent years there has been renewed interest in apocalyptic and in its place in Jewish and Christian theology. There are Jewish works from the Second Temple period which offer revelations of divine secrets and are similar in form and content to the New Testament apocalypse, from which they derive their generic description ‘apocalypse’ (Rev. 1:1). The use of ἀποκάλυψις/ἀποκαλύπτω to describe a revelation of God or of divine secrets is relatively rare in Jewish literature written round about the time of Revelation1 and includes a work probably 1

The evidence is set out in M. Smith, ‘On the History of ΑΠΟΚΑΛΥΠΤΩ and ΑΠΟΚΑΛΥΨΙΣ’, in Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East, ed.

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heavily interpolated by a Christian editor, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and Joseph and Asenath. The words are more common in the New Testament. In the Gospels ἀποκάλυψις is found at Luke 2:32 in a context where already the revelation of a mystery, which angels desire to look upon, had been celebrated as part of the immediately preceding context (2:13, cf. 1 Pet. 1:11–12). Ἀποκαλύπτω appears in contexts dealing with the eschatological revelation of human secrets (Matt. 10:26/Luke 12:2 and Luke 2:35), divine secrets (Matt. 11:25/Luke 10:21; Matt. 16:17), and in the quotation of Isa. 53:1 in John 12:38. The Fourth Gospel uses φανερόω in 1:31; 2:11; 7:4; 9:3; 17:6; 21:1 and of the day of the Son of Man in Luke 17:30. Although the Gospel of John does not use the language of the apocalyptic tradition, it has recently been described as ‘an apocalypse in reverse’.2 In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus is presented as one who came to utter revelation (13:35). The way of God comes through dreams (Matt. 1:20; 2:13, 19; 27:19). The disciples are among those ones to whom divine insight has been given (16:17). Children understand and respond to Christ (cf. 11:25–26). They along with the lame and blind recognise Jesus in the Temple (21:15). The angels of ‘the little ones’ are those closest to God and are vouchsafed the supreme privilege of a vision of God (18:10). Apocalyptic terminology is central to Paul’s self-understanding (Gal. 1:12). It is something past for him but a future hope also (1 Cor. 1:1, cf. 2 Thess. 1:7, cf. 1 Pet. 1:7, 13 and 4:13). The gospel is that which is made manifest, a mystery of hidden things (Rom. 3:21; Col. 1:26; Rom. 16:25). The opening chapters of 1 Corinthians reflect a wisdom which is not attainable merely by the exercise of reason, though it may be supported by the conventional use of scriptural reasoning. The gospel is a mystery hidden from the rulers of the present age (1 Cor. 2:6–7). The divine wisdom, to which the true apostle has access and of which he is a steward (1 Cor. 4:1), is a mystery taught by the Spirit. It can only be understood by others who themselves have the Spirit (1 Cor. 2:10). The divine wisdom manifests itself in surprising turns in salvation history (Rom. 11:25, 33) but pre-eminently in the mystery revealed in Christ (Col. 1:26; 2:3). The word ‘apocalypse’ is used to refer to literary texts, which offer revelation specifically divine. In the modern period, apocalyptic has been used as a heuristic device which serves as a generic label for a collection of revelatory,

D. Hellholm, 2nd edn. (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1989), 9ff., and M.N.A. Bockmuehl, Revelation and Mystery in Ancient Judaism and Pauline Christianity, WUNT 2.36 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1990). 2 J. Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 405; idem, Studying John (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); J.-A. Bühner, Der Gesandte und sein Weg im 4. Evangelium, WUNT 2.2 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1977); and J.J Kanagaraj, ‘Mysticism’ in the Gospel of John: An Inquiry into the Background of John in Jewish Mysticism, JSNTSup 158 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998).

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symbolic and eschatological ideas.3 Interest in apocalyptic and its place in Jewish and Christian theology has been widespread over the last eighty years or so as New Testament commentators have been wrestling with the implications of the work of Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer, both of whom made apocalyptic central to their discussion of Christian origins. Much of this discussion, however, has oscillated between using the words apocalyptic and eschatological. Consequently, treatment of apocalyptic has, perhaps inevitably, ended up as a discussion of eschatology, with well-defined characteristics: the imminent end of this world; a deterministic view of history; a message couched in extravagant symbolism; and the introduction from above, amidst cataclysmic disorders, or a transcendent realm.4 This eschatological orientation of the understanding of apocalyptic demands a little explanation. A concern throughout the Book of Revelation is with a future hope for a better world, expressed in imagery similar to that found in other apocalypses (e.g. Dan. 2:31ff.; 7:1ff.; 8:3ff.; and 1 En. 85ff.) and with a belief in the irruption of God’s way into the historical process (Rev. 6:1ff.; 19:11ff.; 22:20). The use of the word apocalyptic to describe this cluster of ideas is widespread, and it is important to recognise this semantic development, in order to understand how apocalyptic has come to be used virtually as a synonym for eschatology. A distinction is often made, however, between the literary genre, the apocalypse, apocalyptic eschatology, which may be characterised as a religious perspective in which divine plans are viewed in relation to mundane realities, and apocalypticism, ‘which refers to the symbolic universe in which an apocalyptic movement codifies its identity and interpretation of reality’.5 One of the features of this approach to apocalyptic is a clear distinction between the apocalypse and the cluster of ideas known as apocalyptic, or apocalypticism. As a result it is sometimes suggested that apocalypses may not always be the best witnesses to the religious outlook which we designate apocalyptic. Indeed, an apocalypse may, in theory at least, offer no evidence of apocalyptic whatsoever.6 The distinction between the apocalypse as a literary genre and apocalyptic as a type of eschatological thought has led to 3 J.M. Schmidt, Die jüdische Apokalyptik: Die Geschichte ihrer Erforschung von den Anfängen bis zu den Textfunden von Qumran (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1969). 4 See e.g. the discussion of apocalyptic in E. Hennecke, Neutestamentliche Apokryphen, 2 vols., revised by W. Schneemelcher (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1989), 2:516–547. 5 P.D. Hanson, ‘Apocalypticism’, in IDBSup, 28–34, at 30. 6 So M.E. Stone, ‘Lists of Revealed Things in the Apocalyptic Literature’, in Magnalia Dei, the Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, eds. F.M. Cross et al. (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 414–452, especially 439– 443; and J.J. Collins et al., eds., The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, 3 vols. (New York: Continuum, 1998).

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considerable confusion. When we find that the religious beliefs of the apocalypses do not conform to the apocalyptic type as usually defined, and the eschatology of the apocalypses only occasionally evinces what are considered to be the characteristic features of apocalyptic eschatology, our understanding of the pattern of ideas, usually identified as apocalyptic, may be better categorised by some other term, say, transcendent eschatology, thus reserving the word apocalyptic to describe the distinctive religious outlook of the apocalypses themselves. The approach to apocalyptic colours the way in which the origins of apocalyptic are often outlined. When the heart of apocalyptic is its distinctive eschatology, there is a search for eschatological passages in the Old Testament (e.g. Isa. 24–27, Joel, Trito-Isaiah and Zechariah)7 which seem to provide the antecedents of an eschatology, which is regarded as the focal point of apocalyptic. The preoccupation with certain Old Testament passages, which evince an eschatology of a particular type, reflects the extent to which investigation has been dominated by the eschatological orientation to apocalyptic. This widely accepted definition of apocalyptic, which stresses its eschatological characteristics at the expense of other elements, must be questioned because it has scarcely done justice to the religious perspective of the apocalypses. The discovery of the Enoch fragments in Cave 4 at Qumran has pushed back the origin of this work well into the third century BC.8 The question arises, therefore, of the relationship between the later biblical material and the earliest parts of 1 Enoch. The two important areas for understanding the origin of apocalyptic, prophecy and wisdom, both have considerable affinities with this early apocalypse. It is not just the eschatological teaching of the prophetic literature which is important, therefore, but the conviction, inherent in Ezek. 1, and elsewhere, that God is revealed to certain chosen agents. The mode of revelation found in the prophetic literature was one, which according to Jewish tradition passed into oblivion with the last of the prophets (t.Sotah 13:2). But with Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, did prophecy finish, or did it carry on in one form or another? Hints like Zech. 13:2ff. suggest that it did. What is more, the visionary character of Zech. 1–8 already points in the direction of later apocalyptic visions.9 Thus, that quest for higher knowledge, so 7

See O. Plöger, Theokratie und Eschatologie (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1959); ET: Theocracy and Eschatology, trans. S. Rudman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968); P.D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology, rev. edn. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979); cf. J. Barton, Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1986). 8 J.T. Milik, The Books of Enoch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976); and C.A. Newsom, Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985). 9 C. Jeremias, Die Nachtgesichte des Sacharja, FRLANT 117 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977); Barton, Oracles.

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characteristic of apocalyptic, can be grounded in Scripture in the claims of the prophets to direct, visionary experience and to knowledge of the debates in the heavenly court. When we attempt to ascertain the religious outlook of the apocalypses, it becomes difficult to place such great weight on eschatology as the key to our interpretation of these texts. An interest in the future is found in most apocalypses, but the character of this interest and its relationship to other features demand careful consideration.10 When one investigates the eschatology of the apocalypses, what are often regarded as typical features of apocalyptic (imminent expectation of the end of the world, symbolism, historical determinism and a transcendent hope) are by no means common. What is more, actual teaching about the content of the future hope, e.g. the character of the new age, the origin and activity of the Messiah, the organisation of the messianic community etc., is frequently passed over with hardly a mention. While the apocalyptists may devote much attention to the progress of history leading up to the new age, there is an evident reluctance to speculate about its character. The conviction about a glorious future for the people of God is there, but as an outline, which is rarely elaborated in detail, a strange phenomenon for works whose primary interest is supposed to be in the future. A survey of the contents of the apocalypses would reveal a wide range of topics. Important in many apocalypses is an interest in details of the heavenly world (Dan. 7:9; 1 En. 14:8ff.; 71; Apoc. Abr. 18ff.; Test. Levi 2–3; Greek Baruch; Rev. 4; Asc. Isa. 6ff.), astronomy (1 En. 72ff.; 2 En. 23), the course of Jewish history (Dan. 8; 1 En. 85ff.; 91:12ff.; 93; Test. Levi 16ff.; 4 Ezra 11–12; Syr. Bar. 36ff.; 53ff.; and Apoc. Abr. 27ff.) and human destiny (Apoc. Abr. 20ff.; 4 Ezra 3:2ff., 7; Syr. Bar. 48). All these issues correspond roughly with ‘the lists of revealed things’ which, Michael Stone has argued, constitute the heart of apocalyptic.11 Interest in history, eschatology, astronomy and cosmology is by no means confined to the apocalypses only. What is distinctive about the use of this material in the apocalypses is that it is offered to the apocalyptic seer as a revelation direct from God through vision or through divine emissary. It is not the product of human observation, or even of the application of the exegetical techniques of the scribal tradition to Scripture (at least in the form in which it is presented). The divine truth is apprehended by the seer, and by all those to whom the seer chooses to make known this knowledge, as the result of angelic pronouncement or the mysteries opened up as the result of a heavenly ascent. The lack of detail about the hope for the future, an interest in other subjects, and an emphasis on the revelation of 10 See further C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982). 11 Stone, ‘Lists of Revealed Things’, and idem, Scriptures, Sects and Visions: A Profile of Judaism from Ezra to the Jewish Revolts (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).

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divine mysteries, suggest that apocalyptic cannot be regarded as merely a ‘science of the End’, in which heavenly journeys and other revelations serve only as a convenient back-drop for eschatological information. The emphasis throughout on the revelation of God and the divine purpose for the cosmos as a whole may have been an attempt to answer the crisis facing the Jewish tradition at the time of the apocalyptists. While it would be wrong to play down the speculative interest in the descriptions of the heavenly world, the revelation of God enthroned in glory and the divine purposes may be seen as an appropriate way of reassuring those whose historical circumstances might indicate that the God of the Jewish tradition no longer cared for God’s people. The detailed demonstration of divine foreknowledge of Israel’s plight and of the divine plan for human history could enable a beleaguered religious group to have confidence in its traditional affirmations and hopes. The reader then sees the totality of human history from the divine perspective, thereby ensuring that the, perhaps inevitable, preoccupation with the present plight does not detract from belief in God’s saving purposes, which, according to some apocalypses, were on the point of being realised (Dan. 12:6; 4 Ezra 14:10; Syr. Bar. 85:10). Apocalyptic thus provides an authoritative context for belief, which, while rooted in Scripture, avoided the shortcomings of conventional exegesis by recourse to the direct disclosure of heavenly knowledge. Apocalyptic was a religious current in Judaism (and for that matter in the Hellenistic world generally), which spans a long period of time. Even if we date the earliest parts of 1 Enoch to the third century BC12 (and they are probably much older) and the latest apocalypses at the end of the first century CE, we are speaking of a period of three hundred years or more. It is unlikely that the interests over this period remained the same and that circumstances did not affect the choice of material for inclusion in the apocalypses. For example, it is in the three apocalypses written in the aftermath of the First Revolt (4 Ezra, Syriac Baruch and Apocalypse of Abraham), that we find a particular concern for the destiny of Israel, together with impassioned pleas for an explanation of the suffering and eclipse of the people of God.13 12 See further Milik, The Books of Enoch; H.S. Kvanvig, Roots of Apocalyptic: The Mesopotamian Background of the Enoch Figure and the Son of Man, WMANT 61 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1974); J.C. VanderKam, Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition, CBQMS 16 (Washington: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1984); C. Rowland, ‘Enoch’, in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, eds. K. van der Toorn, B. Becking and P.W. van der Horst (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 576–581; J.C. VanderKam and W. Adler, The Jewish Apocalyptic Heritage in Early Christianity, CRINT III.4 (Assen: van Gorcum, 1996); and M. Barker, The Older Testament: The Survival of Themes from the Ancient Royal Cult in Sectarian Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1987). 13 On 4 Ezra see M.E. Stone, Fourth Ezra, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1990).

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Concern with astronomical data is manifested in the Enochic literature (e.g. 1 En. 72ff.), though there is occasional evidence that other apocalyptists may also have been interested in this subject (Syr. Bar. 48:1ff.). Likewise the dominant concern with eschatology in parts of Daniel and Revelation is not typical of all other apocalypses. The origin of Daniel in its present form during the religious crisis provoked by the action of Antiochus Epiphanes probably explains the single-minded preoccupation with suffering, martyrdom and eschatological vindication.14 Apart from the circumstances affecting the interests of the apocalyptists, we may also see change and development in the form in which revelation is delivered.15 Not all apocalypses describe heavenly ascents and visions of the heavenly world; some like 4 Ezra and Syriac Baruch prefer the revelatory angel or the divine voice as the means of communicating the divine mysteries. One common feature is the fact that all the Jewish apocalypses are pseudonymous. Pseudepigraphy is certainly not peculiar to the apocalypses. The practice probably had a long history in the prophetic tradition. It is difficult to believe that the authors were chosen at random; the enigmatic reference to Enoch in Gen. 5:24, for example, and the high opinion of him in some strands of Jewish tradition (e.g. Jub. 4:17ff.) made him a prime candidate as a recipient of divine knowledge.16 Whereas Enoch and Abraham, Levi and Isaiah are allowed to ascend to heaven during their lives and return to tell of their experiences, the same cannot be said of Ezra and Baruch in 4 Ezra and Syriac Baruch respectively, though Greek Baruch does speak of Baruch’s heavenly ascent and the disclosures which result from it (1:8).17 The choice of Baruch and Ezra as recipients of divine revelation is entirely appropriate as they had either lived through the catastrophe of the destruction of the First Temple, or participated in the rebuilding afterwards, and so could speak for those going through similar experiences after 70 CE. The reluctance in both works to speak of heavenly ascents during the lifetime of the seer contrasts with the extensive account of a heavenly journey in the contemporary Apocalypse of Abraham (15ff.).

14 On this theme see G.W.E. Nickelsburg, Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism, HTS 26 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972). 15 J.J. Collins, ed., Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre = Semeia 14 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979); idem, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to the Jewish Matrix of Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1984); idem and J.H. Charlesworth, eds., Mysteries and Revelations: Apocalyptic Studies since the Uppsala Colloquium, JSPSup 9 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991); and D.E. Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983). 16 See I. Gruenwald, ‘Jewish Apocalyptic Literature’, in ANRW II.19.1 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), 105. 17 M.E. Stone, ‘Paradise in 4 Ezra’, JJS 17 (1966): 85–88.

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Pseudepigraphy was a very common literary convention,18 and may have served as a means of enhancing the authority of the revelations committed to writing. It is an open question whether the apocalypses are merely literary creations following a conventional pattern or may include the relics of actual experiences by unknown visionaries. There was a growing concern with the mystical and magical in late antiquity, and apocalyptic may be a Jewish form of what Hengel has described as the quest for higher wisdom through revelation.19

3.2. Apocalyptic: The Esoteric Tradition of Scriptural Interpretation To recognise the importance of the visionary or imaginative element in the religion, not only of Hellenism,20 but also Judaism, is not to imply that apocalyptic religion was somehow antithetical to Torah study. The choice of Enoch rather than Moses as the apocalyptic seer need not be taken as a rejection of the Torah and the tradition of its interpretation. There is much in the apocalypses to suggest that there is no fundamental opposition to the Torah. Indeed, in a work like 4 Ezra obedience to the Law is a constant preoccupation of the writer (e.g. 3:19, 7:17ff. and 9:31ff.) and similar interest in the Law is found in other apocalypses (e.g. 1 En. 93:6; 99:14; Syr. Bar. 38:2; 59:2; and Jub. 23:26ff.). Apocalyptic is a basic component of engagement with the Scriptures.21 It took its start from precisely those passages which deal with hidden mysteries of heaven and earth rather than the application of biblical principles to everyday concerns as set out in the Torah (cf. Luke 11:52).22 18 On pseudepigraphy in the Old Testament and Judaism see M. Hengel and M. Smith in Pseudepigrapha I: Pseudopythagorica – Lettres de Platon, Littérature pseudépigraphique juive, ed. K. von Fritz (Vandœuvres-Genève: Fondation Hardt, 1972), 231–308; J. Duff, A Reconsideration of Pseudepigraphy in Early Christianity, Diss. Oxford, 1998; and D.G. Meade, Pseudonymity and Canon, WUNT 39 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1986). 19 See M. Hengel, Judentum und Hellenismus: Studien zu ihrer Begegnung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Palästinas bis zur Mitte des 2. Jh.s v.Chr., WUNT 10 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1969), 381–394, ET: Judaism and Hellenism, trans. J. Bowden, 2 vols. (London: SCM, 1974), 1:210–218; E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951); and A.F. Segal, ‘Heavenly Ascent in Hellenistic Judaism, Early Christianity and their Environments’, in ANRW II.23.2 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), 1332–1394. 20 R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (London: Viking, 1986). 21 See C. Rowland, ‘Apocalyptic literature’, in It is Written: Scripture Citing Scripture. Essays in Honour of Barnabas Lindars, SSF, eds. D.A. Carson and H.G.M. Williamson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 170–189 = above, pp. 46–63. 22 See D.J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988).

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Because of the esoteric character of the apocalypses it is tempting to suppose that apocalyptic is the product of a movement or groups removed from the mainstream of Jewish interpretation of Scripture.23 From time to time it has been asserted that there was a polarisation in Judaism between apocalyptic and Pharisaism.24 But there is evidence to suggest that apocalyptic may well have been the esoteric tradition of the scribes and nascent rabbinic Judaism.25 That such interests did in fact form part of later rabbinic tradition is widely accepted. There is a hint in the Mishnah that speculative interests, perhaps of an esoteric character, already existed in the tannaitic period, in m.Hag. 2:1: The forbidden degrees may not be expounded before three persons, nor the Story of Creation before two, nor the (chapter of the) Chariot before one alone, unless he is a Sage that understands of his own knowledge. Whosoever gives his mind to four things it were better for him if he had not come into the world – what is above, what is beneath, what was beforetime, and what will be hereafter. And whosoever takes no thought for the honour of his Maker, it were better for him if he had not come into the world.26 23

P.R. Davies, ‘The social world of apocalyptic writings’, in The World of Ancient Israel, ed. R.E. Clements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 251–271. 24 E.g. D. Rössler, Gesetz und Geschichte: Untersuchungen zur Theologie der jüdischen Apokalyptik und der pharisäischen Orthodoxie, WMANT 3 (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1960). Contrast W.D. Davies, ‘Apocalyptic and Pharisaism’, in idem, Christian Origins and Judaism (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1962), 19–30. 25 J. Jeremias, Jerusalem zur Zeit Jesu, 3rd edn. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1962), 265–278; ET: Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, trans. F.H. and C.H. Cave (London: SCM, 1969), 233–235. 26 Translation from H. Danby, The Mishnah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 212–213. On the origins of Jewish mysticism see I. Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, AGJU 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1980); G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 3rd rev. edn. (London: Thames & Hudson, 1955); idem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition, 2nd edn. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1965); E.E. Urbach, ‘Ha-mesorot ʿal torat ha-sod bitequpat ha-tannaim’ (‘The Traditions about Merkabah Mysticism in the Tannatic Period’), in Studies in Mysticism and Religion: Presented to Gershom Scholem on his Seventieth Birthday by Pupils, Colleagues and Friends, eds. idem et al. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1967), 1–30; G.A. Wewers, Geheimnis und Geheimhaltung im rabbinischen Judentum, RGVV 35 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975); D.J. Halperin, The Merkabah in Rabbinic Literature, AOS 62 (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1980); idem, The Faces of the Chariot; C.R.A. MorrayJones, Merkabah Mysticism and Talmudic Tradition (Diss. Cambridge, 1988); idem, ‘Transformational Mysticism in the Apocalyptic-Merkabah Tradition’, JJS 43 (1992): 1– 31; P. Schäfer, The Hidden and Manifest God: Some Major Themes in Early Jewish Mysticism, trans. A. Pomerance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); idem, ‘New Testament and the Hekhalot Literature: The Journey into Heaven in Paul and in Merkavah Mysticism’, JJS 35 (1984): 19–35; P.S. Alexander, ‘A Sixtieth Part of Prophecy: The Problem of Continuing Revelation in Judaism’, in Words Remembered, Texts Renewed, eds. J. Davies et al., JSOTSup 195 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 414–433; M. Lieb, The Visionary Mode: Biblical Prophecy, Hermeneutics, and Cultural Change (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991); and G.G. Stroumsa,

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In the second part of the mishnah we find a dire warning against those who would occupy themselves in subjects which are difficult for humans to comprehend. The four prohibited topics represent the major concerns of the apocalyptists. The Jewish apocalypses contain speculation about heaven, hell and human destiny, as well as the mysterious workings of human history as it moves toward the New Age. The final threat in the Mishnah is a thinly veiled warning to those whose theological interests led them to speculate in such a way that they would dishonour God, particularly in the speculation on the form of God (shiʿur qomah).27 What is of particular interest, however, is the list of restrictions placed on scriptural exposition. Earlier in the Mishnah, in m.Meg. 4, a ban is placed by some sages on the reading of the first chapter of Ezekiel (the merkabah). m.Hag. 2:1 extends the restriction to the exposition of the chapter in the academy. In the case of Ezek. 1 this is a complete prohibition, except when an individual has shown himself to be mature enough to embark on such study (cf. t.Meg. 4:34). In y.Hag. 77a (lines 45ff., cf. 77c, lines 67–68) cautionary stories may be found which are intended to deter the amateur and uninitiated from such a dangerous exercise. Two of the restrictions mentioned in the Mishnah concern Gen. 1 and Ezek. 1. Here are two passages from Scripture, which inevitably open the door to speculation about the creation of the world and the God who created it. They are passages which the talmid studied regularly and which pointed him not so much to his obligations and how they could be fulfilled but to the nature of God and God’s creation. In the light of the sophistication of the exegetical methods applied to the Scriptures in order to enable the will of God in specific situations to be discerned, we can imagine that the hints found in passages like Gen. 1 and Ezek. 1 could lead the expositor to untold extravagances as he sought to understand the process of creation and the immediate environs of the Creator. These passages (to which we might add others like Isa. 6:1ff.) offered the exegete a glimpse into another world, a disclosure of the way things were before the universe existed and the nature of God who sat enthroned in glory on the cherubim-chariot above the firmament. We know from later Jewish texts that cosmogony and theosophy played a very significant part in rabbinic theology. A glance at b.Hag. 12aff. indicates that by this time the mystical lore based on Gen. 1 and Ezek. 1 was fairly extensive. The work of Gershom Scholem has done much to expose the history of Jewish mysticism from its obscure beginnings during the period of the Hidden Wisdom: Esoteric Traditions and the Roots of Christian Mysticism, SHR 70 (Leiden: Brill, 1996). 27 See Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, 213; and M.S. Cohen, The Shiʿur Qomah: The Liturgy and Theurgy in Pre-Kabbalistic Jewish Mysticism (Lanham: University Press of America, 1983).

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Second Temple through the age of the Hekaloth texts (which speak of the mystic’s ascent through the heavenly palaces) to the Kabbalah itself.28 While the literary remains are extensive enough to establish the contours of this speculative interest in the Amoraic period, the precise character of the mystical lore in the age of the Tannaim is unclear. Certainly we find that names like R. Yohanan hen Zakkai (b.Hag. 14b) and R. Akiba (e.g. in b.Hag. 14b– 15b) are linked with it, which suggests, at the very least, that later interpreters considered that the mystical tradition should be associated with the heart of early rabbinic Judaism rather than be regarded as the interest of a peripheral group. It is possible that this interest did form part of the religious beliefs of the main academies in the tannaitic period, a fact which seems to be presupposed by the necessity for the regulation in the Mishnah. But even if this be the case, the paucity of information about the mystical involvement of R. Yohanan ben Zakkai and his pupils R. Eleazar ben Arak, R. Joshua, and of R. Akiba, and his contemporaries, Simeon ben Azzai, Simeon ben Zoma and Elisha ben Abuyah, does not allow us to reconstruct with any degree of certainty the character of this mystical interest. There are certainly hints that visions of Ezekiel’s chariot may have been involved (t.Meg. 4:28; b.Meg. 24b), though it has to be admitted that the evidence does not allow us to do any more than put this forward as a tentative suggestion.29 The interest in passages of Scripture, which might enable the expositor to gain further information about God and his ways, is not confined to the rabbinic tradition. In several places in apocalyptic literature there is evidence that the apocalyptists were also interested in the first chapter of Ezekiel (Dan. 7:9; l En. 14:20; Rev. 4; 4Q405 20 ii 21–22; Apoc. Abr. 17–18)30 and the first chapter of Genesis (Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum 28; 4 Ezra 6:38ff.; Jub. 2:2ff.; and 2 En. 55–56). Consideration of the use made of Ezek. 1 in the apocalypses leads to the suggestion that these passages, one of which (1 En. 14:8ff.) may go back at least to the beginning of the second century BC, already evince an extensive speculative, visionary interest in Ezek. 1. Here is

28 On the heavenly ascent material see M. Dean-Otting, Heavenly Journeys: A Study of the Motif in Hellenistic Jewish Literature (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1984); and M. Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 29 This matter is explored further in Rowland, The Open Heaven, 269–348. 30 On early evidence of merkabah speculation see also C. Rowland, ‘The Visions of God in Apocalyptic Literature’, JSJ 10 (1979): 137–154 = above, pp. 29–45; C.A. Newsom, ‘Merkabah Exegesis in the Qumran Sabbath Shirot’, JJS 38 (1987): 11–30; J.J. Collins, ‘A Throne in the Heavens: Apotheosis in pre-Christian Judaism’, in Death, Ecstasy, and Other Worldly Journeys, eds. idem and M. Fishbane (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 43–58; and A.F. Segal, ‘Paul and the Beginning of Jewish Mysticism’, in Collins and Fishbane, eds., ibid., 93–120.

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evidence that apocalyptists were not merely interested in eschatology, nor did they regard the throne-vision merely as a convenient backdrop for eschatological teaching. Rather the interest in God’s throne is already a matter for study in its own right. In these cases the basis of the apocalyptic vision is Scripture itself. The vision takes its origin from the insight already communicated in the biblical passage, however further it may take it. Examples of Scripture being the basis for apocalyptic visions and pronouncements can be found elsewhere, e.g. Dan. 7 in 1 En. 46, 4 Ezra 12 and 13, Rev. 13, Jer. 29 in Dan. 9 and Gen. 6 in 1 En. 6:1ff.31 To do justice to apocalyptic, however, we cannot ignore that quest for knowledge of things earthly and heavenly which in part at least is characteristic also of the Wisdom tradition.32 The links are particularly close in parts of 1 Enoch, which evinces a definite interest in the created order, e.g. 1 En. 2– 5. The information in 1 En. 72:2 comes through revelation rather than human observation, however. No doubt there are significant differences between the apocalypses and the Wisdom literature. Nevertheless recent study has pointed out the affinity of certain parts of the apocalypses, particularly Daniel, not with the wisdom of the Book of Proverbs, but with mantle wisdom, which was concerned with the mysteries of the stars, the interpretation of dreams and divination.33 Even within the biblical tradition, however, there is a closer link with the wisdom tradition than is often allowed. As has already been pointed out, one group of apocalypses includes an intense questioning of the human predicament, particularly as it affects the righteous in Israel. Parts of 4 Ezra have close affinities with the Book of Job.34 The contrast between human and divine wisdom in the dialogue between Ezra and the angelic intermediary is stark. Even those who are the most righteous of humanity are unable to comprehend the ways of an inscrutable divinity. Ezra’s words express the common-sense position with regard to the lot of humanity, the injustices of the world, and perplexity at the fate of Jews in the wake of the destruction of the Second Temple. The uncompromising divine/angelic

31 Other passages are investigated by L. Hartman, Prophecy Interpreted: The Formation of some Jewish Apocalyptic Texts and of the Eschatological Discourse, Mark 13 par., ConBNT 1 (Lund: Gleerup, 1966). 32 In addition to the works of Stone and Gruenwald already cited see G. von Rad, Theologie des Alten Testaments, 2 vols. (München: Chr. Kaiser, 1960), 2:314–315, ET: Old Testament Theology, trans. D.M.G. Stalker, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1965), 2:301ff., but note the criticisms of P. von der Osten-Sacken, Die Apokalyptik in ihrem Verhältnis zu Prophetie und Weisheit, TEH 157 (München: Chr. Kaiser, 1969). 33 See H.-P. Müller, ‘Mantische Weisheit und Apokalyptik’, in Congress Volume: Uppsala 1971, VTSup 22 (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 268–293. 34 See Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, 4–5, and Stone, ‘Lists of Revealed Things’, 421.

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perspective echoes themes from the Book of Job. The message is that the righteous need to view all things in the light of the eschatological resolution when the messiah comes. Attempting to understand the apparent injustices of the present (4 Ezra 7:16) is futile, because, despite being given a mind to understand, humanity’s sin makes it difficult to do so, and so they await eternal torment (4 Ezra 7:71). What is required is not knowledge of the ‘whys and wherefores’ of human history but obedience. The mystery of the reign of God is that the one who endures to the end will be saved. Like the apocalypses, Job is offered an answer through divine revelation (Job 38–39). The questioning spirit of the biblical wisdom tradition and the interpretation of dreams and visions are antecedents, which should not be ignored in our attempt to elucidate apocalyptic origins. Thus it would be wrong to assert that apocalyptic has its origin either in prophecy or in wisdom; both have contributed much to apocalyptic. Rather, it is a case of elements of prophecy and wisdom contributing to an outlook which set great store by the need to understand the ways of God. Apocalypticists approach Scripture with the conviction that the God who is revealed in the pages of the sacred writings may be known by vision and revelation. The interpretation of Scripture offered the opportunity to plumb the depths of some of the most profound divine mysteries, often only hinted at darkly in the sacred text. The yearning for this knowledge is akin to some of the passionate searching apparent in the Book of Job, but also to the revelation of God to chosen agents, which lies at the heart of the prophetic experience. The apocalyptists were not content with answers to mundane questions but pressed on in search of divine knowledge. Indeed, they were probably the ones castigated in Sir. 3:12ff. (a passage quoted in part in y.Hag. 77c, lines 18ff. and b.Hag. 13a): Do not pry into things too hard for you or examine what is beyond your reach. Meditate upon the commandments you have been given; what the Lord keeps secret is no concern of yours. Do not busy yourself with matters that are beyond you; even what has been shown you is above human grasp. Many have been led astray by their speculations, and false conjectures have impaired their judgement. (Cf. 34:1ff. Translation from the New English Bible)

In contrast with the material in the apocalyptic literature the warning in Ben Sira sets a limit on the extent to which the religious traditions offer opportunities both to seek for, and find, an answer to the most pressing problems of human existence, as well as on human curiosity about God and the divine purposes. In most of the apocalyptic tradition visions and myths serve to disrupt readers’ expectations of what is normal rather than offering the definitive pronouncements about what is demanded. Readers are often tantalised and perplexed into thinking and, above all, behaving differently. The texts carry them to the brink of something different without actually informing them in

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any prescriptive way about the new that is offered. The Book of Jubilees is rather different. It has an angelic revelation to Moses on Sinai: a retelling of biblical history which conforms largely with what is found in Scripture but diverges from mainstream practice on the calculation of the calendar, which has an impact on the days one should celebrate the major festivals, and on the character of Sabbath, and anathematises opponents and their behaviour. In Jubilees it is made quite clear that the calendar laid down by the angelic revelation is not only different from what applies elsewhere but that deviation involves a complete repudiation of the Law of God. Here revelation is used to exclude and anathematise, to vindicate one side in what were contentious matters in Second Temple Judaism. In such a use of apocalyptic there is no sense of human fallibility. Wisdom is offered and received which in effect removes any possibility of discussion of the subject. The text’s meaning is transparent and is the final, authoritative pronouncement. While all apocalypses offer revelation, much of which is in effect confirming what was traditionally believed already, most do not offer an unambiguous answer to questions. Indeed, there is frequently need for angelic interpretation of enigmatic dreams and visions. Even these interpretations are not without their ambiguities. It proved necessary for revelations coined in one era to be the basis of 'updating' and application in the different political circumstances of another. Thus the symbolism of the fourth beast in Dan. 7 is given a new lease of interpretative life in the Roman period when it is made to refer to Rome. Despite its authoritative claim in 22:18, Revelation does not offer unambiguous and exclusive answers. Its apocalyptic symbols can produce as much mystification as enlightenment. So some apocalypses do not provide ‘answers’ through revelation and offer nothing more than the refusal of a complete answer as being beyond the human mind to grasp. Instead, there is a plethora of imagery or enigmatic pronouncement which leaves the reader either with no possibility of ever knowing fully the mind of God or tantalising glimpses of God in the enigmatic symbols of dreams and visions. Apocalyptic can seem to offer easy answers through divine intervention and insight to unfathomable human problems. ‘Higher wisdom through revelation’ can be an antidote to the radical pessimism whose exponents despair of ever being able to make sense of the contradictions of human existence. The bleak national prospects in the second half of the Second Temple period might be expected to breed a mood of acute despair and depreciation of the ability of the practice of human rationality to answer the problems of existence. Those who had resort to the apocalyptic tradition were not content with the world as it appears to ‘normal’ perception. By means of ‘the door open in heaven’ they are offered a challenge to the works and wisdom of this age. For most ancient apocalyptists the time of complete knowledge is still in the future. In the present age, to use Paul’s words, ‘we know in part’ and ‘see in a glass darkly’ (1 Cor. 13:9, 12).

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3.3. Apocalyptic and Gnosis Concentration on the eschatological characteristics of apocalyptic has not prevented commentators from noting the similarities which exist between the apocalyptic literature and gnostic texts.35 The relationship between apocalyptic and gnosticism is a very complex one. That links exist cannot be doubted, particularly since the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts. The Nag Hammadi texts include several apocalypses as well as many other points of contact with the apocalyptic tradition. It is not clear whether apocalyptic has contributed substantially to the gnostic spirituality or has merely provided certain components from its own range of imagery to an eclectic religious system. In the light of what has already been said it will be apparent that the interest in what may be called the heavenly dimension in apocalyptic literature is one important link. Nevertheless the preoccupation with the whole of human history and with eschatology in the apocalypses, the historical/horizontal rather than the heavenly/vertical dimension, suggests that a significant shift has taken place from the former to the latter in the gnostic texts. As a way of pointing out how an apocalypse, albeit a Jewish Christian one, can easily drift in a gnostic direction, some consideration will be given to the Ascension of Isaiah.36 This apocalypse is a work of considerable importance in understanding the link between apocalyptic and gnosticism. It exhibits most of the typical 35

On the links between apocalyptic and gnosticism see R.M. Grant, Gnosticism and Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959); G. Quispel, ‘Christliche Gnosis und jüdische Heterodoxie’, EvT 14 (1954): 474–484; idem, ‘Gnosticism and the New Testament’, in The Bible in Modern Scholarship, ed. J.P. Hyatt (London: Carey Kingsgate Press, 1966), 252–271; idem, ‘The Origins of the Gnostic Demiurge’, in Kyriakon: Festschrift Johannes Quasten, eds. P. Granfield and J.A. Jungmann (Münster: Aschendorff, 1970), 271–276; M. Friedländer, Der vorchristliche jüdische Gnosticismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1898); A. Böhlig, ‘Der jüdische Hintergrund in gnostischen Texten von Nag Hammadi’, in idem, Mysterion und Wahrheit, AGSU 6 (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 80–101; G.W. MacRae, Some Elements of Jewish Apocalyptic and Mystical Tradition and their Relation to Gnostic Literature, 2 vols. (PhD Diss., Cambridge, 1966); R.M. Grant, ‘Les êtres intermédiaires dans le judaïsme tardif’, in Le origini dello Gnosticismo, ed. U. Bianchi, SHR 12 (Leiden: Brill, 1967), 141–154; K. Rudolph, ‘Randerscheinungen des Judentums und das Problem der Entstehung des Gnostizismus’, Kairos 9 (1967): 105– 122; I. Gruenwald, ‘Knowledge and Vision’, IOS 3 (1973): 63–107; idem, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, AGJU 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1980); idem, From Apocalyptic to Gnosticism: Studies in Apocalypticism, Merkavah Mysticism and Gnosticism (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1988); F.T. Fallon, The Enthronement of Sabaoth: Jewish Elements in Gnostic Creation Myths, NHS 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1978); and N. Deutsch, The Gnostic Imagination: Gnosticism, Mandaeism and Merkabah Mysticism (Leiden: Brill, 1995). 36 Translation and brief introduction in E. Hennecke, Neutestamentliche Apokryphen, rev. ed. W. Schneemelcher, 2 vols. (Tübingen: J.C.B Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1989), 2:547– 562: ET: New Testament Apocrypha, 2 vols. (London: SCM, 1992), 2:603–620.

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features of an apocalypse, namely, the revelation of the heavenly world, the heavenly ascent and an elaborate cosmology. The apocalypse proper (chs. 6ff.) is almost completely devoid of eschatological material (but note 9:13), though futurist eschatology is to be found earlier in the work at 4:4ff. The main topics are the world above, the descent of the redeemer and human destiny in this world of light (e.g. 9:9–10). The gnostic proclivities are particularly marked in the section which describes the descent of the redeemer (the Beloved) from the seventh heaven to earth.37 First of all the successful descent to earth depends on his escaping the notice of the lower heavenly powers. Although it does not appear that the powers in the lower heavens are hostile when Isaiah first ascends to the seventh heaven, they present a considerable threat to the Beloved as he descends to earth (10:8ff.). Indeed, he is forced to give the appropriate password to the door-keepers of each of the lower heavens before he is allowed through.38 An incipient dualistic theology becomes explicit in 10:13 where the prince of the world and his angels set themselves up as dominant figures in the cosmos uttering the cry found in other gnostic texts: ‘We alone are, and there is none beside us’ (Isa. 45:22, Hypostasis of the Archons 141:22–23 and Apocryphon of John 59:20). While there is no doubt about the subordination of the powers in the first five heavens to God (7:16; 8:8), the dualistic strain is quite marked. Here then within the framework of a Jewish Christian apocalypse we have signs of that dualism which was to become characteristic of the fully-fledged gnostic systems of the second and third centuries CE.39 There is some other evidence of an affinity with gnostic ideas in the Ascension of Isaiah, as the christology is apparently docetic, e.g. 9:13, 11:7– 8, 11:14, 11:17. It seems likely that the docetism is the result of the doctrine of pre-existence and the descent-ascent pattern of a heavenly redeemer.40 It can, of course, be argued that the gnostic tendencies which we find in the Ascension of Isaiah are the result of infiltration of gnostic ideas into apocalyptic thought. There is, however, a good reason for rejecting this suggestion and instead explaining its character by reference to developments in the apocalyptic merkabah-tradition. 37 On this work see J.M. Knight, The Ascension of Isaiah (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995); and idem, Disciples of the Beloved One: The Christology, Social Setting and Theological Context of the Ascension of Isaiah, JSPSup 18 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996); R.G. Hall, ‘The Ascension of Isaiah: Community, Situation, Date and Place in Early Christianity’, JBL 109 (1990): 289–306; and R. Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead, NovTSup 93 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 363–390. 38 On the passwords see Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, 32–33, and Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, 106–107. 39 See Grant, Gnosticism and Early Christianity, 56. 40 On the descent/ascent theme see C.H. Talbert, ‘The Myth of a Descending Ascending Redeemer in Mediterranean Antiquity’, NTS 22 (1976): 418–440.

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No mention is made of the throne of God in this apocalypse, though it may be implied in 11:3. Isaiah does not disguise the fact that he is unable to look upon the glory of God, but little is said about a throne in the highest heaven. The situation is very different when Isaiah describes what he sees in the five lowest heavens, for in each of these there is a figure seated on a throne surrounded by angels (e.g. 7:13–15, 18–19). We are not given detailed descriptions of these thrones in the lower heavens, but such information as we do possess would suggest some connection with the apocalyptic throne theophanies of Dan. 7:9–10 and 1 En. 14:20–21. Like both these passages we have in the Ascension of Isaiah a throne surrounded by angelic beings singing praises. There is no question here of any dualistic contrast between those who occupy the thrones in the lowest heavens and the invisible God in the seventh heaven as 7:16, 8:8 and 10:1 make plain. The description of the lowest heavens resembles in many ways that found in the later Jewish Hekaloth text, The Visions of Ezekiel.41 The picture here suggests an apocalypse moving in the direction of gnostic dualism rather than one which has incorporated gnostic elements. But it would seem that there are sufficient hints for us to suppose that the divine throne and its occupant have been linked with lower divine beings rather than with God in the highest heaven. Isaiah is told not to worship these figures even though he feels compelled to do so (7:21 and Rev. 19:10).42 The seer considers that these figures have sufficient signs of divinity to warrant worship. Such a compulsion would be understandable if a link had been made between these lower divinities and the vision of God of Isa. 6:1ff. There are indications that such a connection may have been made in Asc. Isa. 7:2. A contrast is implied in this verse between the glorious angel who appears to the prophet at the beginning of his ascent to heaven and less glorious heavenly beings, which he was wont to see. The most obvious way of taking this is as a deliberate contrast with the call-vision reported in Isa. 6, where God had appeared to the prophet surrounded by seraphim singing his praise. The separation which seems to be hinted at in the Ascension of Isaiah between the throne of glory and God is one which appears to be present already in certain Jewish apocalypses. Indeed, it is possible to detect a bifurcating tradition in apocalyptic theology with regard to the throne of God.43 41

See further Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, 134ff. See L.T. Stuckenbruck, Angel Veneration and Christology: A Study in Early Judaism and in the Christology of the Apocalypse of John, WUNT 2.70 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1995). 43 On this see Rowland, The Open Heaven, 103–104; R. Bauckham, ‘The Worship of Jesus in Apocalyptic Christianity’, NTS 27 (1981): 322–341; A. Chester, ‘Jewish Messianic Expectations and Mediatorial Figures and Pauline Christology’, in Paulus und das antike Judentum, eds. M. Hengel and U. Heckel, WUNT 58 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1991), 17–90; Stuckenbruck, Angel Veneration and Christology; J.E. Fossum, 42

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On the one hand there was a tendency to link the throne of glory with another figure, so that, for example, in the Similitudes of Enoch (1 En. 71), the Testament of Abraham and 11QMelchizedek the throne is not inhabited by God but by an exalted human (Enoch, Abel and Melchizedek respectively). On the other hand there seems to have been a growing reluctance to describe the figure on the throne. So in the Qumran merkabah-fragment (4Q 405 20 ii 21–22), Apoc. Abr. 18 and Rev. 4 the throne is mentioned in the briefest of terms and in the first two works little or nothing whatever is said of a figure upon the throne. In both of these trends there is possibly reflected a tendency to make ‘a fundamental distinction between the theophanic appearance and the indefinable essence of God’.44 That is not to suggest that there is anything approaching a radical dualism here. Rather the point is that there exists in this division the possibility for a complete separation, which we find in gnosticism between the demiurge and the invisible, transcendent God. We can see from the Ascension of Isaiah that an extended cosmology and a distribution of divine authority through various heavens could lead to an incipient theological dualism. Thus the Ascension of Isaiah bears witness to the way in which an apocalypse from Jewish Christian circles began to manifest some of the classical features of gnosticism. In this work the vertical/heavenly dimension is pre-eminent, with the motif of ascent/descent (of the prophet) and descent/ascent (of the Beloved) imposing itself on the work as a whole.

3.4. The Nag Hammadi Texts The contribution of Jewish ideas to gnostic literature has long been recognised. There is a sophisticated use of Scripture to argue for a position radically at odds with the received wisdom, a kind of deconstructive reading of the Hebrew Bible reminiscent in some ways of examples in the Pauline corpus in The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord: Samaritan and Jewish Concepts of Intermediation and the Origin of Gnosticism, WUNT 36 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1985); and idem, The Image of the Invisible God: Essays on the Influence of Jewish Mysticism on Early Christology, NTOA 30 (Freiburg, Switzerland: Universitätsverlag, 1995); C. Rowland, ‘The Vision of the Risen Christ in Rev. i.13ff.’, JTS 31 (1980): 1–11 = below, pp. 185–194; A.F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven, SJLA 25 (Leiden: Brill, 1977); idem, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 34–71; S. Kim, The Origin of Paul’s Gospel, WUNT 2.4 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1981); C.C. Newman, Paul’s Glory-Christology: Tradition and Rhetoric, NovTSup 69 (Leiden: Brill, 1992); Ashton, Studying John; but note the cautionary comments in L.W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord (London: SCM, 1990). 44 See the comments of Scholem, Major Trends, 65 and H.R. Balz, Methodische Probleme der neutestamentlichen Christologie, WMANT 25 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1967), 79ff.

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the New Testament. But the hostility to the God of Israel which is manifest in many of the gnostic systems (e.g. in the Apocryphon of John) has persuaded many that it is impossible to find the origin of gnosticism within Judaism. It cannot be argued convincingly that Judaism by itself formed the dominant religious tradition for the gnostic systems. Any glance at the gnostic texts now available to us reveals a wide spread of sources of the ideas used by the writers. Nevertheless the Nag Hammadi discoveries have confirmed that the debt owed to Judaism is considerable. One example of this is the way in which the divine throne-chariot figures in some of the gnostic cosmologies, e.g. Excerpta ex Theodoto § 37, Apocryphon of John 5, 8:15ff., the Hypostasis of the Archons 143:20ff., and particularly the Untitled Work (given the title ‘On the Origin of the World’ in J.M. Robinson’s edition of the Nag Hammadi texts) 150:11ff. and 152:31ff. The cosmology which is described in Untitled Work 150:11ff.45 is similar to the cosmology of the Ascension of Isaiah, where there are seven heavens, in the first five of which are thrones and angelic powers. In each heaven there are thrones and chariots. According to Asc. Isa. 8:26 and 9:10 (cf. Rev. 4:4) there are many other thrones in the seventh heaven belonging to the righteous. In certain later Jewish mystical texts mention is made of a number of chariots belonging to God (e.g. The Visions of Ezekiel, 3 En. 2–3).46 Although there does appear to be a hint of knowledge of passages like Col. 1:16,47 Eph. 1:21 and l Pet. 3:22 in the reference to the armies of ‘divine and lordly’ powers, the large numbers of these angels, actually referred to as ‘'myriads without number’, has affinities with Dan. 7:10 and l En. 14:22. Links with Jewish apocalyptic are far more evident in the following paragraphs. Sabaoth is said to have created a throne for himself in front of his dwelling. This arrangement is rather like 3 En. 1 where God made for the angel Metatron a throne similar to the throne of glory and placed it at the door of the seventh hall.48 The throne-chariot itself is undoubtedly the merkabah of Ezekiel. As in the Hypostasis of the Archons the throne is described as a chariot with four faces. But the description of the chariot is much more extensive than that found in the Hypostasis of the Archons. Here the faces of the living creatures are mentioned (cf. Ezek. 1:5–12). The order in which the 45

See further Fallon, The Enthronement of Sabaoth; and Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, 115ff. 46 Further Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, 137. 47 On the connections of Colossians with Jewish apocalypticism see C. Rowland, ‘Apocalyptic Visions and the Exaltation of Christ in the Letter to the Colossians’, in Essays for Ernst Bammel, eds. idem and W. Horbury, JSNT 19 (1983): 73–83 = below, pp. 195–203. 48 MacRae, Jewish Apocalyptic, 104ff., thinks that dualistic myths of the kind we get in these texts may have influenced Elisha ben Abuyah. See also H. Graetz, Gnosticismus und Judenthum (Krotoschin: Monasch, 1846), and Segal, Two Powers in Heaven.

3. Apocalyptic: The Disclosure of Heavenly Knowledge

83

figures are mentioned differs from Ezek. 1, something which is characteristic of several of the throne-visions of the apocalypses. As in Rev. 4:7 the reference to the human is placed after the lion and the ox. Such a variation points to dependence on a tradition of the interpretation of the first chapter of Exodus rather than on Ezek. 1 itself. It could be argued that the author is dependent on Rev. 4, but this appears unlikely in view of the other differences as compared with Revelation. As elsewhere in the visions of God in the apocalypses, we find that Isa. 6 is combined with Ezek. 1 (Apoc. Abr. 18, Rev. 4:8–9 and 1 En. 14:18ff.). Unlike these other passages Isa. 6 is not woven into the description of the chariot and the creatures. Instead we find an additional reference to the seraphim, dragon-like in their appearance, which praise God continually (cf. Isa. 6:3). The description of the cherubim is without parallel in the Jewish literature. As in Ezek. 1 mention is made of the four ‘forms’, but instead of each corner of the chariot and its creature having four faces, the writer asserts that each corner had eight forms. This makes a total of sixty-four forms in all. This is difficult to reconcile with a belief that the chariot had four corners with a cherub at each corner with eight forms each. One must assume that, in order to obtain a total of sixty-four forms, the author thinks of a throne in the shape of a cube with eight corners, thus making a total of sixty-four forms in all. It is important for the author to have a total of sixty-four, in order to achieve a grand total of seventy-two forms (including Sabaoth and the seven archangels) as the pattern for the angels of the nations. Here too we have an idea familiar to us from apocalyptic literature (Dan. 10:13, 21; 3 En. 30, cf. 1 En. 89:59). This survey of the presence of one particular feature of Jewish apocalyptic in certain of the gnostic texts indicates that a component of gnostic works is derived from Jewish apocalyptic. We have suggested that the descriptions of the throne of the lower divine being derive from developed traditions about Ezekiel’s chariot rather than the original chapter itself. The kind of developments, which we find in these gnostic texts, point to an origin within Jewish circles developing the understanding of Ezek. 1. The Ascension of Isaiah and the angelology of apocalyptic suggest that certain forms of Judaism contained within them the seeds of later gnosticism. Apocalyptic never explicitly offers salvation based on knowledge, though its emphasis on its revelatory insight as a necessary pointer to the way of salvation is part of the function of this type of piety. The revelation of God’s will which comes through the disclosures given to the apocalyptist is a means whereby the readers can ascertain the divine purposes and be better equipped to continue in the way of faithfulness to the divine commands. So, for example, in Rev. 2–3 the revelation of the contents of the heavenly letters is a means of enabling the community to see the true way to salvation. Knowledge of God’s perspective is close to becoming the essential prerequisite to the understanding of what is required for salvation.

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In one respect apocalyptic allows no concession to gnostic theology. There can be little doubt that at all times it keeps a very firm grasp on the completeness of divine control. Nowhere do we find that there is any suggestion that God has lost control of the course of this world. But there are elements in apocalyptic which make its religious outlook susceptible to a gnostic form of dualism. Firstly, there can be no doubt about the way in which God delegates authority to other angelic beings, however temporary that devolution of power might have been (though it has to be stressed that a radical theological dualism is never found in the apocalypses). Nevertheless, if the Tripartite Tractate is to be believed, there were Jews who accepted a form of dualistic theology which ascribed the creation of the universe to angelic beings (112:35).49 Secondly, the hope for the future in the apocalypses necessarily has an implied contrast between the glory of the future age and the miserable circumstances of the present. Although there is no reason to suppose that the apocalyptists thought of matter as inherently evil, in certain circumstances it is conceivable that they could be so disillusioned with any hope for the present that they retreated totally to the world of light which was unsullied by the vicissitudes of the present creation. The common ground between apocalyptic and gnosticism lies in the concern of both movements to make sense of existence by reference to the world beyond. While it may be true to speak of gnosticism as essentially nonhistorical and non-eschatological, it is not correct to put gnosticism at the other end of the religious spectrum from apocalyptic. It is tempting to accept the view that the dualism of apocalyptic literature is eschatologically conditioned, whereas the dualism of the gnostics is cosmologically conditioned. While the apocalyptic literature does demonstrate a keen interest in history as the arena of divine activity, part of the reason for this interest resembles the concern of the gnostics to know whence one has come and whither one is going (cf. m.Aboth 3:1). The total view of human history found in the apocalypses functions as a means of explaining the human situation, in a perplexing world. The ultimate solution may differ from the gnostic, but the quest of the apocalyptist and his reliance on divine revelation as the basis for his answer is akin to gnostic spirituality. We should recall, therefore, that apocalyptic is not directed solely towards the future, and there is an important ‘vertical’ dimension to apocalyptic thought. The knowledge of what already exists in heaven, whether it be the secrets of the future or of God, is a way of giving significance to life in the world below. So differences should not blind us to a similarity of outlook, which makes it difficult to see them as anything other than related religious streams. 49 Translation of the Tripartite Tractate in J.M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 54ff., and see also Grant, ‘Les êtres intermédiaires dans le judaïsme tardif’; and Segal, Two Powers in Heaven, 121ff.

4. A Man Clothed in White Linen: Daniel 10:6ff. and Jewish Angelology There has been a growing interest in Jewish angelology in recent years, particularly with regard to the contribution it might have made to early christology.1 Several Old Testament passages have attracted attention, especially those concerning the ‫מלאך יהוה‬, but of greater importance, not least because of the way it has contributed to the christophany in Rev. 1:13ff., is the angelophany in Dan. 10:6ff.2 It is the assessment of the influence of this passage on several later Jewish texts, particularly Jos. As. 14, which is the aim of this study. That early christologies owed much to angelomorphic categories is not now disputed, at least as far as the post-New Testament period is concerned. Nevertheless the fact that the New Testament writings do not contain any passage which speaks of Christ as an angel has persuaded many that, if there was an angel christology, it was merely a peripheral phenomenon, rapidly rejected by mainstream Christianity (e.g. Heb. 1–3, cf. Col. 2:18). It is the implicit threat both to the uniqueness and divinity of Christ involved in the attribution of the title angel that has led to suspicion of this particular development. Such a negative assessment of the theological implications on angelomorphic christology should not be too precipitate, however. There is clear evidence that at least one New Testament writer identified the divine figure on the throne of glory, seen by the prophet Isaiah, with the pre-existent Christ (John 12:41).3 The rich theological tradition prompted by the throne1

Particular mention should be made of J. Barbel’s important study Christos Angelos, Theophaneia 3 (Bonn: P. Hanstein, 1964), and more recently R. Lorenz, Arius judaizans? Untersuchungen zur dogmengeschichtlichen Einordnung des Arius, FKDG 31 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980); A.F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven, SJLA 25 (Leiden: Brill, 1977); K. Berger, Die Auferstehung des Propheten und die Erhöhung des Menschensohnes, StUNT 13 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976); J.-A. Bühner, Der Gesandte und sein Weg im 4. Evangelium, WUNT 2.2 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1977); cf. J.D.G. Dunn, Christology in the Making (London: SCM, 1980), 149ff. 2 On this see my article, ‘The Vision of the Risen Christ in Rev. i.13ff.’, JTS 31 (1980): 1–11 = below, pp. 185–194, and T. Holtz, Die Christologie der Apokalypse des Johannes, TU 85 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1962), 116. 3 On the importance of this passage and its relationship to Jewish apocalyptic tradition see N.A. Dahl, ‘The Johannine Church and History’, in Current Issues in New Testament

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theophany tradition has been recognised in recent scholarship.4 The angelomorphic categories linked with this interpretative stream provide evidence of subtle variations within the parameters of monotheism, by the delegation of divine authority and attributes to other beings in the divine hierarchy. It has become possible to glimpse something of the raw material for christological reflection available in Second Temple Judaism; but this has made clarification of what is meant by monotheism at this period very necessary. Those of us who have sought to explain this rich seam of Jewish theology have in the past been a little too imprecise in our identification of what exactly may have been going on in the appropriation of Jewish angelology in primitive Christianity. It is probably a mistake simply to talk of angelchristology, at least in the primitive period, without further qualification. It is, in my view, more appropriate to speak of angelomorphic christology in the earliest period. This kind of description in no way implies that Christ was identified entirely with the created order. There is an implicit recognition, that while there may indeed be a prima facie case for the transference of angelomorphic categories in passages like Mark 9:2ff. and Rev. 1:13ff., this need not necessarily mean that Christ was identified as an angel, if by that is meant a being ontologically distinct from God. Commentators have for a long time been perplexed by the identity of this figure, but, unlike the equally mysterious figure of the ‫ כבר אנש‬in Dan. 8:13, it has not attracted anything like as much attention. That we are dealing here with an angel, who in his person manifests the divine kābōd, and not just a known messenger like Gabriel, is recognised by several commentators. Not least important is the fact that there is evidence in this passage of dependence on the vision of the divine glory in Ezek. 1.5 I have examined the links with Ezek. 1 in more detail elsewhere.6 Suffice it to say here that they indicate that the writer of

Interpretation: Essays in Honor of Otto A. Piper, eds. W. Klassen and G.F. Snyder (London: SCM, 1962), 124–142; Segal, Two Powers in Heaven; Berger, Auferstehung; Bühner, Der Gesandte; and C. Rowland, ‘John 1.51, Jewish Apocalyptic and Targumic Tradition’, NTS 30 (1984): 498–507 = below, pp. 204–214. 4 See further M. Black, ‘The Throne-Theophany Prophetic Commission and the “Son of Man”: A Study in Tradition-History’, in Jews, Greeks and Christians (FS W.D. Davies), eds. R. Hamerton-Kelly and R. Scroggs, SJLA 21 (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 57–73; C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982), 94–112; and S. Kim, The Origin of Paul’s Gospel, WUNT 2.4 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1981), 239–252. There is a comprehensive survey of Jewish angelology in J.E. Fossum, The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord: Samaritan and Jewish Concepts of Intermediation and the Origin of Gnosticism, WUNT 36 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1985). 5 ThWAT I (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1973), col. 688, s.v. ‘‫( ’בן אדם‬ET, II, 165). 6 Rowland, The Open Heaven, 3–4.

4. A Man Clothed in White Linen

87

this passage gives the impression that the angelophany has some of the ingredients of a theophany. That there was a continuing interest in the angelophany in Dan 10:6–7 is indicated by the evidence of dependence on it in descriptions of heavenly beings: Christ in Rev. 1:13ff., Jaoel in Apoc. Abr. 11 and Michael in Jos. As. 14.7 Indeed, so close are the links that the parallel passages may be set out in synoptic form. The synopsis on pages 90–92 includes the Masoretic text of Dan. 10:6 together with the Greek versions of Theodotion and the Septuagint, parallel passages from Dan. 7:9 and the descriptions of the heavenly beings in the Apocalypse of Abraham, Joseph and Asenath, Revelation and, by way of comparison, passages from Rev. 10:1, 14:14 and the Apocalypse of Zephaniah 9:12ff. When the material is placed in a synopsis, it is possible to see at a glance the extent of the relationship between Daniel and the later passages. As the link between Dan. 10, Rev. 1 and the Apocalypse of Abraham has been examined elsewhere, I should like to pay particular attention to the angelophany in Jos. As. 14. The links between Daniel and Joseph and Asenath are, if anything, more obvious than between Daniel and the Apocalypse of Abraham. Certainly the Apocalypse of Abraham mentions the clothing,8 body and face of the angel (lines 13–14, 15–16 and 28–29), but its comparisons differ from Daniel.9 Despite mentioning the clothing only in passing10 and omitting reference to the body of the angel,11 Joseph and Asenath starts in a similar 7 The translation of the Apocalypse of Abraham is that by G.H. Box (London: SPCK, 1918) and the edition of Joseph and Asenath is that by M. Philonenko (Joseph et Aséneth, StPB 13 [Leiden: Brill, 1968]). There are only minor variations between the shorter and longer Greek recensions in this passage. 8 The description of the robe shows some differences. Θ has βαδδιν, a transliteration of MT ‫בדים‬. One variant in Θ has δόξαν, an indication of the celestial appearance of the angel, as also is ἐξαίρετα in the Septuagint 36 (cf. syh) (see further J.A. Montgomery, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel, ICC [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1927], 409). 9 The Hebrew ‫ בכתם אופז‬is variously interpreted by the versions. Θ has ἐν χρυσίῳ Ὠφάζ, whereas the Septuagint has ἐκ µέσου αὐτοῦ φῶς. 10 The Peshitta has an interesting variant here: ‘And behold, a man who was clothed with clothes of honour, and his loins girt with honour of glory. And his look was changed and he had no form.’ K.A. George, The Peshitto Version of Daniel (Diss. Hamburg, 1973), 119, fails to note the significance of this variant. 11 Some manuscripts of the Septuagint compare the body of the angel to the sea (θαλάσσης is read for ‫)תרשיש‬. The most notable example of this reading is to be found in 967. See A. Geissen, Der Septuaginta-Text des Buches Daniel, Kap. 5–12, nach dem Kölner Teil des Papyrus 967 (Bonn: Habelt, 1968), and Montgomery, Daniel, 409. Attempts to explain this variant have usually resorted to theories of textual corruption. The possibility of a deliberate theologically motivated change deserves consideration, however. In pursuit of this possibility I would like to mention three other passages which may point

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fashion to Dan. 10 and goes on to speak of the face, eyes and limbs of the angel in very similar, though not identical, terms (lines 15ff.). A superficial glance at Joseph and Asenath may seem to suggest that the similarities with Daniel, far from being the result of direct dependence on the latter, indicate borrowing from Rev. 1:13ff. Of course, the relationship between Joseph and Asenath and Christian ideas has been a matter about which there has been considerable divergence of opinion, though most recent commentators consider it to be a product of pre-Christian Egyptian Judaism.12 The connections between Joseph and Asenath and Revelation are certainly close. Reference to the face (line 15), eyes (line 17) and feet (line 31), for example, can all be paralleled in Revelation as well as Daniel. But when one comes to a detailed examination of these common elements, we note that in no case do we have exact verbal parallels between Revelation and Joseph and Asenath. Thus whereas in Revelation the eyes of Christ are compared to φλὸξ πυρός (line 24), this phrase in Joseph and Asenath describes the hair of the angel. Also, whereas in Joseph and Asenath φέγγος ἡλίου describes the eyes of the angel (line 18), in Revelation ἥλιος describes the face of Christ (line 46). In Revelation the feet are likened to χαλκολίβανος (cf. Daniel: ὡς ὅρασις χαλκοῦ στίλβοντος [Θ]; ὡσεὶ χαλκὸς ἐξαστράπτων [LXX], lines 32–33), whereas Joseph and Asenath has σίδηρος ἐκ πυρός (lines 31–33). These differences indicate that there is no compelling evidence to suggest that Joseph

in this direction: (a) the replacement in Symmachus Ezek. 1:16 of θαρσις by ὑακίνθου; (b) the description of the body of the angel in the Apocalypse of Abraham: ‘the appearance of his body was like sapphire’ (though this may derive from Ezek. 9:2 ζωνὴ σαπφίρου); and (c) a saying of R. Meir in b.Men. 43b which compares the colour of the throne of glory with the colour of the thread of blue (‫)הכנף פתיל תכלת ונתנו על ציצת‬: ‘It is not said here “that you may look upon them”, but “that you may look upon Him”. Thus Scripture teaches that whoever observes the commandment of the fringes is deemed as though he had received the Divine Presence, for ‫ תכלת‬resembles the colour of the sea, and the sea resembles the colour of the sky, and the colour of the sky resembles the colour of the throne of glory’ (on this see further B.Z. Bokser, ‘Thread of Blue’, PAAJR 31 [1963], 1–10). What is more, it may be pointed out that the word used to translate ‫ תכלת‬in the Septuagint of Num. 15:38 is ὑάκινθος. Three points may be made about these passages: (a) there is a link between the colour of the sea and the throne of glory in b.Men. 43b; (b) as we have seen, the angelophany in Dan. 10 has many affinities with the vision of the throne-chariot in Ezek. 1; and (c) there is a link between ‫ תרשיש‬and ὑάκινθος in Symmachus Ezek. 1:16. The possibility must be put forward, therefore, that the reading θαλάσσης could reflect some of the discussions concerned with the colour of the divine throne in these texts. 12 On this subject particular mention should be made of P. Batiffol, Le Livre de la Prière d’Aseneth, 2 fasc. (Paris: E. Leroux, 1889–1890), and C. Burchard, Untersuchungen zu Joseph und Aseneth, WUNT 8 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1965), and idem, Der dreizehnte Zeuge: Traditions- und kompositionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zu Lukas’ Darstellung der Frühzeit des Paulus, FRLANT 103 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970).

4. A Man Clothed in White Linen

89

and Asenath is dependent on Rev. 1; it most probably depends on the source common to both it and Revelation, namely Dan. 10:6–7. Let us now turn to examine some of the details in these passages. Joseph and Asenath, like Daniel (line 3), describes the angel as a man, though adding that he was in all respects like Joseph (lines 3–5). The angel is probably to be identified with Michael as he is called ἀρχιστράτηγος in 14:7, a title given to Michael in Test. Abr. 7 and 2 En. 33:10. The link between a patriarch and an exalted angel is to be found also in the Jewish apocryphal work The Prayer of Joseph, quoted by Origen in his commentary on John 2:6 (Commentary on John 2.31).13 In the fragment quoted by Origen we learn that Jacob is said to be the incarnation of an angel: ‘When I, Jacob, was coming from Mesopotamia of Syria, Uriel the angel of God, came forth and said that I had come down to earth and tabernacled among men and that my name was Jacob’ (κατέβην … ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν καὶ κατεσκήνωσα ἐν ἀνθρώποις …). Unlike the Septuagint, Joseph and Asenath, and Apocalypse of Abraham, Revelation does not use either ἀνήρ (Joseph and Asenath) or ἄνθρωπος (Daniel, Septuagint). Rather, the author describes Christ as ὅµοιον υἱὸν ἀνθρώπου. Most commentators have argued, rightly in my opinion, that we have an allusion to Dan. 7:13 ‫כבר אנש‬/ὅµοιος υἱὸς ἀνθρώπου. Recently, however, Maurice Casey,14 referring to Gustaf Dalman,15 has challenged this assumption. He points out that in Dan. 10:16 (Θ) we find ὁµοίωσις υἱοῦ ἀνθρώπου (cf. LXX ὁµοίωσις χειρὸς ἀνθρώπου and ΜΤ ‫)כדמות בני אדם‬. He argues that the fact that Rev. 1:13ff. is a vision which utilises elements mainly from Dan. 10 rather than Dan. 7 makes it more likely that the phrase ὅµοιον υἱὸν ἀνθρώπου is borrowed from Dan. 10:16, 18. There are, however, good reasons why we should prefer the explanation, which finds an allusion here to 7:13.

13

See further J.Z. Smith, ‘The Prayer of Joseph’, in Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, ed. J. Neusner, SHR 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 253–294. 14 M. Casey, Son of Man: The Interpretation and Influence of Daniel 7 (London: SPCK, 1979), 144. 15 G. Dalman, The Words of Jesus: Considered in the Light of Post-Biblical Jewish Writings and the Aramaic Language, trans. D.M. Kay (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1902), 251–252; cf. G.K. Beale, The Use of Daniel in Jewish Apocalyptic Literature and in the Revelation of St. John (Diss. Cambridge, 1980 [Lanham: University Press of America, 1984]), 142.

90

3

10

12

15

17

20 21 24

32 33

Section One: The Nature of Apocalypticism

Dan. 10,5–6; 7,9 (Θ)

Dan. 10,5–6; 7,9 (LXX)

Dan. 10,5–6; 7,9 (MT)

ἰδοὺ ἀνὴρ εἷς

ἰδοὺ ἄνθρωπος εἷς

ἐνδεδυµένος βαδδιν καὶ ἡ ὀσφὺς αὐτοῦ περιεζωσµένη ἐν χρυσίῳ Ὠφάζ καὶ τὸ σῶµα αὐτοῦ

ἐνδεδυµένος βύσσινα καὶ τὴν ὀσφὺν περιεζωσµένος βυσσίνῳ καὶ ἐκ µέσου αὐτοῦ φῶς καὶ τὸ σῶµα αὐτοῦ

ὡσεὶ θαρσις καὶ τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ

ὡσεὶ θαρσις καὶ τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ

ὡσεὶ ὅρασις ἀστραπῆς καὶ οἱ ὀφθαλµοὶ αὐτοῦ ὡσεὶ λαµπάδες πυρός. [7:9: ἡ θρὶξ τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτοῦ ὡσεὶ ἔριον καθαρόν. ὁ θρόνος αὐτοῦ φλὸξ πυρός]

ὡσεὶ ὅρασις ἀστραπῆς καὶ οἱ ὀφθαλµοὶ αὐτοῦ ὡσεὶ λαµπάδες πυρός. [7:9: τὸ τρίχωµα τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτοῦ ὡσεὶ ἔριον λευκὸν καθαρόν, ὁ θρόνος ὡσεὶ φλὸξ πυρός]

καὶ οἱ βραχίονες αὐτοῦ

καὶ οἱ βραχίονες αὐτοῦ

καὶ τᾶ σκέλη ὡς ὅρασις χαλκοῦ στίλβοντος,

καὶ οἱ πόδες ὡσεὶ χαλκὸς ἐξαστράπτων,

‫ומרגלתיו‬ ‫כעין‬ ‫נחשת קלל‬

καὶ ἡ φωνὴ τῶν λόγων αὐτοῦ ὡς φωνὴ ὄχλου.

καὶ φωνὴ λαλιᾶς αὐτοῦ ὡσεὶ φωνὴ θορύβου.

‫וקול‬ ‫דבריו‬ ‫כקול המון‬

‫והנה איש אחד‬

‫לבוש בדים‬ ‫ומתניו‬ ‫חגרים‬ ‫בכתם אופז‬ ‫וגויתו‬ ‫כתרשיש‬ ‫ופניו‬ ‫כמראה ברק‬ ‫ועיניו‬ ‫כלפידי אש‬ ‫]ושער ראשה‬ ‫כעמר נקא‬ ‫כרסיה‬ [‫שביבין די־נור‬ ‫וזרעתיו‬

91

4. A Man Clothed in White Linen

Jos. As. 14

3

9

ἰδοὺ ἀνὴρ ὅµοιος κατὰ πάντα τῷ Ιωσὴφ τῇ στολῇ καὶ τῷ στεφάνῳ καὶ τῇ ῥάβδῳ τῇ βασιλικῇ [Apoc. Zeph. 9:12ff.: … he was encircled by a golden girdle]

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

πλὴν τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ ἦν ὡς ἀστραπὴ καὶ οἱ ὀφθαλµοὶ αὐτοῦ [7:9: ὡς φέγγος ἡλίου καὶ αἱ τρίχες τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτοῦ

a

ὡς φλὸξ πυρόςa]

Rev. 1

Apoc. Abr. 11

καὶ ἐν µέσῳ τῶν λυχνιῶν ὅµοιον υἱὸν ἀνθρώπου [14:14: ὅµοιον υἱὸν ἀνθρώπου ἔχων ἐπὶ τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτοῦ στέφανον χρυσοῦν καὶ ἐν τῇ χειρὶ αὐτοῦ δρέπανον ὀξύ.] ἐνδεδυµένον ποδήρη καὶ περιεζωσµένον πρὸς τοῖς µαστοῖς ζώνην χρυσᾶν

And the angel came whom he had sent to me, in the likeness of a man …

[v. 16: ἡ ὄψις αὐτοῦ

… and the appearance of his body was like sapphire and the look of his countenance like chrysolite

ὡς ὁ ἥλιος φαίνει ἐν τῇ δυνάµει αὐτοῦ] [1:14b: καὶ οἱ ὀφθαλµοὶ αὐτοῦ ὡς φλὸξ πυρός] ἡ δέ κεφαλὴ αὐτοῦ καὶ αἱ τρίχες λευκαὶ ὡς ἔριον λευκὸν ὡς χιὼν καὶ οἱ ὀφθαλµοὶ αὐτοῦ ὡς φλὸξ πυρός [10:1 καὶ ἡ ἶρις ἐπὶ τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτοῦ]

28 29 31 32 33

36 a…a b…b

καὶ αἱ χεῖρες καὶ οἱ πόδες αὐτοῦ ὥσπερ σίδηρος b ἐκ πυρός.b

καὶ οἱ πόδες αὐτοῦ ὅµοιοι χαλκολιβάνῳ ὡς ἐν καµίνῳ πεπυρωµένης καὶ ἡ φωνὴ αὐτοῦ ὡς φωνὴ ὑδάτων πολλῶν

[and a golden sceptre in his right hand] [and the clothing of his garments like purple]

and the hair of his head like snow and the turban upon his head like the appearance of a rainbow and the clothing of his garments like purple [Rev. 10:1: καὶ οἱ πόδες αὐτοῦ ὡς στῦλοι πυρός.]

A has ὡς φλοξ πυρος ὑπολαµπαδος καιοµενης A has ἐκ πυρος ἀπολαµπων, ὡσπερ γαρ σπινθηρες ἀπεπηδον ἀπο τε των χειρων και των ποδων αὐτου

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46

Joseph and Asenath

Rev. 1

Apocalypse of Abraham

[καὶ τῇ ῥάβδῳ τῇ βασιλικῇ] [Apocalypse of Zephaniah 9:12ff. I raised myself up then and stood there and saw a tall angel who took his stand in front of me; whose countenance shone like the rays of the sun in his magnificence and he was encircled by a golden girdle, likewise, upon his breast; his feet were like brass

καὶ ἔχων ἐν τῇ δεξιᾷ χειρί αὐτοῦ ἀστέρας ἑπτὰ καὶ ἐκ τοῦ στόµατος αὐτοῦ ῥοµφαία δίστοµος ὀξεῖα ἐκπορευοµένη

and a golden sceptre was in his right hand

καὶ ἡ ὄψις αὐτοῦ ὡς ὁ ἥλιος φαίνει

[Rev. 10:1 καὶ τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ ὡς ὁ ἥλιος …]

which glows in a fire.]

ἐν τῇ δυνάµει αὐτοῦ.

[v. 15 καὶ οἱ πόδες αὐτοῦ ὅµοιοι χαλκολιβάνῳ ὡς ἐν καµίνῳ πεπυρωµένης]

Although Rev. 1:13 is not exactly the same form as the Greek of Dan. 7:13, R.H. Charles has pointed out that the author of Revelation uses ὅµοιος as synonymous in meaning with ὡς.16 What is more, he demonstrates that Rev. 1:13 and 14:14, where the phrase ὅµοιον υἱὸν ἀνθρώπου occurs, exhibit not only an identification of ὅµοιος and ὡς in respect of meaning but also in respect of construction. Thus the difference between Revelation and the Greek versions of Dan. 7:13 should not be taken as indicative of an origin in Dan. 10 for the phrase. We have an explicit allusion to Dan. 7:13 in Rev. 14:14. Whatever problems this passage may present for the interpretation of the christology of Revelation, both the presence of the phrase ὅµοιον υἱὸν ἀνθρώπου and the reference to ἐπὶ τὴν νεφέλην make a link with Dan. 7:13 virtually certain. Thus the fact that one of the two instances of the use of υἱὸς ἀνθρώπου in Revelation is to be found in a context where Dan. 7:13 is alluded to makes it likely, in view of the identical form in which the expressions appear in 2:13 16

R.H. Charles, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Revelation of St. John, 2 vols., ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1920), 1:35.

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93

and 14:14, that both refer to Dan. 7:13 rather than that Rev. 1:13 is dependent on Dan. 10:16. Joseph and Asenath and Apocalypse of Abraham refer to the garment of the angel only in passing (lines 5–6), with only Apocalypse of Abraham pausing to describe its colour (‘like purple’, line 29). Revelation is much closer to Daniel, though the priestly garb of the figure is given even more prominence (lines 9ff.).17 Various explanations of this development have been offered, though we ought not to lose sight of the possibility that what we have in Revelation may be a reformulation of Dan. 10 due in part to the apocalyptist’s visionary imagination. Both Joseph and Asenath and Revelation agree in omitting all reference to the body of the angel (line 13), though in Apocalypse of Abraham Jaoel’s body is compared to sapphire (line 14). The reason for the omission of this particular element is not entirely clear. Holtz explains its absence in Revelation as John’s attempt to explain a difficulty in the Danielic vision.18 He points out that the body of the angel is described as well as the garment, which covered the angel’s body. John, he suggests, avoids the confusion by replacing the reference to the body by the references to the head and hair (lines 19–20). Reference to the body of the angel is also absent in the Peshitta of Dan. 10, which departs quite significantly from the Hebrew (‘and his appearance was changed, and he had no form’).19 The reluctance we find here to describe the body of the angel is similar to the reluctance found in some apocalyptic texts to describe the details of a theophany (e.g. 2 En. 22:2, ‘And who am I to tell of the Lord’s unspeakable being and of his very wonderful face?’).20 This deviation in the Peshitta may indicate that Joseph and Asenath and Revelation may have omitted reference to the body of the angel for reverential reasons. The closest similarities between Daniel, Joseph and Asenath, and Revelation are to be found in the descriptions of the face and eyes of the heavenly being (lines 15ff.). Joseph and Asenath only, however, follows the order in Daniel, whereas Revelation has the references to the face tacked on at the end of the description of the vision, and the reference to the eyes follows immediately after the description of the head and hair (line 23); Apocalypse of Abraham has a reference to the face only (line 15). Similar to these passages is the description of the angel who guides Enoch in 2 En. 1 (‘And there appeared to me two men, exceeding big,21 so that I never saw such on earth; 17

See further on this, Holtz, Die Christologie der Apokalypse, 118. Holtz, Die Christologie der Apokalypse, 117. 19 On this reading see George, Peshitto Version of Daniel, 118. 20 See also Tg. Ezek. 1:27 (also 8:2). 21 On this feature of Jewish-Christian angelology see J. Daniélou, The Theology of Jewish Christianity, trans. and ed. J.A. Baker (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1964), 121. 18

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their faces were shining like the sun; their eyes were like burning candles, out of their mouths was fire coming forth, and their arms like golden wings’ …). The major difference between Dan. 10 and the other three texts we have been examining is the fact that Joseph and Asenath, Apocalypse of Abraham and Revelation all make mention of the hair of the heavenly being (lines 19ff.) (cf. 1 En. 106:2). Although the wording of Joseph and Asenath differs from Apocalypse of Abraham and Revelation (Joseph and Asenath: ὡς φλὸξ πυρός; Revelation: ὡς ἔριον λευκὸν κτλ.; lines 21 and 24), this difference is not so marked as to set Joseph and Asenath apart from the other two passages. Commentators on Rev. 1:14 all assume that there is an allusion to Dan. 7:9 here. Holtz, for example, asserts that the bestowal of this divine attribute on Christ is the conscious endowment of divinity from the theophanies of Dan. 7 and 1 En. 46, so that the angelophany of Dan. 10 is given a new dimension with the attribution of this element to Christ.22 Considerations of this feature in Rev. 1:14 have usually ignored the parallel developments in Jewish literature. The fact that we have a feature of the theophany of Dan. 7:9 given to an angelic being in two texts in addition to Rev. 1:14 demands some explanation. There seem to me to be two possibilities: either in Joseph and Asenath, Apocalypse of Abraham and Revelation we have three texts which have independently used Dan. 10 as the basis of a description of a heavenly being and then added to that description a feature of the theophany in Dan. 7:9; or, already there was an established exegetical tradition in Judaism which linked the angelophany in Dan. 10 with the passage about the Ancient of Days in 7:9. In the light of the fact that the combination of Dan. 10:6 and 7:9 can be found in no less than three texts, and may be hinted at in other passages,23 the first alternative seems to be ruled out. But if we assume that the second alternative is correct, the question arises how it came about that Dan. 10:6 was combined with this particular aspect of the 22 Holtz (Die Christologie der Apokalypse, 122, n. l) wrongly asserts that such an attribution is unique. 23 There may well be evidence of it elsewhere also. Reference should be made in particular to y.Yoma 42c, a story of Simeon the Just:

‫כל שנה ושנה שהייתי נכנס לבית קודש הקדשים‬ ‫היה זקן אחד לבוש לבנים ועטוף לבנים נכנס עמי‬ There are two features here which seem to point to some connection with the angelic tradition manifested in Joseph and Asenath, Apocalypse of Abraham and Revelation: (a) the fact that the being is described as an old man, like the ‫ עתיק יומיא‬in Dan. 7:9; and (b) his white raiment like Dan. 10 (‫ )בדים‬and Revelation (ποδήρη). That we are dealing with a theophany here is stressed by A. Marmorstein, The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), 2:49: ‘In the circle of R. Abbahu this report roused some surprise, for it is written that no one shall be in the tent of appointment during the time when the High Priest is atoning in the sanctuary (Lev. 16:17). Not even one of the angels was permitted to stay there at that moment. R. Abbahu says that surely the venerable old man was not a human being but God himself.’

4. A Man Clothed in White Linen

95

description of the Ancient of Days in Dan. 7:9. Two possible explanations suggest themselves: (i) From a very early stage the connections between Dan. 10:6–7 and descriptions of theophanies were recognised, and as a result items from these theophanies contributed to the later use of Dan. 10:6–7. In the light of the close connections which exist between Dan. 10:3ff. and Ezek. 1, it should not surprise us to find that Dan. 10 was linked with theophanic passages, and that it attracted material from them.24 (ii) A rather more complicated process seems possible, which deserves consideration. If in the tradition there had been identification of the angel in Dan. 10:6 with ‫ כבר אנש‬of Dan. 7:13,25 then it becomes possible to see why the angel should have white hair, an attribute of the Ancient of Days. It can be explained by the Septuagint reading of Dan. 7:13, ὡς παλαιὸς ἡµερῶν (cf. Θ: ἕως τοῦ παλαιοῦ τῶν ἡµερῶν), a reading of some antiquity.26 The significance of this variant, whatever the reason for its origin, is that an identification is made between the man-like figure and the Ancient of Days. It is suggested that Apocalypse of Abraham, Joseph and Asenath, and Revelation all reflect an exegetical tradition, which (a) knew of the identification of the man-like figure with the Ancient of Days implied by the Septuagint variant, (b) identified the human figure of 7:13 as an angelic being, and (c) as a result linked this verse with the parallel angelophany in Dan. 10:6–7. Evidence for such a process is not entirely lacking in the passages we have been considering. After all, Rev. 1:13ff. shows that Dan. 7:13 has been linked with the angelophany in Dan. 10, as has already been suggested. Such a link between angelic beings may well have been prompted by the similarity between ‫ כבר אנש‬and ‫איש אחד‬, not to mention the links with Ezek. 1, which are to be found in both passages. In the later development of theophanic passages in apocalyptic texts there is evidence of a tendency to combine features from several related passages.27 It is suggested that Dan. 10:6–7 also attracted material from related passages. Certainly Rev. 1:13ff. offers evidence of this process, for, in addition to Dan. 10, Ezek. 9:2 may have contributed 1:13 (lines 9ff.) (ἐνδεδυκὼς ποδήρη, καὶ ζώνη σαπφείρου ἐπὶ τῆς ὀσφύος αὐτοῦ, cf. Rev. 1:13: ἐνδεδυµένον ποδήρη καὶ περιεζωσµένον πρὸς τοῖς µαστοῖς 24 See my article referred to in n. 2 above and the literature cited there; and also Beale, The Use of Daniel, especially 138ff. 25 On the angelic character of the Son of Man see J.J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Vision of the Book of Daniel, HSM 16 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977); but cf. Casey, Son of Man, 31ff. 26 So J. Lust, ‘Daniel 7.13 and the Septuagint’, ETL 54 (1978): 62–69. 27 See further I. Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, AGJU 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1980), 32ff., and my article, ‘The Visions of God in Apocalyptic Literature’, JSJ 10 (1979): 137–154 = above, pp. 29–45.

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ζώνην χρυσᾶν), and in Rev. 2:16 Ezek. 1:24 is used (line 36) (ὡς φωνὴ ὑδάτων πολλῶν). Evidence of the expansion of Dan. 10 in Joseph and Asenath and the Apocalypse of Abraham is not so easy to find, with the exception of the reference to the hair of the angel, though it is possible that the words ‘the appearance of his body was like sapphire’ (lines 13–14) and ‘countenance of chrysolite’ (lines 15–16) may reflect Ezek. 9:2 and 28:13 respectively. Thus the second explanation deserves consideration, namely, that Joseph and Asenath, Apocalypse of Abraham and Revelation all depend on an interpretation of Dan. 10:6–7 which had linked the latter with Dan. 7:13 in the form known to us in the Septuagint. Whatever may be thought of the second explanation of the development of Dan. 10, there is evidence to suggest that we have in Apocalypse of Abraham, Joseph and Asenath, and Revelation evidence of an interpretative tradition of significance not only for Jewish angelology but also for early christology. That the latter is true is confirmed by evidence of the persistence of this tradition in the christophanies in works like the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis (chs. 4, 11). But this is just a small part of the developing angelology, which is of considerable importance for the study of Judaism and early Christianity alike.28

28

Further exploration of the significance of this material, with particular reference to the Ascension of Isaiah, is being carried out by J.M. Knight of Jesus College, Cambridge.

5. The Book of Daniel and the Radical Critique of Empire: An Essay in Apocalyptic Hermeneutics 5.l. Introduction The Geneva Bible’s marginal notes on the Book of Daniel are a salutary reminder that we are dealing with a text which was exegetical dynamite in its ability to support and inform struggles for change, which may seem to us utterly wrong-headed and bizarre, but which for our forebears were a matter of life and death.1 Something similar is evident in some notes that the English poet and artist William Blake made at a time of great repression in England at the end of the eighteenth century: ‘in this year of 1798 the Beast and the Whore rule without control’.2 Such appropriations of this book are merely more recent stages in any account of a Christian political theology.3 Already within the New Testament, the language of Daniel forms a central backdrop to the emergence of Christian social identity. The enigmatic phrase, the son of man, and the abomination of desolation are just the most obvious examples of discourse which is permeated with the Book of Daniel. It is in Revelation and the contemporary apocalypse, 4 Ezra, that Daniel rooted itself in perceptions of political reality. We see the way in which the critique of empire set in train by Dan. 2 and 7 is taken up afresh in the Roman period. Here we have evidence that as far as early Christianity was concerned, apocalypticism was a dominant mode of viewing the world. This is even true once the eschatological spirit of the Apocalypse was tamed in Augustine’s Tyconian hermeneutics in The City of God, a work whose essential rhetoric is formed by apocalypticism.4 In this essay an important, but often neglected, feature of the ongoing use of the imagery of Daniel is considered: its role in the political theology of 1 C. Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution (London: Penguin, 1993). 2 G. Keynes, ed., The Complete Writings of William Blake: With Variant Readings (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 392. 3 Some elements of this are discussed in C. Rowland, Radical Christianity: A Reading of Recovery (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). 4 See, P. Fredriksen, ‘Tyconius and Augustine on the Apocalypse’, in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, eds. R.K. Emmerson and B. McGinn (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 20–37.

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writers who not only looked forward to a radical transformation of the world predicted by Daniel, but took steps to engineer it in their day. In this process the resource offered by the Book of Daniel proved to be a significant component of the analysis of their world and its wrongs. The centrepiece of this essay is the writing of the seventeenth century radical, Gerrard Winstanley. Two other writers are also considered: the early reformation radical, Thomas Müntzer and William Blake, prophet, artist, engraver and poet. All of these lived at times of great social and political upheaval. The account of the pervasiveness of Danielic discourse is a subject which demands a book of its own and is, in any case, far beyond the competence of this interpreter. There have been, and continue to be, deep divergences in the appropriation of the book for any political theology ranging from the eschatological scenarios of pre-millennialism to the rather different apocalyptic hermeneutics of those who view their history through the lens of apocalyptic imagery and from the perspective of those dominated or ruled by an empire. This essay focuses on a small segment of the radical political appropriation of Daniel, which, like the evidence of the Geneva Bible, offers insights into the way two politically-involved interpreters found the apocalyptic discourse of Daniel a potent tool of social critique. The account of this appropriation of Daniel is set in the context of brief biographies, so that the contours of the interpretations of these two radical political interpreters can be set within the framework of the politics with which their exegesis is inextricably intertwined.

5.2. Thomas Müntzer (ca 1483–1525) Thomas Müntzer’s reputation has changed dramatically, at least as far as his theology, if not his politics, is concerned.5 His extraordinary theology, with its subtle interplay between personal transformation and identification with the suffering of Christ on the one hand and the outer transformation in the world on the other is more widely recognised. Müntzer’s reputation is that of the dangerous fanatic whose resorting to violence drew upon himself and his companions a horrible retribution in the midst of the German Peasants’ Revolt in 1525.6 His religion and politics are intimately intertwined, and 5 A summary of the importance of Müntzer, together with an up to date bibliography, may be found in A. Bradstock, Faith in the Revolution: The Political Theologies of Müntzer and Winstanley (London: SPCK, 1997). The translation of Müntzer’s writings is by P. Matheson, ed., The Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988). 6 See, for example, P. Blickle, The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants’ War from a New Perspective, trans. T.H. Brady Jr. and H.C.E. Midelford (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), and the suggestive evocation of popular Reformation

5. The Book of Daniel and the Radical Critique of Empire

99

apocalypticism is a key element in his theology. Müntzer’s emphasis on the need for intimate knowledge of God, rooted in the piety of late medieval mysticism, has all the hallmarks of apocalypticism,7 and his spirituality is now seen to be a central component of his political activism (indeed it was for the Münster Anabaptists a decade later, influenced as they were by the apocalypticism of Melchior Hoffman).8 In what must be one of the most remarkable sermons preached in the early Reformation period, the so-called Sermon before the Princes, Müntzer depends on Dan. 2 for a final, critical challenge to local rulers to throw in their lot with the common people, and themselves be the agents of the imminent eschatological harvest. In it Müntzer seeks to persuade the German rulers to use their right to wield the sword given to them by God, in support of the peasants, the common people, ‘the saints of the Most High’.9 Müntzer takes as his text for this sermon a passage from Dan. 2 in which the Jewish seer interprets a dream of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, which the wise men of the court were not able to interpret. According to Müntzer, Nebuchadnezzar shamed the people of God by his actions (this was a temporary moment of insight in that he was normally overwhelmed by carnal desire and creaturely comforts as Dan. 3 suggests). At least in the context of the receipt and interpretation of this dream he accepted what God had to say to him and proved himself to be a worthy recipient of the divine mysteries. As for the soothsayers of his own court they resembled the ecclesiastical intellectuals of Müntzer’s own day in presuming to interpret the divine mysteries without really understanding either them or the Almighty. Müntzer, like Daniel and all the true prophets before him, was equipped to do what every pious person could do as the result of the indwelling spirit, namely, to commune with God and have that inner knowledge which God offers through the divine Spirit (here that remarkable passage in 1 Cor. 2 provides a resource for his spiritual hermeneutics). For Müntzer, the Book of Daniel (among others) reminds readers of the importance of the dreams and visions as vehicles whereby that immediate apprehension of the divine will can be appreciated. Müntzer reproaches the clergy who teach ordinary people that ‘God no longer reveals his divine mysteries to his beloved friends by means of valid visions or his audible word’. He lists examples of visions from Scripture, and insists that opponents spirituality in P. Matheson, The Imaginative World of the Reformation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000). 7 This is explored in R. Schwarz, Die apokalyptische Theologie Thomas Müntzers und der Taboriten, BHT 55 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1977). 8 K. Deppermann, Melchior Hoffman, trans. M. Wren (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987). 9 Müntzer uses Dan. 7:27 on several occasions. For example, in a letter shortly before his death he points to this verse supporting the way in which God has given power to the common man, see Matheson, ed., Works of Thomas Müntzer, 150, 156–159, 250, 334.

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of visions are in fact opponents of the Holy Spirit, poured out in the Last Days, which is revealing to the elect ‘a decisive, inevitable, imminent reformation with great anguish’. Müntzer contrasts the way in which the people of God rejected the words of the prophet Jeremiah with the ready acceptance of Daniel’s interpretation by the pagan king Nebuchadnezzar. There is need for discernment, and the spiritual agony endured by the true prophet is sign enough of his calling. This, according to Müntzer, is hinted at in the reference to abstinence in Dan. 2:18. He admits that there have been false prophets and deceivers, but rebukes those who deny the possibility of continuing revelation as faithless men. Those who have fellowship with heaven are in a position to interpret. It is the ‘learned divines who are the soothsayers who publicly repudiate the revelation of God and thus attack the Holy Spirit’, and suppose that what is contrary to their understanding must be of the Devil. The proof of the rectitude of the revelation will be evident to the spiritual person. To gain ‘the self-disclosure of God a person must be separated from all diversion and have a heart resolute for truth and must through the exercise of such truth distinguish the undeceptive vision from the false one’. That means abandoning all consolation of the flesh. Spiritual turmoil and suffering are a mark of divine approbation. It is in such circumstances that God vouchsafes visions and dreams to beloved friends. Then will such a person receive the vision in the present; only then is it to be tested in the light of Scripture: first experience, then Scripture. Knowledge of the Scripture, therefore, is inadequate without the enlightenment which comes from the Spirit. Scripture is a witness to the faith of the writers, and it is the appropriation of that inner illumination which prompted the writing which is at the heart of true discipleship. In Müntzer’s interpretation of the vision of the statue, Christ is the Stone which is about to shatter the final empire, a fact which is appreciated better by ‘the poor laity and the peasants’. In the face of this destruction, the princes are exhorted to side with Christ the Stone whose empire will replace the kingdoms of the present rulers. What is needed is for the princes to recognise the incompetence of the clerics, just as Nebuchadnezzar rejected the wise men of his court. In their place he urges them to recognise that: … a new Daniel must arise and expound your dreams to you … he must be in the vanguard. … He must bring about a reconciliation between the wrath of the princes and the rage of the people.10

Müntzer’s interpretation of the statue fits into a long history of eschatological doctrine in which the ‘fifth kingdom’ is the decisive one.11 The hope of the 10

Matheson, ed., Works of Thomas Müntzer, 246. See, for example, B.S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in SeventeenthCentury English Millenarianism (London: Faber & Faber, 1972). 11

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101

transformation of the world is imminent, indeed in full cry, as the following words from the Sermon make clear: This text of Daniel, then, is as clear as the bright sun, and the work of ending the fifth empire of the world is now in full swing. The first empire is explained by the golden knob – that was the Babylonian – the second by the silver breastplate and arm-piece – that was the empire of the Medes and Persians. The third was the Greek Empire, resonant with human cleverness, indicated by the bronze; the fourth the Roman Empire, an empire won by the sword, an empire ruled by force. But the fifth is the one before us … the stone dislodged from the mountain by no human hand is a large one now, the poor laity and the peasants have a much sharper eye for it than you.12

In a daring exegesis of Rom. 13 (itself probably indebted to the apocalyptic periodisation of history inherent in Dan. 2 and 7),13 Müntzer points out that Paul’s reference to rulers ‘not bearing the sword in vain, for they are the servants of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer’ should be interpreted as an obligation to root out the wicked who are opposed to the ways of ‘the new Daniel’. Müntzer does not allow the rulers to use the argument that judgement must remain in God’s hands and reminds them of their obligation to wield the sword as executors of the divine wrath. There can be no quiet waiting upon God to destroy the works of the Antichrist, for it is human agents acting under the power of God who will effect the divine purposes. If the rulers refuse to do so, the sword will be taken away from those who ‘confess him all right with words and deny him in deeds’. They will be replaced by the ‘angels, who sharpen their sickles for this purpose’; they ‘are the serious servants of God who execute the wrath of the divine wisdom’. Those who repent will be spared, but those who refuse to co-operate in the task of returning the church to its original state cannot be spared: ‘the weeds must be plucked out of the vineyard of God in the time of harvest’. For Müntzer knowledge of God does not depend on the intellectual knowledge of the academy but on the need for the period of trial which leads to true faith. He has sharp things to say about ecclesiastics who lack any experience of words ‘heard from the mouth of God’, an emphasis on the spirit and prophecy which was to be a constant feature of radical political religion.14 Müntzer emphasises the prophetic conviction that he and other prophets of his own day were mouthpieces of God, a method of God’s communication which is still active and not dependent on book learning. He identifies himself as the one who comes in the Spirit of Elijah, the prophet who comes before the ‘great and terrible day of the Lord’ and also ‘a new Daniel’.

12

Matheson, ed., Collected Works, 244. See, for example, C.D. Morrison, The Powers That Be: Earthly Rulers and Demonic Powers in Romans 13,1–7, SBT 29 (London: SCM, 1960). 14 Rowland, Radical Christianity, 89–114. 13

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Thomas Müntzer contradicts the implied passivity of the apocalyptic endurance suggested by the Book of Daniel which demands patience in the face of the necessary wait for God’s reign and the temporary triumph of the prevailing political power. As with Gerrard Winstanley a century or so later, and the Münster Anabaptists a decade after Müntzer’s death, apocalypticism became a potent way of interpreting the present and empowering those with ears to hear the voice of God to take their stand as advisers to, and, if necessary, opponents of the rulers of this age.15 Apocalyptic insight in this instance is no mere consolation, but a catalyst for action.

5.3. Gerrard Winstanley16 A century later in England there arose another prophetic figure whose views on the interpretation of prophetic texts linked to practical action were similar to what we find in the work of Thomas Müntzer, but with more of that sense of passive resistance within the constraints of history that we find in the Book of Daniel.17 Gerrard Winstanley was born in Lancashire and was driven out of business by the English Civil War, which led to the execution of the monarch and the establishment of a republican commonwealth in England. His writing career spans the years 1648 to 1652, the period from the second Civil War to the last years of the Commonwealth. As far as we know, no further theological and political writings of his are now extant.18 From April 1649 to March 1650 Winstanley’s life and writing was intimately bound up with the Digger commune set up in Surrey, the group of which Winstanley was a member. As the term ‘Digger’ implies, the concern of this group was to give practical 15

See N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Secker & Warburg, 1957), and J.M. Stayer, The German Peasants’ War and the Anabaptist Community of Goods (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991). 16 See A. Bradstock, Faith in the Revolution (London: SPCK, 1998); G.E. Aylmer, ‘The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley’, in Radical Religion in the English Revolution, eds. J.F. McGregor and B. Reay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 91–119; C. Hill, The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley, Past and Present Supplement 5 (London: The Past and Present Society, 1978). 17 On the use of Daniel in Winstanley’s writings, see O. Lutaud, Winstanley: Socialisme et christianisme sous Cromwell (Paris: Didier, 1976), esp. 278–281. 18 The standard collection of Winstanley’s writings is: G.H. Sabine, ed., The Works of Gerrard Winstanley: With an Appendix of Documents relating to the Digger Movement (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1941); all the quotations which follow are from Sabine’s edition. Unfortunately, this does not contain Winstanley’s early writings, which are more overtly theological, such as The Breaking of the Day of God and The Saints Paradice (sic). A new edition, which incorporates the early writings, has been provided by Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes and David Loewenstein, eds., The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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effect to their convictions. Winstanley was prompted by a revelation that he and his companions should dig the common land. What we find in these writings is a sophisticated use of the Christian doctrine of the Fall and the apocalyptic imagery of texts like Daniel to demonstrate the injustice and sinfulness of contemporary economic and political arrangements. Winstanley and a few others moved to St. George’s Hill, Weybridge on l April 1649 (now, ironically, one of the most prosperous areas of housing in southern England). Their action provoked hostility from local landowners and complaints to the Council of State, and they were finally driven off the land in the spring of 1650. We know little of what happened to Winstanley, though there is some evidence that he became part of respectable society, leaving behind his Digger days as part of a moment of radical political opportunity which passed. He may have died a Quaker. Winstanley himself had an acute consciousness of his own vocation which he describes with the sense of immediacy familiar to us from the apocalyptic tradition: As I was in a trance not long since, divers matters were present to my sight, which here must not be related. Likewise I heard these words, Work together, Eat bread together; declare this all abroad. Likewise I heard these words. Whosoever it is that labours in the earth, for any person or persons, that lifts themselves as Lords and Rulers over others and that doth not look upon themselves equal to others in the Creation. The hand of the Lord shall be upon that labourer: I the Lord have spoken it and I will do it; Declare all this abroad.19

Winstanley believed that the prophetic spirit was again active in the momentous days in which he lived, and the prophetic images of the Bible were the currency with which latter-day prophets could speak God’s word. Indeed, the prophetic promises of the past were coming to fulfilment: all the prophecies, visions and revelations of Scriptures, of prophets, and apostles, concerning the calling of the Jews, the restoration of Israel; and the making of that people, the inheritors of the whole earth; doth all seat themselves in this work [i.e. the Digger experiment] of making the earth a common treasury.20

He considered that his insights were not merely the product of intellectual exercise, but the proclamation of the True Reason dwelling within him. It was part of Winstanley’s task to ‘unmask the reality’ of contemporary society, which he did by contrasting the present ‘normality’ and the Paradise which God intended. Fundamental to Winstanley’s justification of the communal experiment of the Diggers was the belief that the earth was a common treasury, and as such 19 G. Winstanley, The New Law of Righteousnes, in Sabine, ed., The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 190; idem, The True Levellers Standard Advanced, ibid., 261. 20 Winstanley, The True Levellers Standard Advanced, 260.

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the whole concept of the ownership of land as private property conflicted with this fundamental right. Winstanley was concerned to expose the way in which the preoccupation with private property reflected a fundamental characteristic of humanity after the Fall of Adam and the dominance of the influence of the Beast. His writings, like those of Müntzer, betray a remarkable understanding of the intimate link which exists between the internal struggle that goes on between human acquisitiveness on the one hand and altruism and sharing on the other, and the parallel struggle in society at large between the maintenance of private property and common ownership of the creation. According to Winstanley, private property was one of the consequences of the Fall. Adam consented to the serpent’s covetousness, then fell from righteousness, was cursed and was sent into the earth to eat his bread in sorrow. Private property is the curse, and those who possess this have gained it by oppression or murder. Its prevalence is typified by the rule of the Beast of a professional ministry, kingly power, the judiciary, and the buying and selling of the earth. These correspond to the four beasts in the Book of Daniel; Winstanley’s utilisation of this book is most clearly set out in one of his later works where biblical themes become more prominent once more: These foure powers are the foure Beasts, which Daniel saw rise up out of the Sea … And this Sea is the bulk and body of mankinde … for out of Mankind arises all that darknesse and Tyranny that oppresses it selfe. … The first Beast which Daniell saw rise up out of the deceived heart of Mankinde, was like a Lion; and had Eagles wings: And this is Kingly power, which takes the Sword, and makes way to rule over others thereby, dividing the Creation, one part from another; setting up the Conqueror to rule, making the conquered a slave; giving the Earth to some, denying the Earth to others. And when the time comes for Christ to reign, this Beast shall deliver up his crown, sceptre, authority, and government unto Christ, and lay all down at his feet … The second Beast was like a Beare; And this is the power of the selfish Lawes, which is full of covetousnesse … the power of Prisons … the power of whiping, banishment, and confiscation of goods … the power of hanging, pressing, burning, martering …; take these three ribs out of the mouth of the Law, or Innes of Court trade, and that Beast hath no power but dies. The third Beast was like a Leopard … this is the thieving Art of buying and selling, the Earth with her fruits one to another … this Beast had foure wings; Policy; Hypocrisie; SelfLove, and Hardness of Heart; for this Beast is a true self-Lover, to get the Earth to himselfe, to lock it up in Chests and barnes, though others starve for want. The fourth Beast is the Imaginary Clergy-Power, which indeed is Judas; and this is more terrible and dreadful then the rest … All these Beasts, they differ in shape, and yet they agree all in one oppressing power, supporting one another; one cannot live without another; and yet they seem to persecute one another, and if they truly die, all dies … The Creation, will never be in quiet, peace, till these foure Beasts, with all their heads and hornes, the variety of their branching powers doe run into the Sea againe, and be swallowed up in those waters; that is, into Mankinde, who shall be abundantly inlightned …

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This worke Christ will bring to passe, at his more glorious appearance … their returne back into the Sea, will be the rising up of Love, who is the Sonne of righteousnesse. … When Christ the Anointing spirit rises up, and inlightens mankind, then in his light, they shall see the deceit and falshood of this Beast, that hath deceived all the world; and shall fall off from him, and leave him naked and bare; and if he will teach and rule, let him shew his power over the Beasts; for the people will all looke up to God, to be taught and governed by him … When Christ comes, and is glorified with thousand thousands attending upon him, they shall not be cloathed with devouring instruments, like Dragons, but be cloathed with Love, Righteousnesse and Peace, like Lambs; And at his appearing, said Daniell, the Beast was slaine; and his body given to the burning flame; that is, all the Imaginary selfish Power, that made people run abroad for a Teacher, and a Ruler, was all cast into the fire of pure Light, and was consumed in that unquenchable flame; Even destroyed by the brightnesse of Christs comming, as darknesse vanisheth when Light comes in. Dan. 7.11.21

In this passage, which encapsulates many typical features of Winstanley’s apocalyptic hermeneutics, the process of ‘updating’ Daniel, already evident in Revelation and 4 Ezra, is at work but is now applied to the particular manifestation of tyranny evident in the English monarchical state. The diabolical alliance of monarchy, military power, the legal system, a system of private property and religion maintains a hegemony which crushes ordinary people. Salvation requires the overcoming of this power, and comes about when the scales fall off the eyes of deluded people and the spirit of Christ wells up in people bringing back the justice before the Fall. Such a happening is something which Winstanley believes he glimpses happening in the immediate aftermath of the execution of Charles I in 1649. That is the kairos, the moment of opportunity, which the saints could grasp and institute the messianic age in their common life freed from the tyranny of the Beast of private property. Unfortunately for Winstanley and his companions, the beast raised its head when those who were expected to promote a different order turned out to be just as monarchical and just as guilty of ‘covetousness’ as their predecessors. Winstanley used the imagery of the Book of Daniel, particularly the reference to the beast, to understand the oppression of state power. This reminds us of the importance of this symbolism in the formation of radical Christian positions.22 In the Synoptic Gospels, for example, Jesus had identified his ultimate triumph with the eternal rule of the heavenly Son of Man which would take place after the destruction of the Beast, which was representative of state power. In the Book of Revelation we find the idea of the Beast of Daniel taken up and related to the experience of oppression and state power that was exercised by the state in the apocalyptist’s day. 21

From Fire in the Bush, in CHL 2:190–197; cf. C. Hill, Winstanley: The Law of Freedom and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 234–241. 22 Examples of this may be found in D. Brady, The Contribution of British Writers to the Interpretation of Revelation 13:16–18, BGBE 27 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1983) and Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution.

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Winstanley used the apocalyptic imagery of Daniel and saw the present as a critical moment in the life of the nation. He offers no precise details about when the new age is to come, and what precisely will be the signs of its arrival. Nevertheless, Winstanley was convinced that Christ would reign and judge the world in and through his saints, something which he believed was being realised in the Digger commonwealth. In his view the captivity of the saints under the might of the Beast has come to an end. In Truth Lifting Up its Head, Winstanley can thus speak of the present as a moment when the reordering of society which is God’s purpose is now imminent: Is the Father’s time now come to rule the earth and fill it with himself? Yes: and shall have as large a privilege to fill the earth, as the first man had surely; and he will change times and customs, and fill the earth with new law, wherein dwells righteousness and peace.23

Winstanley’s use of apocalyptic imagery is distinctive; he rejects any literal fulfilment of the eschatological material. Any naive identification of the beast with some remote, eschatological figure removes the immediacy of impact of the symbol whose import is confined to the eschatological times which are to come. By linking the beast to contemporary institutions and persons (just as is the case in the application of the Antichrist myth in 1 John), Winstanley makes the present a time for action: ‘But for the present state of the old world that is running up like parchment in the fire, and wearing away …’.24 The new heaven and earth is something to be seen here and now. In The New Law of Righteousnes he dismisses the view that the New Jerusalem is ‘to be seen only hereafter’, and asserts ‘I know that the glory of the Lord shall be seen and known within creation, and the blessing shall spread within all nations’.25 The kingdom of God is very much a this-worldly kingdom; therefore, Christ’s second coming is the establishment of a state of community when the curse of Adam and the tyranny of the beast has been overthrown. True freedom lies in the community in spirit, and community in the earthly treasury, which is Christ spread abroad in the creation. A new creation will see a community of mankind which is typified by a ‘spirit of love, which is Christ in you, or the law within the heart, leading mankind into all truth and to be of one heart and mind’.26 God is not far above the heavens, but is to be found in the lives and experiences of ordinary men and women. One looks for God within oneself and as a result has commune with the divine spirit and every other creature made in the divine image (a sentiment which reappears in the closing stanza of William Blake’s ‘Divine Image’ in his Songs of Innocence). The person that worships God ‘at a distance’ is deceived by ‘the imagination of his own

23

Sabine, ed., Works, 113. Winstanley, The True Levellers Standard, in Sabine, ed., Works, 252. 25 Sabine, ed., Works, 153. 26 Winstanley, ‘New Year’s Gift’, in Sabine, ed., Works, 386. 24

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heart’. Salvation comes not by believing that a man died long ago in Jerusalem, but by the power of the spirit within.27 God’s kingdom comes when God arises in his saints. The perfect society will come when there takes place ‘the rising up of Christ in sons and daughters’, which is Christ’s second coming,28 when ‘flesh never acts unrighteously or trespasses against others’.

5.4. William Blake Daniel also looms large in the painting and poetry of William Blake.29 If we look at Blake’s poems we can find many connections with biblical books, but it is doubtful whether we can regard these as in any sense an allusion. Rather, the biblical tradition in which Blake was so deeply steeped provides the furniture of his visionary world, without necessarily any intent of parody or copy. Blake thought of himself as standing in a tradition of prophets. But it is that sense of vocation and of insight which enables him to offer the meaning of contemporary events such as the prophecies against the nations, or the visions of the beast and Babylon in Daniel or Revelation. Blake’s portrayal of Nebuchadnezzar as animal-like in both The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Plate 24) and the related picture, symbolises the bestial existence of life, which is focused only on the material world and the perspective of reason and principle. In Blake’s own prophecy, America (Plate 8, line 16), the parts of Daniel’s statue which had appeared in Nebuchadnezzar’s vision appear in an application of the apocalyptic imagery to the unleashing of revolutionary forces against the might of empire: Fires inwrap the earthly globe, yet man is not consumed; Amidst the lustful fires he walks, his feet become like brass, His knees and thighs like silver, & his breast and head like gold.

This is subtly different from Dan. 2:32: ‘the head of that statue was of fine gold, its chest and its arms of silver, its middle and thigh of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay’. The revolutionary man of Blake’s prophecy has no feet of clay, a sign that the revolutionary power shows little vulnerability (at least this was Blake’s view in the 1790s – Blake seems to have become less sanguine about the liberatory potential of 27

Winstanley, The Saints Paradice, in Sabine, ed., Works, 98. Winstanley, The New Law of Righteousnes, in Sabine, ed., Works, 162. 29 D. Bindman, ed., William Blake's Illuminated Books, 6 vols. (London: Tate Gallery Publications/William Blake Trust, 1991–1995); D.V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); J. Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992); E.P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 28

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revolution later in his life). The statuesque man of America 8:16 is not consumed, but rises like a phoenix from the flames of revolution. Blake could never allow scriptural passages to be taken over by him without them being reformed and put to a new prophetic use. This kind of alteration of the visionary material is so typical of Blake’s slight changes and the kind of variation which we see from time to time in the appropriation of Danielic texts in the visionary parts of the New Testament. An example of this is to be found in the way in which Dan. 10:5ff. is taken and represented in Rev. 1:13ff. The visionary material is not simply reproduced, but becomes in the visionary imagination of the later seer a resource of insight that is to a greater or lesser extent independent of the original. Elsewhere Blake, in a way which is typical of his use of Scripture, picks up phrases from Daniel like ‘the abomination of desolation’ and applies them to the dominant, threatening ideology of his day, the culture of reason and the hegemony of state religion (Jerusalem 10:15; ‘On Watson’s Apology’).30 The Danielic beast appears again in an artistic interpretation, with features that are similar to those offered by Winstanley in Fire in the Bush. It is part of Blake’s illustration to Edward Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’ (Blake found himself having to engrave and illustrate the work of others in order to make ends meet),31 an illustration that evokes the image of the beast as taken up in Rev. 17. From the way in which Blake interprets it, the beast represents the various aspects of contemporary political, religious and military power; he depicts the many-headed beast as bishops, a pope, a warrior-king, a soldier and a judge. What is striking about these readings of Daniel is the ready way in which writers relate the images to their own time. These differ from many readings of Daniel, ancient and modern, by not depending on their meaning in the ancient world.32 They also share affinities with those who use Daniel to construct apocalyptic scenarios about the rapture and the end of the world. In the latter, the Danielic images are decoded so as to refer to contemporary political realities, and there is no sense that these images might be needed again to interpret another set of realities at another time. For the political radicals, the present has become a time of fulfilment, in much the same way as in the New Testament figures like Elijah or the Son of Man were neither past figures nor part of a remote eschatological future. This is one of the 30 G. Keynes, ed., The Complete Writings of William Blake: With Variant Readings (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 393. 31 Title Page to Night VIII of Edward Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’, (ca 1795) in R. Lister, The Paintings of William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), plate 17. 32 B.E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and P. Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

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distinctive features of New Testament’s use of prophetic texts. They had become a part of a special period for a specially privileged people whose eyes had been allowed to see what the prophets and angels had longed to look upon (their view would echo the sentiments of verses like Luke 10:18 and 1 Pet. 1:11–12). Past and present become less important than the present as a time of fulfilment; history could go on and later prophets would need to apply the imagery of Daniel afresh in new ways in different situations of oppression.

5.5. Comment and Assessment Whereas Müntzer saw himself as a new prophet in the tradition of Daniel, much as Paul utilised prophetic language to describe his apostolic vocation in Gal. 1, Winstanley’s use of Daniel is more in the tradition of the apocalypse. He is not an interpreter as Müntzer had been of Dan. 2 in his Sermon before the Princes. Rather, he is the prophet like John of Patmos for whom the language of the prophets provides the raw material for a new prophetic announcement to be made. As in Revelation, we find the political critique of empire to be centred on the imagery of the beasts, whereas the hope for the new age, ‘Christ rising in sons and daughters’, takes its cue from the appearance of the Son of Man. In Revelation and 4 Ezra we find contrasting visions based on the beasts on the one hand (Rev. 13; 4 Ezra 11–12) and the ‘one like a son of man’ on the other (Rev. 1:13ff. and possibly 19:11ff.; 4 Ezra 13). The visions provide the contrasting tools for critique and hope, the two standing apart in the later visionary appropriations. Something similar is also to be found in the New Testament Gospels. In all these texts there is no explicit evidence of the critique of empire utilising the beasts of Dan. 7 (though beasts do make an enigmatic appearance at the conclusion of the Marcan temptation narrative in Mark 1:13). There is, however, the frequent reference to the Son of Man which, whatever we make of the origins of the tradition, in the final form of the Gospels has clear links with Dan. 7:13 (this is especially clear in Mark 13:26; 14:62; John 5:27 and perhaps also Matt. 25:31ff.). The theme of vindication in the face of defeat which dominates the majority of Son of Man sayings in the Synoptic Gospels is matched by assertions about the present authority and hidden power of the heavenly Son of Man figure. The political myth of Daniel provides a lens through which to view the political struggle between Jesus and the political powers of the Jerusalem ruling class and the Roman colonial powers. As in the later material we have been examining, we have an acting out of the ancient political myth in contemporary events and persons. Jesus is not a new Daniel, as Müntzer claimed, but acts out the myth of the ultimate triumph of the people of the saints of the Most High whose heavenly representative, one like a son of man, is given a position of authority in the heavenly sphere.

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What is evident in this use of the apocalyptic imagery of Daniel is something which is a distinguishing feature of much radical political theology, which is indebted to apocalypticism. Unlike those who speculate about the future (often in minute detail) by calculating the time of the End by using the images of Daniel and other apocalypses as a code, the interpretation of which can enable the insightful hermeneut to disentangle the complexities of eschatological mysteries, what we find here is, rather, apocalyptic images being used as a lens through which the present circumstances are interpreted. The beast ceases to be an eschatological phenomenon, threatening maybe, but with only vague outlines. Rather, that eschatological phenomenon is seen by the apocalyptic seer stalking the halls of contemporary political and ecclesial life. Such a mind-set is beautifully exemplified by Blake when, at the height of the crisis of war with France, he wrote in a note about life in his country: ‘To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life. The Beast and the Whore rule without control.’33 To see this was the role of the prophet: Prophets in the modern sense of the word have never existed. Jonah was no prophet, in the modern sense, for his prophecy of Nineveh failed. Every honest man is a prophet; he utters his opinion both of private and public matters. Thus: If you go on So, the result is So. He never says, such a thing shall happen let you do what you will. A Prophet is a Seer, not an Arbitrary Dictator. It is man’s fault if God is not able to do him good, for he gives to the just & to the unjust, but the unjust reject his gift.34

In Winstanley’s work, like that of Blake after him, the Danielic images, in which both were so deeply steeped, provided the furniture of his visionary world, without necessarily any intent of parody or copy. Blake thought of himself as standing in a tradition of prophets. He, Winstanley and Müntzer have a sense of vocation and of prophetic insight which enables him to offer the meaning of contemporary events via the visions of the beast or Babylon in Revelation. The language of the Bible has become a mode of discourse in which the original context and purpose has ceased to be of primary concern. In their imagination Daniel is echoed extensively. This is an indication of an appropriation of visionary language; there is no deliberate attempt to write a commentary on the biblical text. Daniel (and other prophetic and apocalyptic texts) has become the appropriate, indeed, inevitable mode of discourse for the visionary; they are quite simply the means whereby visions are expressed and perhaps even engendered. The apocalyptic text has become a catalyst in the exploration of pressing contemporary issues. There is an immediacy in the way in which the text is used because resonances are found with the experience set out in the stories of biblical characters. The Bible offers a typological resource which can be identified with the present difficulties, and at the same time a means by which 33 34

‘Annotations to Watson’s Apology’, in Keynes, ed., Complete Writings, 383. ‘Annotations to Watson’s Apology’, in Keynes, ed., Complete Writings, 392.

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they can be shown to be surmountable in a life of faith and community commitment. The Bible thus becomes a treasury from which the spiritual nuggets can be quarried to assist in the ‘pilgrim’s progress’. This approach has affinities with some examples of use of Scripture in Protestant, pietistic circles. The difference, however, is the setting for the reading, which is not primarily the inner life of an individual Christian, but a wider political horizon. In Winstanley’s case, the experience of digging the common land leads to a present struggle against poverty and oppression in which the apocalyptic image illuminates the nature of that struggle. If one compares his writing before the communal project started with that written after the failure of the Digger experiment, one finds a less immediate sense of what Karl Mannheim has called ‘the propitious moment’,35 the sense that one has become a person of destiny who enacts the realisation of the future hope. The vague hope for the future was transformed once the project was started, and became more muted once the project ended in failure. Of central importance (and in this respect there is an affinity with the emphasis of contemporary liberation theology) the experience of the everyday world is a part of the knowledge of God, along with those inner promptings, which are of the essence of the religion of the Spirit. Knowledge of a more immediate, primary text, the one written on the heart, the voice of the Spirit, or the insistent demand of the present reality makes seers out of all God’s people – hence the invective of Winstanley and Müntzer against the preachers and theologians of their day. We can discern a use of the tradition which refuses to be content with the letter, but pierces to the real meaning of the text. At times this attitude may manifest itself as a rejection of the priority of Scripture and a subordination of it to the inner understanding, which comes through the Spirit. The claim to a renewed knowledge of God is achieved by resorting to the continuing activity of the immanent God through the Spirit in the world who had inspired the prophets of old. Linked with this is the priority of that inner prompting of God, which enables the believer to know what the mind of God is in a particular matter and to which the written text acts as confirmation of that intuitive knowledge of God. With all literature which makes a claim to prophetic insight, from Daniel onwards, the question may immediately be asked: On what basis does the idea of revelation (which in theory could be novel in content) have to do with the tradition embedded in the Scriptures? The simple answer is that the process of innovation inherent in the apocalyptic genre is itself rooted in tradition. We must question the view of those who find very little evidence of any extensive use and connection with Scripture in the ancient Jewish apocalypses. Such a view hardly recognises the intense indebtedness to scriptural 35

K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. L. Wirth and E. Shils (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1936), 190.

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inspiration in the concept of apocalypse itself, though the links with Scripture are hardly interpretative in the sense that they methodically offer interpretations of the chosen texts. Rather, they are highly allusive. The idea of revelation may in theory bring with it connotations of novelty and a radical break with tradition. Surprisingly, there is very little evidence that the ancient Jewish apocalypses were used as vehicles for completely new revelation. Only rarely can it be said that they manifest a concern to contradict Scripture or tradition; that factor is occasionally present, and the potential for radical contradiction is readily apparent. Certainly the Book of Jubilees and certain portions of 1 Enoch use the apocalyptic framework to justify and support a method of calendrical calculation, which differs significantly from what we know to have been the dominant view on such matters in the Second Temple period. It is important to recognise that the concept of revelation is itself firmly rooted in Scripture, which provides the impetus for its use in later generations. Revelation is after all at the heart of the Jewish religion: the manifestation of God’s will to Moses on Mount Sinai. Nothing could be more characteristic of Scripture than to claim continuity with the character of that original revelation, albeit in different circumstances and with a different process of authorisation appropriate to a later stage in Jewish history. In the rabbinic tradition the ascent of Moses up the holy mountain was understood (at least in later midrash) as an ascent to heaven, where the Law-giver received the whole gamut of Scripture and tradition. The problem of revelation became particularly acute towards the end of the first century CE. Some early Christians, Paul in particular, justified attitudes towards and interpretations of the Torah by the conviction, based on apocalyptic awareness, that the messiah had come. The problem is found in its most acute form in the gnostic apocalypses of the second century and later. Here the revelatory form is used to give authority to understandings of Scripture, which completely subvert the character and obvious meaning of the text, by arguing for a theological dualism and a complete denigration of the God of Israel. It is easy to dismiss such developments as the rogue use of the biblical tradition in the service of a rampant anti-Judaism. Such an assessment, however, hardly does justice to the obvious indebtedness to the Bible and the evidence of detailed exegesis of it – hardly the preoccupation of those who totally despised the Jewish heritage. What we find is the use of Scripture and its religious signifiers to form a coherent system. Paul, like the writers of some of the Nag Hammadi texts (e.g. the Hypostasis of the Archons) deconstructs the religious system of which he had hitherto been a part by exploiting its own hermeneutical possibilities. But that hermeneutical exercise is itself the result of the prioritising of the prophetic and the visionary as the fundamental basis of theological insight. The fact is that the apocalyptic framework could offer the basis for radical steps in religion. Radical in content the ancient Jewish apocalypses may not

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be; all the evidence indicates that they repeat in various forms the common assumptions of most Jews. But it is the framework within which such information is communicated which is most significant. Who was to gainsay the authoritative visionary, particularly when the revelations also had the imprimatur of some biblical hero, as was the case with all the Jewish apocalypses of the Hellenistic period? The ground here was laid for those who wished to claim ultimate authority for belief and practice, which was entirely inconsistent with convention (as is evident in the case of Winstanley) or ‘the plain’ meaning of the text of Scripture (as is evident in some of the gnostic apocalypses). As the Bible itself indicates, the issue of false prophecy always remained a problem (Deut. 13; Jeremiah; Zech. 13). It is a theme to which both Müntzer and Winstanley refer, not least because they were aware that their opponents were playing down the significance of contemporary visions and revelations. When claims were made which seemed to be authenticated by God himself, in which current belief and practice was challenged, the difficulties are readily apparent. In the eyes of those Jews who were implacably opposed to them, the early Christian use of Scripture – with its justification of the rejection of certain key commandments on the basis of revelation – must have had all the hallmarks of false prophecy and led to precisely that type of suspicion of charismatic authority with which the New Testament is replete. Müntzer certainly, and to a lesser extent, Winstanley, both prompt that suspicion of the appropriation of Scripture which actualises the meaning of the text not just in contemporary events (for this is something which contemporary pre-millennialist interpretations of biblical eschatology demonstrate too),36 but as an intellectual environment and practical guide for the interpretation of the world and one’s conduct in it. There is no passivity in either Müntzer’s or Winstanley’s careers, at least according to their extant writings. The apocalyptic images become, in the words of another radical interpreter of apocalyptic texts, William Stringfellow, a means of discerning the way ‘Jerusalem and Babylon, Eschaton and the Apocalypse converge here and now’.37 As a counterweight to such views, the emphasis on either futurist eschatology or the ancient context of the meaning of apocalyptic images offers a potent antidote. Nevertheless, the writings and lives of Thomas Müntzer and Gerald Winstanley remind us that the Danielic images offered a powerful incentive for resistance and change, and a lens through which their own political contexts could be interpreted and judged.

36

Cf. Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More. W. Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (Waco: Word Books, 1973), 48. 37

6. ‘A door opened in heaven’: A Comparative Study of the Character of Visionary Experience in Ancient Judaism and Christianity* The purpose of this essay is to put on the agenda once more the quest for visionary experience in the apocalypses, to take at face value, for example, John the seer’s claim that he ‘was in the spirit on the Lord’s day’. Caution is expressed about the effects of a historical criticism which has, curiously, for all its interest in the history of religion, been less aware than it should have been about the religious experience which lies at the heart of many of the claims in the apocalypses. There have been those who have recognised the importance of visionary experience as a neglected component in the exegesis of the apocalypses. Concern about the scepticism with regard to the existence of visionary experience as the motor of prophetic and apocalyptic texts goes back to the very origins of historical study of the Bible. In a famous statement, to which I have found myself returning again and again, the English poet and theologian, Samuel Taylor Coleridge reproached the distinguished biblical critic J.G. Eichhorn for his reductionism in the way in which he approached what Coleridge considered to be the experiential character of prophetic texts, in this case the visions of Ezekiel: It perplexes me to understand how a Man of Eichhorn’s sense, learning and acquaintance with psychology could form or attach belief to so cold blooded an hypothesis. That in Ezekiel’s vision ideas or spiritual entities are presented in visual symbols, I never doubted; but as little can I doubt, that such symbols did present themselves to Ezekiel in visions – and by a law so closely connected with, if not contained, in that by which sensations are organised into images and mental sounds in our ordinary sleep.1

This analytical approach to prophetic, visionary, texts annoyed Coleridge. The reproach of Eichhorn for thinking that Ezekiel’s vision is mere poetic decoration which needs to be explained and deciphered, reflects a lack of sympathy and understanding for poetic imagination. This reflects the ways in * Co-Authored with Patricia Gibbons and Vicente Dobroruka. 1 E.S. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 89.

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which a prophetic text like Ezekiel, or the Apocalypse, has been interpreted. The analytical approach, with minute attention to, and exhaustive explanation of, the detail of the text, contrasts with an approach in which Ezekiel’s vision has in its turn inspired subsequent visionaries. In such an exercise of imagination there is the visualisation in the mind, of objects, inspired by what is read in texts, or, what is in the external world, which has a close relationship with the visionary, the dreamlike and the trance. In the latter the process is usually less deliberate than would be the case with an exercise of imagination. Over the years of his work on 4 Ezra, Michael Stone has repeatedly pointed to the importance of a little known compendium of texts relating to visionary experience, and suggested that pseudepigraphy has too often been a reason for not taking seriously the experiential character of some of these texts. In a recent article, Stone has returned to the theme of the reality of the religious experience lying behind the apocalyptic texts of antiquity.2 Likewise, Eliot Wolfson has demonstrated the importance of visualisation and imagination in Jewish medieval mystical writings.3 In a pioneering study which follows a similar methodological path to that pursued in this article, Dan Merkur uses comparative data to elucidate visionary techniques.4 Finally, in a much-neglected book, Violet MacDermot has reminded us of the wide textual evidence there is in antiquity for this.5 This is a necessary, and long overdue, task not least from the point of view of the history of religions. There is a wealth of evidence from different periods of history suggesting that visionaries or seers of various kinds felt themselves to be not just recipients but mediums of the communications which came from heavenly or distinguished ‘others’. The notion of automatic writing, possibly prepared for by ascetic practices or other means, has a long history down to the present, and its role is not to be discounted as a way of explaining the complex problem of pseudepigraphy in writings which claim visionary authority. This essay sketches work done in Oxford over the last four years. The essay traverses comparative study and the psychology of experience. The approach is avowedly analogical: making full use of comparative data from other periods of history with analogous religious characteristics to the visionary 2

M.E. Stone, ‘A Reconsideration of Apocalyptic Visions’, HTR 96 (2003): 167–180. E.R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 4 D. Merkur, Gnosis: An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Unions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). 5 V. MacDermot, The Cult of the Seer in the Ancient Middle East: A Contribution to Current Research on Hallucinations Drawn from Coptic and Other Texts, Publications of the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine 21 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). More recently, on the religious context of the Jewish material on dreams, see F. Flannery-Dailey, Dreamers, Scribes, and Priests: Jewish Dreams in the Hellenistic and Roman Eras, JSJSup 90 (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 3

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claims that we find in ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts. There are contrasting emphases in the essay. On the one hand, we examine ways in which the biblical text may have been the starting point for imaginative practice and then there is a consideration of the possibility that apocalyptic seers may have thought of themselves in some sense possessed by some great figure of the past.

6.1. The Book of Revelation – the Source: Reality or Fiction? It is unclear how ancient visionaries received their revelation. Did they sit down like a poet and exercise that mixture of imagination and attention to form which is characteristic of poetry, or are visionary texts more akin to the experience of dreams? Many commentators suppose that the Apocalypse and similar visionary texts are the result of a conscious attempt to weave together Scripture and contemporary challenge in a way not dissimilar to how the apostle Paul would have written his epistles. There are many signs in a book like the Apocalypse of a dream-like quality in which the visionary not only sees but also is an active participant in the visions he sees (e.g. 1:12, 17; 5:4; 7:13; 10:9–11; 11:1; 17:3, cf. 1:10; 21:10). There is a methodological question which arises here: should we not interpret the text as a vision unless there are strong reasons arising from our interpretation which suggest the contrary? Of course, in Revelation there is a close relationship with the prophetic texts like Ezekiel and Daniel indicating a knowledge which never manifests itself in explicit quotation. John’s vision draws on images which are familiar to us from elsewhere and in the history of interpretation have a fairly wellestablished meaning. Thus, the contribution of Dan. 7 to the political symbolism of Rev. 13 establishes a frame of reference which informs the sense we make of that chapter. Nevertheless the visionary experience while conditioned by life under Roman dominion, is not determined by it. There is also a semblance of order, which does yield a coherent pattern. In this respect Revelation differs markedly from a Jewish apocalypse like 1 Enoch. By comparison this is a veritable jumble of heterogeneous material. Such conscious ordering, however, need not exclude the possibility that Revelation contains in whole or in part the visions which John saw. Such visions are familiar to us from the mystical traditions of both Judaism and Christianity. These last mentioned factors have been taken as indications that some attempt has been made to give the book shape and coherence, perhaps most particularly marked in the reflective character of the vision in 17:9–10. If Revelation is a vision, that does affect the way in which the text is interpreted. The experience of dreams and visions, particularly when, as in the case of Revelation, it contains no interpretation from the visionary, is not susceptible to a definitive quest for the author’s intention.

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Scholars have highlighted the literary activity of the author of Revelation in the production of the text. Thus Jan Fekkes speaks of ‘John’s literary and exegetical activity’, his ‘fundamental authorial strategy’ and his ‘paradigmatic selection of OT texts’.6 The underlying assumption of such a position seems to be that John set out to create and compose his text. According to this model the text is the result of literary sophistication and artistry and John is seen as an author consciously creating his work. The authority or presumption from which he works is that he is a prophet and communicates God’s message in his chosen way, which on this occasion turns out to be apocalyptic. According to this model the author is self-aware of style and shape which he has selected in order to communicate the message, so much so that the style of the book can be referred to as ‘His exploitation of apocalyptic device and symbol’ which provides ‘the colour’.7 Another scholar refers to Revelation as a ‘work of art’8 and yet another that Revelation is a work of ‘astonishingly meticulous literary artistry’.9 Behind such phrases lies the presumption that the text of Revelation is a consciously crafted piece of work, and is constructed in order to achieve the author’s purpose and intention. One scholar speaking more broadly about apocalyptic literature in general, (into which category Revelation has also been placed) has said ‘the apocalypses are literature, indeed one might even say fiction’.10 One area of investigation concerning the origin and source of Revelation that has been neglected in recent scholarship is the suggestion that the text is a direct reflection of a visionary experience. Of course, such a position raises a host of questions particularly in the area of cognition, mechanisms of comprehension and memory. It is on these areas that my research has been focused. Research undertaken by Patricia Gibbons has been to take a tool of investigation from the works of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur particularly concerning the a priori conditions for human understanding, which he calls mimesis.11 One aspect of Ricoeur’s work gives attention to the influences of

6

J. Fekkes, Isaiah and Prophetic Traditions in the Book of Revelation: Visionary Antecedents and their Development, JSNTSup 93 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1994), 16 and 18. 7 Fekkes, Isaiah and Prophetic Traditions, 38. 8 S. Moyise, The Old Testament in the Book of Revelation, JSOTSup 115 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 18. 9 R. Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy: Studies on the Book of Revelation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), ix. 10 M. Himmelfarb, ‘Revelation and Rapture: The Transformation of the Visionary in the Ascent Apocalypses’, in Mysteries and Revelations: Apocalyptic Studies since the Uppsala Colloquium, eds. J.J. Collins and J.H. Charlesworth, JSPSup 9 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991), 79–90, at 87. 11 P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols., trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983–1986). See especially 1:55–81.

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the human environment in forming the structures of meaning and comprehension within human consciousness. His work at this point is an enquiry that explores the a priori conditions for human understanding. The process of comprehension is a sophisticated set of operations whereby distinctions can be made between a number of things such as between action as opposed to merely movement, between symbolic systems rather than literal apprehension, and in the ability to order and segment experiences which has the effect of distending time in a conceptual way. It also involves the competence of designating appropriate lexical units to experiences, distinguishing between denotation and connotation.12 Ricoeur’s theory suggests that humans generate a cognitive ability for comprehension and narrating which becomes a pre-critical framework for understanding. Importantly, these processes occur at the level of the pre-conscious, pre-critical and pre-linguistic and that the human mind confers a narrativity and readability onto experience in the very process of comprehension. The aspect of mimesis that Gibbons introduces into the debate on the Book of Revelation is Ricoeur’s insights into the a priori conditions for human understanding. These conditions all occur at the level of the pre-conscious and pre-critical, so that it can be said that what John encounters in his visionary experience is made sense of through the framework of understanding already present in his cognition. Using Ricoeur’s theory it is possible to describe the processes of comprehension of an event, in this case a visionary event, which utilises the tools of comprehension already present at a precritical level. My work shows that language labels and conceptual categories, as well as the ability to narrate an event, are due to the abilities already present in John’s pre-consciousness. If a particular individual, here John, has a language reservoir that is saturated in particular language, such as biblical language, then those categories will be engaged at a pre-conscious level, in the very act of comprehending the visionary event. To test out this theory, Patricia Gibbons turned to the life and writing of Anna Trapnel, a seventeenth-century English visionary.13 Gibbons’s work shows how such pre-conscious language categories, heavily influenced by biblical categories, are engaged during the very process of comprehending an ecstatic experience. When Trapnel’s utterances were recorded by a witness of the event, an examination of the text reveals a presence of biblical language and phraseology. Such biblical language will be taken as indicative of the pre-critical language reservoir already furnished in Trapnel’s cognitive appar12

Ricoeur’s discussion of this is found in La métaphore vive, published in English as The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. R. Czerny et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). 13 A. Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone, ed. and introd. H. Hinds (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000).

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atus and engaged on a pre-conscious level in the process of comprehension. Thus, the presence of biblical language in the text resulting from Trapnel’s vision is in no way due to conscious authorial inclusion. Gibbons suggests that the presence of biblical language in Revelation is due not to conscious authorial inclusion but rather as indicative of the very process of comprehending a visionary event utilising John’s existing cognitive apparatus that itself is saturated in biblical language and categories. Trapnel’s text was written by someone in the room transcribing what she uttered. We have no evidence to posit such a thing occurring for John of Revelation. However Gibbons explores another area, that of memory, to show how a trained mind could retain, order and retrieve experiences. In the premodern period the faculty of memory was highly esteemed and highly developed by educated individuals.14 Some present scholars consider that such memory capacity becomes a part of the individual’s cognitive apparatus.15 An exposition of the life and writings of twelfth-century mystic, Hildegard of Bingen, will show this to have a direct impact on the ability to retain and retrieve, and later write down her visions with great accuracy. She suggests that in an analogous way, John may have had a trained memory that was capable of retaining, ordering and retrieving experiences, so that when he had his visionary experience, he could later write it down into the text, which we know as the Book of Revelation. In summary, investigation into the areas of human cognition and memory capacity can be a fruitful area of research to be brought to bear on the Book of Revelation, opening up the way to consider the text of Revelation as a direct reflection of a visionary experience that John had, in which he was commanded to ‘write’ what he saw.

6.2. Exegesis through Imagination: The merkabah It seems probable that esoteric traditions associated with Ezek. 1 and similar passages were inherited by some of the early tannaim from this apocalyptic milieu. These traditions (as in apocalyptic) had both an exegetical as well as a visionary or mystical dimension. The reconstruction of the content of merkabah tradition in the late first century is not easy. The earliest strata of the talmudic tradition do not suggest any heavenly ascent, however, but simply of supernatural phenomena (pre-eminently fire) which accompanied merkabah exposition. Only later in connection with R. Akiba do we find suggestions (in versions of the story of the Four who entered pardes, b.Hag. 14b, y.Hag. 77b, 14 M.J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 15 Carruthers, Book of Memory, 33.

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t.Hag. 2:3–4 and Shir ha-Shirim R. 1:4) of heavenly ascents being practised. The paucity of information about the mystical involvement of R. Yohanan b. Zakkai and his pupils R. Eleazar b. Arak, R. Joshua and of R. Akiba, and his contemporaries Simeon b. Azzai, Simeon b. Zoma and Elisha b. Abuyah, does not allow us to reconstruct with any degree of certainty the character of this mystical interest. There are hints that visions of Ezekiel’s chariot may have been involved (t.Meg. 4:28; b.Meg. 24b), though it has to be admitted that the evidence does not allow us to do any more than put this forward as a tentative suggestion. Of course, if the practical methods were among the most closely guarded secrets of the tradition, and if some influential rabbis were hostile to them, we should expect the sources to be very reticent about them, especially when the practice was liable to cause theological and halakic deviance. Controversy concerning the status and legitimacy of the tradition is likely to have occurred during the first century, probably because of the way in which such traditions were developed in extra-rabbinic circles, not least Christianity. We know Paul was influenced by apocalyptic ascent ideas (2 Cor. 12:2–4). He emphasises the importance of this visionary element as the basis of his practice (Gal. 1:12 and 1:16, cf. Acts 22:17). His apocalyptic outlook enabled him to act on his mystical convictions, so that his apocalypse of Jesus Christ became the basis for his practice of admitting Gentiles to the messianic age without the practice of the Law of Moses. The interest in passages of Scripture which might provide a starting point which would enable the expositor, via traditions of interpretation, to gain further information about God and the divine ways, is not confined to the rabbinic tradition. In several places in apocalyptic literature there is evidence that the apocalyptists were also interested in the first chapter of Ezekiel (Dan. 7:9; 1 En. 14:20; Rev. 4; 4Q405 20 ii 21–22; Apoc. Abr. 17–18), and the first chapter of Genesis (Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum 28; 4 Ezra 6:38ff.; Jub. 2:2ff.; and 2 En. 25–26). Consideration of the use made of Ezek. 1 in the apocalypses leads to the suggestion that these passages, one of which (1 En. 14:8ff.) may go back to the beginning of the second century BC, already evince an extensive speculative and visionary interest in Ezek. 1. The texts from Caves 4 and 11 known as the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice have given considerable support to the view that sees the origin of the idea of the heavenly temple, liturgy and and the existence of a complex angelology linked with speculation about God’s dwelling early in the Second Temple period. They are tantalising glimpses that these fragmentary texts offer us of a speculation. The Qumran merkabah fragment (4Q405 20 ii 20–22) is a remarkable testimony to an extensive and sophisticated interest in the heavenly world which far exceeds the detail of all the extant apocalyptic texts and in many respects has its closest counterparts in the extensive heavenly accounts of the Hekaloth tractates. The fragments represent an insight into the existence of an extravagant, heavenly-orientated, mind-set of the Second Temple period

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which gives the lie to the notion that such speculation and interest is merely the creation of a post-Christian era. In some forms of the interpretation of Ezek. 1 the meaning of the text may have come about as the result of ‘seeing again’ what Ezekiel saw. The visionary’s own experience of what had appeared to Ezekiel becomes itself context for a creative interpretation of the text. For John and his apocalyptic contemporaries in the first century CE, a prophetic text like Ezek. 1 was probably not just the subject of learned debate but a catalyst for visionary experience as is found in the remarkable tradition of interpretation of Ezek. 1: maʿaseh merkabah. In some circles this led to renewed visionary experience as expounders saw again what had appeared to the prophet, but in their own way and appropriate for their own time. In circles influenced by rabbinic Judaism reading Ezek. 1 was severely restricted because of its use by visionaries and the dangers to faith and life which visionary activity posed (m.Meg. 4:10; t.Meg. 4[3]:31ff.; b.Meg. 24a–b). Early Christians, like John the visionary of the Apocalypse (and probably also Paul), were influenced by such visionary currents. This extraordinary tradition was maintained over centuries, particularly in Judaism but also some parts of Christianity.16 In this kind of exposition of prophetic texts, understanding of the text is discerned in the course of visionary experience. This provided the means of understanding its detail rather than it being the result of the deliberate application of exegetical methods to illuminate the ambiguities of the text. Mysticism and apocalypticism are words we use as interpretative categories, by which we seek to make sense for ourselves of a variety of particular characteristics within texts and in religious practice. Both relate to the understanding of and approach to the divine which does not usually depend solely, or even in the first instance, on the exercise of rational modes of interpretation of sacred texts, in which the interpreter by a series of formal rites or customary practices seeks to give meaning to texts. The discovery of meaning may entail practices of relating to them in such a way that the reader or interpreter ceases to be a detached observer or expositor of the texts but is instead actively involved in a performance which allows himself to be a participant and to share in that to which the text itself bears witness. Thus, in the interpretation of Ezek. 1 the meaning of the text may for some involve the explanation of its obscurities by resort to the explanatory devices familiar to us from all biblical hermeneutics, but for others (and it is this group which is most important) it involved seeing again what Ezekiel had seen. It may well have involved the kind of resort to cross-referencing but this contributed to a dynamic imaginative activity in which the details of Ezekiel’s vision are understood by a complex interweaving of vision and textual networking. It is 16

M. Lieb, The Visionary Mode: Biblical Prophecy, Hermeneutics, and Cultural Change (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991).

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something akin to this which we find in Rev. 4, where Ezekiel and Isaiah come together in the visionary’s imagination to produce, along with images which are not always easy to explain from a biblical background, the novel vision we have in this chapter and in what follows it in Rev. 5. Three aspects of Ezekiel’s vision are often described in later interpretations of the vision: colour; the meaning of the difficult word ḥašmal found in Ezek. 1:4, 27, and in 8:2 where it describes the figure who takes the prophet in his vision to Jerusalem; and the human forms mentioned in the vision. It is the ḥašmal which is of particular interest. In one of the passages which discuss it there is evidence that an experiential element was involved in meditating upon the meaning of this word which could lead to damage to inexperienced individuals: Thus far you have permission to speak, thenceforward you do not have permission to speak, for so it is written in the Book of Ben Sira: Seek not things that are too hard for thee. The things that have been permitted thee, think thereupon; thou hast no business with the things that are secret. It is taught: But may one expound (the mysteries of) ḥašmal? For behold there was once a child who expounded (the mysteries of) ḥašmal, and a fire went forth and consumed him. The case of the child is different for he had not reached the fitting age. … The rabbis taught: There was once a child who was reading at his teacher’s house the Book of Ezekiel and he apprehended what ḥašmal was, whereupon a fire went forth from ḥašmal and consumed him. So they sought to suppress the Book of Ezekiel, but Hananiah said: If he was a sage, all are sages. What does the word ḥašmal mean? Rab Judah said: Living creatures speaking fire. In a baraitha it is taught (ḥašmal) means at times they are silent; at times they speak. When the utterance goes forth from the mouth of the Holy one Blessed be He, they are silent and when the utterance goes not forth from the mouth of the Holy One, they speak. (b.Hag. 13a, cf. y.Hag. 77a)

The use of a particularly significant object as a catalyst for visionary meditation may also be ascribed to the numinous character of the tsitsith. In Num. 15:37–39 we read: ‘Speak to the Israelites, and tell them to make fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations and to put a blue cord on the fringe of each corner. You have a fringe so that when you see it, you will remember all the commandments of the Lord and do them.’ The ambiguity of the Hebrew suggested to later interpreters that by looking at the blue cord (teleketh) one would not look at it but at the divine world. ‘Rabbi Meir said: “It does not say, And you shall look upon it, but And you shall look upon him … those who fulfil the commandment of the tassels, it is as if they welcome the divine presence”’ (Sifre Num. 115). So, it became the object of meditative practice, so that by looking at it one might imagine the heavenly firmament and the divine throne itself: It was taught: Rabbi Meir used to say, Why is the blue specified above all colours? Because blue is like the sea, the sea is like the firmament, the firmament is like the throne of glory, as it is written, Underneath his feet was the appearance of sapphire-stone and like the very heaven for clearness (Exod. 24:10) and, Like the appearance of sapphire stone was the likeness of the throne. (b.Men. 43b)

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What is hinted at in these passages is that certain forms of meditation using objects might be the means of moving beyond the physical to the spiritual, from gazing at a particular beautiful colour to the process of visualising the very environs of God. In some examples of the interpretation of Ezek. 1, therefore, the meaning of the text may have come about as the result of the interpreter’s own creative and experiential appropriation of the text, a ‘seeing again’ of what Ezekiel had seen. In this the visionary’s own experience of what had appeared to Ezekiel becomes itself the context for a creative interpretation of the text. David Halperin has captured this aspect of merkabah exegesis well when he writes: ‘When the apocalyptic visionary “sees” something that looks like Ezekiel’s merkabah, we may assume that he is seeing the merkabah vision as he has persuaded himself it really was, as Ezekiel would have seen it, had he been inspired wholly and not in part’.17

6.3. Exegesis through Imagination: The Craft of Memory Such meditative practices have been a key part of religion down the centuries and became the cornerstone of the religious life in the late medieval period, though the practices were rooted in a long tradition. The exercise of imagination involves the visualisation in the mind of objects, inspired by what is read in texts or in the external world. It has a close relationship with the visionary and the dreamlike, therefore, though in the latter the process is usually less deliberate than would be the case with an exercise of imagination. In much of the interpretation we are not dealing with the kind of analytical exegesis which is so typical of academic discourse in which historical context and the precise meaning of words and phrases, or for that matter, the intention of the author are dealt with. Instead, it is a rather indirect relationship with the Scriptures in which the words become the catalyst for exercise of imagination as text is taken up and infuses the imagination. Recalled texts yielded new meaning by process of spontaneous interconnections through recall. Meditation was a regular period of deliberate thought which may start from reading but which then opens up to a variety of subjects. The mixing of the verbal and the visual took place as in the very process of recollection what is retrieved is conceived of anew in meditative imagination. Both in antiquity and also, later, in the medieval period, we find evidence of the stimulation of an affective experience in which an encounter with divine came about through meditation. Such meditative practice might be 17 D.J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988), 71; Stone, ‘A Reconsideration of Apocalyptic Visions’.

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based on books but more often was the result of a sophisticated process of memorisation of scriptural texts, in which the one meditating was able to recall and envision. The exercise of imagination, which might involve the visualisation in the mind of objects, has been an important part of the reading of Scripture. Mary Carruthers has shown how in the process of memorisation and the recall of memory there is a creative process of interaction of images. The medieval scholar remembers things by making a mental vision or seeing of things which are invisible from the matters in the memory, thereby embracing the present and the future through their likeness to that which is past:18 The monastic practice of meditation notably involved making mental images or cognitive “pictures” for thinking and composing. The use of such pictures … derives both from Jewish spirituality and from the compositional practices of Roman rhetoric. The emphasis upon the need for human beings to “see” their thoughts in their minds as organized schemata of images, or “pictures,” and then to use these for further thinking, is a striking and continuous feature of medieval monastic rhetoric. … Medieval memoria was a universal thinking machine – machina memorialis – both the mill that ground the grain of one’s experiences (including all that one read) into a mental flour with which one could make wholesome new bread, and also the hoist or windlass that every wise master-mason learned to make and to use in constructing new matters.19

So, ancient readers and hearers of texts could seek to ‘visualise’ what they read (or heard), and that seeing or listening would frequently involve the creation of mental images. Such meditative practice was the result of a sophisticated process of memorisation of scriptural texts, in which, in imitation of Ezekiel’s and John’s digestion of the scroll passages (Ezek. 3 and Rev. 10 are often mentioned in medieval treatises on the reading and interpretation of Scripture), the one meditating was able to recall and envision. According to Hugh of St Victor in the Didascalion, meditation opened up the gateway to a network of allusions and personal context to effect a memory of Scripture which yielded an elaborate and existentially addressed meditative ‘lectio’ (Didascalion 3:10). Recalled biblical texts yielded new meaning by process of spontaneous interconnections, through meditative recall. This kind of imaginative activity has affinities with the kind of exegetical ingenuity which is presupposed by rabbinic legends in which fire is said to play around a tannaitic teacher, such as Simeon b. Azzai, renowned for his skill in relating one biblical text to another (Shir ha-Shirim R. 1:10.2).

18 M.J. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 68–69. 19 Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 304.

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6.4. Preparation for Visions in Cross-Cultural Perspective Vicente Dobroruka has sought to elucidate one conundrum of study of Jewish apocalyptic: whether the episodes of ecstasy and preparatory practices therein described are relics of first-hand experience. Alternatives are to suppose that they constitute a literary topos, with fasts, otherworldly journeys and contemplation of secrets from the beyond just part of what is expected from a literary genre. Other arguments point to the idea that they may reflect the kind of actual experiences visionaries were having, even if they were not actually being lived by the writer of the text in question, but were rather ‘hearsay’ stories. The common assumption is that we are not dealing with texts written as evident first-hand accounts of mystical experience, but with pseudepigraphy. This poses the additional difficulty that, even if the experiences described could be proven to be authentic, we would have no one to ascribe them due to the pseudepigraphical disguise. One possibility has been suggested by scholars since the last century: pseudepigraphy may indeed be in the very core of the experience – that is to say, ‘mechanical’ writers (the people who have done the actual writing, not the portrayed characters to whom the texts are attributed) might be fully and completely identified with their mythical heroes, to a point that they might have thought they were in fact the latter.20 Promising as this way of investigating is, there is one additional problem: the comparative lack of parallel descriptions of ancient people being possessed and then writing automatically makes straightforward comparison within Judaism, or even towards the Ancient World at large, impossible. The few examples we have are by no means conclusive: a passage in 2 Chron. 21:12 to the ‘letter from Elijah’ may be a reference to automatic writing, but it could be a situation similar to the finding of Deuteronomy in 2 Kgs. 23:24. Lucian also provides us with a description of a contemporary editor of oracles, Alexander of Abunoteichos.21 But in this case we are dealing with a 20

J.J. Collins, ‘Inspiration or Illusion: Biblical Theology and the Book of Daniel’, Ex Auditu 6 (1990): 31–33; D. Frankfurter, Elijah in Upper Egypt: Tthe Apocalypse of Elijah and Early Egyptian Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 40, 59–60, 88; M. Himmelfarb, ‘From Prophecy to Apocalypse: The Book of the Watchers and Tours of Heaven’, in Jewish Spirituality: From the Bible through the Middle Ages, ed. A. Green (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 149; D. Merkur, ‘The Visionary Practices of Jewish Apocalypticists’, in The Psychoanalytic Study of Society 14: Essays in Honor of Paul Parin, eds. L.B. Boyer and S.A. Grolnick (Hillsdale: Analytic, 1989), 120–121; C. Rowland. The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982), 234; M.E. Stone, ‘Apocalyptic – Vision or Hallucination?’, in idem, Selected Studies in Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha with Special Reference to the Armenian Tradition, SVTP 9 (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 425–428. 21 Alexander the False Prophet 19.

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notorious scoundrel whose religious writing was nothing but deceitful, and did not involve any mystical rapture. Another way of approaching this issue is needed, and cross-cultural analysis may lead to the use of much better documented religious practices where actual identification between mechanical and portrayed writers is the norm. In this work a variety of spiritism, Brazilian Kardecism, was chosen by Vicente Dobroruka. He did this for many reasons: its availability, due to the immense output of its main mystic, Chico Xavier (his final output of more than four hundred different titles before his death in 2002 probably qualifies him as the most prolific automatic writer ever); although Kardecist automatic writing has been little investigated in scholarly terms, the mediums themselves, and even Xavier, were quite willing to talk openly about their preparatory devices, and even the self-hypnosis involved; finally, Dobroruka’s firsthand knowledge of Kardecist practices made it an obvious starting point. His thesis intends to take the closest possible look at the possibility that these experiences might be pseudepigraphy itself, by using Kardecism as a heuristic device. The passages in apocalyptic texts and Second Temple texts at large dealing with practices to get visions are not plentiful. The picture that emerges from them, however, tells us that most of the visions occur during sleep, or when sleep has an important part to play in the preparation; sexual abstinence is almost absent, with the exception of the always problematic-dating Sibylline Oracles; the ingestion of chemical substances is numerically unimportant (appearing mostly in 4 Ezra 9:23–29; 12:51; 14:38–48 and, possibly, in Mart. Isa. 2:7–11).22 Fasting plays an important role but, being so common as it was, we are left at a doubt whether the many fasts undergone by the visionaries in Daniel, 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch are sincere experiences or just part of an expected genre. The experiences described by Chico Xavier, the main character in Kardecism and the most informative about preparations, extend much further.23

22 The theme of chemical induction of visionary experiences in 4 Ezra is important enough to be referred to in a separate article – cf. V. Dobroruka, ‘Chemically-Induced Visions in the Fourth Book of Ezra in Light of Comparative Persian Material’, JSQ 13 (2006): 1–26. 23 The main sources for Xavier’s experiences can be found in his description of his own ecstasies in Parnaso de além-túmulo (a book comprising poetry by famous Brazilian and Portuguese poets, from 1932), Nosso lar (which is in itself a kind of modern-day apocalypse, comprising a detailed newspaper-like description of the other world, 1944) and Mecanismos da mediunidade (1960). All were edited by the Federação Espírita do Brasil (originally in Rio de Janeiro, now in Brasília). It should be noted that this is a very elementary sample of Xavier’s output. It is massive but not homogeneous and comprises everything, ranging from commonsensical advice on piety to sophisticated poetry, emu-

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We should bear in mind that, even if we are dealing only with literary topoi in Second Temple texts – i.e. part of an expected genre – this does not in itself mean that the experiences described are false, but rather that this is what the mystic was expected to see. The same pattern would apply to Kardecism – all experience, not just religious, is governed by convention.24 We do not know, however, whether the apocalyptic writers regarded themselves as being channels of the wisdom of, or even ‘incarnating’, the past heroes who then lent their names to the texts and took responsibility for them. An important element to Kardecist automatic writing (psychography) is not apparently present in the range of experiences mentioned in connection with Second Temple visionaries, namely the manipulating of spirits. Indeed, on this issue there are interdictions (Deut. 18:11), as well as confusing references in talmudic literature,25 and more precise ones in Church fathers such as Augustine, Jerome and Origen, who reflect suspicion of it, though the references to it in their writings may indicate that there did exist this belief and practice in some circles.

6.5. Concluding Reflections Where does all this leave us? Firstly, cross-cultural comparison about the psychology of possession deserves further consideration, in order to tease out the peculiarities of the relation between human and divine, and one individual and another. There is considerable scope for further study in this area. The greater body of emphasis concerning the visionary psychology of William Blake, for example, indicates that a key aspect of his experience was confusion over visionary identity. Blake was a creative, imaginative interpreter not a detailed exegete. He took earlier texts, whether biblical or otherwise, and allowed them to become part of his mental furniture and imaginative world. For him any re-reading of an authoritative text is a creative process.26 This is exemplified in Blake’s Milton. In this poem the living poet (Blake) takes up and reformulates the work of a deceased predecessor,27 thereby

lating a vast range of deceased poets by mechanisms which are still not clear but that imply, admittedly by Xavier’s spiritual guide Emmanuel, a measure of self-hypnosis. 24 Himmelfarb, ‘Revelation and Rapture’, 153–154. 25 Cf. C.G. Montefiore and R. Loewe, eds., A Rabbinic Anthology (London: Macmillan, 1938) with special reference to the notes between pages 660–666. Reincarnation plays a major part in Jewish theology but in much later times. 26 P. Ricoeur, ‘Preface to Bultmann’, trans. P. McCormick, in idem, Essays on Biblical Interpretation (London: SCM, 1981), 51. 27 William Blake, Milton a Poem, eds. R.N. Essick and J. Viscomi, William Blake’s Illuminated Books vol. 5 (London: Blake Society/Tate Gallery, 1993), 12: ‘It is an exist-

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through this second act of creativity to redeem the inadequacies of Milton’s writing and life. Milton is in part a critique by Blake of the turn taken by the seventeenth-century poet to a religion of rules. But it is also a moment of inspired recapitulation in which the later poet redeems the earlier’s work, initiated when Blake sees Milton’s spirit enter into his left foot (Milton 14:49).28 In Milton, there is confusion of identity between the writer and the ancient poet. The way in which the latter’s artistic and personal redemption is effected has overlaps with themes in biblical texts where successors take up, take further, refine or even alter the work of a predecessor. Blake’s relationship with Milton is a tandem relationship similar to those scattered throughout the Bible, whereby the persona or charisma of one is carried on and transformed in new situations. One thinks of Elijah and Elisha; John the Baptist and Jesus; and Jesus and the Spirit-Paraclete. Elisha asks Elijah to give him a double portion of his spirit (2 Kgs. 2:9). Indeed, there is possibly something similar going on in Paul’s relationship with Jesus. As an apostle of Jesus Christ, Paul was not merely an agent but also an embodiment of Christ as the result of the indwelling Spirit: ‘it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me’ (Gal. 2:20). His person is not found solely in his corporeal presence, for, as 1 Cor. 5:4 indicates, Paul is able ‘in spirit’ to be with a community assembled ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus’. Of course, unlike Blake, Paul did not think of his apostolic vocation as a correction of the ministry of Christ (though one wonders whether the kind of freedom Paul feels able to manifest in 1 Cor. 9:14, to ignore the command of Jesus may be coming close to this). There is, however, continuation of identity, a reproduction in new circumstances of the dying Jesus, even a completion of the vicarious effects of his sufferings: ‘in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is the church’ (Col. 1:24). Of course, in the case of Blake and Milton, however, the successor is more important than the predecessor and corrects the work of the earlier poet. Although the separate identities of later and earlier poets are recognised, it does raise the question whether more cross-cultural study might help to elucidate the phenomenon of pseudepigraphy in some such way. It seems plausible to go on exploring the possibility that the apocalypses of Second Temple Judaism are the form that the mystical and prophetic religion

ence Blake wished to overcome and replace with a more fluid and open concept of being where the gulf between self and other is bridged – indeed, annihilated.’ 28 There is a parallel depiction of Blake’s deceased brother Robert’s inspiration. Robert does not appear in the text but his role as an inspired prophet poet alongside William is clearly important. Robert died in 1787 but William said that he conversed with him daily, ‘saw him in his imagination and wrote at his dictate’ (William Blake, Complete Writings: With Variant Readings, ed. G. Keynes [London: Oxford University Press, 1972], 797).

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took in the Greco-Roman period. We may find in these texts examples of those moments when human experience moves beyond what is apparent to physical perception, to open up perceptions of other dimensions of existence and with them other perspectives on ordinary life, different from a purely analytical or rational approach to texts or received wisdom. Such experiences may for the visionary have their origin in an approach to texts in which the pursuit of the meaning of the text is not a detached operation but may involve the interpreter as a participant in the narrative of the biblical texts (such as John’s experience of realisation in his own vision of what had appeared to Ezekiel in Rev. 1 and 4). Thereby he (and it was probably almost always a man) becomes a recipient of insight as the text becomes the vehicle of an imaginative transport to other realms of consciousness. It contrasts with the situation when the reader seeks to understand and master the intricacies of the text, by comparing it with other texts or by using those techniques of interpretation by which the enigmas can be mastered, the modes of reading typical of the various midrashic methods, both ancient and modern. There is a significant difference between such visionary appropriations and, say, the ‘closed’ readings of the Habakkuk Commentary, where the text has a clearly defined meaning as a result of the insight of the inspired interpreter. Although there are affinities between the apocalyptic reading and the Habakkuk commentary in their common belief that there is an inspired reading which leads beyond the letter to new insight, in effect the more ‘open-ended’ approaches in the majority of the rabbinic midrashim, are more akin to the visionary potential of the mystical ‘readings’. So, in some forms of the interpretation of Ezek. 1 the meaning of the text may come about as the result of ‘seeing again’ what Ezekiel saw. This may arise in the form of a vision (as appears to have been the case for John the visionary on Patmos), rather than by an explanation of the details of what Ezekiel saw. The visionary’s own experience of what had appeared to Ezekiel becomes itself the interpretation of the text, therefore. This kind of exegesis involves the apprehension of divine wisdom which is normally beyond ordinary human perception and is dependent on a disposition which is open to the visionary or revelatory potential of the text. For the visionary who appropriates the text in this way the earthly and the heavenly are linked and the visionary may experience the sense of being transformed into an angelic existence. This ‘visionary mode’ is similar to allegorical exegesis in so far as the letter of the text, because of its allusiveness and textual uncertainty, points to the need for another level of reality, whereby new dimensions of meaning may be opened up. Understanding, therefore, evokes a perception which pierces beyond the letter. This is the moment of apocalypse when the veil is removed and repentance and epistemological renewal coincide. For the ancient readers of Ezekiel, the prophet’s visionary report offered a gateway for visionary

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perception. For Paul the words of Scripture offered a gateway to Christ, a possible, though not necessary, means of discerning the divine mystery, which was, in the last resort, ‘apart from the Law’. Paul is an exponent of a kind of allegorical hermeneutics in which the apocalyptic/mystical tradition, with its contrasts between above and below, appearance and reality, offers him a hermeneutical device to explain the basis of his departure from hegemonic hermeneutics. Paul inherited from the Bible the belief in revelation, but in his case it was used to subvert dominant ways of reading via a conviction that the spirit enabled a deeper (in his case, christological) understanding of Scripture to come to the fore. The apocalypses likewise also promoted the quest for a deeper meaning in which the imagination is an interpretative space, which opens up a way to eternal verities hidden with God in the heavens.

7. Apocalyptic Literature There are many different kinds of prophecy in Christendom. One is prophecy, which interprets the writings of the prophets … Another kind foretells things to come, which are not previously contained in Scripture, and this prophecy is of three types. The first expresses itself simply in words, without images and figures – as Moses, David, and others of the prophets prophesy about Christ, and as Christ and the apostles prophesy about Antichrist, false teachers, etc. The second type does this with images, but alongside them it supplies their interpretation in specific words – as Joseph interprets dreams, and Daniel both dreams and images. The third type does it without either words or interpretations, exclusively with images and figures, like this book of Revelation and like the dreams, visions, and images that many holy people have had from the Holy Spirit … So long as this kind of prophecy remains without explanation and gets no sure interpretation, it is a concealed and mute prophecy and has not yet come to the profit and fruit which it is to give to Christendom. 1

Luther’s later Preface to the Book of Revelation in 1530, from which this is taken, not only exhibits a clear recognition of the difference in genre among the biblical prophetic and apocalyptic texts, especially Daniel and Revelation, it also echoes earlier attempts to differentiate among visions. The fourfold character of vision is set out by Richard of St Victor: ‘physical sight which contains no hidden significance; a mode of sight such as when Moses beheld the burning bush; the seeing through visible things to the invisible, and finally contemplation of the celestial without the mediation of any visible figures’.2 The term ‘apocalypse’ denotes a particular literary type found in the literature of ancient Judaism, characterised by claims to offer visions or other disclosures of divine mysteries concerning a variety of subjects, especially those to do with the future (‘eschatology’). When we find cataclysmic events described in these texts, they are often labelled ‘apocalyptic’ because they resemble the world-shattering events described in John’s visions in the Book of Revelation. There is only one apocalypse in the Hebrew Bible, the Book of 1 M. Luther, ‘Prefaces to the New Testament’ (1546), in Luther’s Works, Vol. 35: Word and Sacrament, eds. E.T. Bachmann and H.T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1960), 399–400. 2 P. Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua († 203) to Marguerite Porete († 1310) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 146.

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Daniel, though the discovery of fragments of an Enoch apocalypse among the Dead Sea Scrolls reminds us that apocalyptic was a widespread phenomenon in Second Temple Judaism (the religion which came to an end with the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70). Apocalyptic literature has obvious links with the prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible, and particularly with the future hope of the prophets. The concern with human history and the vindication of Israel’s hopes echoes prophetic themes, several of which have contributed to the language of the Book of Revelation, particularly Ezekiel, Daniel and Zechariah. There are also some similarities with the Wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible, with its interest in understanding the cosmos and the ways of the world. The most obvious apocalyptic or revelatory moment in the Wisdom corpus is the opening and dramatic climax of the Book of Job. This climax enables Job’s entirely reasonable stance to be transcended, and for Job to move from understanding on the basis of hearsay to understanding based on apocalyptic insight (Job 42:11).

7.1. Daniel The one Old Testament apocalypse (regarded as a prophetic book in the Christian Bible, placed after the prophecy of Ezekiel but in the Writings in the canon of the Hebrew Bible) contains a mixture of stories concerning the activity of a Jewish elite in Babylon, chief among whom is Daniel, their activities in discerning the mysterious dreams and signs which confront Babylonian kings, and the limits of compromise which lead to persecution. The second half of the book is a series of visions about the future purposes of God, which, though given in the time of the Exile, relates to the political situation in the middle of the second century BC. Its scope is international and relates the life of the righteous people to the succession of world empires and offers them the promise of eschatological vindication (Dan. 12:2 contains the first explicit doctrine of resurrection in the Bible).3 In Daniel, a significant part of the book has to do with the royal court in Babylon, and ch. 2 offers an interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. Here are men who are comfortable, respected Jews, who have a good reputation in the land of their exile, though there is nostalgia for Zion (Dan. 6:10) and limits on what the Jews described in these stories are prepared to compromise. As in Revelation, idolatry is the problem (Dan. 3). The fiery furnace and the lions’ den are the terrible consequence for those who refuse to conform. Yet there is evidence of admiration on the part of the king and a 3

See J.J. Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993).

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reluctance to see these significant courtiers die. Nebuchadnezzar is depicted with a degree of sympathy in Dan. 4. Those who resist the imperial system are prepared to face suffering but have miraculous escapes. Daniel presents individuals who are immersed in the life of the pagan court. Very differently, Revelation countenances no such accommodation. There is a more distanced and antagonistic attitude to empire. Although Rev. 18 reflects, briefly, on Babylon’s fall from the perspective of the kings, the mighty and the merchants, the position is one of vigorous rejection of the power and effects of empire and of satisfaction at the ultimate triumph of God’s righteousness (14:11; 19:3). The only strategies are resistance and withdrawal (18:4). Accommodation may be a sign of apostasy (Rev. 2:20ff.). In Revelation, persecution is expected to include suffering and death (2:11; 6:9; 7:14; 11:7; 12:11; 13:10). Luther was right to note the difference between Daniel and Revelation. However enigmatic the meaning of the texts, the genres of the two books are quite different and leave the reader with different approaches to the original visions. Whereas Daniel is almost offered some kind of interpretation (e.g. in chs. 2, 10–11), in which an angel explains the obscure images, such an explanation is almost completely lacking in Revelation which allows the interpreter greater latitude in the way in which the original vision is interpreted. In one important sense the kind of effect that both have had on subsequent literature and art has taken little account of these differences. The Book of Revelation itself is an indication of the fact that Daniel, from a very early time, was an influential text for later visionaries (along with Ezekiel). Indeed, the particular interpretations are ignored in favour of a reuse of the visionary images in the new visionary situation, two hundred years later. Thus, for example, the interpretation of Daniel’s vision of the beasts arising out of the sea becomes a vehicle of a powerful political critique of the contemporary polity in Rev. 13. Nevertheless, the Danielic vision is interpreted synchronically rather than diachronically. Thus, it is not a succession of empires but a fourfold imperial oppression. The frequent allusions to Daniel in both Revelation and 2 Esdras show that whatever the precision of the interpretations offered Daniel, this prophetic text allowed the possibility of later appropriation and renewed actualisation. Alongside Revelation (and indeed in the extant literature attested earlier), the Book of Daniel formed a foundation of Christian eschatological expectation. Interest in the Book of Daniel in the New Testament revolves around two issues: Christology and eschatology. With regard to the first, the presence, distinctively, in the New Testament of the phrase ‘the Son of Man’ on the lips of Jesus, as well as allusions to Dan. 7:13, indicates the importance attached to this chapter in defining the role of Jesus as the mediator of divine authority. The political character of this kind of reading is implied as the ultimate triumph of the Son of Man over the reign of the beasts, suggesting an end of

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the dominion of the empires of this age (cf. 1 Cor. 15:25). In the Book of Revelation (as also in the roughly contemporary 2 Esdras 13), Dan. 7 has become the source of the political critique, which is found in Rev. 13, where there is an implicit link of the beasts of Daniel with the rule of the contemporary beast, the Roman Empire. To this extent Daniel provided a crucial catalyst for early Christian writers as they sought to expound the significance of Jesus in the light of their eschatological convictions about him. The earliest commentary (and indeed one of the earliest biblical commentaries) now extant on either book is Hippolytus’s commentary at the beginning of the third century.4 This differs from later interpretations, which are more the detailed explication of the eschatological scenario, and in this respect show greater affinity with the detailed explanations, which are to be found in the angelic interpretations in Daniel itself. Hippolytus, who wrote in Rome around the beginning of the third century CE, explains the vision of Nebuchadnezzar with regard to the world empires of antiquity, by interpreting ch. 2 in the light of ch. 7, where the terrible fourth beast of Dan. 7 is identified with Rome. Like many Christian interpreters after him, Hippolytus sees the coming of Christ taking place in the fifth period of an age of the world lasting seven thousand years. The commentary concerns an account of human history in the light of Daniel. Indeed, Hippolytus notices what subsequent scholarship has noticed, namely, that the prophecies of Dan. 9–10 concern the time of Antiochus Epiphanes in the middle of the second century BC. He interprets Dan. 9:25 as the first coming of Christ, and Daniel’s sealed book is that which the Lamb opens in Rev. 5:6. A new dimension of the prophecy starts with 9:26 and the following verses refer to the fulfilment of the eschatological promises. The vision in Dan. 10 is a vision of the preexistent Christ (as also is Dan. 12:6), and Hippolytus interprets the different parts of his appearance as the gifts which he brought. Apart from the way in which Hippolytus apportions some parts of the book to past history (from Hippolytus’s perspective) and others to the future, we find him making links with the other canonical apocalypse, so Dan. 11:36 is linked with Rev. 11. Thus, in the earliest Christian commentary we find the connections already made, which would be systematised and expanded in subsequent eschatological expositions, where Revelation and Daniel are woven together. With the emergence of the self-conscious eschatological timetabling, which was the legacy of the Joachite revolution in the twelfth century, the Book of Daniel’s futurism was mapped onto Revelation, an interpretative move that had been made as far back as the commentary of Hippolytus, to yield a major resource for the description of the divine plan for human history. The influential commentator on Revelation, Joseph Mede (1586– 4

B.E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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1638), whose detailed exegesis of that book offered a way of unlocking both its hermeneutic and its message, allowed others, such as Isaac Newton, to expound the wisdom of the providential ordering of history evident in the prophetic texts. The legacy of this kind of approach to apocalyptic literature is evident in the often complex and detailed descriptions of the meaning of the prophetic texts and the way they relate to one another in the exposition of the future. This has its culmination in the synthetic eschatology in the modern period, which has become a cornerstone of modern eschatological scenarios. The Scofield Reference Bible (1909) popularised a view which has a long pedigree, and which owed not a little to the eschatological interpreter John Nelson Darby (1800–1882). Darby’s link of the rapture of 1 Thess. 4 to the material in Daniel and Revelation (and other biblical prophetic books) in particular, has led to an enormously influential set of beliefs on the future of the world and the relationship of the elect to it. The Geneva Bible’s marginal notes on the Book of Daniel are a salutary reminder that we are dealing with a text which was exegetical dynamite in its ability to support and inform struggles for change. Calvin continues the line taken by Hippolytus with a strictly historical reading of the statue of Dan. 2, though he interprets the stone which shatters the statue christologically. It is Christ who destroys all worldly empires: ‘outside of Christ whatever is splendid and powerful in the world, and wealthy and strong, is fleeting and passing and of little worth’.5 A more immediate, existential, and potentially revolutionary kind of reading of the book is also found. Thomas Müntzer (ca 1483–1525) is a case in point. His reputation is as the dangerous fanatic, whose resort to violence drew upon himself and his companions a horrible retribution in the midst of the German Peasants’ Revolt in 1525. In what must be one of the most remarkable sermons preached in the early Reformation period, the so-called Sermon before the Princes, Müntzer depends on Dan. 2 for a final, critical challenge to local rulers to throw in their lot with the common people and themselves be the agents of the imminent eschatological harvest. According to Müntzer, Nebuchadnezzar shamed the people of God by his actions, by accepting what God had to say to him and proving himself to be a worthy recipient of the divine mysteries. The soothsayers of his own court resembled the ecclesiastical intellectuals of Müntzer’s own day in presuming to interpret the divine mysteries without really understanding either them or the Almighty. Müntzer, like Daniel and all the true prophets before him, was equipped to do what every pious person could do as the result of the indwelling Spirit. Müntzer’s interpretation of the statue fits into a long history of eschatological doctrine 5 See J. Calvin (‘Daniel I, Chapters 1–6’, in John Calvin’s Lectures on the Book of the Prophecies of Daniel, trans. T.H.L. Parker [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993], 106) on Dan. 2:45.

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in which the ‘fifth kingdom’ is the decisive one. At the height of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century, the doctrine of the ‘Fifth Monarchy’ (namely, that the succession of world empires predicted in Dan. 2 and 7 had come to its end and that the reign of King Jesus was about to be established) was extremely influential among revolutionary groups. In the establishment of this ‘fifth monarchy’, the saints were given an active role, being Christ’s instruments in the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth.6 A century later than Thomas Müntzer, in England, there arose another prophetic figure with views on the interpretation of prophetic texts linked to practical action, but with more of that sense of passive resistance within the constraints of history that we find in the Book of Daniel. Gerrard Winstanley’s writing career spans the years 1648 to 1652, the period from the second Civil War to the last years of the Commonwealth. As far as we know, no further theological and political writings are now extant.7 From April 1649 to March 1650 Winstanley’s life and writing was intimately bound up with the practice of communism in rural Surrey. According to Winstanley, private property is the curse of the fall, and those who possess it have gained it by oppression or murder. Its prevalence is typified by the rule of the Beast through a professional ministry; the kingly power; the judiciary; and ‘the buying and selling of the earth’, which correspond to the four beasts in the Book of Daniel. In this passage, the process of ‘updating’ Daniel, already evident in Revelation and 4 Ezra, is at work but now applied to the particular manifestation of tyranny evident in the English monarchical state. What is striking about these readings of Daniel is the ready way in which writers relate the images to their own time. They differ from many readings of Daniel, ancient and modern, in that they do not depend on their meaning in the ancient world.

7.2. Other Apocalyptic Texts: 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra 1 Enoch opens with an alternative account of the corruption of the earth parallel to the opening chapters of Genesis.8 Enoch’s position in heaven means that he can intercede on behalf of the fallen angels. Enoch eventually reaches Paradise. In the next section of the book, the Parables, probably much 6

B.S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (London: Faber & Faber, 1972). 7 G.H. Sabine, ed., The Works of Gerrard Winstanley: With an Appendix of Documents relating to the Digger Movement (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1941). 8 See G.W.E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Vol. 1: Chapters 1–36, 81–108, ed. K. Baltzer, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001); M.E. Stone, Fourth Ezra, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1990).

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later than the opening chapters and with many features which distinguish it from the rest, we have a heterogeneous collection of material which mixes an account of Enoch’s activities with God. In this, Enoch describes a figure ‘like a son of man’ (this section of 1 Enoch has many connections with the ‘Son of Man’ sayings in the Gospels). In ch. 72 we have a section dealing with astronomical material, which Enoch reads in the heavenly tablets. Enoch passes on other awesome visions concerning the future of the earth, one of which is long and symbolic. The book closes with a collection of advice and warning from Enoch to his children, with woes for the rich and powerful and vindication for the humble and meek. The Book of 2 Esdras is an important witness to Second Temple eschatological belief and its influence persisted into the early modern period.9 In 4 Ezra (the Jewish apocalypse found in 2 Esdras 3–14) there is another concern: the apparent inscrutability and mercilessness of God. At times it appears that Ezra’s concerns are more merciful than the divine reply. Such sentiments, however, are dealt with by urging the righteous to concentrate on the glory which awaits those who are obedient to God. From angelic revelation Ezra learns that the righteous need to view all things in the light of the eschatological consummation rather than concentrate exclusively on the apparent injustices of the present. The righteous are urged to attend to their destiny and concentrate on obedience to the law of God. There is a questioning of the way the world is. There emerges, possibly for the first time in such an explicit form, evidence for a hope for a new age which is transcendent, though it appears alongside the conventional hope for a this-worldly reign of God (7:28–29, cf. 5:45; Rev. 20–21). The apocalypse of 4 Ezra purges the mind of any presumption of ability to fathom the wisdom of God, by showing it an erroneous assumption engendered by a corrupted mind. Those who, like Ezra, continue in obedience, a way of life which seems so pointless, receive reassurance that faithful endurance will pay off ultimately. That is the only kind of answer on offer in this tantalising apocalypse. The persistent concern throughout the earlier part of the dialogue between Ezra and the angel is the exploration of the conditions for understanding the ways of God.

9 E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (London: SCM, 1977), 409–418; A. Hamilton, The Apocryphal Apocalypse: The Reception of the Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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7.3. Revelation The Apocalypse is a different sort of text to those discussed above. Daniel is pseudonymous and was probably written in the second century BC at the height of the crisis which threatened Jerusalem and its Temple under the Seleucid king Antiochus IV. John’s apocalypse does not claim some kind of authority via an apostle (although John shares the same name as the son of Zebedee and the book was linked with John from a very early stage in the early church). John’s authority depends on his prophetic call (Rev. 1:9–11). Revelation (or ‘unveiling’ – the meaning of the word ‘apocalypse’) was the catalyst in succeeding centuries for a variety of eschatologically inclined movements and readings of history.10 It is representative of that spirit of early Christianity, which allied expectation of historical change with visionary intuition, endowing its message with authenticity. Traditionally the date of the book has been towards the end of the reign of the emperor Domitian (the mid-90s), who took action against some members of the imperial household for their atheism (though the charge of atheism could equally have been levelled at sympathisers of Judaism such as Christianity). Evidence from Rev. 17 itself suggests that an earlier date is equally likely, perhaps after Nero’s death in 68, when there were four claimants to the office in a year (Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian who finally became emperor). Evidence for persecution in Asia Minor at the time of Domitian is sparse apart from Revelation, though there appears to have been harassment of Jews at the end of Domitian’s reign. Domitian claimed for himself the title dominus ac deus noster. The external evidence is strong for a Domitianic date, but the internal evidence of this chapter points in the general direction of a date for the Apocalypse three decades earlier. Revelation is part of a tradition and is a continuation of much of what has gone before. Ezekiel and Daniel have influenced the form and content of the Book of Revelation. From the Christophany at its opening, via the visions of heaven, the dirge over Babylon, the war against Gog and Magog, and finally the vision of the New Jerusalem, it bears the marks of influence of the written forms of the ancient prophetic imagination on the newer prophetic imagination of John of Patmos. Daniel is an ingredient of John’s vision from almost the first verse to the last: the vision of the human figure in ch. 1; the vision of the beast in ch. 13, and the designation of the character of the book as ‘what must take place after this’ are all indebted to Daniel. Daniel’s beasts from the sea become in John’s vision a terrible epitome of all that is most oppressive. So this unique example in the early Christian literature of the apocalyptic genre is profoundly indebted to Jewish apocalyptic ideas. 10

See J. Kovacs and C. Rowland, Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

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The vision of Christ marks the start of John’s revelation. After the instruction to write the Letters to the Seven Churches, John is called to heaven in the spirit and is granted a vision of the divine throne with one seated upon it. There is at the start of this new dimension of John’s vision, a vision of the throne, which owes some of its details to Ezek. 1 and Isa. 6. The seer is offered a glimpse of a reality which is cut off from normal human gaze and opened up only to the privileged. Rev. 4, however, is subverted in ch. 5. John sees the scroll with seven seals, which contains the divine will for the inauguration of the eschatological process. The means of the initiation of that process turns out to be the coming of the Messiah, the Lion of Judah. The paradox is that this messianic Lion turns out to be a Lamb with the marks of death. It is the Lamb’s marks of slaughter that qualified it to have this supreme eschatological role and to share the divine throne (Rev. 7:17). The sequence of seals, trumpets and bowls is initiated by the Lamb taking the heavenly book (chs. 5, 6, 8–9 and 16). It is the predetermined evolution of the divine purposes in history, as the structures of the world give way to the messianic age (the millennium). The opening of the seals had unleashed the Four Horsemen with their destructive potential. This is suddenly interrupted in ch. 7: the sealing of the servants of God with the seal of the living God. There is a contrast here similar to that found in chs. 13 and 14. In chs. 10–11 the seer is involved in the unfolding eschatological drama of the apocalypse, when he is instructed to eat the scroll and commanded to prophesy. The prophetic commission is followed in ch. 11 by a vision in which the church is offered a paradigm of the true prophetic witness as it sets out to fulfil its vocation to prophesy before the world. Juxtaposed with the vision of the two witnesses, their death and vindication, is another vision about persecution. The message is quite a simple one: a pregnant woman is threatened by a dragon and gives birth to a male child who is precious to God as the Messiah. That is followed immediately by the account of another struggle in which there is war in heaven between Michael and the dragon who had persecuted the woman. Michael and his forces prevail, meaning there is no longer a place in heaven for the dragon. The vision seems to suggest that the picture of a heavenly struggle is closely linked with the earthly struggle of those who seek to be disciples of Jesus to maintain their testimony. A hostile attitude to the Roman Empire emerges in the Book of Revelation. The position is one of vigorous rejection of the power and effects of empire, and of satisfaction at the ultimate triumph of God’s righteousness (14:8; 19:3). The book concludes with visions of the victory of the Son of Man over the enemies of God and the messianic reign on earth, which precede the Last Judgement and the coming of the New Jerusalem. Only in chs. 20–22 is the resolution of the contrary states of heaven and earth, good and evil, which is seen at its starkest in the contrast between the praise of the heavenly host in ch. 4 and the injustice and rebelliousness of

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humanity, achieved in the New Jerusalem, where God dwells on earth with men and women. The location of the throne of God runs like a thread binding the different visions of the Apocalypse together. It is the destiny of the elect and a sign of authority in the universe, contrasting with that other locus of power in the cosmos which deludes the world’s inhabitants (2:13; 13:2). In Rev. 21 the tabernacling of God with humankind is fulfilled in the new creation. There is a contrast between the vision of the New Jerusalem in ch. 21 with the initial vision of the heavenly court in ch. 4. In Rev. 4 the seer is granted a glimpse into the environs of God. This contrast between heaven and earth disappears in the new creation where the tabernacle of God is with humanity. God’s dwelling is not to be found above the cherubim in heaven; for his throne is set right in the midst of the New Jerusalem where the living waters stream from the throne of God and his servants, marked with the mark of God, will see him face to face.

7.4. Apocalypse in History The Book of Revelation points the way to the main contours of apocalyptic interpretation, which were already set within the earliest period of Christianity. These were the visionary appropriation of Scripture, the search for meaning in mysteries and the ‘actualising’ of visions. When Scripture is appropriated in a visionary way, the words offer the opportunity to ‘see again’ what had appeared to prophets and seers in the past, becoming a means of prompting new visions whereby higher spiritual realities may be discerned. Though there are only occasional prompts to quest for the meaning of the mysteries (e.g. 17:9, cf. 1:20; 4:3), Revelation has prompted scores of ingenious attempts to unlock its mysteries. Finally, in ‘actualising’ Revelation, particular visions are picked out and identified with, or believed to be embodied in, contemporary events.11 Early Christian appropriation of the Apocalypse offered evidence that a doctrine of the resurrection and this-worldly eschatology played their part in the writings of both Justin (Dial. 80) and Irenaeus (Adv. haer. 5.26.1–5.36.3). The popularity of apocalyptic ideas among such movements as Montanism led to a growing suspicion of the book. Although in several key respects he had been anticipated by Origen, Tyconius’s reading of the Book of Revelation (ca 400), which had a profound influence on the mature Augustine and thence on later Christendom, stressed the contemporary rather than eschato-

11 See C. Rowland, ‘The Book of Revelation’, in NIB XII (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), 501–743; Kovacs and Rowland, Revelation; C.A. Patrides and J. Wittreich, eds., The Apocalypse in English Renaissance thought and literature: Patterns, antecedents and repercussions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).

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logical import of the visions. The book is used to interpret contemporary ecclesial life. The text becomes a tool facilitating the discernment of the moral and spiritual rather than searching out the eschatological in the text. The mature Augustine continued in this tradition. He accepted an approach to Scripture which enables Revelation to be a source of insight both eschatologically and for the contemporary church. Augustine’s approach to empire in The City of God is in certain key respects at one with the dualistic and suspicious attitude evident in earlier Christian apocalyptic interpretation. The later Middle Ages saw the emergence of the influential reading by Joachim of Fiore, which used Revelation as a hermeneutical key to understand both Scripture and the whole of history. Joachim broke decisively from the Augustinian tradition in being willing to find significance in history. The sixth period is the crucial time and a beginning of the time of renewal and eschatological conflict. What is distinctive about this kind of interpretation is the way in which the present was infused with eschatological vitality, and the renewal movements, especially the Franciscan movement, imbued with eschatological significance. Revelation did not dominate the interpretative horizons of Reformers such as Calvin, even if the whole period was pervaded with a sense of destiny, and the struggles within church and state were seen as evidence of the Last Days. Luther initially outlined his reasons for relegating the book to a subordinate place within the canon of the New Testament, in words which echo much earlier (and later) assessments in the Christian tradition. He believed that it was neither ‘apostolic or prophetic’, because ‘Christ is not taught or known in it’ and ‘to teach Christ is the thing which an apostle above all else is bound to do’ (‘Preface to the New Testament’, 1522), though he subtly modified his view of Revelation in the later editions of his New Testament from 1530 onwards. Luther came to the view that the pope was Antichrist, a view held also by Calvin. A fascinating witness to the interpretation of Revelation in the early Calvinist tradition is provided by the Geneva Bible, which offers a typical example of the historicising interpretation of the day.12 It enables us to see how Revelation was used as part of the ecclesiastical struggle of the time. Its reformed protestant leanings are everywhere apparent. As may be expected, there is identification between Rome and Antichrist (the papacy is the inheritor of the power of the Roman Empire, in the interpretation of the two beasts of Rev. 13). The evidence of an extensive use of Revelation is apparent, however, in the writings of Melchior Hoffman (d. ca 1534), who was a significant influence on radical Anabaptism at Münster. The Melchiorite interpretation of Revelation is an unusual example of the use of the book in the practice of a 12

C. Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution (London: Penguin, 1993).

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millenarian politics which, like the revolutionary actions of Thomas Müntzer a decade earlier (and more recent examples such as the Branch Davidian community at Waco), did not remain at the level of utopian idealism but resulted in violent attempts to establish an eschatological theocracy. Despite the sense of an expectation of imminent fulfilment, what one finds in the post-Münster Anabaptism is the sense of being in the penultimate period, rather than in the eschatological commonwealth on earth. The link between Revelation and radical politics is particularly evident in the English Civil War writing of the seventeenth century. The rule of the Beast is not merely eschatological but is seen in the political arrangements of the day and the professional ministry. Only the high point of medieval interpretation of the Apocalypse in the fourteenth century, in the wake of Joachim of Fiore’s ground-breaking interpretation, can rank with the seventeenth century as a golden age of the interpretation of the Apocalypse. This was a particularly turbulent period of history, when England had its one period of republican rule. The learned and ingenious explanations of Joseph Mede, who saw biblical prophecy as a sign of divine providence, stand in marked contrast with other readers of the Apocalypse in a time of political upheaval. The seventeenth century saw a surge of radicalism, along with a flowering of women’s religious activity in England, which coincided with a crisis in religious and political life.13 A key doctrine, which was to become extremely influential among revolutionary groups, held that the succession of world empires predicted in Dan. 2 and 7 had come to its end and that the reign of King Jesus was about to be established. The influence of the Apocalypse was to permeate English religion through the individualised reading of the apocalyptic narrative in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, itself a product of a period when the revolutionary politics of the mid-seventeenth century were on the wane. Alongside the place of Revelation in radical religion in the seventeenth century, there was a rich tradition of interpretation, in which the careful exposition of the book was carried out in more measured and less heated atmosphere, encouraging a long tradition of apocalyptic speculation. Chief among these was Joseph Mede (1586–1638) whose work had enormous influence on subsequent generations. His synchronic approach to the visions has been typical of many commentators on Revelation down to the present day, and his work was frequently quoted in subsequent centuries. The approach to Revelation, which saw in it an account of universal history in which contemporary events could be found, had a new lease of life at the time of the French Revolution.

13

P. Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

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The use of the Apocalypse as a repository of prophecies concerning the future has been there from the start and reached an influential climax in the work of Joseph Mede. Yet in the last two hundred years it has become very much part of a growing trend of eschatological interpretation. In this kind of interpretation, influentially supported by the Scofield Reference Bible, the Book of Revelation convinces the elect of their secure place in the divine purposes. From the early modern period, interpreters such as Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) argued the Book of Revelation’s meaning was almost entirely related to the circumstances of John’s own day. This view was echoed in Catholic scholarship from the same period, when there was an attempt to play down the contemporary link with the Roman Catholic Church by relating Revelation’s images to the eschaton. This position now dominates modern historical scholarship, where attention is paid entirely to the book in its ancient context. From the earliest references to the book in the second century CE, John’s vision has been linked to the social and political realities of late first-century Asia Minor, with its imperial cult.

7.5. Differing Ways of Reading Revelation Approaches to the Apocalypse may be categorised in the light of whether they refer to past, present or future. In the Apocalypse itself, past, present and future are interrelated: eschatological visions (Rev. 6–22) grow out of the past (Rev. 5), and have an import for life in the present (Rev. 2–3). In classifying interpretations of the Apocalypse there seem to be two basic types of hermeneutical approach to the text. The first could be described as ‘Decoding’. This involves presenting the meaning of the text in another, less allusive, form, showing what the text really means, usually with great attention to the details of the text and their meaning. The interpreter renders the images of the Apocalypse in another form, usually relating to historical events or persons. The Apocalypse only occasionally prompts the reader to ‘decode’ the meaning of the apocalyptic mysteries (17:9, cf. 1:20 and 4:3). In this respect it is different from its biblical counterpart, the Book of Daniel, which is replete with detailed elucidation of its visions. Nonetheless, some have sought precise equivalence between every image in the book and figures and events in history, resulting in a long tradition of decoding interpretation. An image is seen to have one particular meaning, and the interpreter assumes that if the code is understood in its entirety the whole Apocalypse can be rendered in another form and its inner meaning laid bare. There is also a peculiar form of decoding in which individuals act out details of the text, in effect decoding the text once and for all in that person. A different form of interpretation is one that refuses to translate the images but instead uses them metaphorically, so that the image is applied to another

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situation or person, not by way of equating the two but by a process of juxtaposition, to cast light on that to which the image has been applied. In this way, the imagery of the Apocalypse is juxtaposed with the interpreter’s own circumstances, whether personal or social, so as to allow the images to inform understanding of contemporary persons and events, and to serve as a guide for action. This interpretation has deep roots in the Christian tradition, going back at least to the time of Tyconius. In contrast with decoding, it preserves the integrity of the textual pole and does not allow the image or passage from the Apocalypse to be identified solely with one particular historical personage or circumstance. The text is not prevented from being actualised in different ways over and over again. This is crucial. The book becomes a resource not just for the generation of the Last Days but a resource for the religious life in every generation. An example of this is in understanding the book’s images as an allegory of the struggles of the individual soul, in which the Apocalypse serves as a model of the progression from despair and darkness to the brilliance of the celestial city. This pattern lies behind two of the great literary texts that describe a spiritual journey: Dante’s Divine Comedy and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress which are both deeply indebted to the Apocalypse, for their narrative form as well as for particular images.14 A further form of interpretation is the appropriation by visionaries of passages where the words of the Apocalypse either offer the opportunity to ‘see again’ things similar to what had appeared to John, or prompt new visions related to it. So in the visions of Hildegard of Bingen, for example, many details of John’s text reappear. Others, such as William Blake, exhibit a less direct relationship to the letter of the text. In his works the images and symbols of Apocalypse appear in different guise, woven into the tapestry of Blake’s own visionary world and incorporated into his idiosyncratic mythopoiesis.

7.6. Examples of the Treatment of the Biblical Tradition of Apocalyptic Literature within English Literature Medieval texts such as Piers Plowman, which envisions an age in which the world is freed from greed and pride, have a clear apocalyptic dimension in both form and content.15 The poem known as ‘The Pearl’, written in England in the fourteenth century, depicts the New Jerusalem in detail; the main 14 R.B. Herzman, ‘Dante and the Apocalypse’, in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, eds. R.K. Emmerson and B. McGinn (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 398–411. 15 M.W. Bloomfield, Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth Century Apocalypse (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1962); K. Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

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textual source is the Book of Revelation. In John Gower’s (ca 1330–1408) ‘Vox Clamantis’ (Voice of One Crying Out), the writer identifies himself with the voice of John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness, as well as that of John of Patmos in the Book of Revelation. The poem is written in the form of a dream vision, a popular poetic genre in the fourteenth century. Several of Shakespeare’s plays contain lines or phrases echoing those from the Book of Revelation, and King Lear (1608) is notable among them.16 The plot of Lear, in the king’s personal journey into madness and his recovery, gives it an apocalyptic theme, in addition to and beyond the lyrical references to end-times or Revelation language (such as Gloucester’s speech in I.ii, or Lear’s psychologising interpretation of Armageddon’s storms in III.iv). John Milton’s indebtedness to the Book of Revelation in Paradise Lost (1667) comprises many elements. There is the invocation of the Apocalypse at the beginning of Book IV, the entire account of the war in Heaven and the woes and visions of the end in the last two books. It is the emphasis of the Apocalypse on the historical process that is most akin to Paradise Lost; the unilinear course of time on earth, with Christ at its centre, linked with battles and events in Heaven taking place in relation to this, link Revelation and Paradise Lost’s narratives together. There is an apocalyptic dimension to a series of George Eliot’s novels, especially her Romola, set in late fifteenth-century Savonarolan Florence, whose inspiration comes from the Book of Revelation. The Florentine setting of Romola involves a city overwrought with prophecies and end-timed hysteria (though, curiously, the Book of Revelation does not appear to have been a significant influence on the historical Savonarola, even if it did inspire such artists as Botticelli, in his ‘Mystic Nativity’). Similarly, in Daniel Deronda, we find a young Jew who discovers ‘his prophetic vocation and mission to gentile society’, while in Middlemarch, ‘apocalyptic imagery provides a kind of metaphorical drama’. An important strand in the characterisation of the minister Rufus Lyon in Felix Holt is his detailed interpretations of the Book of Daniel. Elsewhere, in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), the vision shown to Ebenezer Scrooge, of his ‘Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas As Yet To Come’ and guiding through his past to his bleak future by the spirits that visit him, has been termed his personal ‘apocalyptic journey’: Its visionary nature, and relation with the future may link it with Revelation, but it also has concepts of individual autonomy and of choice to change behaviour, which are perhaps more from other influences. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899–1902) most of the biblical allusions of the book owe more to the Old Testament. Yet the journey undertaken by the protagonist 16

H. Fisch, The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton and Blake: A Comparative Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999).

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Marlow, up the Congo River in search of the missing agent Kurtz, may be read nonetheless as an individual apocalyptic journey, in the same vein as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, searching the darkness of the individual and of humanity. During their formative period in the early 1790s, the first generation of Romantic poets incorporated in their poems a vision of the French Revolution as the early stage of the abrupt culmination of history, in which there will emerge a new humanity on a new earth that is equivalent to a restored paradise.17 In 1793, while still a student at Oxford, Robert Southey wrote Joan of Arc: An Epic Poem. In it Joan is granted a vision of a ‘blest age’ in the future when, in a violent spasm not quite named the French Revolution, humanity shall ‘burst his fetters’, and ‘Earth shall once again | Be Paradise’. In 1793, Wordsworth concluded his Descriptive Sketches with the enthusiastic prophecy (which precisely matches the prophecy he attributed to the Solitary in his later poem ‘The Excursion’) that events following the French Revolution would fulfil the millennial prophecy of the Book of Revelation. In those happy early years of the revolution, Coleridge shared this expectation, in a historical sequence that he succinctly summarises in his prose argument of the plot of Religious Musings (1794) as ‘The French Revolution. Millennium. Universal Redemption. Conclusion’. Two decades later, the young Percy Shelley recapitulated the millenarian expectations of his older contemporaries. His early principles, Shelley said, ‘had their origin’ in those views that ‘occasioned the revolutions of America and France’. Shelley’s Queen Mab, which he began writing at 19, presents a vision of the woeful human past and the dreadful present, as preceding a blissful future ‘surpassing fabled Eden’, of which most features are imparted from biblical millennialism. Living at this time was, arguably, the person who has understood most about Revelation, without ever explicitly commenting upon it, William Blake (1757–1827).18 Blake inhabited and was suffused with the world of the Bible in a way without parallel. In Blake’s own prophecy the images of Revelation are woven into the fabric of his own visionary mythology. Blake recognised the prophets of the Bible as kindred spirits and he wrote in their style and used their images, but for his own time and in his own way. Throughout the 1790s, Blake’s writing and designs return to the themes of prophetic struggle and the need to be aware of the dangers of the prophetic spirit degenerating into ‘the apostasy of state religion’. He was inspired by Revelation, which seemed to offer a different perspective on the world, to challenge a system which oppressed the poor and turned the religion of Jesus into a series of 17 C. Burdon, The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unravelling, 1700–1834 (London: Macmillan, 1997); M.D. Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999). 18 Burdon, The Apocalypse in England; Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium.

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commandments. In his words and pictures Blake offered an ‘apocalypse’ or an unveiling of, and opportunity to open eyes to, other dimensions of life, and an awareness of the epistemological shift which was required of dulled human intellects. As we have seen, among the English Romantic poets at the beginning of the nineteenth century, apocalypticism had an important place. Thus, William Wordsworth can describe the act of imagination as an ‘apocalyptic’ experience every bit as overwhelming, and in some sense even more vivid and real as experience of the real world. In Book VI of The Prelude he describes the way in which he has been steadily making his way across Europe towards Italy, and has been full of anticipation of the moment when he and his companions will cross the Alps. He discovers that he has actually missed this eagerly anticipated event, however, and in place of the actuality of the experience Wordsworth’s imagination takes over and creates the vision in his mind’s eye. This exercise of creative imagination enables him to have an experience of the physical sight he had missed. It was every bit as overwhelming as the actual experience itself and indeed of proportions akin to that experienced by John in his apocalyptic vision: The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light Were all like workings of one mind, the features Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree; Characters of the great Apocalypse, The types and symbols of Eternity, Of first, and last, and midst, and without end. In this act of imagination the last book of the Bible offers the poet the framework of his visualisation and is the most appropriate way in which the poet can grasp and explain the enormous significance of what has happened to him. Nature itself expanded the horizons of the interpreter as the poet sought to express the meaning of ‘the great Apocalypse’.19 The greatest poetry of the age was written not in the mood of revolutionary exaltation, but in the mood of revolutionary disenchantment and despair, after the succession of disasters that began with the Reign of Terror in 1793–1794. A number of the major Romantic poems, however, did not break with the formative past, but set out to salvage grounds for hope in a new and better world. That is, Romantic thought and imagination remained apocalyptic in form, but with a radical shift from faith in a violent outer transformation to faith in an inner moral and imaginative transformation – a shift from political revolution to a revolution in consciousness – to bring into being a new heaven and new earth. 19

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), 105–107; further Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium.

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William Butler Yeats lost his Christian faith as a boy, but remained a man of profoundly religious temperament. A passionate celebrant of life on earth, he nevertheless maintained a lifelong search for a world beyond. This led him to various kinds of mysticism, to folklore, theosophy, spiritualism and neoPlatonism – not in any strict chronological order, for he kept returning to and reworking earlier aspects of his thought. An immersion in the poetry of William Blake, whose Works (1893) he edited with Edwin Ellis, encouraged his interest in apocalyptic literature, and, in the 1890s, he himself wrote poems on apocalyptic themes. Yeats writes of the poet’s visionary-aware sight in the poem ‘The Valley of the Black Pig’ (1896): The dews drop slowly and dreams gather: unknown spears Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes, And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears. We who still labour by the cromlech on the shore, The grey cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew, Master of the still stars and of the flaming door. Similarly, in ‘The Second Coming’ (1921) Yeats echoes apocalyptic themes: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all convictions, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922) is a work of crisis literature that reveals truths about the past, present and/or future in highly symbolic terms, and was intended to provide hope and encouragement for people in the midst of severe trials and tribulations. Many refer to The Wasteland as an ‘apocalyptic poem’, with all its imagery of a dried-up, arid present and expected future, contrasted with allusions to a richer, more fertile and vivid past. The Wasteland of the desert, the modern city, modern life, is rife with wars physical and sexual, spiritually broken, culturally decaying, dry and dusty. The topic of memory, particularly when it involves remembering the dead, is of critical importance as memory creates a confrontation of the past with the present, a juxtaposition that points out just how badly things have decayed. The ‘dystopia’ of the modern present is seemingly made all the more harrowing in parts of the poem by the absence of God now or in the future: there is no hope for the apocalyptic resurrection, no truth to be revealed at the close of life, rather, in our world the dead are dead, and the living are merely waiting to die. The poem’s apocalypticism may therefore be a form of anti- or counter-Book of Revelation. Yet another T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’ (1927) offers a reflection on the First Coming and expectation/desire of the Second. In a similar vein to Eliot’s poetry, works such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), are often termed apocalyptic. Where they take their cue from the Book of Revelation, it has been argued, is in their ‘dystopian’ nature – being not a prediction of a terrible future, but a nightmare of the present. Taking such a view requires a reading of John of Patmos’s apocalypse as a nightmarish prediction and future dream of revenge and deliverance from the persecution being suffered in the period of the book’s conception. Each of these novels reveal the discomforts, concerns and perceived threats of the times and cultures in which they were written. By taking particular aspects within their present, they project into the future a nightmare scenario, often with the intention of awaking their present readership to a potential worse future. The respective aspects of their present are: industrial massproduction applied to humanity; the totalitarian state on a world scale; a meaningless society living only for trivial entertainment; and, most recently and, therefore, perhaps reflecting closest our current fears in the West, genetic engineering and climate change, which could wipe out the human race. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Book of Revelation is on the one hand the centrepiece of the theological map of a major swathe of Christianity while being largely ignored or reviled by the rest. It is hard to see much connection between this and its powerful inspiration of art and literature down the centuries, or for that matter to see that it could be something different from the map of the end of the world, which has made it such a happy hunting ground of eschatological prognosticators of the last two

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centuries. In a pragmatic world its imaginative and evocative images seem only disturbing or disordered. What fired the imagination of Blake, or even Augustine in The City of God, is largely lost on a world where safety and predictability are at a higher premium. Such suspicion and marginalisation cannot detract from the extraordinary power and influence its images have had down the centuries, and to which art and liturgy, piety as well as literature, have borne witness.

8. Mysticism Recorded: Text, Scripture and Parascripture Mysticism is one of those words that can leave readers confused because it is either so wide-ranging in its meaning or it refers to experiences that are unfamiliar to most of us. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a mystic as ‘one who believes in spiritual apprehension of truths beyond understanding’. April DeConick has defined mysticism as ‘a tradition within early Judaism and Christianity centred on the belief that a person directly, immediately, and before death can experience the divine, either as a rapture experience or as one solicited by a particular praxis’.1 That way of understanding mysticism relates to the ancient Jewish and Christian apocalypses, which seek to reveal hidden truths about God, heaven and the created world. In these attempts they come close to one understanding of the nature of mysticism. They do indeed offer perception of truths beyond the range of ordinary human knowledge in a direct experience of divine revelation. The concern with a hidden, or inexplicable, or religious, truth directly revealed has obvious connections with apocalypticism. So mysticism and apocalypticism are ways of speaking about phenomena that are closely related. As this description implies, such texts have to do with that which is hidden and has now been unveiled or revealed. The origins of mystical literature remain obscure, but it probably emerged during the early Second Temple Period, which concluded with the Temple’s destruction in AD 70. One of the principal concerns found in this literature is meditation on Ezekiel’s visions of God’s manifest glory, seated on the heavenly merkabah, or chariot-throne, upheld by cherubim. The fascination with this shows how closely related the practice of mysticism was to texts. Ancient apocalypses (of which Revelation in the New Testament is the prime example) can no longer be seen simply as collections of predictions about the end of the world. They unveil heavenly secrets, some of which relate to the future. They are not, therefore, solely concerned with the end of the world. They reflect the understanding that mysticism is the perception of truths that exceed the

1

A.D. DeConick, ed., Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism, SBLSS 11 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006), 2.

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capacity of human reason and are mediated by means of divine revelation. It is that kind of religious outlook we find in an apocalypse. Claims to the access of divine mysteries were part of the story of the rise of Christianity. It is an understanding of the divine that does not rely primarily on the rational reflection of received wisdom, but on the intuitive, subjective apprehension that is typical of the dream, vision and audition.

8.1. A Preliminary Understanding of the Relationship between Texts and Mysticism Many modern Christians are familiar with what is commonly known as the Ignatian method of biblical interpretation, so called because it has been inspired by The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits (The Society of Jesus) in the sixteenth century. This method asks the one who is engaging with the Bible to imagine oneself in a biblical scene, specifically, according to Ignatius, one of the stories about Jesus in the days before his death in Jerusalem, and in so doing to make himself a participant in the story. One imagines one’s reaction and what response one might have given to a question or an event. The key to this method is the self-involvement of the reader. It is no longer a question of passively reading about something, but of actively becoming part of the story. It is this kind of merging of text and present experience that is key to understanding the nature of mystical experience in so far as it has been inspired by texts. So here we have an exegesis of the text by acting out or inserting oneself into the text one reads and living with the interpretative consequences as a result of the imaginative engagement. This is not a detached discussion of the exegesis or analysis of the text, but an understanding of what the text means for the reader by personal involvement in it.

8.2. Dealing with the Problem of the Relationship between Texts and Ecstatic Experience When we are trying to reconstruct the nature of secret religion from texts, we are faced with the problem of the indirect nature of our access to the people and events that may lie behind the texts. Not all scholars agree with the assumption made in this chapter that some accounts of visions reflect what may have gone on in the lives of ancient people and they are not the fictional products of writers who never intended to tell us about the visionary experience of ancient people. This is an area where there is no certainty. Without more source material we either remain skeptical and agnostic or give the sources the benefit of the

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doubt and assume that in some cases they are products of visionary experience. The philosopher of religion Richard Swinburne (1934–) in examining religious experience propounds what he calls the principle of credulity. This is summarised by him as follows: ‘If it seems to a subject that X is present, then probably X is present; what one perceives is probably so’.2 So in the case of John of Patmos, the fact that he tells us that he was ‘in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day’ (Rev. 1:10, cf. 4:2; 17:3) and he saw what he did, asks of the reader to believe that he experienced what he wrote unless one can prove otherwise. We cannot so easily apply the principle of credulity to those accounts such as we have in many Jewish and Christian texts in which some figure from the Bible, such as Enoch, Ezra or Abraham is the recipient of the vision. Enoch has been the most prominent visionary because of what interpreters made of the allusive reference to him in Gen. 5:24 (‘Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him’). Readers of these texts today must decide on the basis of the content of the visions ascribed to the figure whether an unknown visionary ascribed a personal vision to a great biblical figure or if they are entirely fictional accounts. Another way in which we have attempted to explore this is by reference to analogous accounts where we can be more certain that an individual was a visionary (as in the case of William Blake) or other examples of engagement with the Bible that were not just a conventional kind of interpretation (as in the resort to visualisation on the monastic tradition of biblical interpretation). Such a resort to analogy is frequently the method adopted by students of ancient religion whose sources do not allow them to answer the questions the modern interpreters may have. That method is one that allows an interpreter to explore possibilities in the light of other texts that offer information about parallel, and so relevant, phenomena. How exactly do mystics use texts? The relationship between mystics’ revelations and texts is based on a feeling familiar to all of us at one time or another in our lives. In many of the texts in which mystics describe their experience, they talk of being in ecstasy. This is a way of speaking that most of us use to describe rare occurrences, usually of utter joy, or of being in some way taken out of ourselves into another sense of relating to the world, for whatever reason. Which texts were the favourites among the mystics? Who were these mystics, and why did they produce their own texts? Answers to these questions are connected with ways in which human memory and visualisation aid readers as they engage texts with their imaginations.

2

R. Swinburne, Is There a God? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 133–136.

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8.3. Ezekiel 1 as the Basis of Jewish Mysticism Ancient Jewish literature suggests that Jewish rabbis were fascinated by the extraordinary vision of God described in the first chapter of the biblical prophecy of Ezekiel: In the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as I was among the exiles by the river Chebar, the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God. … As I looked, a stormy wind came out of the north: a great cloud with brightness around it and fire flashing forth continually, and in the middle of the fire, something like gleaming amber. In the middle of it was something like four living creatures. This was their appearance: they were of human form. Each had four faces, and each of them had four wings. … As for the appearance of their faces: the four had the face of a human being, the face of a lion on the right side, the face of an ox on the left side, and the face of an eagle. … In the middle of the living creatures there was something that looked like burning coals of fire, like torches moving to and fro among the living creatures; the fire was bright, and lightning issued from the fire. The living creatures darted to and fro, like a flash of lightning. As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the earth beside the living creatures, one for each of the four of them. … When the living creatures moved, the wheels moved beside them; and when the living creatures rose from the earth, the wheels rose. … Over the heads of the living creatures there was something like a dome, shining like crystal, spread out above their heads. … And above the dome over their heads there was something like a throne, in appearance like sapphire; and seated above the likeness of a throne was something that seemed like a human form. Upward from what appeared like the loins I saw something like gleaming amber, something that looked like fire enclosed all around; and downward from what looked like the loins I saw something that looked like fire, and there was a splendour all around. Like the bow in a cloud on a rainy day, such was the appearance of the splendour all around. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. (Ezek. 1)

Here the prophet, sitting by a river in Babylon, hundreds of miles from his homeland in Jerusalem, sees the sky seemingly split apart and God appearing in a chariot of fire. The Hebrew word for a chariot is merkabah. So merkabah mysticism refers to the vision of the divine throne-chariot, which had appeared to Ezekiel and also had taken the prophet Elijah up to heaven (2 Kgs. 2:11–12). This he describes in detail, with its fiery flames, the wheels full of eyes, and finally the blue heaven with one like a human figure seated upon a throne. Ancient Jewish texts indicate a fascination with this account, though they give us little indication of what the circumstances were in which such texts were written or whether they reflect the actual experiences of the writers. The meaning of the various components of this vision was a topic of intense debate, and in the opinion of some interpreters, ever since the pioneering work done on this Jewish tradition by Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), there were rabbis who also believed that they too were able to see what Ezekiel had seen many centuries before. Indeed, this tradition has influenced one of the

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books by Nobel Laureate Patrick White, whose novel Riders in the Chariot (1961) testifies to the continuing impact of this biblical passage and the conviction that others might catch a glimpse of it too, as also does the importance of Ezekiel’s vision for Louis Farrakhan (1933–) and the Nation of Islam.3

8.4. Caution among Jewish Teachers about Engaging with Ezekiel 1 The interpretation of this passage (along with certain others such as the account of creation in Gen. 1) was a cause of fascination and fear for the ancient Jewish teachers, the rabbis. In their earliest code of law, the Mishnah (Hag. 2:1), they set down strict rules for who could engage with Ezekiel’s vision (he had to be a mature teacher) and under what circumstances. This suggests that involvement was potentially disruptive to the social fabric and dangerous for the uninitiated. We cannot be sure what the nature of the earliest engagement was. It may have been a learned debate about the meaning of words, but there are also hints that this engagement was self-involving and visionary in character. Thus in one of the stories, when a pupil of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai (one of the leading teachers who lived at the end of the first century CE) discussed the passage, it is said that fire came down from heaven and encompassed all the trees in the field and a song of praise and an angel’s voice came from the fire (b.Hag. 14a). The caution of the rabbinic tradition about things apocalyptic and mystical is not shared in other ancient Jewish texts contemporaneous with the New Testament. For instance 1 En. 14:20 and the Apocalypse of Abraham (chs. 17–18) show an interest in the first chapter of Ezekiel. 1 En. 14:20 may be dated to the beginning of the second century BC. Texts discovered from caves in the wilderness of Judea, known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, especially those known as the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, probably dating from before the first century CE, suggest the idea of the heavenly temple, liturgy and the existence of a complex belief in angels. They give us tantalising glimpses of what the writers believed offered an insight into the existence of an extravagant, heavenly oriented mind-set.

3

M. Lieb, Children of Ezekiel: Aliens, UFOs, the Crisis of Race, and the Advent of End Time (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998).

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8.5. Were Ancient Jewish Mystics Visionaries? We do not know how (and if) ancient mystics had their visions. Modern scholarship is divided on this matter, with some distinguished scholars considering that the extant texts are literary creations that do not bear witness to the visionary experience of ancient mystics.4 All we have are texts that tell us about the visions and little about how they may have occurred. If the accounts that have come down to us are literary fictions and reflect what people at the time believed may have happened, they are not actual visionary reports themselves. I would include myself among the commentators like Michael Stone and Alan Segal who think that, while acknowledging that many descriptions of ascent to heaven may well be literary creations, at least some of these reports reflect the experiences of the writers, or of visionaries who shared their experience with the writers, even if it is now difficult to know for certain which are fictions and which reflect actual experience.5 There are various hints in the literature that those who wanted to incubate a vision undertook various preparations – fasting, recitation of prayers and other formulae. Passages in apocalyptic texts and Second Temple texts at large dealing with practices to provoke visions are not plentiful. The picture that emerges from them, however, tells us that most of the visions occur during sleep or when sleep has an important part to play in the preparation (4 Ezra 9:23–29; 12:51; 14:38–48; and, possibly, in Mart. Isa. 2:7–11). Fasting plays an important role, too. However, as common as fasting is, we are left with a doubt whether the many fasts undergone by the visionaries in Daniel, 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch were sincere experiences or just part of an expected genre. At the very least what we do know is that dreams and visions, for example the belief that one heard angelic voices or had visitations from angels, were part and parcel of the culture of the ancient world. Anyone who has had the privilege of attending a Candomblé ritual in modern Brazil has witnessed the long preparation that takes place before the divine word is finally uttered at the climax of the trance, in this case brought about by dancing.

4

For an alternative perspective see P. Schäfer, The Origins of Jewish Mysticism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009). 5 M.E. Stone, ‘A Reconsideration of Apocalyptic Visions’, HTR 96 (2003): 167–180; A.F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

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8.6. Understanding the Text by Experiencing What the Text Talks About There is a word in Ezek. 1, ḥašmal (Ezek. 1:4, 1:27, and 8:2), which is usually translated as ‘amber’, but the meaning of the word is unclear. It fascinated interpreters and, in one of the passages that discuss the meaning of the word, there is a warning to the uninitiated who might meditate upon the meaning of this word with disastrous consequences. The story suggests that what went on was not just detached intellectual engagement but experiential exploration: It is taught: But may one expound (the mysteries of) ḥašmal? For behold there was once a child who expounded (the mysteries of) ḥašmal, and a fire went forth and consumed him. The case of the child is different for he had not reached the fitting age. … The rabbis taught: There was once a child who was reading at his teacher’s house the Book of Ezekiel and he apprehended what ḥašmal was, whereupon a fire went forth from ḥašmal and consumed him. So they sought to suppress the Book of Ezekiel. (b.Hag. 13a)

Elsewhere in the Jewish tradition we find reference to the visionary potential of the fringes on the garments (tsitsith), as mentioned in Num. 15:37–39: Speak to the Israelites, and tell them to make fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations and to put a blue cord on the fringe of each corner. You have a fringe so that when you see it, you will remember all the commandments of the Lord and do them.

The colour of the blue cord reflects heaven itself. Indeed, one famous teacher of the second century CE, Rabbi Meir, used an ambiguity in the Hebrew of the passages from Numbers to suggest that looking at the cord of blue might mean no less than gazing at God (Sifre Numbers 115). The colour blue is not only like sea and sky but the divine throne (Exod. 24:10; b.Men. 43b). These passages suggest that the Bible can be engaged by means of significant artifacts in order to gain access to the divine glory. So, it would appear that in the interpretation of a visionary text such as Ezek. 1 the meaning of the text is illumined as a result of the interpreter’s own imaginative engagement with the text. What had appeared to Ezekiel becomes itself the context for a creative interpretation of the text.6

8.7. Mysticism and Christian Origins: Paul and John of Patmos Controversy concerning the status and legitimacy of mystical traditions is likely to have occurred during the first century, probably because of the way in which such traditions were developed within Christianity. Paul tells us, 6

D.J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988), 71.

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however reluctant he was to do so, that he was influenced by apocalyptic ideas: I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven – whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person – whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows – was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. (2 Cor. 12:2–4)

This mystical experience, paralleling that which was told about the ancient biblical hero Enoch, whom tradition believed like Elijah had been taken up to heaven by God (Gen. 5:24: ‘Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him’), is an experience Paul would prefer not to share. But in these allusive verses the veil momentarily is lifted, and in trying to persuade the church at Corinth of his credentials, he lets the veil of secrecy slip and shares this mystical moment of ecstasy. Elsewhere, he explicitly emphasises the importance of this visionary element as the basis of his practice (Gal. 1:12 and 1:16, cf. Acts 22:17). Paul, when still a Pharisee, had a mystical vision of Jesus as God’s glorious form or manifestation.7 That apocalyptic vision was the basis for his practice of admitting Gentiles to the messianic age without their adherence to the Law of Moses. Paul became a pioneer of a movement that sought to reform religion based on the revelation of secret knowledge that he had received. For John of Patmos and his apocalyptic contemporaries in the first century, a prophetic text such as Ezekiel was, by John’s own testimony, not just the subject of learned debate but a catalyst for visionary experience. Some of those who engaged with the text expounded its meaning by seeing again what had appeared to the prophet, but in their own way and appropriate for their own time. Understanding of the ambiguities of the text comes about in the course of an imaginative visualisation rather than it being the result of the deliberate application of conventional exegetical methods. In the account of John’s vision, he twice tells his readers that he was ‘in the Spirit’ (Rev. 1:10; 4:2) when he was granted not only a vision of a divine figure who appeared at his side but also of the heavenly world of God enthroned in glory (Rev. 4). The details of its description owe much to the Ezekielian vision complemented by other biblical passages. This vision is the basis for the revelation of the mysteries of the divine purposes for the universe, both terrible and sublime, which unfold in the rest of the book. At its start is a vision, inspired especially by several biblical visionary texts, including the passage from Ezekiel that has been mentioned. John reported having this vision while on the island of Patmos, far away from the 7 J.W. Bowker, ‘“Merkabah” Visions and the Visions of Paul’, JSS 16 (1971): 157–173; Segal, Paul the Convert; C. Shantz, Paul in Ecstasy: The Neurobiology of the Apostle’s Life and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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Temple in Jerusalem and the land of Israel, just like his prophetic predecessor: After this I looked, and there in heaven a door stood open! And the first voice, which I had heard speaking to me like a trumpet, said, ‘Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.’ At once I was in the spirit, and there in heaven stood a throne, with one seated on the throne! And the one seated there looks like jasper and carnelian, and around the throne is a rainbow that looks like an emerald. Around the throne are twentyfour thrones, and seated on the thrones are twenty-four elders, dressed in white robes, with golden crowns on their heads. Coming from the throne are flashes of lightning, and rumblings and peals of thunder, and in front of the throne burn seven flaming torches, which are the seven spirits of God; and in front of the throne there is something like a sea of glass, like crystal. Around the throne, and on each side of the throne, are four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind: the first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature with a face like a human face, and the fourth living creature like a flying eagle. And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and inside. Day and night without ceasing they sing, ‘Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come’. … Then I saw in the right hand of the one seated on the throne a scroll written on the inside and on the back, sealed with seven seals; and I saw a mighty angel proclaiming with a loud voice, ‘Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?’ And no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or to look into it. And I began to weep bitterly because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to look into it. Then one of the elders said to me, ‘Do not weep. See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.’ Then I saw between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. He went and took the scroll from the right hand of the one who was seated on the throne. When he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell before the Lamb, each holding a harp and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. They sing a new song: ‘You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation; you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God, and they will reign on earth.’ (Rev. 4:1–5:10)

This vision echoes, but also departs from, that which we find in Ezek. 1. In particular, the mysterious ‘Lion of the Tribe of Judah’ turns out to be a lamb bearing the marks of slaughter, almost certainly a symbol of the crucified Jesus, who is the one who unlocks the mysteries of the divine purposes for creation and its imminent judgement, which form the bulk of the rest of this startling book. At first sight John’s visionary report suggests a degree of literary artistry and coherence, suggesting an author who is consciously selecting the material in order to communicate the message, and the visionary dress lends authority to the book (cf. Rev. 22:18). So many scholars of John’s Apocalypse, and indeed related visionary texts, think that they are the result of a conscious

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attempt to weave together Scripture and teaching. But there are many signs in a book such as Revelation of a dreamlike quality, in which the visionary not only sees but is also, himself, an active participant in his visions (e.g. 1:12, 17; 5:4; 7:13; 10:10; 11:1; 17:3, cf. 1:10 and 21:10). Although there is a structure to the book, with a coherent pattern, such conscious ordering (if indeed it is deliberate) need not exclude the possibility that Revelation contains in whole or in part the visions that John saw. In addition, there is a close relationship with the prophetic texts such as Ezekiel and Daniel, indicating a knowledge that never manifests itself in explicit quotation. John’s vision draws on images that are familiar to us from elsewhere. For example, the contribution of Dan. 7 to the political symbolism of Rev. 13 establishes a frame of reference that informs the sense we make of that chapter. Nevertheless, the visionary experience, although conditioned by life under Roman dominion, is not determined by it. The book asks of its readers that its visionary character be taken seriously.

8.8. Meditative Engagement with the Bible: The Christian Monastic Tradition and Visualisation Meditative practices have been a key part of religion through the centuries and became the cornerstone of the religious life in the late medieval period, though the practices were rooted in a long tradition. The exercise of imagination involves the visualisation in the mind of objects, inspired by what is read in texts or in the external world. It has a close relationship with the visionary and the dreamlike, though in the latter the process is usually less deliberate than would be the case with an exercise of imagination. In much of the interpretation of texts we are not dealing with the kind of analytical exegesis that is so typical of academic discourse, in which historical context and the precise meaning of words and phrases or, for that matter, the intention of the author are being discussed. Instead, it is a rather indirect relationship with the Scriptures in which the words become the catalyst for the exercise of imagination, as text is taken up and infuses the imagination. Recalled texts yielded new meaning by a process of spontaneous interconnection through recall. Meditation was a regular period of deliberate thought, which may have started from reading but which then opened up to a variety of subjects. The mixing of the verbal and the visual took place, because in the process of recollection what is retrieved is conceived anew in meditative imagination. Both in antiquity and also later in the medieval period we find evidence of the stimulation of an affective experience in which an encounter with the divine came about through meditation. Such meditative practice might be based on books, but more often was the result of a sophisticated process of

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memorisation of scriptural texts in which the one meditating was able to recall and envision. The exercise of imagination, which might involve the visualisation of objects in the mind, has been an important part of the reading of Scripture. Mary Carruthers (1941–) has shown how in the process of memorisation and the recall of memory there is a creative process of interaction of images.8 The medieval scholar remembered things by making a mental vision or picturing things that were invisible from matters in the memory, thereby embracing the present and the future through their likeness to that which was past. The monastic practice of meditation notably involved making mental images or cognitive “pictures” for thinking and composing. The use of such pictures … derives both from Jewish spirituality and from the compositional practices of Roman rhetoric. The emphasis upon the need for human beings to “see” their thoughts in their minds as organized schemata of images, or “pictures,” and then to use these for further thinking, is a striking and continuous feature of medieval monastic rhetoric … Medieval memoria was a universal thinking machine, machina memorialis – both the mill that ground the grain of one’s experiences (including all that one read) into a mental flour with which one could make wholesome new bread, and also the hoist or windlass that every wise master-mason learned to make and to use in constructing new matters.9

So, ancient readers and hearers of texts could seek to visualise what they read (or heard), and that seeing or listening would frequently involve the creation of mental images. Such meditative practice was the result of a sophisticated process of memorisation of scriptural texts, in which, in imitation of Ezekiel’s and John’s digestion of the scroll passages (Ezek. 3 and Rev. 10 are often mentioned in medieval treatises on the reading and interpretation of Scripture), the one meditating was able to recall and envision. Meditation opened up the gateway to a network of allusions and personal context in which the memory of Scripture played an active part and contributed to the meditation (Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalion 3:10). As a result, the recalled biblical texts yielded new meaning by a process of spontaneous interconnections, through meditative recall. This kind of imaginative activity has affinities with the effects of the exegetical athleticism of ancient Jewish teachers. Legends are told (e.g. Shir Hashirim Rabbah 1.10.2) about the way in which fire flicked around them, such as accompanied the giving of the Law on Sinai to Moses, and surround the divine glory in Ezekiel’s vision. 8 M.J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); eadem, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 9 Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 3–4.

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8.9. William Blake: Mysticism and Text William Blake was born in 1757 and died in 1827, living most of his life in London. He was trained as an engraver and pioneered his own technique for engraving on copper plates, and then illuminating the results of what he printed. Occasionally he described remarkable ecstatic experiences (and found a way of transcribing the results of his inspiration.10 He writes of ‘Verse dictated to me’ (Jerusalem 3, E4511), which he then engraved on copper plates thence onto the printed page. These texts make clear the importance of his various moments of inspiration, such as ‘My Fairy sat upon the table and dictated EUROPE’ (E60). This exercise is fundamental to what he called the ‘Poetic Genius’. With Blake we have no detached engagement with the Bible. His engagement with the Bible was both self-involving and as creative as the most daring medieval exegete with whose imaginative visual engagement he has much in common.12 Blake’s favourite prophets, Ezekiel and John of Patmos, continued in his own time and place to manifest the same spirit of prophecy that fired Ezekiel and John. Just as Ezekiel wanders through the streets of Jerusalem and sees a man setting ‘a mark upon people’s foreheads’ (Ezek. 9:4) and John of Patmos sees people marked with the mark of the beast (Rev. 13:16), the narrator of Blake’s poem ‘London’ describes walking through the streets of London: I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. Elsewhere, in one of his works he amusingly writes of dining with Ezekiel and Isaiah (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 12, E38–39), and he explicitly states the continuity between his own creative mythology and the apocalyptic symbolism of John of Patmos in the Book of Revelation. So, in a work, in part inspired by Ezekiel, Blake writes that John already saw on Patmos the images and used the myth that Blake himself was later to use (The Four Zoas 8.115, E385). He was a visionary, and the prophecy of Ezekiel inspired his texts and his art. Although Ezekiel and John inspired Blake, the most graphic example of his engagement with an authoritative text is with Milton’s work. Here we find in a distinctive way text and mysticism together. In Milton a Poem Blake rarely engages directly with Milton’s texts, which he clearly knew and read 10 E.g. in a letter to a friend, see E712–713 in C. Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 133–137. 11 E plus page number(s) refers to Erdman’s edition of Blake’s works, see below, p. 783. 12 Rowland, Blake and the Bible.

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(e.g. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 5, E34–35), but with Milton’s departed spirit. In Milton a Poem the living poet (Blake) takes up and redeems his distinguished deceased predecessor. This happens through Milton’s spirit descending and entering into Blake’s left foot (Milton 14:49). Thus Blake can effect Milton’s belated recognition of his ethical shortcomings and his need for repentance for them. It is a moment of inspired criticism, based on a visionary encounter with the dead Milton through his texts. The intimate knowledge of Milton’s texts leads Blake to become one with Milton and thereby enabled Milton in the spiritual world to see his shortcomings in his behaviour and in his beliefs. Here Blake, the creative, imaginative exegete, who through an earlier author’s texts meets the author himself, so much so that not only do we find earlier texts becoming part of his mental furniture and imaginative world, but also as a result Blake both identifies with the author of those texts and enables the earlier author to recognise his shortcomings. It is a brilliant, inspired and self-involved form of criticism in which text and mystical experience coincide, as past and present merge in Blake’s experience. What David Halperin wrote of ‘the apocalyptic author’ expressing ‘his understanding of Ezekiel’s vision by “seeing” it anew, in its truer form’, is applicable to Blake, the apocalyptic author, engaging with his distinguished predecessor, thereby offering Milton’s genius ‘in its truer form’.13

8.10. Summary Mysticism and apocalypticism are words we use as interpretative categories by which we seek to make sense for ourselves of a variety of particular characteristics within texts and in religious practice. Both relate to the understanding of, and approach to, the divine, which does not usually depend solely, or even in the first instance, on the exercise of rational modes of interpretation of sacred texts, in which the interpreter by a series of formal rites or customary practices seeks to give meaning to texts. The discovery of meaning may entail practices of relating to them in such a way that the reader or interpreter ceases to be a detached observer or expositor of the texts but is instead actively involved in a performance that allows one to be a participant and to share in that to which the text itself bears witness. In the interpretation of Ezek. 1 the meaning of the text may for some involve the explanation of its obscurities by resort to the explanatory devices familiar to us from all biblical hermeneutics, but for others (and it is this group that is most important) it involved seeing again what Ezekiel had seen.

13

Halperin, Faces of the Chariot, 76.

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It may well have involved the resort to cross-referencing, but this contributed to a dynamic imaginative activity in which the details of Ezekiel’s vision were understood by a complex interweaving of vision and textual networking. It is something akin to this that we find in Rev. 4, where Ezekiel and Isaiah come together in the visionary’s imagination to produce, along with images that are not always easy to explain from a biblical background, the novel vision we have in this chapter and in what follows it in Rev. 5. It seems plausible to go on exploring the possibility that the apocalypses of Second Temple Judaism are the form that the mystical and prophetic religion took in the Greco-Roman period. We may find in these texts examples of those moments when human experience moves beyond what is apparent to physical perception, to open up perceptions of other dimensions of existence and, with them, other perspectives on ordinary life, different from a purely analytical or rational approach to texts or received wisdom. Such experiences may for the visionary have their origin in an approach to texts in which the pursuit of the meaning of the text is not a detached operation, but may involve the interpreter as a participant in the narrative of the biblical texts (such as John’s experience of realisation in his own vision of what had appeared to Ezekiel in Rev. 1 and 4). Thereby he (and it was probably almost always a man) became a recipient of insight as the text became the vehicle of an imaginative transport to other realms of consciousness. It contrasts with the situation when the reader seeks to understand and master the intricacies of the text by comparing it with other texts or by using those techniques of interpretation by which the enigmas can be mastered, the modes of reading typical of the various midrashic methods, both ancient and modern. There is a significant difference between such visionary appropriations and, say, the ‘closed’ readings of Pesher Habakkuk, where the text has a clearly defined meaning as a result of the insight of the inspired interpreter. This document, which is one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, offers an example of Scripture being quoted and given its true, divinely inspired, interpretation. As such it differs in its form from a text like Revelation where the biblical text stimulates a later prophet’s own vision. Although there are affinities between the apocalyptic reading and Pesher Habakkuk in their common belief that there is an inspired reading that leads beyond the letter to new insight, in effect the more open-ended approaches in the majority of the rabbinic midrashim are more akin to the visionary potential of the mystical readings. So, in some forms of the interpretation of Ezek. 1 the meaning of the text may come about as the result of seeing again what Ezekiel saw. This may arise in the form of a vision (as appears to have been the case for John the visionary on Patmos), rather than by an explanation of the details of what Ezekiel saw. The visionary’s own experience of what had appeared to Ezekiel thus becomes itself the interpretation of the text. This kind of exegesis involves the apprehension of divine wisdom that is normally beyond

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ordinary human perception and is dependent on a disposition that is open to the visionary or revelatory potential of the text. For the visionary who appropriates the text in this way, the earthly and the heavenly are linked and the visionary may experience the sense of being transformed into an angelic existence. This visionary mode is similar to allegorical exegesis in so far as the letter of the text, because of its allusiveness and textual uncertainty, points to the need for another level of reality, whereby new dimensions of meaning may be opened up. Understanding, therefore, evokes a perception that pierces beyond the letter. It is the moment of apocalypse, when the veil is removed and repentance and epistemological renewal coincide. For the ancient readers of Ezekiel, the prophet’s visionary report offered a gateway for visionary perception. For Paul the words of Scripture offered a gateway to Christ, a possible, though not necessary, means of discerning the divine mystery, which was, in the last resort, apart from the law. Paul is an exponent of a kind of allegorical hermeneutics in which the apocalyptic or mystical tradition, with its contrasts between above and below, appearance and reality, offers him an interpretative perspective to explain the basis of his departure from hegemonic hermeneutics. Paul inherited from the Bible the belief in direct apprehension of the things of God by means of revelation (1 Cor. 2:1–16), but in his case it was used to subvert dominant ways of reading via a conviction that the Spirit enabled a deeper understanding of Scripture to come to the fore. The apocalypses likewise also promoted the quest for a deeper meaning, in which the imagination is an interpretative space that opens up a way to eternal verities hidden with God in the heavens.

9. ‘The heavens were opened and I saw visions of God’: The Open Heaven – Nearly Four Decades On This essay is a plea for the necessity of recognising that in the way in which we use words we risk excluding crucial aspects of their meaning by our use of them. This is nowhere more true than in the case of ‘apocalypse’ and ‘apocalyptic’, which have come to be firmly fixed in common usage as ways of speaking about cataclysm and the doom-laden scenario of the end of the world. The reasons for this are not difficult to understand given the content of the Book of Revelation. Nevertheless, the plea to bear in mind the revelatory dimension of apocalypse/apocalyptic is a necessary component of the adequate understanding of key aspects of the Bible and indeed, Jewish and Christian history. The essay starts with a personal journey, from the study of the possible impact of nascent mystical ideas on the New Testament and other significant challenges, to a dominant understanding of ‘apocalyptic’. This is followed by a brief consideration of the use of these terms in the early nineteenth century and then back to a consideration of passages from the Dead Sea Scrolls and neglected apocalyptic elements in key texts in the New Testament, such as the Pauline letters and the Gospel of John. My perspective on apocalyptic literature came through an unusual route, being introduced to the history of Jewish mysticism during my time as a student in Cambridge. John Bowker, in the late 1960s gave an innovative course of lectures on the Jewish background to the New Testament, in the midst of which were a couple of remarkable lectures about merkabah mysticism and its impact on Paul.1 During my early time as a graduate student I read the work of Hugo Odeberg,2 which introduced me to the groundbreaking studies of Gershom Scholem.3 1

E.g. J.W. Bowker, ‘“Merkabah” Visions and the Visions of Paul’, JSS 16 (1971): 157–

173. 2 H. Odeberg, The View of the Universe in the Epistle to the Ephesians, Lunds Universitets Årsskrift, n.s. 1, 29:6 (Lund: Gleerup, 1934); and idem, The Fourth Gospel: Interpreted in its Relation to Contemporaneous Religious Currents in Palestine and the Hellenistic-Oriental World (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1929). 3 Initially, G. Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1960); idem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 3rd rev. edn. (London: Thames & Hudson, 1955); idem, Origins of the Kabbalah (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

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The New Testament has never seemed the same again. A thorough discussion of ‘apocalyptic’ had not been part of the teaching at Cambridge. Manifesting a distaste for the approach taken by Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer, the dominant ethos was to strip the Son of Man sayings in the Gospels of any apocalyptic significance, however one construed the word. So my route to the study of the apocalypses, Revelation included, was through the early Jewish mystical traditions. What I found in those texts were many affinities between them, the heavenly journeys, the heavenly mysteries and the like, whatever the differences in genre. Unsurprisingly, it was this perspective which dominated my doctoral thesis on the influence of Ezek. 1 on Judaism and Early Christianity and the importance of dreams, visions and auditions in understanding the character of early Christianity, following on from what we find in the Jewish tradition.4 What it enabled me to do was to see how the subject matter of the dissertation impacted more widely on biblical study. Out of this in 1982 emerged The Open Heaven, and, twenty-seven years later, my contribution to The Mystery of God.5 The former has a simple thesis, which I would summarise as follows: it challenged the notion that apocalypse/apocalypticism/apocalyptic was about the end of the world; and ‘apocalypse’ as revelation better captures much of what we find in apocalyptic literature. So apocalyptic texts were not primarily about eschatology so much as an alternative way of discerning the divine will. The opening words of Ezek. 1 quoted at the head of this essay (‘The heavens were opened and I saw visions of God’) beautifully encapsulate the essence of apocalypticism. The Mystery of God is more explicitly linked with the New Testament and offers an account of early Christian intellectual history from the perspective of visionary apocalypticism. So, the book’s thesis is the conviction that the Jewish apocalyptic and mystical writings have much to offer the interpretation of the New Testament. My co-author, Chris Morray-Jones and I shared a common conviction that despite the challenges to Scholem’s thesis, the roots of merkabah mysticism are to be found in the Second Temple period.6 Whether or not there was an established mystical tradition in the late Second Temple and early tannaitic periods is less important to me than openness to the possibility that there might have been engagement with Ezekiel’s merkabah vision, which involved an imaginative and experiential engagement with what Ezekiel saw, which might have been linked with the attempt to elucidate some of the more mysterious aspects of the vision. An apocalypse like 4 F. Flannery-Dailey, Dreamers, Scribes, and Priests: Jewish Dreams in the Hellenistic and Roman Eras, JSJSup 90 (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 5 C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982); idem and C.R.A. Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament, CRINT 12 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 6 P. Schäfer, The Origins of Jewish Mysticism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009).

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Revelation is, I believe, a prime testimony to such visionary appropriation. It is, of course, possible that Revelation is a text which is a deliberate attempt to exploit the apocalyptic genre in order to offer a veneer of authority. That possibility cannot be excluded; I cannot prove that Revelation’s claim that it offers a visionary report is credible. But, notwithstanding the occasional evidence of reflection in the text itself (e.g. 4:5 and 17:9–14) I continue to believe that this text, which ended up in the Christian canon, offers at least one example of Ezekiel’s words inspiring a later visionary appropriation – what David Halperin, no disciple of Scholem, has characterised as follows: ‘When the apocalyptic visionary “sees” something … we may assume that he is seeing the … vision as he has persuaded himself it really was, as [the prophet] would have seen it, had he been inspired wholly and not in part’.7 A simple distinction between exegesis and visionary experience, which I presupposed when I wrote The Open Heaven, I now doubt. The work of Mary Carruthers on memory, rhetoric and visualisation showed me how the exercise of imagination, which included the visualisation in the mind of objects, has been an important part of the reading of Scripture.8 The emphasis upon interpreters ‘picturing’ what they recall, or hear, and then using these for further thinking, are a striking and continuous feature of medieval monastic hermeneutics.9 So, ancient readers and hearers of texts could seek to ‘visualise’ what they read (or heard), and that seeing or listening would frequently involve the creation of mental images. Such meditative practice was the result of a sophisticated process of memorisation of scriptural texts, in which, in imitation of Ezekiel’s and John’s digestion of the scroll passages (often mentioned in medieval treatises on the reading and interpretation of Scripture), the one meditating was able to recall and envision. The preceding account explains both the genesis of my understanding of apocalyptic and also why it is that the important study by Michael Stone, which appeared six years before The Open Heaven was published, does not loom larger in that book.10 It was not long after I had completed The Open Heaven, in the summer of 1976, that I discovered Michael Stone’s article, 7 D.J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988). 8 M.J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); eadem, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and eadem, The Medieval Craft of Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 9 Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 304. 10 M.E. Stone, ‘Lists of Revealed Things in the Apocalyptic Literature’, in Magnalia Dei, the Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, eds. F.M. Cross et al. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976), 414–452.

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which so convincingly and eruditely underpinned my hunches and thoughts about the nature of apocalypticism. That article and a welter of his other publications have substantiated the position that both he and I hold. Michael Stone’s article was a landmark contribution to the debate in the discussion of apocalypticism.11 The apocalyptic writings had to be seen not simply in a stream of tradition that flowed from the prophets; they bore some of the characteristics of Jewish wisdom literature. Stone argued that, if we take the opening chapters of 1 Enoch seriously, and particularly the introductory miscellany preceding the story of the seduction of the women by the Watchers, the wisdom elements parallel lists of revealed things in other apocalyptic texts. The legends and the cosmography, which we also find in the opening chapters of 1 Enoch, might give us pause for thought before we emphasise eschatology as the interpretative key of ‘apocalyptic’. Stone discussed lists of revealed things found in 2 Baruch, 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra and traced them back to similar lists in the sapiential literature. Stone drew on the newly published Qumran Enoch fragments as well, and, opposing the critical consensus, Stone dated large parts of 1 Enoch prior to the Book of Daniel.12 So his definition of apocalypticism began not with Daniel, but with 1 Enoch. That is, so-called apocalyptic eschatology and its prophetic roots could no longer be privileged in discussions and definitions of apocalypticism.13 Cosmology, for example, had to be incorporated into the discussion. The discovery of the Aramaic fragments of parts of 1 Enoch in Cave 4, and of Jubilees (a text which is ‘apocalypse-like’ in its genre), underlines the importance of recognising the variegated character of the material in the Enochic corpus, some of which is eschatological, but by no means all, suggesting that we consider them less as eschatological tracts but as revelations of divine secrets whose unveiling will enable a different perspective on the present situation. In many respects this is true also of other examples of Jewish apocalyptic literature, which have come down to us in translation, such as 4 Ezra, Syriac Baruch and the Apocalypse of Abraham. These are less certainly dated. But with the early dating of parts of 1 Enoch, one had to completely rethink the shape of Jewish religious and intellectual life in the third century BCE.14

11

G.W.E. Nickelsburg, ‘The Study of Apocalypticism from H.H. Rowley to the Society of Biblical Literature’, 1979 (http://www.sblsite.org/assets/pdfs/Nickelsburg_Study.pdf). 12 M.E. Stone, Scriptures, Sects and Visions: A Profile of Judaism from Ezra to the Jewish Revolts (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). 13 E.g. P.D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology, rev. edn. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979); O. Plöger, Theocracy and Eschatology, trans. S. Rudman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968). 14 M.E. Stone, ed., Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period: Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Qumran, Sectarian Writings, Philo, Josephus, CRINT 2.2 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1984).

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The quest for a succinct summary of the nature of apocalypticism had gathered speed mid-century, as is exemplified by the International Colloquium on Apocalypticism, published as Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East.15 More successful, and subsequently influential, has been the definition offered by John Collins in Volume 14 of the journal Semeia, subtitled ‘Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre’ edited by John Collins. It is a report of the Apocalypse Group of the SBL Genres Project. With references to apocalypses in antiquity, which included works of Jewish, Early Christian, Gnostic, Greek and Latin, Rabbinic and Mystical, and Persian origin, it attempted a ‘master paradigm’ within which one could view the literary shape, and to some extent, the content of these works. It defined apocalypse as follows: ‘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.16

The emphasis in this definition starts not from eschatology but revelation. The eschatological aspect of it only comes to the fore in the context of the mystery of eschatological salvation, which is such an important component of many apocalypses. Not all revelations are mediated. Those found in 4 Ezra and occasionally Daniel, in which an otherworldly agent communicates information, are not normative. An ordinary human being, however unusual, whether that be Enoch, Abraham or Isaiah and pre-eminently the prophet John in his visions on the island of Patmos, sees the mysteries of God, angels, past, present and future for himself and is instructed to share these after his return to everyday life. The temporality of eschatological salvation, (for example, the descent of the New Jerusalem from heaven to earth, or the appearance of the messiah, and even his descent through the heavenly world in the Ascension of Isaiah) are seen by the respective visionary seers in anticipation. They are disclosures, apocalypses. At the time of the vision they are transcendent realities to be realised on earth in the messianic age. In some cases the transcendent realities will be revealed on earth in the course of implementation of divine judgement in history, for example, in the case of John’s vision of Babylon mounted on the seven-headed Beast. In sum, this definition is the basis for those working on apocalypticism.

15

Ed. D. Hellholm (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1983; 2nd edn., 1989). Nickelsburg, ‘The Study of Apocalypticism’. 16 J.J. Collins, ‘Introduction: Toward the Morphology of a Genre’, in Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre, ed. idem = Semeia 14 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979), 1–20, at 9.

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9.1. Contrasting Perspectives on Apocalyptic: A Historical Perspective on Etymology and Use ‘Apocalyptic’ was taken up and used to describe a particular development of prophetic eschatology at the beginning of the nineteenth century. As J.M. Schmidt shows in his invaluable study, Friedrich Lücke’s survey of apocalyptic writings first published in 1832 made a strong case for the continuity between prophetic and apocalyptic texts, but he used the word ‘Apokalyptik’ as a means of designating the peculiar form of eschatology, which he found in the apocalyptic texts.17 So, Lücke saw Revelation as ‘the revelations of the end of all things’ and offered an outline of the content of ‘Apocalyptic’ based on this, which has pervaded scholarly, and indeed popular, understanding ever since. In some ways it is strange that the eschatological should have dominated Lücke’s discussion as, a decade before his study, Laurence’s English translation of the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Enoch had been published (the German translation of A. Dillmann did not appear until 1851; Richard Laurence’s translation was first published in 1821). Lücke made much of the difference that the discovery of this text would have on the study of the origins of apocalyptic ideas, though it is The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ and its related canonical text which provides the foundation for Lücke’s characterisation of apocalyptic ideas, as Apokalyptik, a pattern of eschatological religion. This religious perspective of ‘Apokalyptik’, was characterised by the following: imminent expectation, radical contrast between present and future, the hope for another world breaking into and overtaking this world, the doctrines of angels and demons, as well as complex visionary imagery. Vielhauer’s view of apocalyptic eschatology is that there is a stark contrast between this age and the age to come, the latter being of a transcendent kind preordained by God, which will imminently burst upon this age without any human assistance. There is also a concern with the whole of history and a universal scope of salvation.18 As Stone and others have reminded us, when we cast our net wider in the literature of antiquity, we find an emphasis on a revelatory idea of wisdom, which embraces eschatology as well as protology, and much else. It is what

17 J.M. Schmidt, Die jüdische Apokalyptik: Die Geschichte ihrer Erforschung von den Anfängen bis zu den Textfunden von Qumran (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1969); F. Lücke, Versuch einer vollständigen Einleitung in die Offenbarung des Johannes: Oder allgemeine Untersuchungen über die apokalyptische Litteratur überhaupt und die Apokalypse des Johannes insbesondere, 2nd edn. (Bonn: Eduard Weber, 1852). 18 P. Vielhauer, ‘Apocalyptic in Early Christianity’, in New Testament Apocrypha, eds. E. Hennecke et al., vol. II: Writings Relating to the Apostles, Apocalypses and Related Subjects (London: SCM, 1965), 549–550.

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Martin Hengel termed ‘higher wisdom through revelation’.19 What we find in the use of ‘apocalyptic’ in these passages from Coleridge and Lücke is that they pick up on different aspects of the Book of Revelation, Coleridge stressing the visionary and revelatory, Lücke the cataclysmic and eschatological. It is worth adding that both these approaches to the Book of Revelation have been intertwined in its reception history down the centuries. A decade or so before Lücke published his book, S.T. Coleridge assessed the writings of William Blake and judged that they were produced by a man who was both ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘mystic’: A man of Genius – and I apprehend, a Swedenborgian – certainly, a mystic emphatically. You perhaps smile at my calling another Poet, a Mystic; but verily I am in the very mire of common-place common-sense compared with Mr Blake, apo- or rather ana-calyptic Poet, and Painter!20

Coleridge suggests that Blake was a Swedenborgian, following in the footsteps of Emanuel Swedenborg the Swedish visionary writer (1688–1772). Blake regarded Swedenborg as a ‘divine teacher’ and formally approved his theological writings. This is further explained by regarding him as a mystic and finally an ‘apo- or rather ana-calyptic Poet, and Painter’. He was ‘apo-/ ana-calyptic’ in the sense that his mind was unclouded and able to discern things that other poets or painters could not see, so that his words and images enabled those who engaged with them themselves to have that ‘anacalyptic’ experience, in which the veil is removed (2 Cor. 3:14, 18) from the mind to discern the deep things of God (1 Cor. 2:10). This is very much what Blake intended to happen when he wrote ‘if the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 14). Coleridge spent a year in Germany and acquainted himself with emerging biblical criticism, becoming an important intermediary of the insights of German scholars to British theology. His admiration was always discriminating, however.

19

M. Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period, trans. J. Bowden, 2 vols. (London: SCM, 1974), 1:210, cf. 217; G. Macaskill, Revealed Wisdom and Inaugurated Eschatology in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, JSJSup 115 (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 20 S.T. Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. E.L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956– 1971), 4:833–834. On this M. Ferber, ‘Coleridge’s “Anacalyptic” Blake: An Exegesis’, Modern Philology 76 (1978): 189–193; C. Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 240–241. On Blake’s links with Swedenborgianism see G.E. Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 126–129.

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Coleridge’s elucidation of Luther’s dream manifests a similar understanding: I see nothing improbable, that in some of those momentary Slumbers, into which the suspension of all Thought in the perplexity of intense thinking so often passes; Luther should have had a full view of the Room in which he was sitting, of his writing Table and all the implements of Study, as they really existed, and at the same time a brain-image of the Devil, vivid enough to have acquired Outness, and a distance regulated by the proportion of its distinctness to that of the objects really impressed on the outward senses.21

Here the author of ‘Kubla Khan’ goes on to offer a meditation on ‘this Law of imagination’ and to identify with ‘the heroic Student, in his Chamber in the Wartburg’, and the way in which the apparitions insert themselves into his life. In this passage we may grasp not only the extraordinary insight but also the peculiar fecundity of the poet and mystic impinging on historical interpretation. Coleridge allows the poet’s genius to fructify his biblical interpretation. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to read his reproach of J.G. Eichhorn for his lack of understanding of Ezekiel’s merkabah vision. His critique of Eichhorn’s discussion of Ezekiel’s visionary experience deserves mention because it complements what is contained in this book and encapsulates the essence of Coleridge’s best work. That Ezekiel’s call vision is mere poetic decoration, which needs to be explained and deciphered, represents for Coleridge a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the experience which the prophet struggles to articulate and which Coleridge understands so well: It perplexes me to understand how a Man of Eichhorn’s sense, learning and acquaintance with psychology could form or attach belief to so cold blooded an hypothesis. That in Ezekiel’s vision ideas or spiritual entities are presented in visual symbols, I never doubted; but as little can I doubt, that such symbols did present themselves to Ezekiel in visions – and by a law so closely connected with, if not contained in, that by which sensations are organized into images and mental sounds in our ordinary sleep.22

There is much to learn from Coleridge’s approach to visionary texts. It draws on Coleridge’s own experience, doubtless, but that subtle mix of historical enquiry and reverence for the text, the former impelling him to understand better its peculiarity. As many Christian scholars from the Middle Ages on have realised, there are aspects of the Jewish mystical and cabbalistic tradition which have many affinities with Christianity, and this is something that Coleridge himself appreciated.

21 A.J. Harding, ed., Coleridge’s Responses: Selected Writings on Literary Criticism, the Bible and Nature, Vol. II: Coleridge on the Bible (London: Continuum, 2008), 79. 22 S.T. Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. G. Whalley, vol. 2 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 410; also E.S. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 89.

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9.2. Apocalypse/Apocalyptic/Mysticism: Etymology and Usage If we ask whether genre criticism has any contribution to make to the categorisation of texts, the answer to that question may rest as much on the nature of the question itself as the object of study. Before we can ascertain whether the Dead Sea Scrolls have shed new light on the function of apocalyptic writings, or on apocalyptic communities and the social contexts in which these writings were produced and whether it has led to a re-evaluation of the forms, contents, and settings of apocalyptic literature and changed, or reinforced how the subject is approached in contemporary scholarship?, we need to assess whether this reflects the widespread assumption that the adjective ‘apocalyptic’ is perspicuous. To readers of newspapers on 12 September 2001 the banner head line APOCALYPSE over a picture of Manhattan in flames needed no explaining. This was what most people think of as an ‘apocalyptic’ event. The function of epithets is exegetical; they explain the meaning of words. The problem with the word ‘apocalyptic’ is that its usage and its etymology do not overlap. So, ‘apocalyptic’ has become, to say the least, an ambiguous epithet, requiring careful definition of what we mean by it. The term apocalypse has its origins in the opening words of Revelation, a book full of visions, which disclose divine mysteries, principally eschatological mysteries but not only these, but also the Mystery of the Woman and the beast that carries her (Rev. 17:7). Its closest analogy in the Hebrew Bible is the Book of Daniel, though other books, such as Isaiah, Ezekiel (in particular), Amos and Zechariah contain visionary reports, which in some ways anticipate the genre of Revelation and may be seen as analogues of John’s visionary experience, and indeed provide the language of many of the visions. It is understandable why it is that ‘apocalyptic’ is used as a generic term evoking the Book of Revelation. Firstly, and most common, it is the contents of the Book of Revelation, the cataclysmic upheavals, the terrifying irruptions evident in John’s visionary world, and the contrast between this world and the world to come that resonate with people, just as they did with the newspaper headlines. But, in addition, there is the form of Revelation, encapsulated by the opening word of the book, apocalypse, revelation, unveiling, disclosure, where the mysteries of past, present and future are laid bare, in John’s case through a divinely inspired vision. This dimension of the book, which is key to its genre, is all too easily forgotten, and it is a reminder that while usage should take precedence in understanding, the meaning of words, etymology, should never be neglected. There is clearly a problem of the use of labels like ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘mysticism’. In The Mystery of God, I understood something like the Oxford English Dictionary definition ‘belief in or devotion to the spiritual apprehension of truths inaccessible to the intellect’. I would still stand by that rough and ready working definition, though complemented by that offered by

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Bernard McGinn in Vol. 1 of The Presence of God, arising out of a detailed historical study not only of the texts but also the terminological discussion which he summarises under three headings: ‘… a part or element of religion … a process or way of life … an attempt to express a direct consciousness of the presence of God’.23 He rightly argues that mysticism should not be hived off into a separate category but should be part and parcel of the fabric of religion, a particular dimension of its theological claim, which is encapsulated by his words ‘direct consciousness of the presence of God by whatever means, vision, a sense of being caught up into the divine or some other immediate apprehension of divinity’.

9.3. Apocalypticism and the Dead Sea Scrolls The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has certainly expanded the corpus of early Jewish literature. But in what ways can it be said to be ‘apocalyptic’? Whether it can be said to have extended our horizons with regard to core apocalyptic themes is an open question. Yes, the prescriptions for an eschatological warfare have certainly done that. Also, ‘apocalyptic’, in the sense of revelatory character of texts, which are themselves very different from the hitherto extant apocalyptic literature, like Ethiopic Enoch, are evident. So, other writings, including the pesharim, the Hodayot and 4QInstruction, have broadened our ideas regarding the forms and contents of apocalyptic literature. Similarly, many non-sectarian texts discovered at Qumran, notably those composed in Aramaic, have reshaped our views on the origin and early history of apocalyptic speculation. And of course the Scrolls present us with a second well-documented example, along with early Christianity, of an ancient apocalyptic movement. John Ashton helpfully contrasts accessible and revealed wisdom and suggests that the Dead Sea Scrolls enable us to see that both accessible revelation, mediated in the Law of Moses, and hidden wisdom standing alongside each other, which suggests we should be careful about the polarisation between the two.24 Wisdom and understanding are identified with the Law.25 ‘The things that are revealed belong to us and to our children for ever’, but the secret things belong to God (Sir. 29:29, cf. 30:11–14). Similarly, in Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sira, it is accessible wisdom which is commended, whereas ‘hidden wisdom and unseen treasure’ has nothing to offer (Sir. 20:30, cf. 18:4–6). 23 B. McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, The Presence of God, Vol. 1 (London: SCM, 1991), xv–xvi. 24 J. Ashton, ‘“Mystery” in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Fourth Gospel’, in John, Qumran, and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Sixty Years of Discovery and Debate, eds. M.L. Coloe and T. Thatcher (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), 53–68. 25 Ashton, ‘Mystery’, 58–60.

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Sir. 3:21–23 ‘Neither seek what is too difficult for you, nor investigate what is beyond your power. Reflect upon what you have been commanded, for what is hidden is not your concern. Do not meddle in matters that are beyond you, for more than you can understand has been shown you’ is quoted in rabbinic writings about mystical matters in the Babylonian Talmud (b.Hag. 13a). By contrast, texts which give special importance to an extra revelation, above and outside the Law, testify to the importance of access to the ‘hidden’ things reserved for God,26 so reminiscent of that which is ‘apocalyptic’: For the truth of God is the rock of my steps, and his might the support of my right hand. From the spring of his justice is my judgement and from the wonderful mystery is the light in my heart. My eyes have observed what always is, wisdom that has been hidden from mankind, knowledge and prudent understanding (hidden) from the sons of men, fount of justice and well of strength and spring of glory (hidden from the assembly of flesh). To those whom God has selected he has given them as everlasting possession; and he has given them an inheritance in the lot of the holy ones. He unites their assembly to the sons of the heavens in order to form the council of the Community and a foundation of the building of holiness to be an everlasting plantation throughout all future ages. (1QS 11:5–9)

The claim to ‘have observed what always is, wisdom that has been hidden from mankind, knowledge and prudent understanding (hidden) from the sons of men’ (1QS 11:5–7) is ‘apocalyptic’ given that it speaks of the revelation of hidden wisdom. In the biblical exegesis of the Habakkuk Commentary, the Teacher of Righteousness, like John of Patmos, (Rev. 1:11) wrote all that God had made known to him, namely ‘all the mysteries of the words of his servants the Prophets’ (1QpHab 7:1–5). Indeed, the words of the Teacher of Righteousness are ‘from the mouth of God’ (1QpHab 2:2). But elsewhere we find instruction in wonderful mysteries, which are more immediate revelations (1QHa 12:27–28). Knowledge of the truth depends upon the revelation of such divine mysteries and in the Hodayot the writer declares that he has been made ‘a knowledgeable mediator of secret wonders’ (1QHa 10:13) in the manner of Enoch and ‘you have taught me your truth, you have made me know your wonderful mysteries, enlightened me through thy truth (1QHa 15:26–27). In 4QInstruction alongside what Ashton calls accessible wisdom observations on the pragmatics of life, is set remote/hidden wisdom that can be accessed, if at all, only through a special revelation originating in God. Relevant here are two more texts from the scrolls. The first, from 4QInstruction, concerns the one who will walk ‘in the correctness of understanding’ and to whom ‘are made known the secrets of his thoughts [cf. 1 Cor. 2:10], while one walks perfectly in all one’s deed. Be constantly intent on these things, and understand all their effects. And then you will know eternal glory with his wonderful mysteries and his mighty deeds’ (4Q 417 2 11–13).

26

Ashton, ‘Mystery’, 59.

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None of the writings composed by the Qumran sectarians themselves is strictly speaking an ‘apocalypse’, at least in the form which we have in texts like Revelation, 1 Enoch and related apocalyptic literature, for visionary reports and heavenly journeys are missing. But the number of manuscripts of 1 Enoch and Jubilees, plus a quantity of Aramaic texts, found in their library, testifies to their appreciation of the genre, and their own work is suffused with their sense that they are the privileged recipients of a special revelation unavailable to ordinary mortals. This does not mean that they reject the Torah, and the presence among the scrolls of various halakic texts, especially 4QMMT, shows how seriously they took its interpretation. But because of the value they attach to their own revealed mysteries, the Torah may be said to be no more significant to them than this new truth.

9.4. The Apocalyptic Dimension in the Pauline Letters and the Gospel of John These two points are the contrast between accessible and hidden wisdom, the last of which, the apocalyptic claims to offer, and the evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves that both forms of wisdom co-existed and may have determined the common life of the community, which lived according to this material. As such it provides an illuminating analogy to the New Testament sources. Paul’s extant writings include no apocalypse. Rather what we have is a mix of the pragmatic, the rhetorical and the apologetic along with flashes of claims to apocalyptic insight into divine mysteries and ecstatic experiences. With regard to Paul and apocalyptic and mystical matters, the emphasis will depend on the understanding of apocalyptic, but, if it is apocalyptic as access to hidden mysteries, passages like 2 Cor. 12:2–4, the references to divine mysteries to which Paul has access (Rom. 11:25; 16:25; 1 Cor. 2:1, 7; 4:1; 13:2; 15:51), and the language about knowledge of the depths of God (1 Cor. 2:10) are all relevant to the revelation of divine mysteries.27 1 Corinthians is arguably, at least in part, about the management of the claims to the mystical. Whatever we make of the remarkable section in 1 Cor. 2 where Paul talks 27 C. Rowland, ‘Paul as an Apocalyptist’, in Jewish Apocalyptic Tradition and the Shaping of New Testament Thought, eds. B.E. Reynolds and L.T. Stuckenbruck (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017), 173–204 = below, pp. 412–435; U. Luz, ‘Paul as a Mystic’, in The Holy Spirit and Christian Origins: Essays in Honor of James D.G. Dunn, eds. G.N. Stanton et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 131–143; A.F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); J. Ashton, The Religion of Paul the Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); C. Shantz, Paul in Ecstasy: The Neurobiology of the Apostle’s Life and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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about access to the depths of God, something which not only Paul and his companions but also the Corinthians might enjoy, by the time he is writing this letter he was seeking to challenge a form of piety which may be mystically sublime but not ethical enough. In the allusive mishnah Hag. 2:1 learning as a basis for understanding of one’s own knowledge, a maturity which later tradition based on knowledge of rabbinic learning, is a prerequisite for the sage who would embark on the interpretation of passages like the first chapter of Ezekiel. That learning rooted in the ancestral traditions is derived from the authoritative teacher. In 1 Corinthians, Paul offers himself as a role model, in a way like the stories that are offered in rabbinic texts, such as those in the talmuds, where Yohanan ben Zakkai gives his seal of approval to Eleazar ben Arak. The problem with the Corinthians, to paraphrase the encomium of Eleazar ben Arak, is that exposition and fulfilment do not coincide. High-flown angelic words, for example, are not matched by deeds. What is needed is following the example of the apostle/teacher who imitates Christ, accepting his authority and the halakah-like instructions he offered. For Paul the community is a holy temple (1 Cor. 3:16; 6:19; 2 Cor. 6:14–7:1) – a purified space, an extension of the Temple in Jerusalem – in the Corinthian community. Paul lays down the level of holiness expected of those who had access to the divine world in their midst and the measures needed to ensure that this holiness was not compromised. Peter Tomson’s words accurately sum up the Paul of 1 Corinthians, ‘truly Jewish and Pharisaic, Paul’s apocalyptic faith is consummated in active life’.28 1 Corinthians is a letter which is distinguished by its ethical demand and is peppered with appeals to tradition (e.g. 7:10; 11:2; 14:37), his own role as a steward of divine mysteries (4:1; 2:1, 6), his own apostolic authoritative pronouncements (7:6, 8, 12; 11:33; 16:1) and to Paul’s example (4:16; 9:1–23; 11:1). In 2 Cor. 3–4 Paul gives us a glimpse of beliefs about the present transformation. This takes place not through heavenly ascent to the angelic realm but through identification with the pattern of Christ whose path to glory involved affliction and death. Such themes are at the heart of Paul’s theology. The mystery hidden from before the foundation of the world is one that is now revealed, but this apocalypse is of the crucified Christ, a stumbling block to many. The divine is revealed in the world of flesh, not through heavenly ascent but in the cross of Christ and the lives of his followers, especially his apostle, whose path involves affliction and death. But the revelation remains a mystery to those on the way to perdition (2 Cor. 2:16). In contrast with the Pauline letters, John Ashton is probably right that ‘unlike Enoch and the Qumran community, the Gospel of John abandons the Law completely. The Law is not just superseded, but canceled … (John 1:17), 28

P.J. Tomson, Paul and the Jewish Law: Halakha in the Letters of Paul, CRINT 1 (Assen: Van Gorcum; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), 80.

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and it is Jesus, so he himself asserts, to whom the scriptures bear witness (5:39). He has succeeded the Law and replaced it as the object of revelation.’29 Not all will agree with this judgement, but it encapsulates the rather more clear-cut prioritisation of ‘hidden revelation’ over accessible revelation, or better put, the hidden revelation itself is deemed to be accessible and so replaces the Torah, and so immediate access to God is found in him, Jesus. ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father.’ The God who appeared to Ezekiel on the throne-chariot is now in Jesus, who reveals God’s glory to humans.30 The Fourth Gospel locates revelation in the person of Jesus, though it does hint that Jesus has a privileged access to information from God as well as sight of the divine. Jesus proclaims himself as the revelation of the hidden God (14:8; cf. 1:18). The highest wisdom of all, the knowledge of God, comes not through the information disclosed in visions and revelations but through the Word become flesh, Jesus of Nazareth, whose authority relies on the communication he has received from his father. The goal of the apocalyptic seer, the glimpse of God enthroned in glory (1 En. 14), is to be found in Jesus (John 1:18; 6:46; 12:41; 14:9) and, to borrow from the letter to the Colossians, he it is ‘in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ (Col. 2:3). He is the goal of the angels’ search for the divine mysteries (John 1:51, cf. 1 Pet. 1:11–12). But there is more going on in the Gospel of John, which brings it close to the poles of accessible and hidden/remote wisdom that we have discussed. Like the Teacher of Righteousness, the Johannine Jesus prioritises ‘immediate revelation’ which he has received from the Father. The Johannine Jesus is impelled by a higher call than obedience to the Law of Moses and its tradition of interpretation, and this appeal is the basis for his action. Jesus has seen God and heard God’s words. Like Isaiah, who ‘saw his glory and spoke of him’ (John 12:41; 12:49–50, cf. Isa. 6:1, 5). In Isa. 6, Isaiah both saw and was sent, two themes, which are central to the Gospel of John. Isaiah was remembered as faithful in his vision, who showed hidden things before they happened (Sir. 48:22, 25). The early chapters of Ascension of Isaiah suggest Isaiah’s reputation was as a visionary prophet who saw the Lord. Isaiah retreats from Jerusalem to the desert along with the faithful prophets who believed in the ascension to heaven and lived on wild herbs (Mart. Isa. 2:7– 11). The charge against Isaiah was that he had contradicted Moses and

29

Ashton, ‘Mystery’, 64. J.J. Kanagaraj, ‘Mysticism’ in the Gospel of John: An Inquiry into the Background of John in Jewish Mysticism, JSNTSup 158 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998); also J. Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); idem, The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014); and C.H. Williams and C. Rowland, eds., John’s Gospel and Intimations of Apocalyptic (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 30

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asserted that he had seen God and lived. So he was called a false prophet (Mart. Isa. 3:6–10). Jesus too is depicted in the Gospel of John as a visionary prophet, who sees God and reports what he has seen and heard, and is sent by the Father. The Johannine Jesus is impelled by ‘divine impulse’. But in the Gospel of John there is more, as Jesus claims to offer revelation of God in his person (e.g. 14:9). Comparing the Pauline texts with the Gospel of John, there is a mix of accessible and remote wisdom in the Pauline letters, less so in the Gospel of John where Jesus comes as the revealer of remote wisdom, which turns out to be the clue to the divine purposes, so superseding the Law of Moses (cf. John 1:17).

9.5. Conclusion When I wrote The Open Heaven, part of what I wanted to achieve was to bring together all that I had learnt from Scholem about Jewish mysticism with the discussion of apocalypticism. I still remain convinced that the eschatological elements in apocalyptic texts, whether transcendent or otherwise, are not the determining feature of what constitutes apocalyptic. Nevertheless, for reasons I have sketched, I do understand why it is that ‘apocalyptic’ is used as a generic term, because of the character of the contents of the Book of Revelation. But that needs to be complemented by an understanding of apocalyptic, which attends to the revelatory form of apocalyptic literature and any visionary experience to which it bears witness. As I indicated, I do think that the Society of Biblical Literature in large part does embrace both. It was part of the exegetical culture in which I was raised to want to illuminate the Bible by being able to relate documents and individual verses to particular ‘parallel’ texts. This was the motor behind the method I learnt. So, it mattered greatly to demonstrate that, for example, later rabbinic mystical texts reflect earlier ideas, which could have influenced the New Testament. When I wrote The Open Heaven, and at the start of writing The Mystery of God, I was more interested in being able to trace genealogical relationships between ancient Jewish and Christian texts, even if, as is the case with many Jewish texts, these came from centuries later than the Christian texts. I do not want to turn my back on this method. Indeed, I am still convinced that there was a visionary-experiential practice in parts of Second Temple Judaism, which might have made an impact on early Christianity, particularly evident in the Book of Revelation. But I am now as interested in the reception history task of Ezek. 1 in Christianity, as well as Judaism. My interest has moved to a different kind of diachronic perspective, which concentrates less on antecedents and more on effects. Strangely, this has taken me back to where I started as a graduate student, when I was interested to explore how far early

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Christian texts were a part of the Wirkungsgeschichte of the merkabah, though I did not at that time see it in those terms! This story, as Michael Lieb has shown, from the Apocalypse via Dante to Boehme and Blake is in its way every bit as fascinating as elucidating the history of merkabah mysticism.31 The history of the study of ‘Apocalyptic’, and indeed of ‘Mysticism’, deserves elucidation. A more thorough and systematic analysis than I have offered here would reveal a more nuanced picture. H.-G. Gadamer wrote in his foreword to the second edition of Truth and Method, that our interpretation is ‘not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing’.32 Far from standing outside history, we are firmly within history. Gadamer thus emphasises the crucial role of the interpretative subject in the hermeneutical process: In fact history does not belong to us; we belong to it. Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live. The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgements, constitute the historical reality of his being.33

The hermeneutical task involves recognising the extent to which traditions of historical scholarship are themselves bound by their diachronic determinants. The task of each generation is not so much to be free of them but to be aware of the pervasiveness of their influence.

31 M. Lieb, The Visionary Mode: Biblical Prophecy, Hermeneutics, and Cultural Change (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991). 32 H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd edn. (London: Sheed and Ward, 1989), xxvi; M. Knight, ‘Wirkungsgeschichte, Reception History, Reception Theory’, JSNT 33 (2010): 137–146. 33 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 276–277; italics in original.

Section Two

Apocalyptic, Eschatological and Related Themes in the New Testament

10. The Vision of the Risen Christ in Revelation 1:13ff.: The Debt of an Early Christology to an Aspect of Jewish Angelology The impact which Jesus of Nazareth made upon his followers was such that various ideas derived from contemporary religious and philosophical usage were employed to convey the significance of his person and work. All these ideas, in one way or another, were intended to impress upon readers and hearers the significant, indeed unique, status of Jesus in the relationship between God and man. Very quickly titles such as Messiah (Mark 8:29; John 20:31; and Acts 3:20) and even divine attributes like creative power (Col. 1:15ff.; Heb. 1:2) were bestowed upon Jesus, in order to express the importance of his life, death and resurrection. The study of New Testament Christology has concentrated on the titles used as a reasonably accessible means of ascertaining the character of the earliest beliefs about Jesus.1 Yet the use of titles was but one way of speaking about Jesus’ relationship with God. Investigation of the way in which the first Christians expressed their convictions about Jesus’ unique mediatorial function need not be confined to the study of Christological titles. In this respect the Christophany which functions as the commission to John of Patmos in Rev. 1:13ff. offers us a Christology of some sophistication, whose importance does not depend on the presence of exalted Christological titles. In this passage it is the language used in describing the appearance of the Risen Christ which particularly demands our comment and attention.2 Many elements in the Christophany are taken from the description of the angelophany in Dan. 10:5ff. This is particularly apparent in Rev. 1:13 (ἐνδεδυµένον ποδήρη καὶ περιεζωσµένον πρὸς τοῖς µαστοῖς ζώνην χρυσᾶν, cf. ἐνδεδυµένος βύσσινα καὶ τὴν ὀσφὺν περιεζωσµένος βυσσίνῳ) and 1:14–15 (καὶ οἱ ὀφθαλµοὶ αὐτοῦ ὡς φλὸξ πυρὸς καὶ οἱ πόδες αὐτοῦ ὅµοιοι χαλκολιβάνῳ ὡς ἐν καµίνῳ πεπυρωµένης, cf. καὶ οἱ ὀφθαλµοὶ αὐτοῦ ὡσεὶ λαµπάδες πυρὸς καὶ οἱ πόδες ὡσεὶ χαλκὸς ἐξαστράπτων). But this vision does not 1

E.g. R.H. Fuller, The Foundations of New Testament Christology (London: Lutterworth, 1965), and O. Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament, trans. S.C. Guthrie and C.A.M. Hall (London: SCM, 1963). 2 For a detailed consideration of this passage see T. Holtz, Die Christologie der Apokalypse des Johannes, TU 85 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1962), 116ff.

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merely consist of the direct transference of the imagery of Dan. 10:5ff. to the exalted Christ. Not only do some of the elements undergo subtle transformations,3 but the material from Dan. 10 is expanded by the use of Dan. 7:9 (Rev 1:14a) and Ezek. 1:24 (Rev 1:15). Thus some consideration of the use of Dan. 7:9 in this passage, in addition to Dan. 10:5–6, is called for. With regard to the former, it seems likely that the quotation of part of this verse in this context puts us in touch with a significant theological development within Judaism. In Dan. 7:13–14 a figure, likened to a human being, comes with the clouds of heaven to God, the Ancient of Days, whose appearance and environs have already been described by the seer (Rev. 5:9–10). Whether we understand the author to have intended the human figure as a symbol of the saints of the Most High (vv. 18, 22, 26–27) or their angelic representative (and there seem to be good reasons for supposing that the latter is the case),4 there can be little doubt that later interpreters of Dan. 7:13 understood this figure to be a heavenly, eschatological redeemer (e.g. 1 En. 46:3; Mark 14:62; Rev. 1:13). So it is apparent that the scene in Dan. 7:13–14 could be understood as the bestowal of the office of vice-regent on one heavenly being by another.5 What we have in Rev. 1:13ff., however, is not merely a reference to Dan. 7:13 (to which there seems to be an allusion in the words ὅµοιον υἱὸν ἀνθρώπου in v. 13), but the transference to the heavenly Son of Man of imagery linked in Dan. 7:9 with the Ancient of Days. The words αἱ τρίχες λευκαὶ ὡς ἔριον λευκὸν ὡς χιών in v. 14 (cf. Dan. 7:9 LXX ὡσεὶ ἔριον λευκὸν καθαρόν) are found in Dan. 7:9, but in the latter context they are used in the description of God, not the Son of Man. It seems likely that this transference of imagery from God to the Son of Man derives from a theological development in a variant found in the Septuagint version of Dan. 7:13. In the Greek versions of this verse we find a bifurcating tradition with regard to the translation of the words ‫עד עתיק יומיא‬. Theodotion follows the Masoretic Text and translates the Aramaic by ἕως τοῦ παλαιοῦ τῶν ἡµερῶν, whereas the Septuagint translates by ὡς παλαιὸς ἡµερῶν.6 The implication of the Septuagint reading is

3

See Holtz, Christologie, 116ff. See, e.g., C. Colpe, ‘ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου’, TDNT 8:400ff., and U.B. Müller, Messias und Menschensohn in jüdischen Apokalypsen und in der Offenbarung des Johannes (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohn, 1972). 5 On the possible Canaanite background of Dan. 7 see, e.g., J.A. Emerton, ‘The Origin of the Son of Man Imagery’, JTS 9 (1958): 225–242. 6 On this reading see W. Bousset, Die Religion des Judentums im späthellenistischen Zeitalter, HNT 21, 3rd edn., ed. H. Gressmann (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1926), 26–27; H.R. Balz, Methodische Probleme der neutestamentlichen Christologie, WMANT 25 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1967), 69; and J.A. Montgomery, ‘Anent Dr. Rendel Harris’s Testimonies’, The Expositor 22 (1921): 214–217. 4

X. The Vision of the Risen Christ in Revelation 1:13ff.

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that the human figure is regarded as the embodiment of the divine, in so far as the characteristics of divinity have been transferred to him.7 The main contribution to the description of Christ in Rev. 1:13 is, as we have already noted, the angelophany in Dan. 10:5ff. Commentators have tended to assume that the figure described by the seer in Dan. 10 must have been the angel Gabriel, who is mentioned earlier in the book (8:15–16), but, apart from the fact that an identification with Michael is out of the question (10:21), there is little in this section to suggest that this is Gabriel.8 Indeed, the over-all impression which the appearance of the angel has on the seer is not unlike the impact of the theophany on the prophet Ezekiel (Dan. 10:8–9, cf. Ezek. 1:28).9 In fact this is but one of several links with that chapter. Although the first four words of Dan. 10:5 indicate some dependence on Ezek. 9:2 and the presence of words like ‫תרשיש‬, ‫( כתם אופז‬cf. Ezek. ‫)זהב‬ and ‫( ברק‬cf. Ezek. ‫ ברקת‬and Ezek. 1:13) suggests the contribution of Ezek. 28:13,10 the impression one gets from the vision is of a close connection with the first chapter of Ezekiel. For example, the word ‫ מתניו‬is found in Ezek. 1:27 in the prophet’s description of the human figure, and the more explicit references to the different parts of the angel’s body in Dan. 10:6 look like a development of the more reserved outlook of Ezek. 1:27. Also in Dan. 10:6 the eyes of the angel are said to be ‫כלפידי אש‬, a phrase which occurs in Ezek. 1:13, though, in the latter, referring to the fiery phenomenon in the middle of the creatures (‫)כמראה הלפידים‬. Whereas in Ezek. 1:16 the wheels of the chariot are said to be ‫כעין תרשיש‬, in Daniel the word ‫ תרשיש‬is now transferred to the description of the body of the angel ‫גויתו כתרשיש‬. The words ‫ גויתו‬and ‫ מרגלתיו‬can be paralleled in Ezek. 1:23 and 7 respectively, and the voice of the angel (Dan. 10:6) bears some resemblance to the phrase ‫קול המלה‬ ‫ כקול מחנה‬in Ezek. 1:24. The words ‫ כעין נחשת קלל‬are exactly like Ezek. 1:7, where they are used of the legs of the creatures. All this seems to indicate that what we find in Dan. 10:5–6 is a broadly based dependence on Ezekiel, and in particular the first chapter. Such a transference of images to the angelic figure, which are found in rather different contexts in Ezekiel, could well have taken place in the context of a vision when the precise identification of various words and phrases was confused by 7

Similar to the language used in this Christophany is the description of the angel in Jos. As. 14, on which see C. Burchard, Der dreizehnte Zeuge: Traditions- und kompositionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zu Lukas’ Darstellung der Frühzeit des Paulus, FRLANT 103 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970), 59ff. 8 Cf. Holtz, Christologie, 116, n. 3. 9 So also O. Plöger, Das Buch Daniel (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohn, 1965), 148. 10 The description of the Urmensch in Ezek. 28:13 seems to have contributed to the theophany in Rev. 4:3, see my ‘The Visions of God in Apocalyptic Literature’, JSJ 10 (1979): 137–154 = above, pp. 29–45.

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the overwhelming impression of glory on the seer. But whatever the origin of this particular grouping of the images of Ezekiel, the appearance described in Dan. 10 is of no ordinary angelic being. It is true that he was sent to fulfil a particular function, namely to communicate to Daniel the historical events which were to take place (10:11). But the fact that he acts as a divine emissary cannot disguise the fact that the language used in the description of this angel tends to set him apart from other angelic beings.11 Indeed, R.H. Charles has pointed out the theological significance of these verses.12 The fact that links do exist with Ezek. 1 suggests that we should examine the contents of this chapter to ascertain whether they throw any light on the character of the angelophany in Dan. 10:5ff. At the end of his vision of the divine throne-chariot, the prophet Ezekiel sees the appearance of God in human form (1:26–27), which, despite all the qualifications in the language of these verses, gives the reader the impression that it was in the form of a man that the prophet perceived the God of Israel. What is of particular interest, however, is that the figure described in this vision appears again to the prophet in 8:2, but this time without the thronechariot:13 ‘Then I beheld, and lo, a form that had the appearance of a man,14 below what appeared to be his loins it was fire, and above his loins it was like the appearance of brightness, like gleaming bronze.’ 11 Later tradition is divided about the identity of the angel in Dan. 10:6. The Syriac shows a reluctance to describe the body of the angel, an omission which can be paralleled in Rev. 1:13ff. (see Holtz, Christologie, 117). A link is made with Ezekiel in the MS. H.P. 34, where the river by which Daniel is said to have had his vision (10:4) is said to be the Chebar (so J.A. Montgomery, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1927], 407). References to this passage in later Jewish literature give no special position to the angel, e.g. Shem.R. 28, b.Meg. 3a, b.Hul. 91b, though there may be an allusion to these verses in the description of the angel Metatron in 3 En. 15 and 48(c). 12 R.H. Charles, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1929), 256–257. 13 On this change see O. Procksch, ‘Die Berufungsvision Hesekiels’, in Karl Budde zum siebzigsten Geburtstag am 13. April 1920 überreicht von Freunden und Schülern, BZAW 34 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1920), 141–149; idem, ‘Christus im Alten Testament’, NKZ 44 (1933): 57–83, especially 79; idem, ‘Der Menschensohn als Gottessohn’, Christentum und Wissenschaft 3 (1927): 425–442, 473–481; Balz, Methodische Probleme, 80–81; J. Maier, Vom Kultus zur Gnosis: Studien zur Vor- und Frühgeschichte der “jüdischen Gnosis”, Bundeslade, Gottesthron und Märkabāh (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1964), 118; Colpe, TDNT 8:421, n. 151; W. Zimmerli, Ezechiel, 2 vols., BK 13.1–2 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1969), 1:210; and M. Black, ‘The Throne-Theophany Prophetic Commission and the “Son of Man”: A Study in Tradition-History’, in Jews, Greeks and Christians (FS W.D. Davies), eds. R. Hamerton-Kelly and R. Scroggs, SJLA 21 (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 59–60. 14 Following the Septuagint and the Latin versions. The Masoretic Text reads ‫אש‬. The yodh was probably omitted because of the similarity to ‫ כמראה אש‬in 1:27. See further Zimmerli, Ezechiel, 1:191.

X. The Vision of the Risen Christ in Revelation 1:13ff.

189

The independence of the glory of God from the cherubim-throne is not new in Ezekiel. In cultic acclamations (e.g. Ps. 94:1) we find the belief that God was enthroned above the cherubim, and, despite the important position of the national shrine in Israelite history, it is probably correct to assume that God’s presence was not always confined to a position above the ark, even if the circumstances of the Exile brought such a theological conviction to prominence. In any case, Ezekiel himself knows of the independence of God’s kābōd from the throne-chariot, for in 10:4 the prophet sees the divine kābōd moving from above the cherubim to take up a position in another part of the Temple. The significance of Ezek. 1:26–27 for Jewish theology has not gone unnoticed.15 H.R. Balz, for example, thinks that ultimately Ezek. 1:26 lies behind the theology of Dan. 7:13–14, but he fails to notice the real importance of the separation between the human figure and the throne in Ezek. 8:2 and concentrates his attention on its relationship to the angelic scribe in 9:2ff.16 But there seems to be little evidence to connect the human figure in 8:2 with the angelic scribe of 9:2ff. Balz is certainly right to point out that there is a gradual splitting up of the divine functions among a number of divine beings, but he omits consideration of the most significant development, the relationship between Ezek. 1:26–27 and 8:2.17 Consideration of these verses permits us to conclude that the human figure seated in glory could appear apart from the throne. According to 8:3 this separation enabled the figure to act as the agent of the divine purpose, in so far as this figure was the means whereby the prophet was removed to Jerusalem.18 The separation of the divine glory from the throne-chariot enables it to function as a quasi-angelic mediator, in much the same way as the anonymous angel in Dan. 10:5–6. Thus there is evidence to suggest that behind the Christophany in Rev. 1:13ff. there is a theological history of some importance, stretching right back to the call-vision of Ezekiel. In Revelation and Daniel there is no knowledge betrayed of the connection which exists between the man-like figure and the divine throne-chariot, for in Rev. 4:3 John does not speak of an empty throne, however unwilling he may be to describe its occupant. The position is slightly different, however, in the Apocalypse of Abraham, a Jewish apocalypse, which was probably written at 15

See, e.g., A. Feuillet, ‘Le Fils de l’Homme de Daniel et la tradition biblique (1)’, RB 60 (1953): 170–202, and on the significance for later mysticism G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 3rd rev. edn. (New York: Schocken, 1954), and I. Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, AGJU 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1980). 16 Balz, Methodische Probleme, 82–83 and 94. 17 That the link between these two passages was recognised by ancient exegetes is confirmed by the targum on Ezekiel (A. Sperber, The Bible in Aramaic, vol. 3 [Leiden: Brill, 1959]), where the same reserve is apparent in the description of the figure in Ezek. 8:2 as is found in Ezek. 1:27. 18 Zimmerli, Ezechiel, 1:210.

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Section Two: Apocalyptic and Eschatological Themes in the New Testament

the end of the first century CE.19 In this work, whose angelology in other respects, as we shall see, has marked similarities to Rev. 1:13ff., an angelic emissary is described as well as the divine throne, but here the throne is said to be empty (ch. 17). Whether this indicates a direct link with the developments in Ezek. 1:27 and 8:2 may be doubted, but the character of the angel, Jaoel, referred to in this apocalypse deserves attention. The first appearance of the angel occurs in ch. 10 and takes the following form: And the angel came, whom he [God] had sent to me, in the likeness of a man, and grasped me by my right hand, and set me up on my feet, and said to me: Stand up, Abraham, friend of God, who loveth thee; let not the trembling of man seize thee. For lo, I have been sent to strengthen thee and bless thee in the name of God, who loveth thee, the creator of the celestial and the terrestrial. Be fearless and hasten to him. I am called Jaoel by him who moveth that which existeth with me on the seventh expanse of the firmament, a power in virtue of the ineffable name that is dwelling in me. … And I rose and saw him who had grasped me by my right hand and set me up upon my feet: and the appearance of his body was like sapphire, and the look of his countenance like chrysolite, and the hair of his head like snow, and the turban upon his head like the appearance of a rainbow, and the clothing of his garments like purple; and a golden sceptre was in his right hand. (Apoc. Abr. 10:5– 9; 11:1–2)20

Apart from the exalted status bestowed upon the angel by virtue of the possession of the divine name, (cf. Metatron in b.San. 38b) the description of Jaoel owes its origin to several sources. Mention of the body of the angel resembles Dan. 10:6 but the reference to sapphire probably derives from Ezek. 28:13, though a link with Daniel cannot be ruled out.21 The possession of the turban is a distinctive feature and may indicate a priestly function (cf. Exod. 28:4).22 The rainbow is reminiscent of Ezek. 1:28 (cf. Rev. 4:3 and 19

For a brief discussion of date see A.-M. Denis, Introduction aux pseudépigraphes grecs d’Ancien Testament, SVTP 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 37, and É. Turdeanu, ‘L’Apocalypse d’Abraham en Slave’, JSJ 3 (1972): 153–164. On the significance of the angelology of this text see, e.g., G. Quispel, ‘Christliche Gnosis und jüdische Heterodoxie’, EvT 14 (1954): 480ff.; A.F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven, SJLA 25 (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 196; and G. Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition, 2nd edn. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1965), 43ff. There is probably some connection with the vision of Simon the Just, who, according to y.Yoma 5:2 (42c, 25ff.), was wont to see an old man in the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement. On this see A. Marmorstein, The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), 2:49–50, and Segal, Two Powers, 47ff. 20 Translation from G.H. Box, The Apocalypse of Abraham (London: SPCK, 1918). 21 We may note how chrysolite is mentioned in a description of the body of God in a shiʿur qomah text quoted by Scholem, Major Trends, 64. 22 In b.Hag. 12b Michael has a priestly function. See further H. Bietenhard, Die himmlische Welt im Urchristentum und Spätjudentum, WUNT 2 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1951), 123ff.; O. Hofius, Der Vorhang vor dem Thron Gottes, WUNT 14 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1972), 15; and Holtz, Christologie, 118.

X. The Vision of the Risen Christ in Revelation 1:13ff.

191

10:1). As in Rev. 1:13ff. the description of the angel applies the attribute of the Ancient of Days in Dan. 7:9 to the angel, for the angel’s hair is said to be ‘like snow’. Once again there would appear to be an indication that this angel is closely linked with God himself. The purple colour of Jaoel’s garment may derive from the use of the colour in the description of the furnishing of the tabernacle (Exod. 25:4; 26:1), though there may be a link with ‫פתיל תכלת‬ prescribed in Num. 25:38–39, which was said, according to later tradition, to reflect the glory of heaven.23 The sceptre in the angel’s right hand resembles Rev. 1:16. As in a passage from Ezekiel the Tragedian, where God places Moses on a throne with a diadem upon his head and a sceptre in his hand,24 this reference is a symbol of authority and power (cf. Ps. 55:6). As we have already noted, the description of God’s throne in the Apocalypse of Abraham is notable for the absence of any reference to a figure sitting upon the throne-chariot. The fact that the description of the merkabah owes much to Ezek. 1 makes the lack of any figure all the more significant. The question arises whether there is a similar pattern in the Apocalypse of Abraham to Ezek. 1:26–27 and 8:2. Does the angel Jaoel stand in a relationship to the divine throne similar to that of the figure described in Ezek. 8:2? It would appear that Jaoel is the companion of the throne of glory. Such a close link between the two is confirmed by the words of the angel: ‘I am called Jaoel by him who moveth that which existeth with me on the seventh expanse of the firmament’, etc. We know from Apoc. Abr. 19 that it is the throne which Abraham sees on the seventh firmament, and one must assume that it is this which the angel is referring to in the words just quoted. Such an interpretation may be supported by reference to Ezek. 1:12, where movement is said to be one of the characteristic features of the thronechariot.25 At the very least it seems that Jaoel, like Wisdom in Wisd. 9:4, was the companion of God’s throne. Thus while there may be no explicit evidence from the Apocalypse of Abraham to suggest that Jaoel was the figure in the form of a man who sat on the divine throne, it is not impossible that we have a theological description here which reflects that found in Ezek. 1 and 8, where the human figure on the throne leaves the throne to function as the agent of the divine will.

23 According to R. Meir the colour of ‫ תכלת‬was that of the throne of glory itself. See further B.Z. Bokser, ‘Thread of Blue’, PAAJR 31 (1963): 1ff. 24 On this passage see E.R. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, 13 vols. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953–1965), 5:103ff., and W.A. Meeks, The Prophet-King: Moses Traditions and the Johannine Christology, NovTSup 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1967), 241ff. 25 This is also true of the merkabah-fragment in 4Q Serek Širot ha-Šabbat (J. Strugnell, ‘The Angelic Liturgy at Qumran – 4Q SEREK ŠÎRÔT ʿÔLAT HAŠŠABBĀT’, in Congress Volume Oxford 1959, VTSup 7 [Leiden: Brill, 1960], 318–345).

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Section Two: Apocalyptic and Eschatological Themes in the New Testament

A comparison between Rev. 1:13ff. and the description of Jaoel in the Apocalypse of Abraham reveals some striking similarities. Both seem to bear witness to a strand in Jewish angelology, probably derived ultimately from Ezek. 1:26 and 8:2, in which prominence was being given to an exalted angel who functioned as the embodiment of the divine purpose and person. There are certain obvious similarities here with the description of angels in the oldest strata of the pentateuchal tradition, which speak of the angel of Yahweh as ‘an emissary of Yahweh … no longer clearly distinguishable from his master’.26 In that both the angel Jaoel and the Risen Christ according to Rev. 1:13ff. inherit the characteristics of divinity, both can be said to fulfil a role similar to that of the ‫ מלאך יהוה‬in the Old Testament. That is not to suggest that there is a direct link between Ezek. 8:2 and the ‫מלאך יהוה‬ traditions. Rather, the fact that there do appear to have been beliefs which spoke of the angelic emissary as the presence of God himself was bound to make it easier for early Christian writers, influenced as they were by Jewish monotheism, to show how Jesus acted as the representative of God to men by maintaining the closest possible identity between the exalted Lord and God himself without in any way compromising monotheism.27 There can be little doubt that angelic beliefs such as these were in no way intended to undermine monotheism, and their presence in Jewish religion was a way of safeguarding monotheistic belief while at the same time stressing the variety of divine activity in the world. Indeed, the persistence of such beliefs in early Christian theology was precisely because they seemed to support a monotheistic faith over against certain apparently ditheistic trends in Christian theology. Nevertheless, there are indications in the Jewish sources that such developments as have been outlined in this essay were susceptible of an interpretation which was entirely contrary to the monotheistic heart of Judaism. There is some evidence in the rabbinic sources to suggest that from about the beginning of the Christian era rabbis had to combat heterodox teachings, 26

W. Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, trans. J.A. Baker, 2 vols., OTL (London: SCM, 1967), 2:34, and further on this F. Stier, Gott und sein Engel im Alten Testament, ATA 12.2 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1934), and A.R. Johnson, The One and the Many in the Israelite Conception of God (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1961), 28ff. 27 On the importance of angel-Christology see M. Werner, Die Entstehung des christlichen Dogmas (Bern: Paul Haupt, 1941); W. Michaelis’s reply in Zur Engelchristologie im Urchristentum (Basel: Heinrich Majer, 1942); and J. Barbel, Christos Angelos, Theophaneia 3 (Bonn: P. Hanstein, 1941), which includes a survey of recent discussion of the subject. Mention may also be made of J. Daniélou, The Theology of Jewish Christianity, trans. and ed. J.A. Baker (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1964), 117ff.; G. Kretschmar, Studien zur frühchristlichen Trinitätstheologie, BHT 21 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1956); and M. Hengel, Der Sohn Gottes (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1975), 77 and 131.

X. The Vision of the Risen Christ in Revelation 1:13ff.

193

which argued for the existence of two divine powers.28 The character of this teaching can be illustrated by reference to a well known rabbinic legend concerning Elisha b. Abuyah, which, despite its late date in its present form, probably reflects controversies which were raging during the early part of the second century CE. Its importance for the present study is that one of its central characters is an exalted angel by the name of Metatron. Hebrew or 3 Enoch, though of late date,29 is the climax of the extravagant claims which were being made about Enoch in Jewish sources (e.g. 1 En. 71:14ff.; 2 En. 22–23; Test. Abr. Rec. B 11; Targ. Ps.-Jon. on Gen. 5:24). In the opening chapters of this heterogeneous collection of material, we find a description of Enoch’s translation to heaven (cf. Gen 5:24) and his transformation into the angel Metatron. There is an extended description of the angel’s coronation, his possession of a throne like that of God (ch. 10), the worship of him by the heavenly host (ch. 14), and his possession of the divine name (ch. 12 and b.San. 38b). Thus, in this work, in addition to God, there is an angel who is given all the power of God. It has to be said that there is certainly no question of any thoroughgoing Gnostic dualism, though some form of Gnostic influence cannot be ruled out. The theological complexity of this work cannot be underestimated. This is something which is particularly apparent in 3 En. 16. In this chapter we have a description of the ascent of Elisha b. Abuyah (alias Aḥer, fl. 130 CE) to heaven to gaze upon the glories of the merkabah. He sees Metatron exercising authority in the heavenly court and the great glory of the angel caused Elisha to wonder whether the view, which asserted that there were two gods, was not after all correct. Elisha’s comment leads to a declaration of his exclusion from the divine mercy and the punishment of Metatron. This is not the only version of this legend which has come down to us, for it occurs in what is probably an earlier version in b.Hag. 15a, where virtually nothing is said about Metatron’s power. In this account Metatron is not enthroned in glory but is merely the heavenly scribe (cf. Jub. 4:23; Test. Abr. Rec. B 11), who fails to stand when he sees Elisha coming into the divine presence. Elisha’s comment is said to be the direct result of his glimpse of Metatron rather than the confirmation of previously held views, as the version in Hebrew Enoch would seem to suggest. As is well known, later rabbinic tradition was unwilling to refer to Elisha by name because of his apostasy from the Jewish faith, the precise reason for which is by no means easy to ascertain.30 Whatever the links between this 28

The evidence is collected in the important study of Segal, Two Powers, 6, n. 1. See the discussion in P.S. Alexander, ‘The Historical Setting of the Hebrew Book of Enoch’, JJS 28 (1977): 156–180. 30 See, e.g., S. Back, Elischa b. Abuja-Acher (Frankfurt am Main: Kaufmann, 1891); H. Graetz, Gnosticismus und Judenthum (Krotoschin: Monasch, 1846), 62ff.; R.T. Herford, 29

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story and the exact reasons for Elisha’s abandonment of his ancestral religion it would be a mistake to regard this incident as an isolated and unrepresentative tendency within Jewish thought, for closer investigation suggests that it represents an outcrop of a deep-seated theological viewpoint within Judaism. In the light of the angelology already discussed, it seems that Elisha’s response, as it is recorded in this story, is at least understandable, if ultimately unjustifiable because of its neglect of the fundamental truth that all created beings, however great their power, are subordinate to God.31 While it would not be right to place too much weight on stories which cannot be dated with certainty, it would be a mistake to dismiss them out of hand as unrepresentative of currents in Jewish thought in the first two centuries CE. At the very least this story does provide confirmation of the fact that angelic beliefs were open to misinterpretation, particularly in a climate infected by Gnostic ideas.32 Investigation of the Christophany in the first chapter of Revelation suggests that one strand of primitive Christology had connections with a trend in Jewish angelology, which derived ultimately from the separation of the human figure from the merkabah in Ezek. 8:2. No doubt other aspects of Jewish angelology may cast light on the developments of Christology, but the significance of John’s call vision is that it offers linguistic evidence of the use of these beliefs in a Christological statement in the earliest period of Christianity. Whereas the precise character of the notions refuted by the author of Hebrews in the opening chapters of that letter are bound to remain uncertain, the vision of Christ in Rev. 1:13ff. demonstrates that the theological possibilities of angelology for Christological exposition were being explored at a very early stage, ideas which were taken up by later writers dependent on the Jewish apocalyptic tradition as a Christological tool of considerable potential. ‘Elisha b. Abujah’, in Essays Presented to J.H. Hertz, eds. I. Epstein et al. (London: Edward Goldston, 1942), 215–225; W. Bacher, Die Agada der Tannaiten, 2 vols., 2nd edn. (Straßburg: Karl J. Trübner, 1903), 1:430ff.; H. Bietenhard, Die himmlische Welt, 151ff.; and Segal, Two Powers, 60ff. 31 There is a parallel situation emerging in a discussion between R. Akiba and R. Jose reported in b.Hag. 14a. According to this passage Akiba said that one of the thrones mentioned in Dan. 7:9 was for David. Jose rebukes Akiba for this interpretation and proceeds to treat the verse in metaphorical fashion, see Marmorstein, The Old Rabbinic Doctrine, 2:134–135; A. Goldberg, Untersuchungen über die Vorstellung von der Schekhinah in der frühen rabbinischen Literatur, StJ 5 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1969), 316; and Segal, Two Powers, 47–48. Akiba’s interpretation may have some basis in 1 Chron. 29:23, a passage which became the basis for much speculation in later midrashim; see, e.g., Goodenough, Jewish Symbols, 9:127, and 10:99ff. 32 On the connection between some Gnostic texts and apocalyptic ideas see F.T. Fallon, The Enthronement of Sabaoth: Jewish Elements in Gnostic Creation Myths, NHS 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1978), and G.W. MacRae, Some Elements of Jewish Apocalyptic and Mystical Tradition and their Relation to Gnostic Literature, 2 vols. (PhD Diss., Cambridge, 1966).

11. Apocalyptic Visions and the Exaltation of Christ in the Letter tο the Colossians Recent studies of the false teaching at Colossae have not neglected to emphasise the significant Jewish component within the position1 opposed by Paul.2 The presence of words like new moon and sabbath in Col. 2:16 appears to point to a Jewish influence on the ideas of Paul’s opponents. Though Paul never mentions the false teaching in detail, most commentators expect to be 1 See the collection of studies in F.O. Francis and W.A. Meeks, eds., Conflict at Colossae (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1972). Of particular importance is Francis’s essay, ‘Humility and Angel Worship in Col. 2.18’ (reprinted from ST 16 [1963]: 109–134; all references are to the version in Studia theologica). See also W. Foerster, ‘Die Irrlehrer des Kolosserbriefes’, in Studia Biblica et Semitica (FS T.C. Vriezen), eds. W.C. van Unnik and A.S. van der Woude (Wageningen: Veenman, 1966), 71–80 (he notes the links with apocalyptic passages like 1 En. 14; see p. 79); N. Kehl, ‘Erniedrigung und Erhöhung in Qumran und Kolossä’, ZKT 91 (1969): 364–394; M. Smith, ‘Observations on Hekaloth Rabbati’, in Biblical and Other Studies, ed. A. Altmann (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 142–160; J. Lähnemann, Der Kolosserbrief (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohn, 1971), 30ff.; E. Schweizer, Der Brief an die Kolosser, EKK 12 (NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1976), 121–122 (translated into English by A. Chester, The Letter to the Colossians [London: SPCK, 1982], 125–126 and 161–162. References will be to the English translation); A.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: Cambridge University Press, 1981); A.J. Bandstra, ‘Did the Colossian Errorists need a Mediator?’, in New Dimensions in New Testament Study, eds. R.N. Longenecker and M.C. Tenney (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974), 329–343 (Bandstra’s argument that there exists a polemic against mediatorial activities in some Jewish works which may well apply to 4 Ezra and Syriac Baruch; cf. M.E. Stone, ‘Paradise in 4 Ezra’, JJS 17 [1966]: 85–88, who notes the moves against speculative activity in 4 Ezra, but Bandstra fails to take account of the nature of the angelophany in the Apocalypse of Abraham which seems to point against this thesis; see C. Rowland, The Open Heaven [London: SPCK, 1982], 94ff.); and C.A. Evans, ‘The Colossian Mystics’, Biblica 63 (1982): 188–205. There is a collection of Jewish material relevant to a discussion of the Colossian false teaching in J.J. Gunther, St. Paul’s Opponents and their Background, NovTSup 35 (Leiden: Brill, 1973), especially 271ff. For earlier discussion of the problem see E. Percy, Die Probleme der Kolosser- und Epheserbriefe (Lund: Gleerup, 1946), 140ff. 2 The case for non-Pauline authorship is set out by E. Lohse, Colossians and Philemon, trans. W.R. Poehlmann and R.J. Karris (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971), 84ff. and 175ff., and by E.P. Sanders, ‘Literary Dependence in Colossians’, JBL 85 (1966): 28–45. Pauline authorship is assumed in this essay.

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able to find various hints from the letter itself concerning the point of view opposed by the apostle. Indeed, this seems to be particularly true of 2:2–19, where a number of allusions help us to piece together the character of the teaching opposed by Paul.3 The consensus of scholarly opinion argues that the Colossian Christians had been led to believe that their acceptance of Christ as the key to salvation was not necessarily sufficient and that other rites like circumcision (2:11), the observance of Jewish festivals (2:16), beliefs concerning the angels in heaven and possibly visions of them (2:18) were needed for the complete religious experience. In response to this Paul stressed the Colossians’ release from rites and practices, which were appropriate to the old aeon, (2:14 and 17) and Christ as the locus of the divine character and wisdom (2:3; 2:9 and 19).4 Inevitably the question arises whether the religious climate of the area around Colossae in the middle of the first century CE was influenced by Jewish apocalyptic and mystical ideas.5 An answer to this question would be much facilitated by knowledge of the type of Judaism prevalent in the area. Unfortunately evidence about Judaism in Colossae is rather sparse, although it is known that there was a thriving Jewish community in the area.6 Such evidence as we do possess about the type of Judaism to be found in this part

3 2:18 in particular makes it difficult to agree with M.D. Hooker’s doubts about the existence of a false teaching at Colossae reflected in her essay, ‘Were there false teachers at Colossae?’, in Christ and Spirit, eds. B. Lindars and S.S. Smalley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 315–332. On the importance of the early part of ch. 2 for our understanding of the false teaching see Bandstra, ‘Colossian Errorists’, 339–340. 4 There was probably no explicit threat to the supremacy of Christ despite Col. 1:15ff.; see Evans, ‘The Colossian Mystics’, 203, and F.O. Francis, ‘The Christological Argument of Colossians’, in God’s Christ and his People, ed. J. Jervell (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1977), 192–208, at 193. 5 My approach to apocalyptic and mysticism is entirely that taken in my book The Open Heaven (see above, n. 1). When I use the word ‘mystical’ I use it in the sense of the apprehension of truths, which are beyond human reason. If there is any distinction to be made between apocalyptic and mysticism (and I remain to be convinced that there is a substantial difference), it is that the latter may well involve interest in the higher wisdom for its own sake rather than the improvement of the religious and moral life which such knowledge may bring. It is this last feature which is typical of much (though not all) of the apocalyptic literature. 6 For information about Judaism in Asia Minor see A.T. Kraabel, Judaism in Western Asia Minor under the Roman Empire (Diss. Harvard University, 1968), 125ff., and S.E. Johnson, ‘Asia Minor and Early Christianity’, in Christianity, Judaism and Other GrecoRoman Cults, ed. J. Neusner, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 2:77–145. On early Christianity in the area see U.B. Müller, Zur frühchristlichen Theologiegeschichte: Judenchristentum und Paulinismus in Kleinasien an der Wende vom ersten zum zweiten Jahrhundert n.Chr. (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohn, 1976).

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of Asia Minor points in the direction either of a form of syncretism7 or, if Revelation is typical of the religious outlook of Jews in this area, of a religion in which apocalyptic and related mystical ideas were an important component. It is the hypothesis that the latter was the dominant feature of the Colossian false teaching, and, by implication, a significant feature of the Jewish spirituality of the area, that we intend to test here. The end of the second chapter contains the most explicit references to the false teaching (vv. 16ff.). In 2:16 we can discern the ethical rigour of the teaching, with its emphasis on dietary restrictions (cf. vv. 22–23) and the observance of certain festivals.8 Such dietary restrictions fit well into a situation where an interest in visions of the heavenly world was being encouraged. We know from certain Jewish apocalypses that strict dietary preparations were often the prerequisite for the receipt of visions (e.g. Dan. 10:2–3).9 But even if it be admitted that such rigorous regulations with regard to food and drink were intimately bound up with apocalyptic spirituality, the question remains whether Colossians does offer evidence that the false teachers at Colossae were claiming visions of heaven such as we find in certain apocalypses. The answer to this question will depend much on the way in which we interpret the difficult verse 2:18. A translation is offered which will be supported in the following exegetical notes:10 Let no one disqualify you, taking delight in the humility and worship of angels, which he saw on entering (heaven), being puffed up without reason by his carnal mind.

Paul here seems to be warning the Colossians about those who would attempt to distinguish between believers, accepting some and disqualifying others.11 The basis for disqualification is their delight12 ‘in humility and worship of angels’. Much attention has centred on the meaning of the words ταπεινοφροσύνη and θρησκεία τῶν ἀγγέλων, translated by the RSV ‘self-abasement’ and ‘worship of angels’. Some would translate ταπεινοφροσύνη ‘fasting’, follow7

This is the explanation favoured by Kraabel, Judaism in Western Asia Minor, 148. The evidence of Revelation makes it likely that apocalyptic was a significant component of Anatolian Judaism. 8 See Lohse, Colossians and Philemon, 123. 9 See Francis, ‘The Christological Argument’, 114ff., and on the later mystical tradition see G. Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition, 2nd edn. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1965), 103ff., and Rowland, The Open Heaven, 228ff. 10 For a survey of interpretations see Francis, ‘The Christological Argument’, 109ff.; Lohse, Colossians and Philemon, 117ff.; and Percy, Probleme, 137ff. On the entry into heaven in this verse see also Evans, ‘The Colossian Mystics’, 196. 11 Following the translation of καταβραβευέτω adopted by Francis, ‘The Christological Argument’, 110. 12 Francis, ‘The Christological Argument’, 113; Percy, Probleme, 146; and Lohse, Colossians and Philemon, 118.

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ing Hermas, Vis. 3.10.6.13 Thus the questions of food and drink mentioned in Col. 2:16 and the regulations spelt out in 2:21–22. are all part of the ταπεινοφροσύνη practised by the false teachers. Such an interpretation seems very attractive in view of the evidence of the context, but there are problems with this interpretation, which can only be fully appreciated by reference to the verse as a whole. F.O. Francis, in an important article, has rightly pointed out that the preposition ἐν in 2:18 is not repeated before the phrase θρησκεία τῶν ἀγγέλων.14 This may indicate that the genitive τῶν ἀγγέλων stands in the same relationship to ταπεινοφροσύνη as it does to θρησκεία. The question is whether one should follow most commentators on the passage and take the genitive only with θρησκεία, and, what is more, maintain that the genitive is objective rather than subjective. There seem to be no pressing reasons why the genitive should not explain both ταπεινοφροσύνη and θρησκεία. What Paul would then be referring to would be the activities of the angels in heaven, their humility and their worship. Thus the references to the false teaching would not be fasting by human beings followed by devotion to exalted angelic beings, but entirely concerned with the angels in heaven. The phrase ‘humility and worship of angels’ does not appear to make much sense until we recognise that there was considerable interest in the apocalyptic literature in the worship of the heavenly court. Indeed, according to Aboth de R. Nathan 23a, the angels in heaven practised humility to an excessive degree.15 The devotions of the heavenly attendants in the divine court are mentioned on several occasions in Revelation, e.g. 4:9–10. Thus, in talking about the humility and worship of angels, Paul was referring to a regular experience of the apocalyptic visionary. What is more, this was something in which the visionary could himself participate.16 While it may not be correct to say that the worship of angels by men is unknown in Judaism, as some have supposed,17 there does not seem to be any strong reason for supposing that Paul was dealing with this particular problem in Colossae. 13

See Percy, Probleme, 148; Francis, ‘The Christological Argument’, 114; and W. Carr, ‘Two Notes on Colossians’, JTS 24 (1973): 492–500. 14 Francis, ‘The Christological Argument’, 130. 15 See H.L. Strack and P. Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch, 4 vols. (München: Beck, 1922–1928), 3:629. There are related ideas in 3 En. 18; 35:1 and 39; Apoc. Abr. 17; 4Q Serek Širot ha-Šabbat. There is possibly a hint of angelic humility also in Jude 9. 16 See Francis in idem and Meeks, eds., Conflict at Colossae, 170ff.; Kehl, ‘Erniedrigung und Erhöhung’, 364ff.; Bandstra, ‘Colossian Errorists’, 331–332; H.-W. Kuhn, Enderwartung und gegenwärtiges Heil, StUNT 4 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966); Lincoln, Paradise Now; and Evans, ‘The Colossian Mystics’, 196. 17 E.g. Percy, Probleme, 149ff., and A.L. Williams, ‘The Cult of Angels at Colossae’, JTS 10 (1908–1909): 413–438. The prohibition of address to angels in the Talmud and the

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If we take τῶν ἀγγέλων as a subjective genitive explaining both ταπεινοφροσύνη and θρησκεία, it is easier to make sense of the following relative clause ἃ ἑώρακεν ἐµβατεύων.18 There has been considerable debate about the meaning of this sentence, and several commentators have resorted to emendation of the text in order to make sense of it.19 This course of action seems rather unnecessary, however, as it is not impossible to make sense of the text as it stands. The problems emerge when we examine the syntax of the relative clause. First of all, it is by no means clear what the antecedent of the neuter plural relative is. Secondly, the participle ἐµβατεύων is normally intransitive, and as a result it is difficult to see how the clause ἃ ἑώρακεν can be dependent on that verb, as is presupposed, for example, by the RSV translation. We would have expected a preposition before the relative clause if it were governed by the participle. Thus it seems preferable to suppose that the antecedent of the relative must be the phrase ταπεινοφροσύνη καὶ θρησκεία τῶν ἀγγέλων. Parallels have been offered where the verb ἐµβατεύειν is used in connection with entry into the shrine after initiation into the mysteries.20 The problem with this is that it does not appear to make sense of other allusions in Colossians, which give little or no indication of being concerned with the mystery-rites. Accordingly, one has to ask whether F.O. Francis’s suggestion, namely, that we have here a reference to the entry of the visionary into the heavenly world for his visions, does not make better sense.21 While it cannot be demonstrated that ἐµβατεύειν is used as a technical term for describing a heavenly ascent, there are occasional examples of the apocalyptic visionary describing his ascent into heaven as an ‘entry’ into the world above. In 1 En.

command not to worship angels in Rev. 19:10 and 22:8–9, as well as in Asc. Isa. 7:21, may indicate that this was a much more widespread problem than is often supposed. See e.g. W. Lueken, Michael: Eine Darstellung und Vergleichung der jüdischen und der morgenländisch-christlichen Tradition vom Erzengel Michael (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1898), 4ff., and P. Schäfer, Rivalität zwischen Engeln und Menschen, StJ 8 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975), 67ff. 18 See Francis, ‘The Christological Argument’, 179–180; Carr, ‘Two Notes on Colossians’, 500; and Evans, ‘The Colossian Mystics’, 197. 19 See Lohse, Colossians and Philemon, 119. 20 E.g. M. Dibelius, ‘Die Isisweihe bei Apuleius und verwandte Initiations-Riten’, in idem, Botschaft und Geschichte (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1956), 30–79, at 55ff.; and S. Lyonnet, ‘L’Epître aux Colossiens (Col. ii.18) et les mystères d’Apollon Clarien’, Biblica 43 (1962): 417–435; but see the criticism of Francis, ‘The Christological Argument’, 120–121, and Percy, Probleme, 170ff. 21 Lohse, Colossians and Philemon, 118, n. 33, criticises Francis; but see further support for Francis’s approach in Evans, ‘The Colossian Mystics’, 198, Schweizer, Colossians, 161, and Francis and Meeks, eds., Conflict at Colossae, 197ff.

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14:9, Enoch speaks of entering heaven after he has been borne thither by the winds of heaven.22 There have been two main objections to an interpretation of Col. 2:18, which sees it as a reference to a heavenly ascent and a vision of the humility and worshipful attitudes of the angels in heaven. First, it has to be recognised that in supposing that the nouns ταπεινοφροσύνη and θρησκεία τῶν ἀγγέλων are the antecedents of the relative, we have to assume that in this case the relative has been placed in the neuter despite the fact that the antecedents would have led us to expect a feminine plural. This is not an insuperable difficulty, however. A neuter relative following feminine nouns is to be found also in 2:16, though it has to be said that the list does include one neuter noun. A closer parallel is to be found in Col. 3:6, where the neuter plural relative follows a string of feminine nouns.23 The use of the neuter plural relative would thus refer to the totality of the actions performed by the angels, which the visionary saw during his ascent to heaven.24 The second criticism of this solution is more serious. When taken in isolation from its surrounding context, there is every reason to suppose that τῶν ἀγγέλων should be taken as a subjective genitive. The problem comes when we turn to 2:23 and find there the words ἐν ἐθελοθρησκίᾳ καὶ ταπεινοφροσύνῃ καὶ ἀφειδίᾳ σώµατος. Clearly the words are being used of the activities of men and women and not angels; what is more, they seem to be used in a negative sense.25 It might appear, therefore, in the light of 2:23, that it would be more natural to interpret the similar terms in 2:18 as referring to devotions performed by human beings and not angels. A difference in the personnel referred to in 2:18 and 2:23 need not be a difficulty, if we assume that there may have been a tendency for the Colossian teachers to imitate the behaviour of the angels, which they had seen in their visions. Evidence from 22 Other evidence in Francis, Conflict, 122–123, Evans, ‘The Colossian Mystics’, 198, n. 45, and Schweizer, Colossians, 124. 23 See further C.F.D. Moule, An Idiom Book of New Testament Greek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 130. 24 The interpretation adopted here has the advantage of maintaining a similar setting for both the humble acts and the worship of the angels in heaven. It is difficult to see how the humility could be part of the things seen when entering heaven unless it was an action performed by angels. Francis’s comment, Conflict, 130 (‘Instruction in humility for the purpose of obtaining visions is itself the subject of visions’), is not really consistent with the apocalyptic material he examines. It makes better sense of the section to regard the humility not as a reference to the ritual preparations for visions performed by men (e.g. fasting) but as part of what was seen by the visionary. See also Evans, ‘The Colossian Mystics’, 195–196. 25 Those who note the problem posed by 2:23 include Lohse, Colossians and Philemon, 119, n. 38, Schweizer, Colossians, 124–125, and R.P. Martin, Colossians: The Church’s Lord and the Christian’s Liberty (Exeter: Paternoster, 1972), 92. See further on this Francis, Conflict, 181–182, and Lincoln, Paradise Now.

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the Qumran scrolls suggests that there was a close link between the activities of the community and the angels. Just as the angels in heaven had their allotted place in the heavenly liturgy (4Q Serek Širot ha-Šabbat, cf. 2 En. 20:3–4), so also the community is given a position corresponding to God’s everlasting purposes (1QS 2:22–23; 6:8ff. and 5:23ff.).26 Because the Qumran community’s life was itself an extension of the life of heaven, we may expect that the practice of heaven would have impinged on their common life. Likewise Paul’s opponents in Colossae may have considered that the activities of the angels were not merely of interest to the visionary but important as an example for the righteous to imitate.27 Thus the use of the same words in vv. 18 and 23 to speak of the activities of the angels in heaven, and the behaviour of certain members of the Colossian church, is entirely understandable, if we appreciate that the communion with the angels, which the false teachers enjoyed, had persuaded them to copy the servile attitudes of the angels in their lives as a true reflection on earth of the will of God. The Colossian false teaching has two major components: the detailed preparations, which were necessary to receive visions (2:16), and the visions themselves (2:18), which offered the recipients a pattern of existence, which could be extended to everyday life (2:23). The problem with the teaching is its insistence on further rites and experiences in order to embrace the fulness of religion. It is this aspect which Paul finds so unhealthy; he is not opposed to visions in any way, as 2 Cor. 12:2ff. makes plain. What appears to have worried him was that the Colossians were not interested in Christ as the centre of their religious experience, but in the activities of the angels as a pattern for living, which might detract from the example of Christ. It is in this sense only that there was a threat to the position of Christ; there was probably no specifically heterodox christology at Colossae (cf. Heb. 1–3).28 In Paul’s view the new life in Christ already qualified believers to share the glory of heaven, where Christ was seated in glory (2:11 and 3:1). In Col. 1:12, Paul stresses that, already, the church has the privilege of sharing ‘in the inheritance of the saints in light’, surely a reference to communion with the angels (cf. 1QS 11:7–8).29 The point is made most clearly in 3:1, which stresses that the aim of the believer, the direct consequence of his baptism, is 26

On the Qumran material see J. Strugnell, ‘The Angelic Liturgy at Qumran – 4Q SEREK ŠÎRÔT ʿÔLAT HAŠŠABBĀT’, in Congress Volume Oxford 1959, VTSup 7 (Leiden: Brill, 1960), 318–345; Kehl, ‘Erniedrigung und Erhöhung’, 371ff.; Kuhn, Enderwartung und gegenwärtiges Heil; and D.E. Aune, The Cultic Setting of Realized Eschatology in Early Christianity, NovTSup 28 (Leiden: Brill, 1972). Participation by human beings in the heavenly worship can be found at Apoc. Abr. 17; 3 En. 1:12; Test. Job 48–49; Mart./Asc. Isa. 7:37 and 9:31ff. 27 See Kehl, ‘Erniedrigung und Erhöhung’, 348ff., and Schweizer, Colossians, 159ff. 28 See Francis, ‘Christological Argument’, 193. 29 So also Lohse, Colossians and Philemon, 36.

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the place where Christ is now seated. This means that it is the Christian’s responsibility to seek that which is above, the place where the hope for the future has its origin (1:5). The heavenly world is open to the believer by virtue of his baptism (2:12).30 The consequence of Christ’s exaltation is the fact that the Christian has the right to set his mind on that which is above, without any need to resort to additional practices or beliefs to enable him to have access to that realm.31 Additional practices and revelations obviously had the effect of separating between the brethren (2:18: µηδεὶς ὑµᾶς καταβραβευέτω). For Paul such a division was totally unacceptable, not only because all the mysteries of heaven were to be found in Christ,32 but also because baptism had enabled all believers to participate in the light of the world above.33 It was illegitimate, therefore, for the believer to look outside his relationship with Christ for knowledge of the world above (2:19),34 as the very essence of divinity was to be found in his person (2:9).35 30 Lohse, Colossians and Philemon, 132–133, and see also E. Grässer, ‘Kol iii.1–4 als Beispiel einer Interpretation secundum homines recipientes’, ZTK 64 (1967): 139–168. Although he is right to point to the significance of the heavenly ascent for the understanding of this passage (pp. 161–162), this is more likely to have been derived from Jewish apocalyptic (see Strack/Billerbeck, Kommentar, 1:325 and 277, and A.F. Segal, ‘Heavenly Ascent in Hellenistic Judaism, Early Christianity and their Environments’, in ANRW II.23.2 [Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980], 1332–1394). 31 The promise of resurrection-life as a consequence of baptism in 3:1 and 2:11 is an advance on the view expressed in Rom. 6:5. See further Lohse, Colossians and Philemon, 103ff., and R.C. Tannehill, Dying and Rising with Christ, BZNW 32 (Berlin: Töpelmann, 1967), especially 47ff. 32 On this verse see Bandstra, ‘Colossian Errorists’, 339ff. He outlines the parallels with Jewish apocalyptic literature (e.g. Syr. Bar. 54:13, 44:14 and 48:24) and argues that this implies that the Colossian teachers did not seek the revelation of God’s mystery in Christ alone. So also Evans, ‘The Colossian Mystics’, 203. 33 Lohse, Colossians and Philemon, 36. 34 On this verse see Evans, ‘The Colossian Mystics’, 198–199. 35 There has been much debate over the meaning of 2:9. In the light of recent trends in the study of Colossians, the possibility should not be ruled out that this verse too may well be best understood in the light of apocalyptic and mystical ideas. The phrase τὸ σῶµα τῆς σαρκός occurs only in Colossians in the whole of the New Testament. It is used in connection with the reconciliation wrought by God in Christ in 1:22. In 2:11 it is found after the word ἀπέκδυσις to explicate the meaning of the circumcision not made with hands, which in turn is linked with the circumcision of Christ. Paul means by this the fate he (Christ) endured at his death: the stripping off of the body of flesh. This implies that at this moment he left one realm of being (the body of flesh) for another (the body of glory; cf. Phil. 3:21 and see further the comments of G. Scholem, Von der mystischen Gestalt der Gottheit [Zürich: Rhein-Verlag, 1962], 276; and on the anthropomorphic theology of early Judaism see A. Marmorstein, The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God, 2 vols. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927], 2:48ff.). The possibility ought to be explored whether Col. 2:9 may presuppose Jewish ideas about the corporeal aspect of God and the identification of this manifestation of the divinity with the risen and glorified

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Christ (cf. Justin, Dial. 114, and A.F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven, SJLA 25 [Leiden: Brill, 1977]). From this point of view the significance of the presence of the adverb σωµατικῶς in 2:9 should not be missed. Commentators consider the significance of the adverb either to be a reference to the incarnation (e.g. E. Schweizer, ‘σῶµα’, TDNT 7:1075) or the reality of the divine indwelling (Lohse, Colossians and Philemon, 100). It should be noted, however, that in both the other New Testament uses of the adverb (Luke 3:22 and 1 Tim. 4:8) the physical aspect is to the fore; the word is not used in a transferred sense. We should, therefore, be open to the possibility that this is true of Col. 2:9 also (on this verse see N. Kehl, Der Christushymnus im Kolosserbrief, SBM 1 [Stuttgart: Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1967]). One of the main objections to taking the word here as a reference to the incarnation, is the present tense κατοικεῖ (cf. 1:19). But it is the Platonic background which has always been stressed (see e.g. J. Jervell, Imago Dei: Gen. 1,26f. im Spätjudentum, in der Gnosis und in den paulinischen Briefen, FRLANT 76 [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960], 223–224, and Lohse, Colossians and Philemon, 100, n. 48; but note the criticisms of M. Smith, ‘The Shape of God and the Humanity of the Gentiles’, in Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, ed. J. Neusner, SHR 14 [Leiden: Brill, 1968], 315–326). The presence of the fulness of divinity in bodily form may be illustrated from Jewish sources. We know that exalted angels like Jaoel and Metatron had positions of prominence in the heavenly hierarchy because they had God’s name dwelling in them (Apoc. Abr. 10–11 and b.San. 38b). In addition, the Jaoel tradition is part of a much more complicated theophany tradition in which the appearance of God in human form plays a part (see Rowland, The Open Heaven, 94ff.). The preeminence of Christ could easily be stressed by identifying him with the divine kābōd appearing in human form (see also S. Kim, The Origin of Paul’s Gospel, WUNT 2.4 [Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1981]). Recent study has suggested that an important strand of Paul’s christology may have owed much to this tradition (Kim, Origin, 239ff.). By regarding Christ as the human manifestation of God, known in biblical theophanies and angelophanies, the very embodiment of divine fulness, Paul could point away from the bewildering variety of the apocalyptic visions of the heavenly world to a single-minded devotion to the deity embodied in the Risen Christ. Thus he can be said to speak the language of the Colossian apocalyptists but turns their attention away from the paraphernalia of heaven to the central goal of the mystics, the person of the deity enthroned in glory, whom Paul identified with Christ (cf. Evans, ‘The Colossian Mystics’, 203ff.).

12. John 1:51, Jewish Apocalyptic and Targumic Tradition One of the dominant motifs of the Fourth Gospel is the centrality of Christ for any kind of relationship between man and God. This theme at least stands out as a main purpose of the author, for he sets out to persuade his readers ‘that Jesus is the Christ’, and that believing they ‘may have life in his name’ (20:31). What is more, he points out the superiority of the revelation in and through Jesus Christ (1:17; 3:13) as compared with all other claims to offer revelation about God. Whether the author was seeking to persuade nonbelievers of the truth of the Christian message or Christians to remain faithful to the faith, which they already had, is much disputed.1 As far as the present discussion is concerned, however, it will be assumed that the Gospel is directed primarily to those who were believers already, rather than being evangelistic in outlook, and is intended to dissuade Jewish-Christians from abandoning their new allegiance to Christ. In the interests of presenting the Christian case over against the claims of non-believing Judaism, we find a christological exposition of considerable sophistication. The Gospel opens with the description of the activity of the divine Logos from the beginning of creation to the incarnation, and the reader is left in no doubt that Jesus of Nazareth is the only one who reveals fully the character of God. It is the importance of this theme which demands consideration in the light of claims made by the Jewish apocalyptic literature. The revelation of God and the celestial mysteries are essential elements of Jewish apocalyptic.2 The quest of the apocalyptic seer is to ascertain God’s secret purpose for his creation (e.g. Apoc. Abr. 20ff.), and the reasons for the oppression of the holy people of God (e.g. 4 Ezra 3:20ff. and Syr. Bar. 14). 1

See further R.E. Brown, The Gospel of John, 2 vols., AB 29 and 29A (London: Continuum International Publishing, 1971), 1:lxxviii; C.K. Barrett, The Gospel of John and Judaism (London: SPCK, 1975), 17; S. Pancaro, The Law in the Fourth Gospel, NovTSup 42 (Leiden: Brill, 1975), especially 533–534; and M. de Jonge, ‘Jewish Expectations about the Messiah according to the Fourth Gospel’, NTS 19 (1973): 263–264. Particularly important for the understanding of the Johannine church is J.L. Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel (New York: Harper & Row, 1968). 2 See e.g. G. Bornkamm, ‘µυστήριον’, TDNT 4:815 and J.J. Collins, ‘Introduction: Toward the Morphology of a Genre’, in Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre = Semeia 14 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979): 1–20.

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Also, on occasion the seer can glimpse the glory of God himself (1 En. 14:8ff., Apoc. Abr. 17–18 and Rev. 4). That quest for the knowledge of God, which is so characteristic of the Jewish apocalypses, is a key element in the christological portrait of the Fourth Gospel, and it seems appropriate to explore the possibility of a relationship between the outlook of the apocalypses and the Fourth Gospel, with due allowance for the fact that the understanding of revelation in the latter is bound up with Jesus the Word made flesh. In pursuit of this a comparison between the Fourth Gospel and Revelation proves to be instructive. For John of Patmos, it is the coming of the New Jerusalem from heaven, which heralds an era when ‘the dwelling of God is with men’ (21:3). The verb σκηνόω, which is used in John 1:14 of the dwelling of the incarnate Logos among men, appears in this chapter of Revelation. The major difference between Rev. 21:3 and John 1:14 is that the dwelling of God among men in Revelation is part of the eschatological bliss enjoyed in the new age, whereas the author of the Fourth Gospel points out that this event has already taken place in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.3 The climax of the Apocalypse is the description of the heart of the New Jerusalem, where the throne of God is set, and the elect are granted the privilege of seeing God (22:4). For the seer, this event is still in the future, although in certain circumstances he, like other apocalyptic visionaries, considered it possible for some individuals to anticipate this by means of the apocalyptic vision (e.g. Rev. 4:2–3). In Revelation, and for that matter the rest of the apocalypses, the vision of God is a glimpse of the divine glory hidden in heaven. The Fourth Evangelist agrees with some apocalypticists that God can indeed be glimpsed in the present aeon by humanity. Unlike them, however, he does not presuppose the need for the door of heaven to be opened (cf. Rev. 4:1) before God can be revealed. For him God has been revealed in the person and words of Jesus (12:47ff.). The unveiling of the things of God comes only through him because he is the one who has seen God (6:46) and makes known the divine will (7:16). Indeed, to see Jesus is to see God himself (14:9). The complete revelation of God’s character comes only in Jesus, for he is the one who manifests the grace and truth of God (cf. Exod. 34:6).4 The claim made in 1:18 that Jesus is the one to make God known must be set in the context of the claims made by the apocalypticists to reveal the divine secrets. Like the roughly contemporary 4 Ezra, which denies the possibility of an ascent to heaven to see God and his throne (4:8; 8:21), the Fourth Gospel offers a deliberate rebuff to those who would claim to know God by any other means apart from the revelation of God in Jesus. All visions given to the prophets of old are invalid if they are understood without reference to 3

So also Brown, Gospel of John, 1:53. On this theme see A.T. Hanson, Grace and Truth (London: SPCK, 1975), and Pancaro, The Law in the Fourth Gospel, 489ff. 4

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Section Two: Apocalyptic and Eschatological Themes in the New Testament

Christ (3:13). That is not to say that the claims to visions made by the religious heroes of Israel’s past are without foundation, for they must be understood in the light of Christ. The vision of Isaiah in Isa. 6, for example, is understood by the Fourth Evangelist not as a vision of God but as a vision of Christ (12:41), for a vision of God without reference to Christ would be unthinkable. Unlike Jesus, the Jews have never seen God’s form or heard his voice (5:37, cf. Deut. 4:12 and John 6:46). Jesus is the one who in his person and words appears with the character and authority of the God of Israel. Indeed, one could say that the goal of the heavenly ascent, the sight of the throne of God and the glory of God upon it, so cherished by the Jewish apocalyptic seers, is, in the eyes of the Fourth Evangelist reached only in Jesus. The suggestion that aspects of the theology of the Fourth Gospel can best be understood in the light of Jewish mystical and apocalyptic ideas is not new.5 One of the pioneering works in this field, by Hugo Odeberg, concentrated on Jewish mystical literature from a later period in an attempt to set the Gospel within the religious currents of late antiquity. It is a study which still has many insights of considerable importance for the understanding of the Fourth Gospel. Nevertheless little attempt has been made to relate the Gospel to the earlier apocalyptic texts of Judaism, which either antedate the Gospel or are roughly contemporary with it, whether they be the extant Jewish apocalypses or the esoteric tradition of early rabbinic Judaism. One reason for this has been the belief that the Gospel is one of those early Christian texts, which is least influenced by apocalyptic.6 This is entirely understandable if one works with a view of apocalyptic which sees its essence to be a particular form of eschatological belief. If we admit, however, that apocalyptic is concerned above all with the revelation of divine mysteries, the outlook of the Fourth Gospel fits very well into such a religious outlook. In an attempt to support this approach to the Gospel, some consideration will be

5

Particular mention should be made of the following: H. Odeberg, The Fourth Gospel: Interpreted in its Relation to Contemporaneous Religious Currents in Palestine and the Hellenistic-Oriental World (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1929); G. Quispel, ‘Nathanael und der Menschensohn’, ZNW 47 (1956): 281–283; N.A. Dahl, ‘The Johannine Church and History’, in Current Issues in New Testament Interpretation: Essays in Honor of Otto A. Piper, eds. W. Klassen and G.F. Snyder (London: SCM, 1962), 124–142; P. Borgen, Bread from Heaven: An Exegetical Study of the Concept of Manna in the Gospel of John and the Writings of Philo, NovTSup 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1965); idem, ‘God’s Agent in the Fourth Gospel’, in Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, ed. J. Neusner, SHR 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 83–96; W.A. Meeks, The Prophet-King: Moses Traditions and the Johannine Christology, NovTSup 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1967), and A.F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven, SJLA 25 (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 213ff. 6 E.g. Barrett, John and Judaism, 40ff.

12. John 1:51, Jewish Apocalyptic and Targumic Tradition

207

given to John 1:51, the exegesis of which has often utilised Jewish apocalyptic notions. John 1:51 comes at the end of the first chapter of the Gospel and is the climax of many christological themes running throughout these verses,7 though it is probably an isolated logion of some antiquity, which has been added by the evangelist at this point.8 The saying promises to Nathanael, the true Israelite, a vision of an open heaven and ‘angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man’ (RSV). There are similarities with passages like Acts 7:56 and 10:11, both of which offer disclosures of divine secrets by means of the stereotyped formula of the open heaven.9 But it is the origin of the contents of the vision promised to Nathanael which has provoked most discussion. The ascent of the angels followed by their descent looks rather strange if we suppose that the open heaven made it possible for angels in heaven to move directly onto the Son of Man. One would have expected the descent from heaven to earth to have preceded the ascent to heaven. If for no other reason, this particular order of ascent followed by descent points in the direction of a link with Gen. 28:1210 where we find ‫עלים וירדים בו‬. Interpretations of John 1:51 in the light of Gen. 28:12 have rightly recognised that the author of the Fourth Gospel was not dealing merely with the Bible as we have it but also with a long tradition of scriptural interpretation, which had considerable influence on the way in which the original texts were understood. Investigation of certain of these later interpretations casts a rather different light on the meaning of the original, for instead of Jacob being merely a passive spectator of an angelophany, in the later versions of the story he becomes an active participant in the event. One passage in particular, which has frequently been referred to by commentators, is the discussion between R. Hiyya and R. Yannai in Ber.R. 68:12.11 7

See e.g. de Jonge, ‘Jewish Expectations’, 247ff. On the antiquity of the saying see J. Jeremias, ‘Die älteste Schicht der MenschensohnLogien’, ZNW 58 (1967): 171, H. Windisch, ‘Angelophanien um den Menschensohn’, ZNW 30 (1931): 223ff., but cf. W. Michaelis, ‘Joh. 1,51, Gen. 28,12 und das Menschensohn-Problem’, TLZ 85 (1960): 561–578. 9 On this see F. Lentzen-Deis, Die Taufe Jesu nach den Synoptikern (Frankfurt am Main: J. Knecht, 1970), 99ff., and W.C. van Unnik, ‘Die geöffneten Himmel in der Offenbarungsvision des Apokryphons des Johannes’, in Apophoreta (FS E. Haenchen), BZNW 30 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1983), 269–280. 10 Against the link with Gen. 28:12 see Michaelis, ‘Joh. 1,51’, but see now the comments of G. Reim, Studien zum alttestamentlichen Hintergrund des Johannesevangeliums, SNTSMS 22 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 102ff. 11 See e.g. Odeberg, The Fourth Gospel, 33ff., and C.F. Burney, The Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1922), 116. There is a survey of various interpretations in F.J. Moloney, The Johannine Son of Man (Roma: Libreria Ateneo Salesiano, 1976), 25ff. 8

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Section Two: Apocalyptic and Eschatological Themes in the New Testament

There are two aspects of this passage which merit our attention. First of all, Jacob takes the place of the ladder as the means whereby the angels ascend and descend between heaven and earth. The reason for this is that the Hebrew ‫ בו‬in Gen. 28:12 could be taken to indicate that Jacob, and not the ladder, was the means of the angels’ ascent and descent. Secondly, it is asserted that Jacob is important for the angels, because his features are fixed on high. As a result the angels ascend to heaven and see his features in heaven and descend to earth to look upon the same features in the person of the sleeping patriarch. The problem with this passage from Bereshit Rabbah, as with so many others from rabbinic collections, is that in its present form it cannot be dated with any certainty before the third century CE. Thus we cannot be sure that it was in fact in existence at the time of writing of the Fourth Gospel. This criticism is not as weighty as is often supposed, however. One cannot deny that the basis for such an interpretation already existed in the ambiguity of the Masoretic Text itself. Although the evidence that such an interpretation was in existence in the first century is not available, it would seem to be a reasonable assumption that, in the light of the sophistication of exegetical methods practised by Jewish interpreters, this ambiguity would have been exploited to the full from a very early time. Mention of Jacob’s features being fixed on high is found in several other Jewish sources (e.g. b.Hullin 91b), and in particular in the versions of the Palestinian Targum to Gen. 28:12.12 In them there is considerable agreement as the following synopsis shows:13

12 The importance of the targum on this verse has been noted by Lentzen-Deis, Taufe Jesu, 214ff., who gives a complete list of the versions in the targumim; Odeberg notes it in passing (The Fourth Gospel, 35, n. 3) but does not comment further on it; likewise also M. McNamara, Targum and Testament (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1972), 146–147; J. Jervell, Imago Dei: Gen. 1,26f. im Spätjudentum, in der Gnosis und in den paulinischen Briefen, FRLANT 76 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960), 96ff. and 116–117: M.-É. Boismard, Du Baptême à Cana: Jean, 1,19–2,11, LD 18 (Paris: Édition du Cerf, 1956), 123ff.; and G. Stemberger, ‘Die Patriarchenbilder der Katakombe in der Via Latina im Lichte der jüdischen Tradition’, Kairos 16 (1974): 37. 13 The texts used as the basis of this translation are A. Sperber, The Bible in Aramaic, 4 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1959–1973); M. Ginsburger, Thargum Jonathan ben Uzziel zum Pentateuch (Berlin: S. Calvary & Co., 1903); idem, Das Fragmententhargum (Berlin: S. Calvary & Co., 1899) (also M.C. Doubles, The Fragment Targum, Diss. St. Andrews, 1964) and A. Díez Macho, Neophyti 1: Targum Palestinense MS de la Biblioteca Vaticana, Vol. 1: Génesis (Madrid and Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1968).

12. John 1:51, Jewish Apocalyptic and Targumic Tradition

209

Onkelos

Pseudo-Jonathan

Neofiti I

Fragment Targum

And he dreamed and behold a ladder was fixed on earth and its top stretched to the height of heaven. And behold angels

And he dreamed and behold a ladder was fixed on earth and its top stretched to the height of heaven. And behold the angels who went to Sodom and who had been banished from them because they revealed the secrets of the Lord of the world. And they were banished and went until the time that Jacob left the house of his father. And they escorted him in kindness

And he dreamed and behold a ladder was fixed on earth and its top stretched to the height of heaven. And behold the angels

And he dreamed and behold a ladder was fixed on earth and its top stretched to the height of heaven. And behold angels

who escorted him from the house of his father

who escorted him from the house of his father

went up to

went up to

announce to the angels on high

announce to the angels on high

saying Come, see the pious man whose features are fixed on the throne of glory which you desire to look on. And behold angels from before the LORD were ascending and descending and looking on him.

saying Come, see the pious man whose features are fixed on the throne of glory which you desire to look on. And behold holy angels from before the LORD were ascending and descending and looking on him.

to Bethel. And on that day they went up to the high heavens

spoke and said Come, see Jacob the pious whose features are fixed on the throne of glory which you desire to look on. Then the rest of the holy angels of the LORD were going up and descending on it.

descended to look on him.

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Section Two: Apocalyptic and Eschatological Themes in the New Testament

Before we look at this material the question inevitably arises whether we are justified in using this as evidence of Jewish interpretation of Gen. 28:12 round about the time the Fourth Gospel was written. There are many problems with the dating of targumic material, for it cannot be doubted that the most elaborate of the targumim to the Pentateuch, Pseudo-Jonathan, did not reach its final form until well into the Islamic period. Nevertheless few would deny that this late targum and the others do contain relics of very ancient Jewish exegesis.14 But is this true of the development of Gen. 28:12, which we have reproduced above? Three points may be made in favour of an early dating. First of all, it is worthy of note that we have virtual agreement in the outlines of the expansion of the verse in three of the targumim. This could indicate that this interpretation was firmly grounded in the tradition, though there are sufficient variations to exclude the possibility that the agreement is the result of a definitive recension of the passage at a later stage. Secondly, there are signs that the interpretation found in the targumim may have been in existence at the latest in the second century CE as it is hinted at in the baraitha in b.Hullin 91b.15 Thirdly, it would appear that this interpretation is presupposed by the passage in Ber.R. 68:12, for the latter seems to be a development of the version found in the targumim, making the intercourse between heaven and earth a comparison of Jacob with his heavenly εἰκών and also incorporating the exploitation of the ambiguity in the Hebrew. Thus, although it would be wrong to suppose that certainty in the matter of dating is possible, it does seem justifiable to explore the development of Gen. 28:12 found in certain targumim in the hope that it may assist our understanding of John 1:51. The Targum of Onkelos has a version which offers little more than a literal translation of the Hebrew. The other targumim, however, follow the Hebrew closely only until the section dealing with the ascent and descent of the angels. Then all three offer an extensive elaboration of the original passage, with Pseudo-Jonathan, as one might expect, being by far the most elaborate of the three. This targum reports that the angels who had been to Sodom (Gen. 19:1) and who had been expelled for revealing the divine secrets,16 had 14

See e.g. M. McNamara, The New Testament and the Palestinian Targum to the Pentateuch (Roma: Pontificio Istituto biblico, 1966). On the problem of dating see A.D. York, ‘The Dating of Targumic Literature’, JSJ 5 (1974): 49–62. 15 ‘A tanna taught: they ascended to look at the image above and descended to look at the image below.’ 16 Is there any link with the legends at the beginning of 1 Enoch in Targum PseudoJonathan? In these chapters of 1 Enoch the Watchers are finally excluded from heaven because they revealed the divine secrets to men (1 En. 7:1ff. and 7:6). If there is, it would appear that they are also guilty of revealing another secret, the fact that Jacob’s features are those fixed on the throne of glory.

12. John 1:51, Jewish Apocalyptic and Targumic Tradition

211

accompanied Jacob as he had set out from his father’s house (Gen. 28:5). These were the ones who had ascended into heaven and persuaded the angels in heaven to descend to earth to look upon the face of Jacob. Neofiti and the Fragment Targum are virtually identical in their expansion of the original. Both mention the fact that the angels had accompanied Jacob as he set out from his father’s house and tell of the ascent of these angels to heaven to tell the angels in heaven of the significance of the one who was asleep at Bethel. The central feature of the targumic interpretation is the conviction that the features (‫ )איקונין‬of Jacob are set on the throne of glory. Because this fact is known to the two angels who accompany Jacob, they ascend to heaven to tell the angels there about it, and, as a result, angels from heaven come down to look at Jacob. This reflects the belief that the most secret things of God were hidden even from angels (1 En. 14:21, cf. 1 Pet. 1:12). But the impossibility of angels viewing the divine mysteries has been overcome, for by looking at Jacob the angels can see the features of one whose form is found on the throne of glory. The secrets of the divine throne-chariot were among the most important mysteries (m.Hag. 2:1),17 and knowledge of these mysteries was now possible for the angels by gazing at the sleeping Jacob. The fact that the ascent preceded the descent is explained by angels returning from earth to heaven, to impart the information about Jacob to other angels, who then descend to gaze at the features of the patriarch. Perhaps we should be content to leave the interpretation of this passage with the conclusion that the angels descended merely to see in Jacob one of the secrets of the throne of glory. But can we be more specific about exactly which secret the targumists had in mind? To answer this question one must enquire what is meant by the clause ‫דאיקונין דידיה קביעא בכורסיה איקרא‬. Most commentators on this passage consider that the features of the patriarch are in fact those of the face of the man, mentioned among the creatures in Ezek. 1:10.18 In so far as the throne-chariot as a whole was an object of speculation, such an interpretation would seem to be perfectly adequate. Nevertheless the great significance, which is attached to the disclosure of the ascent of the angels, suggests something even more important. That could only be the climax of the apocalyptic ascent, the glimpse of God in glory (Rev. 4:2; 17

On this see G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 3rd rev. edn. (New York: Schocken, 1954). On the earlier material see the monograph of I. Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, AGJU 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1980). 18 So L. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 7 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1911–1938), 5:290. A passage is to be found in Pirke de R. Eliezer 35 (Friedlander’s translation, New York: Hermon Press, 1965, 265), which explicitly identifies Jacob with the face of the man among the ḥayyoth. According to Simeon b. Lakish in Ber.R. 82:6, however, ‘the patriarchs, they are the chariot’. See further on this J.Z. Smith, ‘The Prayer of Joseph’, in Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, ed. J. Neusner, SHR 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 284–285.

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Section Two: Apocalyptic and Eschatological Themes in the New Testament

1 En. 14:20; 2 En. 22). In the light of this, it has to be asked whether the targumim here hint that Jacob’s features were in fact identical with the form of God on the throne of glory (Ezek. 1:26–27).19 If this targumic material does lie behind the evangelist’s presentation of 1:51, there are certain consequences for our understanding of that verse. First of all, the open heaven does not precede a revelation of the Son of Man in heaven, for, like Jacob, he is on earth. Second, taking full account of the targumic background suggests we take the phrase ἐπὶ τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου as the destination of the angels’ descent. Thirdly, we must take this phrase only with the second participle καταβαίνοντας (unless we follow Odeberg’s suggestion, which has not met with much approval, of movement between the celestial εἰκών and its earthly counterpart), as in the targumim the angels come down from heaven towards the patriarch once the angels on earth had ascended on high to communicate their news to the angels above.20 This means that the promise, which Jesus makes to Nathanael, concerns a demonstration of the significance of the Son of Man by indicating that he is the one whom the angels in heaven sought to look at, as the one who embodied the mystery of God himself. Some justification must now be offered not only for the translation of the preposition ἐπί adopted here but also of the function of the phrase ἐπὶ τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου within the sentence as a whole. It should be noted that of all the uses in the Fourth Gospel of καταβαίνω with a prepositional phrase denoting the destination of the descent, two of the three (excluding 1:51) use ἐπί with the accusative (6:16; 1:33), the exception being 2:12, where εἰς is used. The use of ἐπί in 1:33 is a little difficult to evaluate, for the preposition is used after καταβαῖνον and µένον. After the latter participle there can be little doubt that it refers to the place where the Spirit rested after its descent, as is the case also in 1:32, but this hardly does justice to the phrase ἐφ’ ὅν in 1:33, which seems also to imply motion of the Spirit towards Jesus. It will be noted that the preposition ἐπί is repeated twice in this sentence. In all probability this is to be explained as a semitism, in which there is repetition of the prepositional phrase within the relative clause, after the clause itself has been introduced by a similar preposition preceding 19

Cf. b.B.Bathra 58a: ‘R. Banaʾah used to mark out caves. … When he came to the cave of Adam, a voice came forth from heaven saying, Thou hast seen the likeness of my likeness [i.e. Abraham], my likeness itself [Adam] thou shalt not behold.’ See further on this Jervell, Imago Dei. 20 So M.-J. Lagrange, Évangile selon saint Jean (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1927), 52. The Peshitta confirms the interpretation of the Greek followed in this essay in its translation of ἐπὶ τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου. See also Aphrahat, Demonstratio XX (Aphraatis Sapientis Persae Demonstrationes, ed. J. Parisot, vol. 1, Patrologia Syriaca 1.1 [Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1894], col. 912) but cf. the translation of F.C. Burkitt in Evangelion Da-Mepharreshe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 1:428.

12. John 1:51, Jewish Apocalyptic and Targumic Tradition

213

the relative.21 If this is the case, we probably have to reckon with the fact that ἐπί serves both as a preposition denoting the downward movement of the Spirit towards Jesus (following καταβαῖνον, as it does also in Matt. 3:16 and Luke 3:22), as well as a preposition denoting the resting position rather than the ultimate goal (after µένον). The suggestion that ἐπὶ τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου should be taken only with καταβαίνοντας and not ἀναβαίνοντας also demands further consideration. There are several examples in the Gospel in which two verbs of motion are each included in two co-ordinate clauses. These examples may be divided into two types: (i) a group in which two verbs of motion in parallel coordinate clauses each have their own prepositional phrase denoting either the origin or destination of the action (e.g. 1:32; 3:8; 7:3; 8:14; 13:3; 18:6; and also 3:13, which is not strictly speaking in this category but is so similar that it should be mentioned here); (ii) sentences in which two verbs of motion joined by καί have only one prepositional phrase in the second clause with the direction of the motion in the first clause implied (e.g. 1:51; 14:28; 20:2). It is this second group, of course, which is of particular interest to us. Of the examples in this group, 20:2 speaks of movement towards Peter in the second clause, and this is, though not certainly, implied in the first clause. In 14:28, however, the first clause speaks of a return to God, whereas the second talks of the return of Jesus to the disciples (ὑπάγω καὶ ἔρχοµαι πρὸς ὑµᾶς). In the light of the last mentioned example, it seems perfectly reasonable to suppose that in 1:51 ἐπὶ τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου should be taken only with καταβαίνοντας and not ἀναβαίνοντας, with the implied destination of the latter being heaven. Such an interpretation as the one adopted here, with its emphasis on a man as the one who reveals the secret things of God, is completely consistent with the summary in John 1:18. For the Fourth Evangelist, however, it was not Jacob whose form and person disclosed the nature of God but Jesus, the Son of Man. It is the developed understanding of Gen. 28:12, rather than the original, which proves more suited to the evangelist’s purpose. He is not anxious to portray Jesus merely as the recipient of angelic revelations, for he wants to stress that Jesus is himself the embodiment of the revelation of the divine kābōd.22 Nathanael is thus offered a vision which will go much further than the evidence upon which he has confessed Jesus as the Son of God. He

21 See M. Black, An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts, 1st edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 85, where he argues that ἐπί in John 1:51 is a translation of ‫‘ על‬towards’. It is worthy of note that Black did not include these remarks in the third edition of his book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), as noted also by Moloney, The Johannine Son of Man, 29, n. 39. 22 Similarly also Quispel, ‘Nathanael und der Menschensohn’.

214

Section Two: Apocalyptic and Eschatological Themes in the New Testament

will be shown that the one whom he has acknowledged is in fact the one whom angels desire to look upon. As the one in whom the secrets of God are to be found, Jesus becomes the goal of the heavenly ascent and the disclosure of the things of God. But the apocalypse is not to be found in the visions of the mystics and the disclosures which they offer of the world beyond but in the earthly life of Jesus Christ. There is in the Johannine doctrine of the incarnation an attempt to play down the value of any claim to revelation apart from Christ. The denial of all previous ascents to heaven (3:13) and the unequivocal emphasis on Jesus as the focal point of revelation make the heavenly ascent and all the paraphernalia of apocalyptic mysteries superfluous. John 1:51 stands out in the Fourth Gospel as a solitary testimony to the revelation of the world beyond. Even in this verse the function of the vision is not for the visionary to gaze into heaven but to see the way in which those who are already in heaven find the revelation of God located in a figure on earth.23

23 Since this article was submitted there has been a significant increase in the study of the christology of the Fourth Gospel in the light of Jewish apocalyptic. Among studies which deserve particular mention are those by J.-A. Bühner (Der Gesandte und sein Weg im 4. Evangelium, WUNT 2.2 [Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1977]), and R.W. Paschal (The Farewell Prayer of Jesus [Diss. Cambridge, 1982], especially 149ff.). I have explored the view of the Jewish apocalyptic world presupposed in this study in The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982). The importance of the targumim to Gen. 28 is noted by E.G. Clarke in ‘Jacob’s Dream at Bethel as Interpreted in the Targums and the New Testament’, SR 4 (1974): 367–377.

13. Keeping Alive the Dangerous Vision of a World of Peace and Justice Hope exists for the sake of the hopeless. … All memory of suffering awakens dangerous visions, visions that are dangerous for those who try to control the present or the future. They are visions of the kingdom of justice, which enable the suffering people to shake off their bonds and to keep moving along the road to liberation.1

13.1. The Search for Christian Messianism Christianity began life as part and parcel of Second Temple Judaism, but it rapidly became a very different religion, whose concerns can be linked with its Jewish antecedents, yet has moved far from those original concerns with obedience to the Torah, which characterise life of the covenant people. Nowhere is this difference expressed more clearly than in the realm of messianism and eschatology. Christianity repudiated the hope of the reign of God on earth and instead looked for the fulfilment of the divine promises in a transcendent realm. Similarly it is often asserted that the political messianism of Judaism was rejected in favour of a non-violent ‘spiritual’ messianism. In the process chiliastic beliefs were repudiated or reinterpreted. It is one of the features of twentieth-century theology that eschatology and politics have had a wedge driven between them because of the abandonment of the chiliastic/ millenarian tradition by Christian theology, and thereby the this-worldly messianism, which is the most important legacy of the Jewish scriptures. Part of the task of biblical interpretation is to transcend the damaging dualism between eschatological and political theology and so cement the link with Judaism and the world of injustice, which demands messianic praxis here and now.

13.2. Transforming Messianism Two features of early Christianity have continued to fascinate me. Firstly, there is the way in which a movement, which was so firmly based in a Jewish matrix, should have become overtly theological in its extant writings when 1

L. Boff, Way of the Cross – Way of Justice (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1980), 25.

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the parent religion was moving (and, in my view, was already in the period of the Second Temple firmly attached) to the priority of the ethical in its understanding of religion. Secondly, by the end of the second century the messianic and millenarian elements, which Christianity had inherited from Judaism, were in the process of being marginalised or domesticated. Accommodation with the existing order and a growing concentration on theology and the life of the ecclesia was matched by a diminution of interest in the expectation of a coming reign of the messiah on earth. Of course, eschatological ideal persisted within the early Church, particularly among groups which were marginalised by the emerging dominant ideology. It is no surprise, therefore, that by the fourth century Eusebius of Caesarea was speaking in a disparaging way of the chiliasm of Papias of Hierapolis, though neglecting to mention that other theological giants of the second half of the second century – like Justin and Irenaeus – were likewise committed to such views. The messianic group could erupt from the seething cauldron of an expectant society, develop its beliefs and practices and indeed find itself at odds with those outside its circle (as the nascent Christian movement certainly did). If it survived, the heady enthusiasm, which characterises the initial outburst, evolved, prompted by disappointment or the need for consolidation and accommodation. Also, when messianism moved to different settings and into different social strata, there was bound to be an effect of the socio-economic reality on those ideas. One of the fascinating things about the formation of ideologies is the subtle way in which language can undergo significant shifts of meaning in different social contexts.2 The radical political thrust of millenarian beliefs means that rapid shifts in the core meaning of dominant ideas can take place, and then they can be accommodated into a dominant ideology with their cutting edge blunted. One of the features of messianism is that it represents a clear alternative to conventional wisdom and custom. What is more, its adherents frequently regard their beliefs as matters for present implementation rather than pious platitudes relating to some uncertain future. It is precisely that energy which enables the millennial beliefs to transform existence, which makes them such a disruptive force within society and elicits a violent reaction either from without or, more often, from within the movement itself. To be part of a messianic movement means to be part of social change, almost certainly of an unpredictable form. However well mapped out the received wisdom on the future hope may have been, the challenge of claims to fulfilment to that system of beliefs inevitably leads to new responses, which push the adherents

2 On this see further S. Hall’s essay ‘Religious Ideologies and Social Movements in Jamaica’, in Religion and Ideology, eds. R. Bocock and K. Thompson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 269–296.

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along an uncharted path of religious and social experiment. There is usually little guidance. Indeed, if the Jewish material now extant is anything to go by, primitive Christians who believed that a new order had dawned with the life and teaching of Jesus, had little information to go on as they set out to explore the implications of what they were doing and saying for the culture of which they were a part. In this respect the Book of Revelation is a classic messianic text, with its uncompromising dualism and negative assessment of the injustice of the ruling power and its spurious claim to universal recognition. As such it stands in the sharpest possible contrast with those strands within Christianity which sought continuity with the world as it was and found value in its ideas and institutions. What is most important for the debate between Church and synagogue was that it kept alive the need for a critical distance from contemporary culture, which Judaism had always maintained in the distinctiveness of its practice and its complete repudiation of idolatry. So on the margins of the Christian canon, Jewish messianism was preserved. Revelation so firmly demands that Christians remember that their canon contains two parts. Thus the New Testament must, as Paul Ricoeur has argued,3 be regarded as the re-reading of the Jewish scriptures. The Book of Revelation has been the basis of the appeal for radical social and political change throughout the history of the Church, and it is no surprise that it should continue to be the seedbed of revolutionary religious action in our generation. In this it presents a challenge to the Church to take seriously that Jewish inheritance as a necessary corrective to the temptation to the flight from history and the solid obligation to seek the justice of God in human affairs, which the Hebrew Scriptures demand of us.

13.3. Apocalypse: An Unmasking of Reality4 The New Testament Apocalypse sets out to reveal things as they really are – in both the life of the Christian communities and the world at large. In so doing it gives little comfort to the complacent Church, or the powerful world. For the powerful and the complacent it has a message of judgement and doom, whereas for the powerless and oppressed it offers hope and vindication. The characterisation of contemporary society in the apocalyptic symbolism of ‘beast’ and ‘harlot’ is a vigorous unmasking and denunciation of the ideology of the powerful, by which they seek to legitimise their position by persecution and economic exploitation; it is an ancient Christian form of the critique 3

See P. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980). The interpretative approach is indebted to F. Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1981). 4

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of ideology. The critique of the present is effected by the use of a contrast between the glories of the future and the inadequacies of the present. The process of unmasking involves an attempt not only to delineate the true character of contemporary society but also the super-human forces at work in the opposition to God’s righteousness in the world. Also, the enormous power of those forces which undergird the oppression and unrighteousness of the world order are shown to be unstable and destined to defeat. In contrast the apparent fragility of the witness of those who follow the way of Jesus is promised ultimate vindication. Revelation is not a detailed blueprint of an ideal society to be contemplated at leisure or which engages the reader only temporarily. Hope inspires action, readiness to suffer and urgent need of repentance in the face of catastrophe. It seeks to persuade its readers that the present moment is a time of critical importance. The outline of future history is offered as the basis for a change of heart to engage the whole of life in its drama, which will have drastic consequence for the one who reads it. Acceptance or rejection of its message is nothing less than the difference between alignment with the reign of God which is to come or sharing the fate of the ‘beast’ in the Lake of Fire.

13.4. The Resolution of the Social Contradictions of the Present in the Vision of the New Creation Revelation offers canonical justification for the cosmic and historical context of divine activity. The view, so deeply imbedded in the Jewish scriptures, was subordinated in mainstream Christian doctrine to the concern for the individual soul, a process already evident in the New Testament. The struggle between darkness and light in human affairs was neglected in favour of that conflict in the human heart. The Book of Revelation has provided encouragement for all those who look for the fulfilment of God’s righteousness in human history. The contrast between the vision of the New Jerusalem in Rev. 21 with the initial vision of the heavenly court in Rev. 4 also should be noted. In ch. 4 the seer is granted a glimpse into the environs of God. Here God the Creator and Liberator is acknowledged, and, as we notice from the following chapter, it is from the God of the universe that the historical process begins which leads to the establishment of a new aeon after the manifestation of divine judgement. In the chapters following (4–5) we find the picture of a world afflicted but unrepentant – indeed, manifesting precisely the kind of misguided devotion to evil which has to be rooted out before God’s kingdom can finally come. In Rev. 4ff. God is still in heaven, and it is there that the heavenly host sing his praise and magnify his name. There is a contrast with Rev. 21 where God’s dwelling is on earth; it is no longer in heaven.

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This contrast between heaven and earth disappears in the new creation. Now the tabernacling of God is with humanity, and they shall be his people. God’s dwelling is not to be found above the cherubim in heaven; for God’s throne is set right in the midst of the New Jerusalem where the living waters stream from the throne and God’s servants marked with the mark of God will see God face to face. Here we have an example of theological immanentism, which is predicted for the New Age. It is only then that there will be the conditions for God and humanity to dwell in harmony, which was impossible while there was rejection of the divine righteousness in human affairs. Heaven on earth is what the New Age is all about. God is no longer transcendent but immediate – part and parcel of that world of perfection and evident in it. Indeed, those who are his will be his children and carry his name on their heads: they will be identified with the character of God and enjoy God’s presence unmediated. In the apocalyptic vision, therefore, the contradictions of a fractured existence are resolved in the harmony offered by the apocalyptic text. Apocalyptic writers were convinced that this divine immanence was not reserved solely for the New Age. The glory, which the apocalyptic seer enjoyed in his revelation, was a matter of living experience here and now for those who confessed Jesus as messiah and participated in the eschatological spirit. Already those who possessed the spirit of God were sons and daughters of God; already those in Christ were a new creation and a temple of the divine spirit. That hope for the final resolution, of the contrast between heaven and earth was already perceived by those who had eyes to see and know it.

13.5. Epistle and Apocalypse 13.5.1. Concentrating the Mind on the Reality which Confronts the Reader The Apocalypse can remind readers of early Christian literature, that the hope for a reign of God on earth, when injustice and oppression will be swept away and the structures of an evil society broken down, is an important component of the Christian Gospel. One can understand how easy it would have been for the early Christians to have capitulated to their feelings of political powerlessness by concentrating on individual holiness only. But Paul, for example, speaks of a process of salvation which is firmly rooted in the process of liberation for the whole of creation. Similarly, the Apocalypse does not easily allow a retreat into the conventicle as the main arena of divine activity, for it persuades the saints to prophesy before the world about the righteousness of God and the dreadful consequences of ignoring its implementation. The readers of the Apocalypse are not allowed to dream about millennial bliss without being brought face to face with the obstacles which stand in the way of its fulfilment and the costly part to be played by them in that process.

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One of the problems of utopianism is that it can lead the reader into construction of ideal worlds, which distract him or her from the demands of the present. Those demands are evident in the ‘Letters to the Churches’, which introduce the vision of hope and, in the concluding admonitions, stress the authority of the text and the imminence of the fulfilment of its message. Utopianism can lead to an escape from reality however much its attempts betoken that yearning for something better. Writers who resort to utopianism do so as a compensation for the inability to do anything about the world as it is. The Book of Revelation is a timely reminder in its own form about supposing that its preoccupation with eschatological matters offers an opportunity to avoid the more challenging preoccupations of the present. Thus, the vision of hope inaugurated by the exaltation of the Lamb is set within the framework of the ‘Letters to the Seven Churches’. The promise of a part in the New Jerusalem is linked with present behaviour. Readers of the Apocalypse are urged to wash their robes and make them white in the blood of the Lamb, and avoid being marked with the mark of the beast. Similarly in the Marcan eschatological discourse the preoccupation of the bulk of the material is not so much the satisfaction of curiosity about the details of the times and seasons so much as dire warnings of the threat of being led astray, of failing at the last and of the need to be ready and watchful to avoid the worst of the disasters which are to come. In the bleak moments of the last days in Jerusalem there is little attempt to dwell on the privileges of discipleship (though an eschatological promise is made to the disciples a little later in the Lucan story in Luke 22:29–30 in the context of the Supper discourse). It is not a future without hope but the thoughts of the hearers are made to dwell on responsibilities in the short and medium term as the essential prerequisite of achieving a millennial bliss. There is in fact very little attempt made to sketch the character of the liberation which draws near. The sketch of the ideal society or the ideal world is lacking, a mark of either a lack of any political realism or of a merely utopian fixation. The certainty of vindication is there but the lot of the elect, when they have been gathered from the four corners of the earth, is not touched on at all in Mark. The element of judgement at the Parousia of the Son of Man is not entirely absent, however, from the synoptic discourses, as the climax of the Matthaean version is the account of the final assize with the Son of Man sitting on God’s throne separating the sheep from the goats. But here as elsewhere in these discourses the focus of attention is on the present response of the elect. It is the recognition of the heavenly Son of Man in the brethren who are hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, weak and imprisoned in the present age who will inherit the kingdom prepared by God from the foundation of the world. The eschatological discourse in the Synoptic Gospels must not be separated from the narrative of Jesus’ proclamation and inauguration of the reign of God. It is that context which is necessary to prevent the discourse

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about the future becoming the goal of the narrative. Discipleship involves sharing the way of the Cross of the Son of Man as he goes up to Jerusalem. What is offered to the disciple is the sharing of the cup of suffering of the Son of Man, rather than the promise of sitting at his right hand and his left when he reigns on earth. It is not that this request is repudiated but, as the eschatological discourse makes plain, there can be no escape from the painful reality of the present witness, with its need to endure the tribulations which precede the vindication. That is the challenge which faces those who wish to live out the messianic narrative in their own lives; no short cuts to the messianic reign are to be found here. It is easy to see how the discourse material in the Gospels can be extracted from their narrative context and function as instructions, which abstract the reader from the challenge of the messianic way as it intersects with an order which is passing away. 13.5.2. Epistle and Apocalypse: The Scope of Christian Concern The New Testament letters reflect the ambiguities and contradictions of life. Even the most overtly messianic and historically oriented text of the New Testament cannot but be affected by the contradictions between hope and impoverished reality. The letters, which impress on readers the importance of present action, indicate a degree of interest in specifically religious issues, (one of the reasons, one suspects, that these letters continue to gain a more ready hearing from contemporary Christian audiences). That concern to recapture one’s first love, and endeavour to maintain the purity of relationship to the Lord who stands in the midst of his churches, (1:19) indicates the emerging preoccupation with personal and ecclesial holiness, which is itself part of the reaction to political impotence. The letter, that medium of the Pauline urban Christianity, which appears so different from the world of Jesus and the first followers of Jesus (to borrow Gerd Theißen’s description) seems also to embody that spirit of urban Christianity, where accommodation with the surrounding culture, and acceptance of its priorities, are a greater issue.

13.6. Keeping Alive the Oppressed Culture in the Face of a Dominant Ideology The role of the follower of the messiah is not quiet resignation. In the unfolding eschatological drama in the main body of the Apocalypse, the involvement of the seer in ch. 10, when he is instructed to eat the scroll and commanded to prophesy, is a direct call to participate actively as a prophet, rather than merely be a passive spectator of it. Revelation is insistent that the role of the martyr or witness is of central importance. Jesus of Nazareth is the faithful prophetic witness, and his followers have to continue that testimony of Jesus. That will involve suffering in the great tribulation, but those who

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join the messianic throng are those ‘who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb’. In ch. 11 the church is offered a paradigm of the true prophetic witness as it sets out to fulfil its vocation to prophesy before the world. Utilising the figures of Moses and Elijah that prophetic witness takes place in a social scene opposed to God, where that witness must take place even though it ends up with martyrdom: ‘the martyr defends not his life but his cause’, as Leonardo Boff has put it. One of the prime issues in the ‘Letters to the Seven Churches’ is ‘eating food sacrificed to idols’, and ‘immorality’, almost certainly a reference to idolatry (2:14 and 2:20). The strictures against those who recommend eating food sacrificed to idols indicates the need to create some distance between the conduct of Christians and the typical behaviour of society. The references to idolatry and immorality in these passages are to be understood as in the tradition of the Jewish concern for holiness, that distinctive pattern of life over against the nations: ‘it shall not be so with you …’ (Mark 10:43). There is a challenge to the assumption that the disciple is going to be able to take part without too much discomfort in the social intercourse of the contemporary world. As Klaus Wengst has put it: According to John the decisive question with which he sees the Christians of his time confronted, is not ‘How can I survive this situation with the least possible harm?’ … Rather, the question of the possibility of his own survival is completely put in the shade by the one question which is important to him: In this situation, how can I bear witness to the rule of Christ, his claim to the whole world? … He calls for an exodus … as joining in, life along the usual lines, necessarily means complicity with Rome. The consequence is social separation. … By refusing to ‘join in’, by contradicting and resisting, they dispute that the world belongs to those who claim to rule over it. … ‘Here is a call for the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus’ (14:12). … This endurance puts Christian life into the role of the outsider.5

Wengst reminds us of those counter-cultural strands in Revelation. Apart from the issue of meat sacrificed to idols, I can do little more at this stage than indicate other features which suggest that we have a text here which resists compromise and accommodation, and advocates keeping alive the spirit of Jesus (and the apostles in faith and practice) by an advocacy of a critical distance from contemporary culture – in the character of social relations and the language of its religious discourse. Let me offer some examples. Firstly, the invective against complacency in the ‘Letters to the Seven Churches’ has been interpreted as an indication of growing laxity and lack of rigour. The concern for holiness in Jewish culture was tied up with the maintenance of an alternative culture over against the nations. This can be seen in the repudiation of idolatry, the food laws, circumcision and sabbath 5

K. Wengst, Pax Romana and the Peace of Jesus Christ, trans. J. Bowden (London: SCM, 1987), 133–134.

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observance. Likewise the call to martyrdom indicates the need for resistance, even if that means non-participation in the Roman economic system. Secondly, for Revelation, the spirit and prophecy have a central role, as they were to have in the Montanist movement a century later. By then prophecy was viewed with suspicion, so much so that Revelation’s place as part of the canon was challenged. Ambivalence with regard to prophecy has always characterised religion. Revelation stands out against those who would quench the spirit and despise prophecy. As with the messianic/millenarian/apocalyptic tradition, prophecy was too deep-rooted in the Christian memory to be anathematised, so that other ways had to be found to domesticate it. Finally, the apocalyptic imagery and cosmology itself betokens a view of the world where protest and resistance to compromise are the order of the day. The dualistic cosmology encouraged a separatist mentality. The millenarian horizon, with its radical alternative to the present order, showed up the discredited social processes of the present in the starkest possible relief. It was not just a case of relativising the world order in the light of the glory of the City of God, for it also involved casting the power behind the structures as diabolical, and exposing its concerns as oppressive. There is little room for accommodation with the ‘beast’ and Babylon.6 Now all this is not to suggest that the apocalyptic outlook could not be ‘appropriated and neutralised’ by its incorporation into the dominant ideology. Clearly that did happen to some extent, not least by its incorporation into the canon. But it was a difficult process, for such subversive ideas could never be completely tamed.

13.7. The Two Poles of the Interpretative Task It is inadequate to concentrate in any social hermeneutic simply on what the text meant. Of equal, if not still greater importance, is the analysis of contemporary usage, whether in academy or in Church, and the investigation of the particular interests that are being served by various patterns of interpretation. That point is neatly encapsulated in the diagram taken from the work of the Brazilian theologian, Clodovis Boff: Scripture

ourselves and our reality

↕

↕

its context

our context7

6 As is suggested by A.Y. Collins in her discussion of Rev. 13:15–17 in her article ‘The Political Perspective of the Revelation to John’, JBL 96 (1977): 241–256. 7 From C. Boff, Theology and Praxis: Epistemological Foundations (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1987), chapter 8.

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So the Book of Revelation can be the resource of both ends of the political spectrum. On the one hand, it has been a testimony of hope to oppressed Christians throughout the ages and continues to be a resource for many poor people in their struggle against injustice. On the other hand, it offers a dream of miraculous rescue at the rapture of the saints, which serves as a licence for escape from political struggle. Our unease with that usage is not sufficient reason to avoid wrestling with our apocalyptic and millenarian heritage and to leave it to literalists and those bent on dehumanising fanaticism ruthlessly to impose utopia. Deep down we may sympathise with Bultmann’s assessment of Revelation as ‘weakly Christianised Judaism’,8 a theological assessment which is as questionable as it is deeply offensive to our Jewish roots. The use made of the Book of Revelation by the poor as they meet for their Bible study in the grassroots communities of the contemporary Third World church is an eloquent testimony to the fractured existence of life in a fallen world. The quest for a perfect society, to which early Christianity was committed, is reflected in a fragmentary way in its textual production, evidence of the constraints on the pursuit of the millennium. The eager longing for change and frustrated expectations manifest in the outbursts of vengeful anger in the songs of triumph over the fall of Babylon in Revelation are expressions of that fractured existence. Resolution is offered in the vision of hope as a necessary means of overcoming the tensions inherent in an oppressive society. The ‘dangerous visions’ of a messianic age offer a very different horizon of hope, which seems foolishness to the prevailing culture. It is this alternative horizon to which the apocalyptic and millenarian tradition has borne witness. It has protested against those arrangements which have the appearance of order but which in reality have brought about the prosperity and progress of some at the expense of others. It is frequently those who have to bear that suffering who can see the fragility of those structures which appear to offer peace and security and find in that tradition a way of articulating their protest and a spur to their actions. Those whose lives are fragmented and who live at the margins can discern the signs of the times in ways which are frightening to those of us who cannot see from what is apparently a more favoured vantagepoint. Their cries of protest and their aspirations for liberation are expressed in that longing for the manifestation of God’s righteousness. It is hardly surprising that such powerful statements should be domesticated or branded as eccentric or, worse, anathematised and repressed. But they are too powerful, too deep-rooted and are a reminder of the fact that the way of the messiah can only be eclipsed and never obliterated as the Paraclete who convicts the

8

R. Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, trans. K. Grobel, 2 vols. (London: SCM, 1951), 2:175.

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world of sin, of righteousness and judgement never allows the work of the Messiah to die.9

9 See further C. Rowland, Radical Christianity: A Reading of Recovery (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988) where the importance of the recovery of the millenarian and utopian horizon in the Christian tradition is stressed. The project contrasts with the rejection of the chiliastic tradition suggested by J. Ratzinger in his essay ‘Eschatology and Utopia’ in his Church Ecumenism and Politics (Slough: St Paul, 1988), 223–238. His position is based on a very dubious attempt to separate both Jeremiah and Jesus from what he calls the theopolitical. This does not stand up to exegetical scrutiny. Both Jesus and Jeremiah do not deny God’s involvement in the process of history but reject the false views of their contemporaries as leading to destruction.

14. The Parting of the Ways: The Evidence of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic and Mystical Material There is now a widespread recognition that apocalypticism played an important part in the emergence and maintenance of the earliest Christian communities1 and that it may well have been a more influential force in nascent rabbinic Judaism than has often been allowed. What I shall attempt in this paper is a descriptive analysis of some of the main witnesses to the apocalyptic tradition and a summary statement of the evidence for a mystical tradition in rabbinic Judaism. While my concern by and large will be the apocalypses, I have included for reasons of comparison some account of eschatological material from the Synoptic Gospels and a brief survey of the indebtedness of the Fourth Gospel to this world of thought. I have confined myself to apocalyptic material mainly (by which I refer to those works which purport to offer visions and revelations of the world beyond or from agents who come from that world). Although my prime interest is with visionary material, I have not included all the eschatological material from the period, except, where as I have already indicated, there are reasons for so doing in order to illustrate how similar concerns emerge in the way in which eschatological discourse functions within early Christian paraenesis. I accept Martin Hengel’s summary of apocalyptic as ‘higher wisdom through revelation’2 and consider that eschatology can frequently be part of the content of that revelation but does not define its character. With the possible exception of Revelation we have no certain way of knowing who wrote these texts nor can we be sure whether claims of visions played a significant role in determining attitudes within late first century Judaism. If the evidence of the New Testament is anything to go by, however,

1 See C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982); W.A. Meeks, ‘Social Functions of Apocalyptic Language in Pauline Christianity’, in Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East, ed. D. Hellholm (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1983), 687–705; and J.J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to the Jewish Matrix of Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1984). 2 M. Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period, trans. J. Bowden, 2 vols. (London: SCM, 1974), 1:210.

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it probably did.3 As such it is likely that attention should be devoted to the way in which such claims could buttress or undermine established practices. Certainly when we get to the second century the appearance of the apocalyptic genre among the gnostic texts suggests that it provided a literary support for special interest4 which may well have conflicted substantially with emerging orthodoxy. As such claim to visionary authority could play an important role in determining the shape of a movement and justifying its assumptions. The concerns of this essay are as follows: (i) What form were Christians and Jews giving to their apocalyptic tradition at the end of the first century? (ii) Was apocalyptic material marginal or central in the parting of the ways between Church and Synagogue?5 (iii) What developments in form and content can one note in comparison with earlier examples of the apocalyptic tradition (e.g. 1 Enoch)? (iv) Apocalyptic was a vehicle of hope and offers an important witness to the shape of that hope in the non-rabbinic writings of Judaism. That being the case, where does the apocalyptic enthusiasm (in the form of visions, prophecy) fit into the process of routinisation and in emerging rabbinic Judaism with its tighter boundaries? Did apocalyptic offer a means of challenging or supporting established conventions? Did it offer a vehicle to indulge in speculative interest or was its concern for the future in the main determinative of present responsibilities? This paper starts with an examination of Revelation and contemporary apocalypses, 4 Ezra, the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch and the Apocalypse of Abraham and then moves on to a consideration of evidence for mystical ideas within late first century tannaitic Judaism, the Fourth Gospel and the Apocalyptic and Mystical Tradition; a comparative study of the synoptic eschatological discourses; and apocalyptic as a resource for dealing with the lack of eschatological fulfilment.

14.1. The Apocalypse The Apocalypse6 sets out to reveal things as they really are in both the life of the Christian communities and the world at large. For the powerful and the 3

Rowland, The Open Heaven, 358ff. See I. Gruenwald, ‘Jewish Merkabah Mysticism and Gnosticism’, in Studies in Jewish Mysticism, eds. J. Dan and F. Talmage (Cambridge, Mass.: Association for Jewish Studies, 1982), 41–55. 5 See P.R. Davies, ‘The social world of apocalyptic writings’, in The World of Ancient Israel, ed. R.E. Clements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 251–271. 6 C. Rowland, Radical Christianity: A Reading of Recovery (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 66ff. 4

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complacent it has a message of judgement and doom, whereas for the powerless and oppressed it offers hope and vindication. The critique of the present is effected by the use of a contrast between the glories of the future and the inadequacies of the present. The process of unveiling the true nature of things involves an attempt to delineate the real character of contemporary society and the superhuman forces at work in the opposition to God’s righteousness in the world. Revelation seeks to persuade its readers that the present moment is a time of critical importance. The outline of future history is offered as the basis for a change of heart to engage the whole of life which will have drastic consequences for the one who reads it. Acceptance or rejection of its message is nothing less than the difference between alignment with the reign of God which is to come or sharing the extinction of all that is opposed to God. The Apocalypse can remind readers of early Christian literature that the hope for a reign of God on earth, when injustice and oppression will be swept away and the structures of an evil society broken down, is an important component of the Christian gospel. Revelation offers canonical justification for the cosmic and historical context7 of divine activity. The Book of Revelation has provided encouragement for all those who look for the fulfilment of God’s righteousness in human history. It would have been easy for the early Christians to have capitulated to their feelings of political powerlessness by concentration on individual holiness only. The Apocalypse does not easily allow a retreat into the religious world, for it persuades the saints to prophesy before the world about the righteousness of God and the dreadful consequences of ignoring its implementation. The central theological theme of the book is the overcoming of opposition between God and earth.8 In this respect the contrast between the vision of the New Jerusalem in ch. 21 with the initial vision of the heavenly court in ch. 4 also should be noted. In Rev. 4 the seer is granted a glimpse into the environs of God. Here God the Creator and Liberator is acknowledged, and, as we notice from the following chapter, it is from the God of the universe that the historical process begins which leads to the establishment of a new aeon after the manifestation of divine judgement. In Rev. 4ff. God is still in heaven, and 7 On the widespread use of chiliastic ideas in early Christian theology see J. Daniélou, The Theology of Jewish Christianity, trans. and ed. J.A. Baker (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1964), and on their mutation G. Bonner, ‘Augustine and Millenarianism’, in The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick, ed. R. Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 235–254. It is interesting to compare Revelation with 4 Ezra where the eschatological hope hardly alters the extreme pessimism of the dialogues. Revelation offers a more coherent eschatological message in which Rev. 21 is more intimately related to the earlier chapters than 4 Ezra 13 is to what precedes it. 8 See also P.S. Minear, ‘The Cosmology of the Apocalypse’, in Current Issues in New Testament Interpretation: Essays in Honor of Otto A. Piper, eds. W. Klassen and G.F. Snyder (London: SCM, 1962), 23–37.

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it is there that the heavenly host sing his praise and magnify his name. There is a contrast with Rev. 21 where God’s dwelling is on earth; it is no longer in heaven. This contrast between heaven and earth disappears in the new creation. Now the tabernacling of God is with humanity, and they shall be God’s people. It is only in the New Age that there will be the conditions of God and humanity to dwell in that harmony which was impossible while there was rejection of the divine righteousness in human affairs. In the apocalyptic vision, therefore, the contradictions of a fractured existence are resolved in the harmony offered by the apocalyptic text. What seems impossible in the real world of social contradictions is overcome in literary form. In the chapters following 4–5 we find the picture of a world afflicted but unrepentant, indeed, manifesting precisely the kind of misguided devotion to evil which has to be rooted out before God’s kingdom can finally come. Apocalyptic writers were convinced that this divine immanence was reserved solely for the New Age, however. The glory which the apocalyptic seer enjoyed in his revelation was a matter of living experience here and now for those who confessed Jesus as messiah and participated in the eschatological spirit. Already those who possessed the spirit of God were sons and daughters of God; already those in Christ were a new creation and a temple of the divine spirit (cf. 1 Cor. 6:13). That hope for the final resolution of the contrast between heaven and earth was already perceived by those who had eyes to see and know it. The role of the follower of the messiah is not quiet resignation, therefore. In the unfolding eschatological drama in the main body of the apocalypse the involvement of the seer in ch. 10 when he is instructed to eat the scroll and commanded to prophesy is a direct call to participate actively as a prophet rather than merely be a passive spectator of it. Revelation is insistent that the role of the martyr or witness is of central importance. That will involve suffering in the great tribulation, but those who join the messianic throng are those ‘who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb’. In ch. 11 the church is offered a paradigm of the true prophetic witness as it sets out to fulfil its vocation to prophesy before the world. Utilising the figures of Moses and Elijah that prophetic witness takes place in a social scene opposed to God where that witness must take place even though it ends up with martyrdom. The readers of the Letters to the Seven Churches are not allowed to indulge their curiosity about future bliss. They are brought face to face with the obstacles which stand in the way of its fulfilment and the costly part to be played by them in that process. Revelation differs from utopian programmes in the absence in it of any detailed account of the construction of the ideal, eschatological world. Such accounts of ideal worlds can distract the reader’s attention to the here and now (though, of course, that need not be the case). So utopianism can lead to an escape from reality however much its attempts

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betoken that yearning for something better.9 Writers who resort to utopianism often do so as a compensation for the inability to do anything about the world as it is.10 The demands for present obedience are evident in the Letters to the Churches which introduce the vision of hope and in the concluding admonitions which also stress the authority of the text. The Book of Revelation offers a timely reminder in its own form about supposing that its preoccupation with eschatological matters offers an opportunity to avoid the more challenging preoccupations of the present. Thus, the vision of hope inaugurated by the exaltation of the Lamb is set within the framework of the Letters to the Seven Churches. The promise of a part in the New Jerusalem is linked with present behaviour. There are features which suggest that we have a text here which is resisting compromise and accommodation, advocating keeping alive the prophetic spirit of Jesus by an advocacy of a critical11 distance from contemporary culture in the character of social relations and the language of its religious discourse. Let me offer some examples. Firstly, the invective against complacency in the Letters to the Churches has been interpreted as an indication of growing laxity and lack of rigour. The concern for holiness in Jewish culture was tied up with the maintenance of an alternative culture over against the nations. This can be seen in the repudiation of idolatry, the food laws, circumcision and sabbath observance. Likewise the call to martyrdom indicates the need for resistance, even if that means nonparticipation in the Roman economic system. One of the prime issues in the Letters to the Seven Churches is ‘eating food sacrificed to idols’, and ‘immorality’, almost certainly a reference to idolatry (2:14 and 2:20). The strictures against those who recommend eating food sacrificed to idols indicates the need to create some distance between the conduct of Christians and the typical behaviour of society.12 The references to idolatry and immorality in these passage are to be understood as in the tradition of the concern for holiness, that distinctive pattern of life over against the nations: ‘it shall not be so with you’ (Mark 10:43).13 There is a challenge to the assumption that the disciple is going to be able to take part without too much comfort in the social intercourse of the contemporary world. 9

On utopianism see the survey in B. Goodwin and K. Taylor, The Politics of Utopia (London: Hutchinson, 1982). 10 See Rowland, Radical Christianity, 112–114, and V. Geoghegan, Marxism and Utopianism (London: Methuen, 1987). 11 See K. Wengst, Pax Romana and the Peace of Jesus Christ, trans. J. Bowden (London: SCM, 1987), 133–134. 12 A.Y. Collins, ‘The Political Perspective of the Revelation to John’, JBL 96 (1977): 241–256. 13 On holiness see J.H. Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).

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Secondly, for Revelation the spirit and prophecy have a central role as they were to have in the Montanist movement14 a century later. But the prophecy was viewed with suspicion, so much so that Revelation’s place as part of the canon was challenged. Ambivalence with regard to prophecy has always characterised religion.15 Revelation stands out against those who would quench the spirit and despise prophecy. Indeed, it is arguable that one of the most distinctive features of its theology over against, say, 4 Ezra, where the eschatological spirit is not active in the community of the elect, is its pneumatology. As with the messianic/ chiliastic/apocalyptic tradition, prophecy was too deeply rooted in the Christian memory to be allowed to be anathematised, so that other ways had to be found to domesticate it. So the Book of Revelation, written either in the 60s or 90s, keeps alive apocalyptic ideas in circumstances where we might expect something more sober. It is a testimony to the pervasiveness of apocalyptic in early Christianity that at a time when stability seemed to be required its voice speaks in a different tone from the religion of convention and consolidation. A question might be raised about the extent to which the form apocalyptic took in this early Christian example contributed to tension between emerging Judaism and Christianity. The presentation of God’s throne is different from other examples: Rev. 5 and 7 have the Lamb sharing it with God. Whether passages like Rev. 5:12 and 7:10 would have been impossible theologically for nascent rabbinic Judaism is unclear.16 Finally, the apocalyptic imagery and cosmology itself betokens a view of the world where protest and resistance to compromise are the order of the day. The dualistic cosmology encouraged a separatist mentality. Even the language and syntax of Revelation refuse to conform to established convention. It demands of the reader that s/he is open to the darker side of the world. The eschatological horizon with its alternative to the present order show up the discredited social processes of the present in the starkest possible relief. It was not just a case of relativising the world order in the light of the glory of the City of God, for it also involved revealing that the power behind the structures 14

On Montanism see Rowland, The Open Heaven, 392ff. On the phenomenon of prophecy in the ancient world and early Christianity see D.E. Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983). 16 See R. Bauckham, ‘The Worship of Jesus in Apocalyptic Christianity’, NTS 27 (1981): 322–341; L.W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (London: SCM, 1988); A.F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven, SJLA 25 (Leiden: Brill, 1977). It always strikes me as significant that Christ is symbolised in Revelation generally as a Lamb and only in 1:13ff. is there a description in angelomorphic terms. It is thus possible that the use of the symbol of the Lamb as the way of expressing God’s messianic activity is a way of reducing the threat to monotheism implicit in a human figure sharing God’s throne and sovereignty. 15

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was diabolical and exposing its concerns as oppressive. There is little room for accommodation with the Beast and Babylon. Now all this is not to suggest that the apocalyptic outlook could not be ‘appropriated and neutralised’ by its incorporation into the dominant ideology.17 Clearly that did happen to some extent, not least by its incorporation into the canon. But it was a difficult process, for such subversive ideas could never be completely tamed.

14.2. Fourth Ezra, Syriac Baruch and the Apocalypse of Abraham18 These apocalypses which are usually dated to round about the end of the first century CE offer contrasting attitudes in their form and content. There is similarity of outlook in the first two which have led some to suppose some kind of literary relationship between them. The Apocalypse of Abraham stands apart from the other two in its use of a traditional heavenly ascent pattern which includes a vision of God as well as the usual eschatological concerns. The only area in which it overlaps to any significant extent with the other two is in its preoccupation with issues of theodicy:19 why does God allow Israel to suffer, a matter which is covered with varying degrees of sophistication in the other two. In 4 Ezra eschatological beliefs make their appearance (e.g. 4:37ff.; 6:18ff.; 7:28ff. and ch. 13). What is interesting about the eschatology of 4 Ezra are the signs that there emerges here, possibly for the first time in such an explicit form, evidence for a hope for a new age which is transcendent. It appears, however, alongside the conventional hope for a this-worldly reign of God (7:28–29, cf. 5:45). In this it parallels Revelation where the vision of the new heaven and new earth is preceded by the millennial messianic reign. This juxtaposition has led some commentators to suppose that there is evidence of a later editorial addition. Much more likely is that this particular pattern represents a significant development of late first century eschatology when political despair may have contributed to the emergence of a transcendent eschatology alongside the hope for a messianic kingdom on earth. These concerns are eclipsed by the other concern: the evil of humanity, the wrestling with the apparent merciless character of the divine purposes and human frailty in the face of God’s inscrutability. Throughout the book there 17

See F. Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1981). On 4 Ezra and Syriac Baruch see W. Harnisch, Verhängnis und Verheißung der Geschichte, FRLANT 97 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969). We need to recognise that we have these apocalypses extant only in translations. Certainty with regard to a late first century date must, therefore, be out of the question. 19 On this theme see A.L. Thompson, Responsibility for Evil in the Theodicy of IV Ezra, SBLDS 29 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977). 18

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is a consistent attempt at theodicy. Israel is oppressed and yet is the elect of God (3:30). Even biblical traditions are subjected to questioning and shown to be irrelevant to the eschatological concerns which should occupy the attention of the righteous (7:102–103). There is a concern for the majority of humanity whose unrighteousness seems to be about to consign them to perdition (7:62ff.). At times it appears that Ezra’s concerns are more merciful than the divine reply. Such sentiments, however, are dealt with by urging the righteous to concentrate on the glory which awaits those who are obedient to God (8:52; 9:13). God’s patience is not for the sake of humanity but because of faithfulness to the eternal plan which is laid down before creation (7:74). What the righteous need to do is to view all things sub specie aeternitatis rather than concentrate exclusively on the apparent injustices of the present (7:16). Throughout, the ways of God are vindicated. God is the one who orders the times and the seasons and alone will bring the New Age about (6:5). God is most high (a title occurring over sixty times throughout the work), and seemingly indifferent to the terrible fate awaiting most of humanity. Just as in the Book of Job where the divine answer contrasts human and divine wisdom, so here too the impossibility of understanding the divine purposes in the midst of the old order is stressed (4:1ff., 21; 5:36).20 Ezra longs for the righteousness of the holy to be taken into account when God judges Israel (8:27), but even here the sense of solidarity with the people disappears. Instead there emerges a pervasive individualism in which the righteous are urged to attend to their destiny and desist from understanding matters which are too hard for them even when they seem to contradict all the characteristics of justice and mercy. What is important is obedience to the law of God. The divine law must be vindicated whatever else happens (7:19; 9:37). Few will be saved (8:3), and it is necessary to choose now (7:129) so that the fate which awaits the bulk of humanity can be avoided (7:129). The problem with humanity is that it has continued to sin even though God has endowed it with understanding (cf. Rev. 9:20). What emerges in the work is a perceptive understanding of the pervasiveness of evil which makes difficult the attempts of men and women to fulfil the divine command. There is free will (3:8; 8:50–51), but Adam’s sin has had devastating effects (3:20; 4:30; 7:118). Even so, Ezra can justly wonder why God does not give any further assistance to enable that obedience which is required (3:20). Of course, for those who persevere the message is not gloomy. A blessed place is reserved for the fortunate few who endure to the end and are saved. In Syriac Baruch there is a more obvious concern with the destruction of Jerusalem (the fictitious setting is of the eve of the fall of Solomon’s Temple). The reader is left in little doubt that this destruction is not only ordained by 20

On the link with Job see M.A. Knibb, ‘Apocalyptic and Wisdom in 4 Ezra’, JSJ 13 (1982): 56–74.

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God but carried out with God’s active participation (chs. 3 and 80). Israel is culpable and entirely deserves judgement at God’s hand (ch. 6). Zion’s destruction is not a total disaster, however, as it paves the way for God’s eschatological act (ch. 20) which is near at hand (ch. 23) when the nations are to be judged (chs. 13; 82). As in 4 Ezra there is questioning of the way the world is: is there any profit in being righteous (ch. 14)? There is clear assurance that for those like Baruch and Ezra there is the promise of being ‘taken up’ (48:30, cf. 4 Ezra 14). In the present what is essential is obedience to the Law (chs. 32; 44; 46; 51:7; 77:13). Continual vigilance is necessary (88:5ff.) as there is nothing left but this one guide to God’s purposes. Humanity, endowed as it is with understanding, is without excuse and deserves to be punished. Attempts to pierce the mysteries of God’s purposes are subject to the frailty of the human mind (chs. 23; 48). Once again eschatological material (which is much more extensive in this work: chs. 25–30; 35–40; 53– 76) serves to remind the reader of the imminent consummation of all things (ch. 23; 85:10) and the present need to use the limited time available which will enable achievement of Paradise. In the Apocalypse of Abraham (an apocalypse which has many more affinities with the Enochic apocalypses), chs. 20ff., there is also a discussion of human evil. Once again the freedom of God to act in any way that God chooses is enunciated but it is also linked with an explanation which sees the emergence of evil and the oppression of Israel. Because God foresees their attitude to Israel they are permitted to desire evil so that the nations can ultimately be punished for their deeds. Also Abraham is urged to take an eschatological perspective. It is only when Abraham sees the glorious eschatological future unfolding that he will be able to glimpse something of the wisdom of the divine counsels. The issues which are raised are what we would have expected Jews to have struggled with after the traumatic experience of AD 70. There would be an inevitable reappraisal of attitudes with needs for more precise definitions of what was required of the people of God and an emphasis on the centrality of the Law. What is also significant is the continuing pervasiveness of eschatological interest and the clear belief that the consummation of all things is near. Thus the debacle of 70 does not appear to have lessened the impact of these beliefs, and there is evidence to suppose that the years between the two revolts continued to be full of eschatological hope. Still the burning question in both 4 Ezra and Syriac Baruch is not so much: ‘When will the End be?’ but ‘How can one make sense of the present and ensure participation in the eschatological paradise of God?’ Eschatology forms a part of the divine answers to the seers’ questions which usually concern pressing matters of present concern. It is part of the way in which the impoverished character of existence and the injustices of the world are given a different perspective.

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One suspects that all these apocalyptists would have endorsed the sentiments of Theodor Adorno: The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. … it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence, whereas we all know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but it is also marked for this very reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape.21

14.3. Merkabah Mysticism and Rabbinic Judaism: The Position in the Late First Century In the Mishnah (Hag. 2:1) brief reference is made to exposition of the first chapters of Genesis and Ezekiel. The cryptic reference there indicates that it is a matter of some concern to the authors and is a hint of the central importance mystical and apocalyptic ideas played in the religion of rabbinic Judaism. Gershom Scholem’s assertion that there was a connection between the apocalyptic tradition of early rabbinic Judaism and strands within Second Temple Judaism has been widely accepted.22 Even if Scholem’s position can be questioned and the early rabbis did not inherit the apocalyptic and mystical

21 T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974), 247. The importance of Adorno’s links with Gershom Scholem is a feature of twentieth century theology which cannot be overestimated (see D. Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979]). Both were instrumental in publicising the work of Walter Benjamin (J. Roberts, Walter Benjamin [London: Macmillan, 1982]), who in turn was influenced by Ernst Bloch (see W. Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch [London: Macmillan, 1982]); Bloch himself influenced the theology of Jürgen Moltmann, see R. Bauckham, Moltmann: Messianic Theology in the Making (Basingstoke: Marshall Pickering, 1987). All this is a reminder of the part played by this Jewish/Marxist tradition in the discussion of messianism in the twentieth century. 22 E.g. in his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 3rd rev. edn. (New York: Schocken, 1954), and also I. Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, AGJU 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1980), though it has been challenged by David Halperin in The Merkabah in Rabbinic Literature, AOS 62 (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1980) (though his more nuanced treatment in The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 [Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1988] should be welcomed). This section owes much to the work of Christopher Morray-Jones who has effectively rebutted the approach of Halperin (Diss. Cambridge, 1987).

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tradition immediately, emerging rabbinic Judaism would have been faced with the issue of controlling a lively apocalyptic tradition after AD 70. There is evidence of controversy concerning the canonicity of the Book of Ezekiel during the first half of the first century CE (b.Hag. 13a; b.Shabb. 14b; b.Men. 45a). This controversy is said to have been resolved by Hananiah b. Hezekiah b. Goron, a Shammaite teacher of the period. There may have been a connection with the ‘danger story’ of the child consumed by fire (or: whose teacher was consumed by fire) while studying Ezek. 1 in the Beth Midrash, which also mentions an attempt to conceal the book (b.Hag. 13a). These two stories seem to indicate that the restrictions recorded by Origen concerning the study/teaching of Ezek. 1 have their origins in this period. Thus by AD 70 Ezek. 1 was already a restricted text. This is confirmed by study of the lists of restricted targumin (m.Meg. 4:10; t.Meg. 4[3]:31ff.; b.Meg. 24a–b). In his doctoral dissertation Dr. C. MorrayJones has argued that the nucleus of the baraita is a list of passages whose liturgical use was restricted because they told of breaches of the prohibited relations of Lev. 18. Other passages were added to this list from a number of different contexts. One such context is the restriction on exegesis of ʾarayot, maʿaseh bereshit and hammerkabah, recorded independently by m.Hag. 2:1. m.Meg. 4:10 seems to outline the process whereby items originally extraneous to the ‘incest list’ were added to it. Ezek. 1 does not figure in the Babylonian Talmud’s list, while public reading of the chapter is emphatically permitted by the Tosefta: here the formula employed is radically unlike that of the other items on the list. The indication is that the permissive ruling was formulated in a context of controversy. The Mishnah forbids the use of Ezek 1 as a haftarah but records a minority opinion permitting this. This opinion is ascribed to R. Judah. Even the generally liberalising trend that seems to have influenced the development of these lists and given the fact that Ezek. 1 did become the haftarah for Shavuot, it seems virtually certain that the restrictive opinion recorded in the Mishnah is the earlier. The Mishnah thus indicates that the early second century was the period in which public reading of Ezek. 1 in the synagogue began to be permitted by some authorities. Prior to this it seems to have been forbidden. Thus restrictions concerning the study and public reading of Ezek. 1 go back at least as far as the early first century and may well be much older. At the end of the first century there is every reason to believe that these restrictions were still in force, though it is possible to detect the beginnings of a more permissive attitude at or shortly after this period. Turning to m.Hag. 2:1 it seems virtually certain that the three items circulated independently of each other. The numerical sequence is derived from the beyahid of the merkabah restriction; this did not originally carry a strictly numerical significance but meant ‘by an individual (on his own account)’. There are grounds for believing that the merkabah-restriction was originally

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expressed in the past tense. This pre-mishnaic form may be detectable in Eleazar ben Arak’s lecture before Yohanan ben Zakkai. So, in the first century this was already believed to be an ancient tradition. Morray-Jones has argued that the merkabah-restriction originally meant that only a ‘mantic’ wise man who was able to understand the text on the basis of his esoteric knowledge was permitted to ‘expound’ (in the sense of giving teaching about) Ezek. 1. The restriction is derived from apocalyptic-wisdom tradition. Thus the background and context are an esoteric tradition concerned with divine secrets. It thus seems probable that esoteric traditions associated with Ezek. 1 and similar passages were inherited by some of the early tannaim from this apocalyptic milieu. Doubtless these traditions (as in apocalyptic) had both an exegetical and a ‘practical’ (i.e. visionary-mystical) aspect. Maʿaseh merkabah indicates a systematisation of such traditions within the context of rabbinic Judaism (though of course such traditions were also shared by extra-rabbinic groups as well). A feature of the rabbinic development of these traditions was their association with and subordination to the Sinai revelation.23 In the earliest strata of tradition, as in the apocalyptic texts, this connection is not always evident, and it seems likely that this association was developed in order both to legitimise and control the development within a rabbinic context, a process which probably began during the first century. Analysis of the story of Eleazar ben Arak’s merkabah lecture and the associated traditions linking Yohanan ben Zakkai with maʿaseh merkabah suggest that the talmudic perspective which makes Yohanan the authoritative source of maʿaseh merkabah tradition is inaccurate. The import of the original story seems to have been that Eleazar, Yohanan’s student, ‘performed’ what his master could not. This included the production of the phenomenon of fire and other charismatic/ecstatic effects associated with Ezekiel’s vision. The tradition concerning the eighty disciples of Hillel the Elder, of whom Yohanan was the least, also indicates that Yohanan did not have access to this tradition, or lacked charismatic power. Analysis of Yohanan’s relations with charismatic figures (Haninah ben Dosa and especially Eliezer ben Hyrcanus) also suggests that Yohanan did not have access to the ecstatic-esoteric tradition. In the case of both Eliezer ben Hyrcanus and Eleazar ben Arak the later redactors of the tradition altered it so as to present Yohanan as the authoritative source. These considerations suggest that an esoteric, visionarymystical tradition, probably with a strong magical or thaumaturgical aspect, was inherited by some tannaim but not by Yohanan. The stories about the exposition were probably developed in circles associated with their heroes and seem to have undergone a development in three stages: (i) stories telling how various figures performed what Yohanan could not; (ii) the same stories re-shaped so as to indicate that Yohanan recognised and approved of such 23

Cf. Rowland, The Open Heaven, 293.

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things – a necessary development if the tradition was to gain acceptance; and (iii) the talmudic redactional tradition which makes Yohanan the source. This reconstruction is confirmed by the Hekaloth texts which nowhere cite Yohanan as the source of their tradition (quite an astonishing phenomenon, if their intention was to claim fictitious talmudic authority for their traditions). These texts consistently cite Akiba and Ishmael as the sources of their tradition, who received them from Eliezer ben Hyrcanus and Nehunyah ben HaQannah respectively. Nehunyah is an obscure figure in talmudic literature, and it seems unlikely that he would be invoked in order to give talmudic authority to these traditions. Eliezer’s charismatic and magical powers are well documented. Indeed, he is paired with Eleazar ben Arak as the best student of Yohanan be Zakkai (m.Aboth 2:8, cf. Aboth de R. Nathan [B] 13 and Pirke de R. Eliezer 1:2 where there is a clear reference to charismatic or ecstatic speech). Moreover, both Eliezer and Eleazar ended their lives in disgrace and exile from the mainstream rabbinic community. Ecstatic-mystical and esoteric exegetical traditions were being developed in circles associated with some rabbinic teachers during the first century CE. Eleazar ben Arak, Nehunyah ben HaQannah and Eliezer ben Hyrcanus can be identified with far more certainty as focal points of this tradition. Perhaps in the light of evidence from 2 Cor. 12:2 we might surmise that Gamaliel, Paul’s teacher, was familiar with these traditions. The tradition was universally recognised and widely accepted, though some authorities (possibly including Yohanan) seem to have disapproved of it. This hostility probably never died out and certainly extended down to the time of the redaction of the Mishnah (it seems likely that Rabbi disapproved of the tradition – y.Hag. 2:1). By the early second century the esoteric tradition was known to and practised by leading rabbis such as Akiba. Thus some controversy concerning the status and legitimacy of the tradition is likely to have occurred during the first century, probably because of the way in which such traditions were developed in extra-rabbinic circles, not least Christianity. We know Paul was influenced by apocalyptic ascent ideas (2 Cor. 12:2ff.) and emphasises the importance of this visionary element as the basis of his practice (Gal 1:12 and 1:16, cf. Acts 22:17). Perhaps he should be linked with those other significant figures who became marginal to rabbinic Judaism or a focus of hostility: Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, Eleazar ben Arak and Elisha ben Abuyah. After all his apocalyptic outlook enabled him to act on his eschatological convictions, so that his apocalypse of Jesus Christ became the basis for his practice of admitting Gentiles to the messianic age without the Law of Moses. His relegation of Sinai below the new covenant in the Messiah contrasts with the firm subordination of the apocalyptic spirit of Ezek. 1 to the Sinai theophany in the rabbinic mystical traditions. The threat posed by apocalyptic may be discerned elsewhere (and indeed could have contributed to the development of christology in early Christianity). It may be that the controversy about two centres of

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divine power with roots deep within the apocalyptic tradition may lie behind the stories of Elisha ben Abuyah’s confrontation with the archangel Metatron.24 How far is it possible to reconstruct the content of maʿaseh merkabah tradition in the late first century? In the first place, of course, there is continuity between apocalyptic, maʿaseh merkabah and Hekaloth mysticism. The earliest strata of the talmudic tradition do not talk of a heavenly ascent but simply of supernatural phenomena (pre-eminently fire) which accompanied merkabah exposition. Only in the time of Akiba do we find suggestions (in versions of the story of the ‘Four who entered pardes’, b.Hag. 14b, y.Hag. 77b, t.Hag. 2:3–4 and Shir ha-Shirim R. 1:4) of heavenly ascents being practised. The story of the ‘Four who entered pardes’ is probably based on the Song of Songs not on Ezek. 1. A vision of the King (God) in glory may be implied, however. What was later to become the Hekaloth visionary tradition was a synthesis of a number of different traditions which employed a variety of texts, preeminently Ezek. 1, Isa. 6 and the Song (the latter being particularly important for the shiʿur qomah), as their basis. These aimed at the achievement of ecstatic trance experiences (such traditions were probably very old). Maʿaseh merkabah will have been the rabbinic development of the traditions associated with Ezek. 1 in apocalyptic. Heavenly ascents were probably associated with some traditions in some circles. At an early stage it may well have been the case that the content of the merkabah tradition was primarily (though not exclusively) exegetical. The focus of the tradition was the throne-chariot of God and the glorious figure enthroned upon it. Probably highly emotionally charged (perhaps even at this stage ritualised) visualisation practices were also in some quarters associated with this exposition. If the ‘Great Séance’ of Hekaloth Rabbati involving Nehunyah ben HaQannah has any basis in actual practice during the late first century then ascent traditions may have been practised in this period too (as some apocalypses seem to indicate).25 Paul’s trance-vision in the Temple (Acts 22:17) is similar enough to suggest the tradition is this old.26 The only question is: to what extent were such practices current and respectable in mainstream academies? Neusner27 suggested that meditation on passages like Ezek. l, set as it is in exile and in the aftermath of a previous destruction of the Temple, would have been particularly apposite as the rabbis sought to come to terms with the devastation of AD 70. Of 24

Cf. Rowland, The Open Heaven, 293. See G. Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition, 2nd edn. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1965). 26 On this verse see O. Betz, ‘Die Vision des Paulus im Tempel von Jerusalem’, in Verborum Veritas (FS G. Stählin), eds. O. Böcher and K. Haacker (Wuppertal: Brockhaus, 1970), 113–123. 27 See J. Neusner, A Life of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, StPB 6, 2nd edn. (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 140. 25

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course, if the practical methods were among the most closely guarded secrets of the tradition, and if some influential rabbis were hostile to them, we should expect the sources to be very reticent about them, especially when the practice was liable to cause theological and halakic deviance.

14.4. The Fourth Gospel, Revelation and the Apocalyptic Tradition The apocalyptic credentials of the Book of Revelation require little support despite the occasional attempt to put distance between it and the Jewish apocalyptic tradition. The opening of the book says quite clearly where the text stands in relation to other literary genres of the period and the debt to books like Daniel and Ezekiel in particular are a telling pointer to the literary background from which the book comes. It may be more of a surprise to find that the Fourth Gospel should be classed with the apocalyptic and mystical writings of the period. Without necessarily supposing common authorship there seem to be good reasons for supposing that we should class the Fourth Gospel in a broadly similar tradition. Despite significant differences in use it is that tradition which forms the basis of a counter-cultural position in both and in the Fourth Gospel is the foundation of its Christology.28 The goal of the apocalyptic seer and the visionary is the glimpse of God enthroned in glory (1 En. 14), the manifestation of God’s secret purposes (Apoc. Abr. 20ff.), and in the case of the late first century CE apocalypses issues of theodicy (apparent in 4 Ezra, Syriac Baruch and the Apocalypse of Abraham). Apart from the unique reference at the end of ch. 1 (John 1:51) where the characteristics of the apocalyptic tradition are manifested in the references to an open heaven, angelic mediators and a heavenly son of man, there is little in the Fourth Gospel which might suggest that this is a text which is at all interested in apocalypticism. But if we accept that apocalyptic is constituted by ‘higher wisdom through revelation’ rather than the paraphernalia of eschatology, then there is a sense in which the Fourth Gospel can be seen as falling quite clearly within that world of discourse. That is not to say that the concern with the minutiae of hidden mysteries is a preoccupation of the evangelist. Quite the reverse in fact. Rather, he wants to stress that the vision of God is to be found in Jesus (1:18; 6:46; 12:41; 14:9) and, to borrow from the letter to the Colossians, ‘in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom 28

H. Odeberg, The Fourth Gospel: Interpreted in its Relation to Contemporaneous Religious Currents in Palestine and the Hellenistic-Oriental World (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1929); Segal, Two Powers; and further literature cited in C. Rowland, ‘John 1.51, Jewish Apocalyptic and Targumic Tradition’, NTS 30 (1984): 498–507 = above, pp. 204– 214, and J. Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).

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and knowledge’ (Col. 2:3).29 Jesus is represented as the supreme revelation of God and God’s character. Unlike Jesus the Jews have never seen God’s form or heard his voice (5:37). All visions and ascents are invalid if they are understood without reference to Jesus the Son of Man who alone has ascended and descended (3:13). The Son of Man is the goal of the angels’ search for the divine mysteries (1:51), much as in 1 Pet. 1:11–12. We would expect in an apocalypse dualism30 to be an important component of its epistemology.31 It is an essential ingredient of its attempt to offer that alternative perspective on reality by positing another, divine dimension to human existence and thereby indicating that the form of the present order is only temporary. In Revelation the present contrast between heaven where God is enthroned and acknowledged as creator on the one hand and earth in rebellion and the recipient of God’s wrath on the other contrasts with the future when God will dwell with humanity. The contrast between appearance and reality with the latter laid bare by the revelation, the drawing back of the veil which hides God’s mysteries, is one of the fundamental aspects of apocalyptic. That epistemology is fundamental to the Fourth Gospel also. Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls we have become used to finding the background to these ideas in such sectarian sources. The Apocalypse’s concern to offer the truth of the situation, whether it be the spiritual condition of the churches or the reality of the unfolding of the divine purposes, is matched by the Fourth Gospel’s dualistic contrasts which serve to throw into the sharpest possible relief the impoverished character of the world and the blindness of its inhabitants. Here as elsewhere both Revelation and the Fourth Gospel are indebted to the apocalyptic tradition. Of course, there are differences between the Fourth Gospel and Revelation. However restrained the vision of the enthroned God might be in Rev. 4:2ff. in comparison with Ezek. 1:26 John of Patmos still claims to have a vision of God. That is not on offer in the Fourth Gospel. Claims to see God must be regarded as claims to see Jesus. If they are not, they are to be rejected as spurious. Elsewhere, there is similarity of language between the descrip29 On Colossians and its connection with Jewish mysticism and apocalyptic see C. Rowland, ‘Apocalyptic Visions and the Exaltation of Christ in the Letter to the Colossians’, JSNT 19 (1983): 73–83 = above, pp. 195–203. 30 On Johannine dualism see e.g. J.H. Charlesworth’s essay ‘Qumran, John and the Odes of Solomon’, in John and Qumran, ed. idem (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1972), 107–136, and O. Böcher, Der johanneische Dualismus im Zusammenhang des nachbiblischen Judentums (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1965). 31 On apocalyptic epistemology see the suggestive comments in J.L. Martyn, ‘Epistemology at the Turn of the Ages’, in Christian History and Interpretation: Studies Presented to John Knox, eds. W.R. Farmer et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 269– 287; and further J. Marcus and M.L. Soards, eds., Apocalyptic in the New Testament: Essays in Honor of J. Louis Martyn, JSNTSup 24 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989).

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tion of the New Age in Rev. 21 and the prologue of the Fourth Gospel. In Rev. 21:3 the tabernacling of God with humankind is fulfilled in the new creation. It is an eschatological hope which awaits the completion of that process of judgement on the unrighteous institutions which barred the way to God’s reign. In contrast John 1:14 speaks of the tabernacling of the Divine Word in history not as an event in the future but as an event in the past, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. While in Rev. 21 the dwelling of God with humanity takes place in a world made holy and acceptable for this, in John the Incarnation takes place in an environment where the ‘world knew him not’ (John 1:10). The twin emphases on realised eschatology and lack of concern for the kind of cosmic redemption which marks the climax of eschatology are in stark contrast with Revelation. The preoccupation is on the life of a group of disciples whose task is to overcome an alien world which hates them as it hated their master (15:18ff.).32 So whatever hope there may be for the future (and I am convinced that the Fourth Gospel has not moved entirely to a realised eschatology), the focus is on the first coming as the ultimate moment to which the witness of the community and the Spirit-Paraclete both point. Those who love Jesus and keep his commandments are those to whom the incarnate Son of God comes and with whom the Father and the Son make their abode (John 14:21 and 23). However we interpret the enigmatic reference to the Son of Man and Jacob’s ladder in Gen. 28:12 there is the idea of communion between heaven and earth in the past revelation of glory in Jesus (cf. 1 John 1:1). Also, the presence of the eschatological glory among the disciples who love him has about it a ‘vertical’ dimension in which the coming Son of Man is not primarily a figure who appears as a reproach to the nations. The disciple now looks forward to a time when s/he will be with Jesus to behold his glory (17:24).33 It is now not a question of ‘they shall look upon him whom they pierced’ (19:37) but ‘the world will see me no more but you will see me’ (14:19). Both the Fourth Gospel and Revelation manifest concerns which are typical of the apocalyptic tradition as it is found at the end of the first century. We have noted already that the Fourth Gospel vigorously locates revelation in the person of Jesus and denies the significance of all other claims to divine knowledge without relation to him. There is a similar restraint in 4 Ezra. Heavenly ascents are not the means of revelation (4:20 and 8:21). Indeed, there is a vigorous denial of it (and there is no evidence of that tradition in Syriac Baruch though it does emerge in the roughly contemporary Apocalypse of Abraham). 4 Ezra instead places great emphasis in a situation of crisis on the necessity of the elect to keep the Torah. That means avoiding 32 D.K. Rensberger, Overcoming the World: Politics and Community in the Gospel of John (London: SPCK, 1989). 33 R.W. Paschal, The Farewell Prayer of Jesus (Diss. Cambridge, 1982).

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unnecessary speculation about matters which are too difficult to understand (a constant theme of the divine reply to Ezra). Like the mishnaic restriction on speculative activity in m.Hag. 2:1 and earlier in Sir. 3:22, 4 Ezra echoes Job’s divine pronouncement about the inscrutability of God’s purposes. There is necessity for a single-minded devotion to God’s will in order to attain the eschatological bliss. That emphasis on ethical rectitude at the expense of satisfying eschatological and theosophic curiosity is echoed in several works of the period. At a time when the upheaval caused by the decimation of Jewish institutions had thrown the whole tradition into the melting pot there is a remarkable convergence of opinion in Jewish and Christian apocalyptic and mystical sources on the primacy of ethical rectitude as the key to salvation. As we have seen, Revelation sets the apocalyptic revelation about the age to come in the context of Letters to the Seven Churches. The present is marked by costly struggle not leisurely dreams of the future. The latter’s purpose is to reinforce the demand for righteousness and to assure those who are seeking to enter by the narrow gate that there is hope of vindication and fulfilment. Likewise in the Fourth Gospel acceptance of Jesus’ messiahship is demonstrated by love of the brethren, something made even more explicit in 1 John where division over christological controversy is rooted in separatism and inability to relate to one’s fellow believers in the way that God requires (1 John 3). Apocalyptic is a luxury which cannot be divorced by the pressing demands for practical righteousness. It serves to enhance the power of the demand by rooting it in the direct voice of God. Any other pursuit of the divine mysteries appears indulgent and a distraction from the real task in hand.

14.5. Synoptic Eschatological Material: A Comparison of the Concerns of Other First Century Eschatological Discourses34 When viewed in the light of Revelation the synoptic discourses show some remarkable omissions. It is true that they manifest the same kind of preoccupation with the messianic woes which are so characteristic of several eschatological passages from writings of this period of Judaism. While there may well be some kind of connection between the sort of focus of evil which is outlined so cryptically in Mark 13:14 and the hubris of the man of lawlessness mentioned in 2 Thess. 2, nothing is said about the effects of the coming of the Son of Man on the forces of evil. Indeed, the description of the coming of the Son of Man in all three Synoptic Gospels is linked explicitly with the

34

See D. Wenham, The Rediscovery of Jesus’ Eschatological Discourse (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1984), for a guide to the literature on the eschatological discourses.

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vindication of the elect, thus focussing on the final aspect of the messianic drama in the vision of the man from the sea in 4 Ezra 13. The certainty of vindication is there but the lot of the elect when they have been gathered from the four corners of the earth is not touched on at all in Mark. The element of judgement at the Parousia of the Son of Man is not entirely absent, however, from the synoptic discourses as the climax of the Matthaean version is the account of the final assize with the Son of Man sitting on God’s throne separating the ‘sheep from the goats’ (Matt. 25:31ff.). But here as elsewhere in these discourses the focus of attention is on the present response of the elect. It is the recognition of the heavenly Son of Man in the brethren who are hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, weak and imprisoned in the present age who will inherit the kingdom prepared by God from the foundation of the world. In the Markan discourse the preoccupation of the bulk of the material is not so much the satisfaction of curiosity about the details of the times and seasons as much as dire warnings of the threat of being led astray, of failing at the last and of the need to be ready and watchful to avoid the worst of the disasters which are to come. In the bleak moments of the last days in Jerusalem there is little attempt to dwell on the privileges of discipleship (though an eschatological promise is made to the disciples a little later in the Lucan story in Luke 22:29–30 in the context of the supper discourse). It is not a future without hope but the thoughts of the hearers are made to dwell on responsibilities in the short and medium term as the essential prerequisite of achieving their eschatological inheritance. In comparison with the more extended accounts of the coming of the New Age to be found in other material both Christian and Jewish the synoptic discourses concentrate on the period of strife and tribulation leading up to the coming of the Son of Man. What happens thereafter is not explored. In the Lucan account, however, there is the expectation that the arrival of the Son of Man is but the beginning of the process of liberation, for which the tribulations and destruction had been the prelude. This point is made very clearly in the climax of the discourse in Luke 21:26ff.: ‘when these things comes to pass, stand up right and hold your heads high, because your liberation draws near’ (v. 28). It is only when what has been described in the series of predictions come to pass that the kingdom of God begins to draw near. The implication is that the kingdom does not arrive with the coming of the Son of Man; that is only part of the eschatological drama whose climax is still to come, when there will be a reversal of Jerusalem’s fortunes (v. 24). There is in fact very little attempt made to sketch the character of the liberation which draws near. The sketch of the ideal society or the ideal world is lacking, a mark of either a lack of any political realism or of a merely utopian fixation (in the sense of merely dreaming about the form of the ideal society). Rather they prefer to hint at their conviction that one is coming without being too precise about what it will involve.

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The eschatological discourse is set within the context of the narrative of Jesus’ life, itself a paradigm of discipleship. The discourse material in the Gospels must be seen within their narrative context. It is attention to the whole that is needed. The discourses must not be allowed to function as instructions which abstract the reader from the challenge of the messianic way as it intersects with an order which is passing away. But what happens when the discourse material does become abstracted from the narrative can be glimpsed in the Gospel of Thomas and the Apocalypse of Peter. In their different ways these works use teaching to effect an otherworldly preoccupation on the part of the readers. The former by its concentration on Jesus as a teacher of wisdom makes the understanding of the divine knowledge he brings the goal of salvation. Similarly, the knowledge of the delights of Paradise and the horrors of Hell in other parts of the apocalyptic tradition35 and its derivatives can lead to a morbid curiosity with the world beyond and the believer’s participation in it which can detract from the impact of that future age in the ruins of the age which is passing away.

14.6. The Resources of Apocalyptic as Compensation for Eschatological Disappointment36 A question which always arises when the development of Christianity at the end of the first century CE is discussed is the issue of the problem caused by the non-fulfilment of the expectation of the coming of the reign of God on earth. This theory is one which has been extraordinarily influential within biblical exegesis over the last century or so. The classic theory which ascribes the emergence of orthodox Christian doctrine as part of the response to the problem caused by the delay has been subjected to critical scrutiny over the years. There is little doubt that the explicit evidence for the delay of the parousia being a problem within primitive Christianity is not as large as is often suggested. 2 Pet. 3 is in fact a rather exceptional piece of evidence. Other passages which are often mentioned in Matthew and Luke, for example, have to be set alongside other indications which point in the opposite direction. But while one would want to question the view that the delay of the parousia must have been a problem, it has raised issues which are of particular importance for understanding the development of the apocalyptic tradition. The apocalyptic tradition in its various forms pervades the early Christian thought world. The apostle Paul’s theology and self-understanding cannot be properly understood without reference to it. This ranged from his conviction 35

M. Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 198. On the Parousia and its delay see Rowland, Christian Origins, 285ff. and below n. 41. 36

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that God had revealed the mystery of salvation to him and his part in it (Gal. 1:12 and 16) to his expectation of the partial presence and imminent expectation of a new age. From Schweitzer to Sanders via Munck37 it is the eschatological hope which is offered as the best way to understand Paul. The mission to the Gentiles and probably also the collection for the saints in Jerusalem38 were intimately linked with the framework of an eschatological drama in which Paul is a crucial actor. Thus what had happened in the Christ event was linked with his own mission within the overall scheme of salvation history. In many ways Paul’s thought offers us one of the best examples of what Karl Mannheim has called chiliastic mentality.39 One aspect of this type, he argues, is the way in which the present moment becomes the Kairos, the moment to take decisive action. The utopian then takes it upon himself: to ‘enable the absolute to interfere with the world and condition actual events’ … the present becomes the breach through which what was previously inward bursts out suddenly, takes hold of the outer world and transforms it. … The Chiliast … is always on his toes awaiting the propitious moment … he is not actually concerned with the millennium to come; what is important for him is that it has happened here and now … the chiliastic mentality has no sense for the process of becoming; it was sensitive only to the abrupt moment, the present pregnant with meaning.40

That sense of destiny which probably undergirded Paul’s self-understanding and his activity actually enabled his thinking to cohere as an expression of the outlook of one who believed himself called to be an agent in the dawn of the New Age, the means by which the Gentiles became fellow heirs of the commonwealth of Israel (cf. Matt. 19:28). Of course, that is most clearly expressed in Ephesians where not only the apostle’s but also the church’s role as the bearers of the divine mysteries is stressed (3:5ff.). As Ephesians indicates, it was possible for a later generation to keep alive that framework of thought provided that there is a clear understanding of the soteriological role of apostle and community. Once that sense of being part of the ‘propitious moment’ disappears, however, the understanding of present activity as an integral part of that drama and its relationship with the future consummation of the divine purposes gradually disappears also. When that happens it does become more difficult to see that future consummation as anything other than 37

A. Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, trans. W. Montgomery (London: A&C Black, 1931); E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (London: SCM, 1977); J. Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind, trans. F. Clarke (London: SCM, 1959). 38 On the collection D. Georgi, Die Geschichte der Kollekte des Paulus für Jerusalem (Hamburg-Bergstedt: Herbert Reich, 1965); ET: Remembering the Poor: The History of Paul’s Collection for Jerusalem. Nashville: Abingdon, 1992. 39 K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. L. Wirth and E. Shils (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960). 40 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 192–195.

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an article of faith rather than a goal in which present activity forms an indispensable part in ‘interfering with the world and conditioning actual events’. Richard Bauckham has argued that already within the eschatological tradition there was an attempt to come to terms with the delay of the coming of God’s reign, and he argues that there are ‘traces of a positive theological understanding of the delay in terms of God’s longsuffering and his desire for his people’s repentance’.41 He is right to point to the apocalypses as important evidence of a resource for dealing with the non-fulfilment of God’s reign on earth. Many have recognised that the apocalypses are just as much interested in the world above where God’s reign is acknowledged by the heavenly host and where the apocalyptic seer can have access to the repository of those purposes of God for the future world. Thus the apocalyptic seer can glimpse either in the heavenly books about the mysteries of eschatology or by being offered a preview of what will happen in human history in the future. In most apocalypses that experience of a disclosure of the heavenly mysteries is reserved for the apocalyptic seer, but it was perfectly possible to extend that privilege to a wider group. It is that which we find in different forms in the Hodayoth (1QH) and the Odes of Solomon both of which offer the elect group a present participation in the lot of heaven and a foretaste of the glory which is to come. The identification of the ecclesia of the elect with Christ in the heavenly places is stressed in the Letter to the Ephesians (1:21, cf. 3:5ff.), so that the present life of the church becomes a glimpse, a foretaste of the kingdom of God, just as the Spirit enables the believers to regard the present as a participation ‘in the powers of the age to come’ as the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews puts it (Heb 6:5).42 An important example of apocalyptic being used by a group which found itself alienated from the mainstream of life is to be found in the JewishChristian apocalypse the Ascension of Isaiah.43 There is a clear reference to the promise of Christ’s coming in 4:14ff. Elsewhere, particularly in the Vision of Isaiah in the last part of the work the concern is wholly with the descent and ascent of the Beloved with its promise of hope for the glorified elect with the patriarchs and prophets in the highest heavens. The coming relates to the descent of the Beloved and his Incarnation (unless the christology is entirely docetic). Like the Gospel of John the marginalised visionary

41

R. Bauckham, ‘The Delay of the Parousia’, TynBul 31 (1980): 3–36, at 19. H.-W. Kuhn, Enderwartung und gegenwärtiges Heil, StUNT 4 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966); D.E. Aune, The Cultic Setting of Realized Eschatology in Early Christianity, NovTSup 28 (Leiden: Brill, 1972). 43 On the Ascension of Isaiah see J.M. Knight, The Ascension of Isaiah (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995). 42

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group is the focus of attention. It has separated itself from society at large and joined with the prophet in the desert: And many … who believed in the ascension to heaven withdrew and settled on the mountain. And they all put on sackcloth and they all were prophets; they had nothing with them, but were naked and bitterly lamented the apostasy of Israel. (Asc. Isa. 2:9)

In many respects the Ascension of Isaiah in its final form offers an interesting contrast to the Book of Revelation among the extant Jewish and Christian apocalypses. The second half of the work describes the ascent of Isaiah through the seven heavens to the presence of God and then proceeds to describe the descent of the Beloved to the world below. That process in which the keepers of the lower heavens are deceived during the ascent only to find themselves caught out by his triumphal ascent back to the Father offers a pattern of salvation which may be hinted at from time to time in the New Testament (e.g. 1 Cor. 2:9ff. and 1 Pet. 3:20). In the second half of the apocalypse there is lack of any historical dimension to eschatology, though this makes its appearance in the first part of the work. We have in the Ascension of Isaiah an apocalypse which raises in the acutest possible form the question of the relationship between apocalypticism and gnosticism.44 The guardians of the lower heavens, described as they are in terminology derived from the Jewish theophany tradition, echo the cry of the gnostic demiurge that there is no other divinity apart from them (10:13). Just as in the Hypostasis of the Archons and the Untitled Work from Nag Hammadi there is a debt to the merkabah tradition,45 so here too we find in them a question raised about the extent to which apocalyptic contributed to the development of certain forms of gnostic religion. Apocalyptic could lend itself to a radical form of otherworldliness in which the light of the heavenly throne-room of God offered a stark contrast to a benighted creation. In a political situation in which hope was at a premium apocalyptic may have offered a significant catalyst to the development of that distinctive and systematic denigration of this world which is at the heart of fully-fledged gnosticism. Any account of the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity has to take account of this trend. 44

On the connection between apocalyptic and gnosticism see the comments of R.M. Grant, Gnosticism and Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). It is probable that gnosticism’s dualism allowed the possibility of outward conformity with society at large while offering a view of the world which regarded human beings as entirely alien within it, see R.M. Grant, ‘Early Christians and Gnostics in Graeco-Roman Society’, in The New Testament and Gnosis: Essays in Honour of Robert McL. Wilson, eds. A. Logan and A.J.M. Wedderburn (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983), 176–183. 45 See F.T. Fallon, The Enthronement of Sabaoth: Jewish Elements in Gnostic Creation Myths, NHS 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1978); and Gruenwald, ‘Jewish Merkabah Mysticism and Gnosticism’.

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The issue of the contrasting ways in which eschatological hope was handled in the gradually separating communities is a central part of the story of the parting of the ways. There is a sense in which early Christianity’s muting of its realised/inaugurated eschatology, whether by routinisation in ritual expression or institutional control, represents a telling expression of Christian identity at this period. In this respect Christianity became more like the groupings from which it was parting than the eschatological sectarianism which is more likely to have characterised much of its early existence.

14.7. Conclusion Apocalyptic has performed a variety of different functions within religion. Its interest in visions of a world beyond with its myriad of angels and preoccupation with the means of achieving communion with that world makes it a classic example of offering an opportunity of an opiate for those who wish to escape from a heartless world. And yet it has also frequently been a spur for those engaged in movements of change where visions of hope have fuelled powerful societal forces demanding change in the existing order. It is a matter of dispute whether apocalyptic functioned in this way in our period or at the time of the First Revolt46 though in later Christian apocalyptic movements it did perform exactly that function. The Elect were offered conviction of their identity and certainty to engage in that struggle to actualise their visions of the eschatological reign of God. In the apocalyptic material we have been examining there is little sign that it was the motor of violent change. That should not necessarily surprise us. In its textual form we would expect it to have undergone a process of taming among those groups who had the sophistication and communitarian persistence to engage in writing and to ensure that their work was preserved. Those who used apocalyptic as part of their struggle for change did not leave any literary memorial which would have been preserved by more careful successors. Its role in the extant late first century CE apocalypses is to encourage obedience by stimulating the reader to recognise the temporary nature of present realities and the urgent need to persevere to receive the promise which is to come. One might say that in some of these works, both Jewish and Christian, there is a ‘stick and carrot’ approach to religion: eschatological bliss is offered to those who take the difficult decision in the present to stay with the ancestral laws or their obedience to the messianic way. In all this material there is probably a secondary theme running through them: the need to maintain an identity as a

46

M. Goodman, The Ruling Class of Judaea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and T. Rajak, Josephus (London: Duckworth, 1983).

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religious community in circumstances of difficulty.47 The apocalypse offers a demonstration of the divine undergirding of the religious community, its practices and beliefs in a situation where that identity might have been under threat because of the extreme disjunction between tradition and reality. So apocalyptic functions not so much as vehicle for change at this stage as a means of reaffirming what has been received and an incisive encouragement to endure (to borrow a favourite word from Revelation) and to build up the ancient ruins. In the Jewish material it should not surprise us that a central focus is the Law. Syriac Baruch articulates the position most clearly in asserting that there is nothing left except obedience to it. The conclusion of 4 Ezra likewise makes a clear link between Ezra’s visions and the Law of Sinai as being part of one continuing revelation from God. With those markers of Judaism, such as the Temple and the whole apparatus of the sacrificial system based on the centrality of Jerusalem, suddenly gone what was left became all the more important, to anchor the religious communities and prevent them from being moved too far from their moorings. Apocalyptic in this situation was an essential way of increasing certainty in the validity of what was left. Likewise in the Christian texts the emerging emphasis on the centrality of Christ,48 particularly in the Fourth Gospel, guaranteed by the assertion of the ultimacy of the revelation in and through him, was the sole foundation for a JewishChristian group seeking to maintain its messianic convictions and their link with the biblical tradition. The indications are that there was little opportunity for diversity when the pressure was there to hang on to what was left, whether it be particular interpretations of the Law or the assertion that the same Law found its fulfilment in the life of the Messiah. For all these differences there is also a consistent theme running throughout much of the material that we have examined. Apocalyptic is not here offered as a means of satisfying curiosity. In most cases it is subordinated entirely to the demand for obedience and ethical rigour on the part of the reader. From the Letters to the Seven Churches via the mishnaic regulations to the vision of 4 Ezra there is a consistent emphasis on the need for an ethical response, often, in the apocalypses at least, left unspecified in any detail. We are left with the clear impression that it is this which must provide the setting for the visions whose main aim is to admonish and encourage.

47 Meeks, ‘Social Functions’, and idem, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). 48 On suggested developments of the apocalyptic tradition see J. Baumgarten, Paulus und die Apokalyptik, WMANT 44 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1975); cf. J.C. Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1980).

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Apocalyptic literature by its very nature encourages a feeling of certainty in the reader by appearing to offer the authentic word of God on a variety of matters. There is something of this kind of tone in Revelation where the concluding verses seem to give the book an authoritative air quite without parallel in the rest of the New Testament (22:18–19). Yet apocalyptic symbolism made such certainty in the process of deriving meaning from its symbolism much more speculative and open to constant questioning. In this sense most apocalypses flatter to deceive. They appear to offer final answers by their revelatory form and yet frequently prove to be opaque in their interpretation. It is rather different in the Fourth Gospel. Here the emergence of an exclusive christology serves to demand an unequivocal response concerning the centre of divine revelation. So, despite the revelation from God about what is to come the apocalyptic genre in Revelation allows for a considerable degree of ambiguity about the precise content of the revelation and the demands it makes upon the reader both doctrinally and ethically. It is true that the text offers a resolution of the contradictions of the world in its vision of the future but alongside this it demands participation in present struggle. That is the immediate reality confronting the readers in their everyday life. The paradise of God is still future, and the precise way there is hardly clear. What is apparent is that there can be no compromise with the old order and every expectation that a price will have to be paid for the patient endurance of the saints. Similarly in 4 Ezra apocalyptic offers no clear answers to the heart-felt questions of the seer. By the end of the book we are left with a clear message of hope but little real insight about why it is that the glory which is to come is so exclusive in its scope. In the apocalypses the readers are asked to stay with the confusions and contradictions of the world as it is. Apocalypse is not a means of offering easy answers and certain remedies which will ensure participation in the Paradise of God. The apocalyptic genre demands of the people of God, whether in Judaism or Christianity, a response in action which will ensure the continuation of the divine righteousness not through fantastic speculation but patient endurance: ‘Here is a call for the endurance of the saints, those who keep to commandments of God [and the faith of Jesus]’ Rev. 14:12).

15. Apocalyptic, the Poor and the Gospel of Matthew* In the last twenty years there has been a growing recognition that the form and contents of the Book of Revelation offer more to the exegesis of the New Testament than has usually been thought. Of course, apocalyptic has for a century or more featured in discussion of the New Testament.1 It has been considered an essential ingredient in any explanation of the origins of Christianity, but has been understood almost exclusively as heralding the end of the world. Early Christianity has thus been characterised as a movement eagerly awaiting the Parousia and the winding up of history.2 More recently there has been a long-overdue questioning of this consensus, which has so pervaded the interpretation of the New Testament, and serious doubts have been raised about the understanding of apocalyptic which undergirds it.3 Ancient apocalypses (of which Revelation is the prime example) can no longer be seen as little more than a collection of predictions about the end of the world. First and foremost apocalypses unveil secrets, some of which relate to the future.4 They are not, therefore, solely concerned with the end of the world. Their chief task is to reveal truths about God and the universe, and in these attempts they come close to one understanding of mysticism: the perception of truths which exceed the capacity of human reason and are mediated by means of divine revelation. It is that kind of religious outlook we find in an apocalypse.5 *

This is an abbreviated version of the 1992 Manson Memorial Lecture, given in the University of Manchester. 1 The centrality of apocalyptic for Pauline theology has often been stressed. See e.g. J.C. Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1980). 2 The influence of the approach to apocalyptic and eschatology pioneered by J. Weiss (e.g. his Die Idee des Reiches Gottes in der Theologie [Gießen: J. Ricker, 1901]) and others still pervades treatment of the subject. 3 T.F. Glasson has for a long time been a persistent critic of this consensus, see ‘Schweitzer’s Influence – Blessing or Bane?’, JTS 28.2 (1977): 289–302. 4 See C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982), 9ff. 5 Apocalyptic and mysticism are usually distinguished as distinct religious phenomena. But, given that apocalyptic is in large part concerned with the secrets of heaven, there is a considerable degree of overlap between the two. In his treatment of the kabbalah, Gershom

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In apocalypses, what happens in heaven corresponds to what happens, or will happen on earth. It is a kind of overview from an altogether different perspective. It is not a literal representation of reality – past, present or future – for it tells us more about the reality which it seeks to portray than any literal representation could do. The language which Jewish tradition uses to speak of God’s mysteries in the apocalypses enables the reader to understand the meaning of history more profoundly than would be possible from a straightforward narrative. So, if apocalyptic is not only about the end of the world, neither is it mere prediction. Of course, it speaks about the future, but it is a future – as well as a present – viewed in the light of the God who now reigns and will be seen to reign on earth. John on Patmos is commissioned to write ‘what is now, and what is to take place hereafter’ (Rev. 1:19). It is like a drama happening on two levels in which the ‘higher’ level in some sense interprets what takes place on the ‘lower’ level.6 That which takes place in heaven, or is reported as having its origin in heaven, offers an insight into the perplexing story of the world. By this means an understanding of the mystery of existence is given a new dimension. Events on the earthly stage are enigmatic. One who looks at them from the ‘lower’ level can nevertheless be offered another perspective on reality through the eye of vision. It is that which is the basis of the apocalypse. It is not that the ‘higher’ level determines the way in which events below work out. Human beings are not puppets at the end of the divine strings. They can be confronted with the reality of God and the coming kingdom, and with inexorable truths which demand understanding and action, but they possess freewill and can make choices about the way they will respond. The vision of the apocalyptic writers enables the reader, with eyes to see and ears to hear, to make sense of events and interactions, which, without that added perspective, would seem utterly enigmatic. Scholem has argued for that continuity between the apocalyptic tradition of the Second Temple period and the Hekaloth tradition (see Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 3rd rev. edn. [New York: Schocken, 1954]; Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition, 2nd edn. [New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1965]), also I. Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, AGJU 14 [Leiden: Brill, 1980]). Apocalyptic and mysticism thus serve as heuristic devices to denote different phases of the tradition of belief and practice associated with speculation about the heavenly world and its mysteries (see further on the problems of definition, John Barton, Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile [London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1986]). The continuity between apocalyptic and early rabbinic mysticism has been challenged by D.J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988), (on which see C. MorrayJones’ dissertation [Merkabah Mysticism and Talmudic Tradition, Diss. Cambridge, 1988], his review of Halperin’s book in JTS 41.2 [1990]: 585–589, and [with C. Rowland] The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament [Leiden: Brill, 2009]). 6 See the pertinent comments in J.L. Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).

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It is such a perspective which can transform understanding so that what appears to be confusion and folly may be apprehended as the wisdom of God. This applies also to the Jewish mystical tradition, with which the revelations vouchsafed to apocalyptic seers have several affinities.7 The mystical tradition behind Jewish mysticism has an obscure history but it is generally thought to have had its origins early in the Second Temple period and to have owed much to the exile. One of its principal subjects is the meditation on the chariot, the merkabah, of Ezekiel. The vision of the glorious God enthroned on the cherubim-chariot was a source of wonder and fascination, as is evident from the early rabbinic literature, which much scholarly work in recent years has made available to us together with the discovery of related texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls.8 In the mystical account, the vision of the divine throne-chariot in heaven was the goal of a heavenly ascent. For example, in the account of the ascent to heaven by Enoch (1 En. 14), the seer is granted a sight of God enthroned and enrobed in glory. Here the beatific vision, the supreme goal of life, is possible in the midst of the vicissitudes of earthly existence. There has been, in recent years, a greater appreciation of the rich potential offered in New Testament theology by the apocalyptic and mystical texts of Judaism, when viewed not merely as a means of elucidating eschatological themes but also of shedding light on a range of texts less obviously related to such themes. The themes in particular, which have been the object of study from the perspective of mysticism, are transformation, Christology and cosmology. Concerning the first of these, the occasional hint in Paul’s letters about a transformation of the believer in the midst of the present life, in addition to the eschatological change at the Parousia, provides an opportunity to apply the frequent references to bodily transformation of the apocalyptic seer to passages like 2 Cor. 3. Concerning the second, the development of Christology, and the existence of exalted mediatorial figures in the heavenly world, has been the subject of fierce debate: was early Christianity merely taking over a theology in which the existence of divine beings wielding divine authority was part of the fabric of Jewish belief? Or were early Christians responsible for a significant mutation of the beliefs of Second Temple Judaism about angels, in which their convictions concerning Jesus as messiah acted as a catalyst?9 Thirdly, a typical feature of apocalypses is the way they divide

7

See further Rowland, The Open Heaven, 269ff. See C.A. Newsom, Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985) and on the expositions of the chapter in the apocalyptic tradition see C. Rowland, ‘The Visions of God in Apocalyptic Literature’, JSJ 10 (1979): 137–154 = above, pp. 29–45. 9 See A.F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven, SJLA 25 (Leiden: Brill, 1977) and L.W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (London: SCM, 1988). 8

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heaven into various levels, the highest being occupied by God and the most exalted angels, and the lowest by lesser angelic powers and demons.10 The ascent of Christ into the heavens, his conquest of the powers, and the relationship of all these to his death ‘outside the gate’ in a text like Hebrews11 have all been illuminated by the thought-world of apocalyptic and mysticism.12 The heavenly world and its relationship to God’s saving purposes and to human history are matters of concern to the New Testament writers. The exploration of the relationship of the New Testament to the world of Jewish mysticism has concentrated on theological themes in the more obviously theological writings of the New Testament. On the whole, the narrative texts have not seemed so susceptible to this kind of treatment. But John Ashton’s examination of the relationship between the Gospel and the apocalyptic and mystical tradition in his work on the Gospel of John, in which he distils the scholarship of a generation, suggests that the narrative texts of the New Testament may also repay careful study in the light of this material.13 It is a similar perspective which underlies what follows on the Gospel of Matthew. There are apocalyptic themes running through Matthew’s narrative. From the dreams of Joseph and the Magi to the dream of Pilate’s wife before the crucifixion, knowledge through dreams and revelations are a significant element in this Gospel. Several of the accounts Matthew shares with the other two Synoptic Gospels, the Baptism in which there is a clear allusion to Ezek. 1:1, fulfilling the prophetic longing for God to rend the heavens and reveal the divine purposes (cf. Isa. 64:1).14 There are other links between the Baptism and the Jewish mystical tradition. The descent of the Spirit on Jesus is compared with that of a dove, and it may be possible to see hints of maʿaseh bereshith, the ‘work of creation’, here by linking the baptismal accounts with a rabbinical story concerning the early second century teacher, Simeon ben Zoma.15 In this story Ben Zoma meditates on the first chapter of Genesis and in particular on the words at 1:6–7, and he sees a small gap separating the 10

See A.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: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 11 E.g. O. Hofius, Der Vorhang vor dem Thron Gottes, WUNT 14 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1972). 12 In this regard, the Ascension of Isaiah, an apocalypse which in its present form comes from the late first or early second century CE, reflects the blend of apocalyptic cosmology and soteriology which may have contributed to passages like 1 Cor. 2:9, Col. 2:14–15 and 1 Pet. 3:22. 13 J. Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 337ff. and 381ff. 14 See further Rowland, The Open Heaven, 358ff. 15 Rowland, The Open Heaven, 323 and 361.

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upper and lower celestial waters which he connects with the Spirit of God hovering on the face of the waters four verses earlier.16 This small gap he compares to the small gap which exists when a bird hovers over its nest, and in the version of the story in the Babylonian Talmud the hovering of the Spirit of God is compared to a dove hovering over its young. Such ideas could have arisen from a comparison of Gen. 1:2 with the only other occurrence of the verb rahaph, ‘to hover’, at Deut. 32:11, where the bird hovers over her young. Whereas in the story of Ben Zoma the meditation was a detached piece of cosmological speculation on the nature of the heavenly waters, in the story of the Baptism the creative Spirit hovers over the head of the Son of God. Similarly the Transfiguration, particularly in its Matthaean version, has several points of contact with ancient Jewish theophanies and the traditions which developed from them. It especially resembles the christophany of Rev. 1:13ff.,17 where the risen Christ appears to the exiled seer on Patmos, and where the links with the throne-theophany tradition based on Ezekiel are widely acknowledged. In the Transfiguration, alone of all the synoptic texts (and surprisingly so, given the nature of the post-resurrection appearances), we come closest to the heavenly appearance of an exalted angelic figure. One of the oldest of the throne-theophany scenes provides some connections, 1 En. 14:20–21 (cf. Test. Abr. Rec. A 12), where several words are found in common with the Greek of the Synoptic Gospels: sun, face, snow, clothing (ἱµάτια in the Gospels, cf. περιβόλαιον in 1 Enoch), while ἐξαστράπτων at Luke 9:29 is reminiscent of 1 En. 14:11 and 17. In Matthew, at 17:6, the disciples fall on their faces, a typical reaction to a theophany (cf. Ezek. 2:1 and Dan. 10:9), while also in Matthew, at 17:9, the event is described as a ὅραµα ‘vision’ (cf. Acts 7:31 and 9:12). According to Mark, the experience on the Mount of Transfiguration hardly enables Peter to understand the significance of what he is seeing, for we are told he does not know what to say on account of his terror (Mark 9:6, cf. 16:8), a theme repeated in Luke at 9:33 but absent in Matthew where, arguably, the request to build three σκηναί is understood to indicate a true perception of the significance of what is happening. Similarly in Matthew the suggestion of clearer perception on the part of the disciples is confirmed by their ensuing question concerning Elijah. Jesus’ enigmatic reply is understood by the disciples as a reference to John the Baptist (17:13). Here their interpretative wisdom is marked. It is of great moment to attach the mystery of the prophecy of Elijah to John the Baptist, a flash of insight parallel to Matthew’s version of Peter’s confession, which is said to be the result of divine revelation (16:17ff.). 16

t.Hag. 2:6; y.Hag. 77b; b.Hag. 15a and Ber.R. 2:4. See C. Rowland, ‘The Vision of the Risen Christ in Rev. i.13ff.’, JTS 31 (1980): 1–11 = above, pp. 185–194. 17

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Wisdom and insight about the nature of things, particularly concerning the mysteries of the future, are typical of the apocalyptic and mystical tradition, and it is often after a throne-theophany that they are granted to the mystic. In the Apocalypse of Abraham, for example, the patriarch is shown the meaning of the story of humanity from creation to eschaton. In the Hebrew Book of Enoch (3 Enoch) the ascent to heaven includes angelological mysteries as well as the secret of God’s failure to act on behalf of the Jews. That kind of insight about a problem is paralleled in the enigmatic passages which follow the account of the ascent of the Four to the heavenly Paradise in the Babylonian Talmud version.18 In that version in particular, there is little doubt that what is described is a heavenly journey with all its perils and privileges.19 At its conclusion Ben Zoma, one of the four, is asked difficult halakic questions, which he is able to answer in consequence of his heightened awareness and insight. It is a feature of the later mystical tradition that such insight is vouchsafed to the mystical adept, who safely makes the heavenly journey and is thereby able to consult with śar Torah, the ‘Prince of Torah’20 (one of the angels), about the mysteries of Torah interpretation. In Matthew’s account of the Transfiguration, the points of contact with Jewish mysticism make such a background likely. We are not then surprised to find that, at the climax of the Gospel (28:18), the risen Christ claims all authority not only over the earth but in heaven too. Other passages relate directly to our theme of the poor and outcast, and in these it is possible to detect a polemic against a preoccupation with heaven. For Matthew, the glorious Son of Man on his heavenly throne has descended to earth and is to be located among ‘the least’. Blessedness is not, we are to understand, attained by searching the heavens but, in the phrase Matthew uses after the adoration of the Magi, ‘by another way’ (2:12). The first of these passages to be considered is the conclusion of the eschatological discourse (25:31–46) where we find a judgement scene, commonly called the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, with a parallel not in the other Synoptic Gospels but in a Jewish text, ‘The Similitudes of Enoch’ (1 En. 37–71), where the heavenly Son of Man sits on God’s throne of glory, exercising judgement and vindicating the elect. A new element in the Matthaean scene, however, is the astonishment with which the righteous learn that they have, in fact, ministered to this glorious Son of Man in the persons of the naked, the poor, the hungry, the sick, the stranger and those in prison. Their destiny, they discover, was determined at the moment of responding to the needs of those who appeared to be nonentities, those who were apparently

18

b.Hag. 14b. See Rowland, The Open Heaven, 309ff. 20 Scholem, Major Trends, 77. 19

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the farthest removed in every respect from this heavenly judge who now claims that what the righteous had done to them they had done to him. There are parallels to all this in the Jewish tradition where respect for the human person created in God’s image, irrespective of nation or religious affiliation, is to be found. Most akin to Matthew’s sheep and goats is 2 En. 42:8ff., where clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, looking after widows and orphans, and coming to the aid of those who have suffered injustice, are criteria for blessedness. But Matthew’s links with the throne-theophany tradition are revealed in other, more surprising ways. In ch. 18 the disciples ask Jesus who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. He answers by taking a child and declaring to the disciples that the one who ‘humbles himself as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven’ (v. 4). The child must be their measure of true greatness. In v. 6 Jesus is portrayed as speaking of the children as ‘these little ones’, another key term in Matthew’s Gospel. Response to the child or the little one is the same as response to Jesus. Just as fulfilling the needs of the hungry and thirsty means fulfilling the needs of the heavenly Son of Man, so receiving a child means receiving Jesus himself (v. 6). A woe is pronounced on those who cause one of them to stumble, for ‘these little ones’ are the ones ‘who believe in me’.21 There is something special about the child. Once again, echoing the language of the apocalyptic tradition, we are told their angels have the privilege of beholding God’s face, the highest of all privileges. The climax of the heavenly ascent is the vision of God enthroned in glory, something normally denied not only to mortals but also to angels. The angels of Matthew’s little ones stand in close proximity to the throne of glory and share in that destiny which is vouchsafed to the elect in the New Jerusalem, described in Revelation (22:4), of seeing God face to face: ‘His servants shall worship him, and they shall see his face, and his name shall be on their foreheads.’ The little ones in Matt. 18:10 have a particular privilege, just as in Matt. 11:25 it is ‘the babes’ to whom the significance of Jesus’ ministry is revealed while it is hidden from the wise. Matt. 18:10 presupposes some kind of link between the little ones and their angels. Such a connection is found in the Jewish haggadah, where the ancestors are regarded as the embodiment of the mysteries of God’s throne and person. So one source says: ‘The patriarchs are the merkabah, the thronechariot.’22 Accordingly we find in another passage angels competing with one another to catch a glimpse of Abraham and Jacob whose features are

21

This phrase ἕνα τῶν µικρῶν τούτων τῶν πιστευόντων εἰς ἐµέ is found only here in Matthew and most likely refers to the privileged insight given to the least as compared with the wise and sophisticated (Matt. 11:25–26). Certain groups are privileged to be in receipt of the divine mysteries vouchsafed in Jesus’ teaching (13:35, cf. 1 Pet. 1:11–12). 22 E.g. Ber.R. 47:6; 69:3; 82:6.

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engraved on the throne of glory.23 Perhaps it is something similar which lies behind Paul’s assertion in 2 Cor. 3:18 that life under the new covenant means that ‘we all, with unveiled face, are beholding the glory of the Lord and being changed from glory to glory’. Earlier in Matthew, in the Beatitudes at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus declares that the pure in heart will see God. Once again we have terminology familiar from the mystical tradition in which the seer is vouchsafed a glimpse of the divine kābōd, ‘glory’, after the heavenly ascent. Just as in the Jewish mystical tradition such a privilege comes only after a thorough grounding in Torah, Mishnah and Talmud, so here too, in Matthew, an ethical dimension is similarly stressed. Less obviously connected with the apocalyptic and mystical tradition is Jesus’ exposition of the significance of John the Baptist’s person and activity in Matt. 11. All the Synoptic Gospels link John with the messenger who is to precede the great and terrible day of the Lord: ‘Behold, I send my messenger to prepare the way before me’ (Mal. 3:1). John’s position is indeed exalted in so far as the marginal figure baptising at the Jordan is identified with Elijah returned from heaven to announce the imminence of that great and terrible day. The significance of the allusion to the verses in Malachi, lost in our English translations, is the occurrence of the word ἄγγελος, usually translated ‘messenger’. Even allowing for some flexibility of usage, due account needs to be taken of the fact that elsewhere in Matthew ἄγγελος refers to a heavenly emissary from God. Moreover, the verse from Malachi applied to John is an allusion to Exod. 23:30 which speaks of God’s angel going before the people as they journey out of Egypt. Exod. 23:20 is a passage of some importance within Jewish mystical literature. It is used to support the belief in an exalted angel named Metatron whose greatness derives from the indwelling of the divine name in him (see b.San. 38b). Although references to that angel who bears the divine name are found only in texts later than the New Testament, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that such beliefs were current at the end of the first century when early Christians were formulating their beliefs about Christ. One example of this comes in an apocalypse which is dated towards the end of the first century CE. In it there appears an angel, the description of whom bears remarkable similarities to the vision of Christ in Revelation, as well as with other Jewish texts (Apoc. Abr. 10:9: ‘I am called Jaoel by him who moves that which exists with me on the seventh expanse of the firmament, a power in virtue of the ineffable name that is dwelling in me’).24

23

Targum Neofiti on Gen. 22. See C. Rowland, ‘A Man Clothed in White Linen: A Study in the Development of Jewish Angelology’, JSNT 24 (1985): 99–110 = above, pp. 85–96. 24

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There is more to be said on this subject in connection with the elucidation of New Testament Christology. Though this material may not at first sight seem to be relevant for the interpretation of the reference to John the Baptist in Matt. 11, the identification of John with an angel belongs to an ancient tradition (and, in the Orthodox East, a continuing one). It is discussed by Origen who, in his commentary on the Gospel of John (2.31 on John 1:6), interprets ‘there was a man sent from God whose name was John’ with a quotation from the important Jewish pseudepigraphon The Prayer of Joseph.25 He offers this as an example of the belief that a human being could be an incarnation of an angel: I Jacob who am speaking to you am also Israel an angel of God and a ruling spirit. Abraham and Isaac were created before any work. But I Jacob … whose name is Israel … am he whom God called Israel, which means a man seeing God, because I am the first-born of every living thing to which God gives life. … I descended to earth and tabernacled among humanity, and I was called Jacob.

The importance of this Jewish work, which is quoted only partially by Origen, is that in it we learn that the patriarch Jacob is the incarnation of the exalted angel Israel. The terminology used here is reminiscent of that used of the incarnation of the Logos in John 1:14 and (if authentically Jewish) is testimony to a Jewish writing envisaging the possibility of a heavenly being becoming incarnate in human form. After the quotation there is a lengthy digression in which Origen argues for the belief that John the Baptist was an angel and took human form in order to bear witness to the light of the divine Logos. There may be hints in Matthew (and in Luke) that there was an awareness of an identification of John with an angel. Not only does the passage in Matthew (11:7–11) contain the application of Malachi to John but the ensuing discussion suggests that John is no ordinary human being. His extraordinary character is stressed here – ‘he is the greatest among those born of women’. That could be interpreted as an implicit polemic against more exalted claims for John such as are reflected in Origen’s discussion. There may have been those who held that he really was an angelic mediator, the angel who would go before the face of the Lord. He would thus be a figure like the angel Israel in the Prayer of Joseph. The angelic origin of John is not denied in Matthew, and indeed may be the reason why he is the greatest of those born of women. But, despite John’s greatness, the least in the kingdom is greater than he. Who then is ‘the least’? This is a matter of debate. It could refer to Jesus himself. Jesus would then be the one who followed John, not in the role of a mighty figure but as the one who is meek and lowly of heart. The superior 25 The authenticity and theological provenance is discussed by J.Z. Smith, ‘The Prayer of Joseph’, in Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, ed. J. Neusner, SHR 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 253–294.

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position is thus given in Matthew and Luke to the Son of Man who had nowhere to lay his head (Matt. 10:32, cf. Luke 12:8). Those who identify with this ‘little one’ are themselves thereby given a significant status. Response to ‘little ones’ is response to the one who is ‘least’ in the kingdom (Matt. 10:42). Or it may be a reference to the sort of person who identifies with Jesus. If we suppose that the least, ὁ µικρότερος, is a reference to the humble disciple, we have an elevation of the ‘least’ to a position which exceeds that of John. So much, in brief survey, for possible connections with the apocalyptic tradition. Debate, however, has raged over the identity of Jesus’ brethren in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. Is it right to see in the verse, ‘As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me’ (25:40) a reference to all the poor, naked, hungry, sick and imprisoned, or is it not the case that, in Matthew’s Gospel at least, they are references to followers of Christ, particularly to those Christian missionaries who might need shelter and care? Powerful arguments have been marshalled for the view that Jesus’ brethren refers exclusively to poor Christians and not to the poor in general.26 And such arguments adduce the fact that Jesus’ disciples are referred to as ‘brethren’ elsewhere in the Gospel. Moreover the related verse at 10:42, which speaks of service to one of these little ones, has been taken to mean that a reward goes to anyone offering a drink of water to a disciple, the parallel verse at Mark 9:41 lending support to this view.27 Matthew’s change of wording could represent an intention not to confine the recipients of acts of mercy to followers of Christ only, the debate over the identity of the ‘brethren’ of 25:40, or of ‘the least’ at 25:45, however it is decided, should not blind the reader of Matthew’s Gospel as a whole to the fact that, throughout Matthew’s narrative, the Son of Man identifies himself with a much wider group than the disciples who are in need of succour, who are ‘like sheep without a shepherd’ (9:36, cf. 4:23).28 There is one issue which I believe has not received enough attention in the debate about the identity of Jesus’ brethren. While an identification of the 26

For an example of this see G.N. Stanton, Gospel for a New People: Studies in Matthew (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992), 207ff., and S.W. Gray, The Least of My Brothers, SBLDS 114 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). 27 Most translations of Matt. 10:42 identify the little ones as the disciples. But the Greek is more ambiguous, a fact well brought out in the Authorized Version’s rendering ‘And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple’. The phrase εἰς ὄνοµα µαθητοῦ may well be a Semitism but we are not in a position to decide whether the act is earned out because the recipient is a disciple, because the donor is a disciple, or because the donor acts on the basis of the injunction or example of a disciple. 28 For an approach to Matt. 25:31ff. which takes seriously the wider literary context and questions the priority of the original meaning of the text see F. Watson in The Open Text: New Directions for Biblical Studies? (London: SCM, 1993), 57ff.

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disciples with the µικροί, the little ones, may indeed be found earlier in the Gospel, the picture of the disciples becomes progressively less positive.29 After the revelation granted to Peter at 16:17 concerning the true nature of Jesus, Peter becomes an embodiment of Satan and a σκάνδαλον to Jesus, while his remonstration with Jesus at 26:33, ‘Though they all fall away because of you, I will never fall away’, is followed by his emphatic denial of Jesus later in the same chapter. After the descent from the Mount of Transfiguration, the disciples who failed to heal the epileptic boy are reproached by Jesus for being a faithless generation (17:17, cf. 16:4 and 21:20). And despite the words of Jesus about the blessedness of children, the disciples rebuke the children who come to Jesus (19:13), they are indignant with the woman who anoints the head of Jesus (26:8), and they are astounded by the implications of Jesus’ teaching on divorce and wealth (19:10 and 19:25). They are blind to the humble way of the Messiah and desire places of honour in the kingdom (which is not disguised by their mother acting as their agent, 20:20ff.). They remain attached to the old order (24:1) and, like the Pharisees, want to know what signs will usher in the New Age (24:3, cf. 16:4). Judas betrays Jesus; his closest disciples fail to watch with him (26:40–45); while their readiness to use the power of the old order to resist Jesus’ arrest is rebuked by Jesus in a statement of spiritual principle peculiar to Matthew’s account: ‘all who take the sword will perish by the sword.’ Even after the resurrection, when the eleven disciples go to Galilee to meet Jesus on the mountain, ‘some of them doubted’ (28:16). So a case can be made for seeing the second half of the Gospel as being one in which the ideal of discipleship ceases to be embodied in the group of disciples, with the result that other paradigms are needed. This is seen most clearly in ch. 18, where the child is set over against the Twelve as the type of true greatness. Although Peter has had his moments of insight, it is the crowd which hails Jesus as he enters Jerusalem (21:9), the blind and the lame who come to him in the Temple (21:14), and the children who cry out, ‘Hosanna to the son of David!’ (21:15). These are the νήπιοι, babes, of whom the Psalmist speaks and Matthew quotes: ‘Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise’ (21:16 quoting Ps. 8). The νήπιοι referred to at 11:25, where Jesus gives thanks to his heavenly father for hiding these things from the wise and intelligent and revealing them to babes, includes the disciples,30 but as the Gospel proceeds the adult disciples are those who are seen to slip over onto the side of Satan, betraying, denying and abandoning 29

Cf. the classic treatment of discipleship in Matthew by U. Luz, ‘The Disciples in the Gospel According to Matthew’, in The Interpretation of Matthew, ed. G.N. Stanton (London: SPCK, 1983), 98–128. 30 On the possibility that a wider circle is suggested see U. Luz, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus, Teilband 2, EKK 1.2 (Zürich: Benziger, 1990), 205–206.

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the Son of Man. This shift is in line with much else in Matthew’s Gospel which, like the Book of Revelation, is directed to challenging complacency.31 Certainty concerning salvation is not offered by these works, not even to those who can claim to be disciples. In the light of this shift I want to question the widespread assumption that the child in Matthew’s Gospel is merely a cipher for the Church member. Children are mentioned elsewhere in the Synoptic Gospels and are important in the Bible generally. They continue the race and are a sign of hope and, in the case of Immanuel at Isa. 7:14, of judgement. But, whatever their significance as symbols, their rights are limited, their obligation being to continue in the tradition of the fathers. The ideal child is one who is obedient. A rebellious son like Absalom is no role model. The instructions to sons in Proverbs epitomise the subordinate position of the child. His task (and it is instruction directed to males rather than to females) is to be an empty vessel ready to receive the wisdom of his father (Prov. 13:1, cf. 5:1; 6:20; 4:10; 4:1–4; 4:20; 1:8). A fool on the other hand spurns his father’s correction (15:5). Folly is deep-rooted in children and only a good beating will drive it out of them (22:13). It is the task of the parent to set the child on the path he should go. Being a child is to be an inferior who needs to have the emptiness of immaturity filled with adult wisdom. All this contrasts with the themes of Matthew’s Gospel. There, the privilege of the apparently insignificant and of children is given added importance by the mystical tradition which forms part of the background of Matthew’s account. It is a surprising perspective. The child moves to centre stage. To place a child in the midst of the disciples is to challenge the assumption that the child has nothing of worth and can only be heeded when it has received another’s wisdom. The ordering of things which characterises the adult world is not the embodiment of wisdom, and may in fact be a perversion of it. Here is a perspective which challenges the traditions of older generations. To be as a child is a mark of greatness, in terms of the values of the kingdom, for it is the children and those able to identify with them who have solidarity with the humble – and therefore with Jesus. The characteristic of the child, the little one, the least, is that such are peculiarly able to have the kind of insight appropriate to those whose angels always behold the divine face. The position of children in the ancient world

31 Stanton’s argument in The Gospel of a New People, that Matthew’s eschatology is typical of the promise of vindication for a beleaguered sect, and so is lacking in concern for non-members, seems to me to ignore the ambiguities which pervade the Gospel’s portrayal of ‘insiders’. When the disciples are addressed, it is often with words of warning about their imminent failure (24:5, 6, 25, 42; 25:15) – something which actually takes place in 26:24 and 31.

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was much inferior to the more child-centred world of today.32 They were often, as a matter of course, treated brutally by our standards. On the other hand children were widely believed to be in close contact with the divine world and in the light of this it is possible to understand why Matthew suggests that children possess an insight which disciples must emulate, not despise. Theirs is an intuition into the nature of God, which seems to belong especially to those who are in some sense at a disadvantage in relation to the wise and prudent of this world (11:25). It is too simple to say that those who have such insight are the ‘poor’. It might be more appropriate to call them the ‘marginal’. They are, in any case, the ‘humble’, both in terms of status and natural endowment.33 In Matthew’s Gospel there is a privilege for this group in regard to the understanding of divine mysteries; a privilege which is to be seen as a grace rather than as a right. And the disciples share in it, but they have imbibed the dominant ideology and their vision is limited in consequence. At the heart of Matthew’s Christology is the deliberate identification of Immanuel – ‘God with us’ – with the powerless and weak, an identification which is maintained consistently throughout the Gospel: ‘He took our infirmities and bore our diseases’ (Isa. 53:4 quoted at 8:7), ‘He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smouldering wick’ (Isa. 42:3 quoted at 12:20), and ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice’ (Hos. 6:6) which Matthew quotes twice (9:13 and 12:7), the second time being a significant addition to the story of the disciples plucking ears of corn (cf. Mark 2:23–28; Luke 6:1–5). The privilege of being called into the kingdom is no longer confined to the seer or mystic, but is granted to the sheep who follow the Shepherd in identifying with the poor and humble, and who respond to those making claims on them from positions of weakness. But, quite as much as the goats, the sheep are misled by appearances. They do not know that in ministering to the naked, poor, hungry, sick, stranger and imprisoned they have ministered to the heavenly Son of Man on his throne of glory. So in Matthew’s Gospel we have a narrative in which another dimension to ordinary life is revealed, a strategy typical of the apocalyptic and mystical tradition. It gives us another perspective, a divine dimension of which apocalyptic enables us to catch a glimpse. It is impossible to understand human existence or the hidden nature of individuals unless one is also aware of

32

See e.g. T.E.J. Wiedemann, Adults and Children in the Roman Empire (London: Routledge, 1989), S. Légasse, Jésus et l’enfant (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1969), but note the cautionary remarks of P. Garnsey, ‘Child Rearing in Ancient Italy’, in The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present, eds. D.I. Kertzer and R.P. Saller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 48–65. 33 Similarly K. Wengst, Humility: Solidarity of the Humiliated, trans. J. Bowden (London: SCM, 1986).

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another, hidden story. The apocalyptic dimension to ordinary life is especially pronounced in Matthew. The little ones are really the ones whose angels are able to gaze on the divine kābōd. The hungry and the imprisoned are really the ones who are, in some sense, representations of the divine Son of Man. We may speak perhaps of a story on two levels, which cannot be understood without regard to both levels of the narrative. Not much of the second level is available to us, but occasionally the curtain is raised on it and we catch a glimpse. One might even say that the Gospel is a kind of allegory and that it is not so much the plain meaning of the text but that other story, which alone can make sense of the plain meaning. There has to be an apocalyptic dimension to it in order to open our minds to its true meaning and thereby to read it aright. I hope I have said enough to suggest that there are sufficient indications in the Gospel of Matthew to warrant a closer consideration of its indebtedness to the Jewish apocalyptic and mystical tradition, and that what has been said with regard to Matthew can be said, mutatis mutandis, for other parts of the New Testament. These reflections on the First Gospel are representative of the possibilities, which study of this aspect of the Jewish tradition can yield for the interpretation of the New Testament as a whole. There is hardly a book in it which cannot be illuminated by the esoteric world of mysticism and apocalyptic – a challenging prospect for the student of Christian origins.

16. Apocalyptic, Mysticism and the New Testament 16.1. The Mystical Dimension of Apocalypticism As a young graduate student I vividly remember reading with a profound sense of gratitude Martin Hengel’s statement of the importance for New Testament studies of the emerging mystical tradition of Judaism: ‘Investigation of the Jewish Hekaloth and Merkabah literature for early Christian christology has still a wide field to explore …’.1 I am glad to have this opportunity to explore aspects of that, still wide, field here. Jewish mysticism2 in all its various manifestations has had a long history from the very earliest times after the return from exile in Babylon by way of 1

M. Hengel, The Son of God (London: SCM, 1976), 89. In addition to the New Testament documents considered here Ephesians and Hebrews would need to be included in a complete survey of the links between the New Testament and early Jewish mysticism (see briefly A.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: Cambridge University Press, 1981]; L.D. Hurst, The Epistle to the Hebrews: Its Background of Thought [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990]; O. Hofius, Der Vorhang vor dem Thron Gottes, WUNT 14 [Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1972]; H. Odeberg, The View of the Universe in the Epistle to the Ephesians, Lunds Universitets Årsskrift, n.s. 1, 29:6 [Lund: Gleerup, 1934]). 2 G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 3rd rev. edn. (New York: Schocken, 1954); idem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition, 2nd edn. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1965); also I. Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, AGJU 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1980); idem, From Apocalyptic to Gnosticism: Studies in Apocalypticism, Merkavah Mysticism and Gnosticism (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1988); N. Deutsch, The Gnostic Imagination; Gnosticism, Mandaeism and Merkabah Mysticism (Leiden: Brill, 1995); D.J. Halperin, The Merkabah in Rabbinic Literature, AOS 62 (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1980); idem, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988), especially ch. 3 (see C.R.E. Morray-Jones’s dissertation, Merkabah Mysticism and Talmudic Tradition [Diss. Cambridge, 1988] and his review of Halperin’s Faces, in: JTS 41 [1990]: 585–589); C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982); D. Hellholm, ed., Apocalypticsm in the Mediterranean World, 2nd edn. (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1989); J.J. Collins and J.H. Charlesworth, Mysteries and Revelations: Apocalyptic Studies since the Uppsala Colloquium, JSPSup 9 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991);

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the mystics among the tannaim and amoraim through the kabbalah down to the Hasidic movements nearer our own day. According to m.Hag. 2:1 Jewish mysticism is divided into two main branches, that concerned with cosmogony and cosmology based on Gen. 1 (maʿaseh bereshith) and that based on Ezek. 1 and the throne-chariot of God (maʿaseh merkabah). The latter is much more theologically orientated in so far as it deals specifically with the nature of God and the deity’s immediate environment in heaven. What we have here is not a mystical communion of the saint with God as in Christian mysticism, but the participation in and knowledge of events which are unseen to the human eye. Jewish mysticism is much more a case of knowledge or enlightenment about things which remained hidden in heaven, whether cosmological, astronomical, eschatological or theological. It seems probable that esoteric traditions associated with Ezek. 1 and similar passages were inherited by (some of) the early tannaim from the apocalyptic milieu of Second Temple Judaism, though the precise relationship remains obscure. These traditions (as in apocalyptic) probably had both an exegetical and a ‘practical’ (i.e. visionary-mystical) aspect. The tradition was linked with authorities like Yohanan ben Zakkai and Rabbi Akiba though some disapproved of it. This hostility probably never died out and certainly extended down to the time of the redaction of the Mishnah (it seems likely that Rabbi disapproved of the tradition – y.Hag. 2:1). By the early second century the practices of the esoteric tradition appears to have been engaged in by leading rabbis such as Akiba. Controversy concerning the status and legitimacy of the tradition is likely to have occurred during the first century, probably because of the way in which such traditions were developed in extra-rabbinic circles, not least Christianity. The publication of the material from Caves 4 and 11 known as the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice3 has given support to the view that the origin of the idea of the Hekaloth (heavenly Temple), liturgy and the existence of a complex angelology is linked with speculation about God’s dwelling in the Second Temple period. These fragmentary texts offer us tantalising glimpses of a (speculative?) interest, which need not necessarily be the property of a P. Schäfer, The Hidden and Manifest God: Some Major Themes in Early Jewish Mysticism, trans. A. Pomerance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); J. Dan and F. Talmage, eds., Studies in Jewish Mysticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Association for Jewish Studies, 1982); and G.A. Wewers, Geheimnis und Geheimhaltung im rabbinischen Judentum, RGVV 35 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975). 3 See C.A. Newsom, Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985), and on the expositions of the chapter in the apocalyptic tradition see C. Rowland, ‘The Visions of God in Apocalyptic Literature’, JSJ 10 (1979): 137–154 = above, pp. 29–45; C.A. Newsom, ‘Merkabah Exegesis in the Qumran Sabbath Shirot’, JJS 38 (1987): 11–30; I. Chernus, ‘Visions of God in Merkabah Mysticism’, JSJ 13 (1982): 123–146; and Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism.

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marginal group within Judaism. In them we find angelic beings described as ‘gods’ (4Q405 23 i 13) having a priestly function in a heavenly liturgy within the innermost sanctum of heaven (4Q405 23 ii). These divine beings have intimate knowledge of the divine secrets engraved in the heavens (e.g. 4Q402 4). The repetitive style is typical not only of the later Hekaloth material but also of the letter to the Ephesians. The mention of the different heavenly languages (4Q403 1 i 1–294) suggests a peculiar language for different parts of heaven that may be akin to the glossolalia mentioned in the New Testament and alluded to in works like the Testament of Job 48. The various structural parts of the Temple are praised in 4Q403 1 i 41–46 and are made up of divine merkaboth whose parts themselves have become angelic beings (4Q403 1 ii5, cf. 11Q17 where a number of thrones are mentioned). The angelic host is divided into different groups each with their own leader and is so reminiscent of the complex angelology of a later text like 3 Enoch (e.g. 4Q403 1 ii6). The carefully defined order of the liturgy and the deferential nature of the worship of the different grades of angels to the group of higher status may illuminate the enigmatic reference to the ‘humility and worship of angels’ of Col. 2:18. In heaven there is a variety of entrances (similar to the earthly Temple) in and out of which run the angelic host (4Q405 14–157) destined for the divine service. In the merkabah fragment published many years ago8 (4Q4059), the movement of the divine merkabah is described and speaks of the glorious chariots (merkaboth). They are a testimony to an extensive interest in the heavenly world, which exceeds the detail of all the extant apocalyptic texts. The fragments provide an insight into the existence of speculations in the Second Temple period, which give the lie to the notion that such interests were merely the creation of the early Christian era. We cannot, however, conclude that they originated in visionary experience, and were part of a report of heavenly ascents or some other genre from the fragmentary evidence now extant. The descriptions of the divine throne in the Jewish apocalypses owe their inspiration principally to the first chapter of Ezekiel, though it is apparent that Isa. 6 has also been incorporated (e.g. 1 En. 14; Dan. 7:9; Apoc. Abr. 17; Test. Abr. 11; Rev. 4; 2 En. 22). There has been much debate about the character of that tradition. On the one hand there are those who consider that the evidence indicates that the study of Ezekiel involved a seeing again of 4 F. García Martínez and E.J.C. Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 819. 5 García Martínez and Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, 821. 6 García Martínez and Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, 817. 7 García Martínez and Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, 835. 8 Ed. J. Strugnell, ‘The Angelic Liturgy at Qumran – 4Q SEREK ŠÎRÔT ʿÔLAT HAŠŠABBĀT’, in Congress Volume Oxford 1959, VTSup 7 (Leiden: Brill, 1960), 318–345. 9 García Martínez and Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, 833–834.

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Ezekiel’s vision by the apocalyptists and rabbinic mystics. On the other hand there are those who argue that the material (particularly the rabbinic sources) will not bear the weight of such an interpretation and prefer to see the references as indicating a midrashic activity connected with these chapters, which did not differ substantially in the earliest period from that connected with other parts of Scripture. In apocalyptic texts the vision of the merkabah is often preceded by an ascent to heaven, though there is nothing in the Qumran material explicitly to suggest that humans ascend to heaven to witness these heavenly events.10 This is a noteworthy development as compared with the biblical exemplars. Although Isaiah believes that he can be part of the heavenly court during the course of his call-vision in the Temple (Isa. 6, cf. 1 Kgs. 22:16), there is no suggestion that this involves an ascent to the heavenly world. The most remarkable passage of this kind in the Jewish apocalypses, and which offers early testimony of interest in the divine merkabah, is 1 En. 14:8ff.11 It is found in the context of Enoch’s intercession for the doomed Watchers and is in some ways an extraordinarily long digression from the main point of the saga. Enoch is commissioned to announce judgement on the Watchers and Azazel (13:1) and to convey their request that Enoch should intercede with God on their behalf (13:4ff.). The Watchers’ petition is rejected (14:1ff.) and Enoch recounts his experience in 14:2ff., which leads to the heavenly ascent and another account of the divine rejection of the petition. Here we have an account of a mortal taken into the divine presence (parallel to other early Enoch traditions such as Jub. 4:20ff., which may be dependent on 1 En. 14), the latter confirming the view that the former may present Enoch as a celestial high priest entering the heavenly Holy of Holies.12 We probably have no way of knowing if the descriptions of God’s throne in the apocalypses, with their amalgam of various biblical passages, are the product of conventional exegetical activity carried on in the confines of scribal activity. But the possibility should not be ignored that in the study of Scripture creative imagination could have been a potent means of encouraging the belief that the biblical passages were not merely written records of past events but vehicles of contemporary manifestations of the divine. That, of course, is precisely what the writer of the New Testament Apocalypse asserts in speaking about being ‘in the spirit’ (Rev. 4:2, cf. 1:9). Such indica-

10

This has been the subject of detailed study of late and the importance of this phenomenon in writing emerging in Judaism and Christianity cannot be underestimated, see M. Dean-Otting, Heavenly Journeys: A Study of the Motif in Hellenistic Jewish Literature (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1984); and M. Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 11 Halperin, Faces of the Chariot, 78ff. 12 Halperin, Faces of the Chariot, 80ff.

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tions, when taken together with the obvious absence of the kind of orderly exegetical activity, which we find in contemporary biblical commentaries, should make us wary of ruling out the possibility of the biblical text being, in the minds of the apocalyptic visionaries, a door of perception in which the text could become the means of opening up a living reality as its details merged with parallel scriptural passages to form the distinctive visions of heaven now found in some of the apocalypses.13

16.2. The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ Mysteries are mentioned from time to time in the New Testament; revelations are reported, and the future can be predicted in the darkest of hues. But in the Apocalypse the whole panoply of apocalyptic is set before us. The panorama of divine wrath and restoration vividly portrayed in the visionary imagination seems to belong to a different world from much of the rest of the New Testament. Revelation is a continuation of much of what has gone before, however, certainly as far as the debts to the emerging mystical tradition are concerned.14 The Books of Ezekiel and Daniel have influenced the form and content of the Book of Revelation. From the christophany at its opening via the visions of heaven, the dirge over Babylon, the war against Gog and Magog, and finally the vision of the New Jerusalem all bear the marks of influence on the prophetic imagination of John of Patmos. Daniel’s beasts from the sea become in John’s vision a terrible epitome of all that is most oppressive and uncannily akin to the way of perfection symbolised by the Lamb that was slain.15 This unique example in the early Christian literature of the apocalyptic genre is profoundly indebted to Jewish apocalyptic ideas. In Revelation Ezek. 1, the merkabah chapter, has not only contributed to the visionary vocabulary of John but the initiatory visions (namely 1:13ff. and 4:1ff.) are dominated by it. While it may be supposed that the resources which John could call on to

13 Or as Halperin, Faces of the Chariot, 71, has put it: ‘When the apocalyptic visionary “sees” some- thing that looks like Ezekiel’s merkabah, we may assume that he is seeing the merkabah vision as he has persuaded himself it really was, as Ezekiel would have seen it had he been inspired wholly and not in part.’ John of Patmos exemplifies Halperin’s point: John follows Ezekiel’s example in seeing the heavens opened (Rev. 4:1, cf. Ezek. 1:1) and eating the scroll (Rev. 10:9, cf. Ezek. 3:1ff.) and, what is more, like Daniel, sees a divine figure who is the author of the revelations of what is to come (Rev. 1:13ff., cf. Dan. 10:5–6). 14 In addition to Rowland, ‘The Visions of God’, and Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, see Halperin, Faces of the Chariot, 87ff. 15 On the connections of Daniel and Revelation with Ezekiel’s ḥayyot, see the suggestive comments of Halperin, Faces of the Chariot, 76ff.

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express the divine glory that confronted him were indeed limited (at least as far as scriptural exemplars were concerned), the extent of the indebtedness to Ezekiel points in the direction of more than a chance reference. When taken alongside those other descriptions of the divinity, which are now extant from the Second Temple period, we may suppose that we have in Revelation a glimpse of the tip of a mystical iceberg now largely lost from our view. What is visible, points to a distinctive use of the prophecy parallel to, but in significant respects different from, other apocalyptic texts. Although the secrets which are revealed in Revelation are largely concerned with the future hope, its outlook is at one with the mystical literature of Judaism. Its angelology, heavenly voices and preoccupation with the hidden, is precisely what we find in the mystical literature. Revelation is not concerned with the minute detail of the heavenly ascent (indeed there is a minimum of interest in the paraphernalia of the apocalyptic ascent) nor does it offer details of what is required of the mystic to make a successful entry into the heavenly palaces. We cannot know what led to John’s dramatic meeting with the heavenly Son of Man on the Isle of Patmos, even if conjectures may be made about the significance of the time (the Lord’s Day) and the place (in exile as was the prophet Ezekiel). The opening of the book describes a christophany with few parallels in the New Testament (the Transfiguration being a notable exception).16 There are some similarities with various christophanies and angelophanies from both Jewish and Christian texts. The elements of this chapter are inspired by several Old Testament passages, one of which is the first chapter of Ezekiel,17 particularly that at the climax of his call-vision where the prophet catches a glimpse of the form of God on the throne of glory in the dazzling gleam of bronze, and Dan. 10:5–6 where we find a vision of a heavenly being broadly based on Ezekiel and especially on the first chapter. There are hints of a tradition of interpretation of Ezek. 1,18 particularly in visionary contexts, in which the glorious figure on the throne acts in a quasiangelic role. This is evident when we compare Revelation with the contemporary Apocalypse of Abraham, where there is a remarkably similar vision.19 16 Thoroughly explored in L.T. Stuckenbruck, Angel Veneration and Christology: A Study in Early Judaism and in the Christology of the Apocalypse of John, WUNT 2.70 (Tübingen: J.C.B Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1995). 17 The vision of God’s glory in human form was the basis of the shiʿur qomah speculation which may go back to the Second Temple period. See M.S. Cohen, The Shiʿur Qomah: The Liturgy and Theurgy in Pre-Kabbalistic Jewish Mysticism (Lanham: University Press of America, 1983); J.M. Baumgarten, ‘The Book of Elchesai and Merkabah Mysticism’, JSJ 17 (1986): 212–223. 18 Most recently discussed in Stuckenbruck, Angel Veneration, 211–212. 19 A detailed comparison is offered in C. Rowland, ‘A Man Clothed in White Linen: A Study in the Development of Jewish Angelology’, JSNT 24 (1985): 99–110 = above,

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Rev. 1:13–17

Apocalypse of Abraham 11:2

… and in the midst of the lamp stands one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden girdle round his breast; his head and his hair were white as wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters; in his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth issued a sharp twoedged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength …

… and the appearance of his body was like sapphire, and the look of his countenance like chrysolite, and the hair of his head like snow, and the turban upon his head like the appearance of a rainbow (cf. Rev. 4:3), and the clothing of his garments like purple; and a golden sceptre was in his right hand …

The vision of Christ marks the very start of John’s revelation, and although there are similar ‘angelophanies’ in Rev. 10:1ff. and 14:6ff., this inaugural vision is not typical of the christology of the rest of the Apocalypse.20 After the instruction to write the Letters to the Seven Churches (a scribal role which resembles that of Enoch in 1 En. 12–14), John is called to heaven ‘in the spirit’ and is granted a vision of the divine throne with one seated upon it. There is no mention of a heavenly journey in this text preceding the granting of the vision of God. Indeed, Revelation is singularly lacking in the complex uranology, which is typical of later Jewish apocalyptic texts and is sparse in the details communicated about the heavenly world. Nevertheless there is at the start of this new dimension of John’s vision, a vision of the throne which owes some of its details to Ezek. 1 and to the related passage in Isa. 6. Rev. 4 offers a heavenly throne scene which could easily have been written by any Jew, though some have found evidence of particular Christian influence in the reference to the twenty-four elders.21 God sits in heaven surrounded by the celestial retinue, praised by the heavenly host. It is a reality which is cut off from normal human gaze and opened up only to the privileged seer. The scene in heaven is transformed in ch. 5. John sees the scroll with seven seals, which contains the divine will for the inauguration of the eschatological process. The means of the initiation of that process turns out to pp. 85–96. It has been suggested that the angel Jaoel is conceived as the figure on the throne who moves from the throne, now covered with fire and with no reference to a human figure upon it, to act as Abraham’s guide (J.E. Fossum, The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord: Samaritan and Jewish Concepts of Intermediation and the Origin of Gnosticism, WUNT 36 [Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1985]; Rowland, The Open Heaven, especially 94ff.), but the evidence does not permit any certainty in this matter (see L.W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism [London: SCM, 1988], 88–89). At the very least this angel seems ontologically to be linked with God. 20 Discussed in Stuckenbruck, Angel Veneration, 205ff. 21 Rowland, ‘The Visions of God’, 137ff. = above, pp. 3ff.; cf. L.W. Hurtado, ‘Revelation 4–5 in the Light of Jewish Apocalyptic Analogies’, JSNT 25 (1985): 105–124.

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be the coming of the messiah, the Lion of Judah. The paradox is that this messianic Lion turns out to be a Lamb with the marks of death. Superficially, the scene is similar to that described in Dan. 7:9, where there is also a heavenly court. Whereas in the latter a human figure comes to take divine authority, here it is an animal. This parallels the way in which in 1 En. 89–90 animals represent men. Clearly, it was the fact that the Lamb’s marks of slaughter qualified it to have this supreme eschatological role and to share the divine throne (7:17). At first the Lamb stands as one of the heavenly throng, but wins the right to superiority and the privilege of divine power, as the result of the conquest wrought through death. There is in the imagery of this chapter an unusual development of the apocalyptic tradition. We are familiar with animals in dream visions from 1 En. 89ff. (the so-called Animal Apocalypse). These almost always are given symbolic significance as representing persons or nations (as the beasts represent kings in Dan. 7). In 1 Enoch, for example, animals represent humans, and men (or shepherds) angels. What we have in Revelation rather is a picture of the heavenly world. Rev. 5 offers an unusual, perhaps unique juxtaposition of the throne-theophany vision with the dream vision. We might have expected the angelic figure of ch. 1 to have been the suppliant before the divine throne. Instead there is resort to the animal symbolism of the dream vision in which the Christ is represented by a Lamb. And it is this symbol which is maintained throughout the apocalypse.22 The use of that animal symbolism, when viewed in the light of the 1 Enoch material, suggests a determined attempt to stress the humanity of the messianic agent (humans are invariably animals and only become angelic proleptically in the case of Noah in 1 En. 89:1). We may even speak of a mixing of genres here, all the more apposite when the message, which the text seeks to convey, is of the cosmos-shattering effects of the triumph of Christ. If we examine the Jewish apocalypses, it is apparent that there are several types of vision.23 There is the report by the seer of what he has seen in heaven, usually after a mystical ascent. Then there is the communication to the seer of divine secrets by an angel in which heavenly visions play no part. Finally there is the dream vision in which the seer sees in a dream various objects (often animals), which afterwards, by means of an angelic interpretation, are explained. These have no independent existence except as part of the dream vision and are merely symbols of persons and events which take place on earth. There is usually a fairly clear distinction in the apocalypses between visions of the first type and visions of the third type. In type 1 we have attempts to describe the environs of God using the terminology of Ezekiel and Isaiah. 22

See Stuckenbruck, Angel Veneration, 267ff. See the survey in J.J. Collins, Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre = Semeia 14 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979). 23

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These are not symbols but a report of what is actually believed to be the case in the world above. The dream vision with its extravagant symbols and interpretation are not usually mingled in the Jewish apocalypses as they are in Rev. 4–5. The vision in Rev. 4 is a good example of the first type of vision. John glimpses the activities in heaven normally hidden from human perception. If John had followed the conventions of apocalyptic set out in ch. 4, he might have been expected to have described Christ in language similar to that in 1:13ff. Instead we have the introduction of the language of the symbolic vision – ἀρνίον ἑστηκὸς ὡς ἐσφαγµένον. The juxtaposition of visionary types has few parallels. The awkwardness of the juxtaposition reflected also in the oxymoron in 5:5–6 ἰδοὺ ἐνίκησεν ὁ λέων ὁ ἐκ τῆς φυλῆς Ἰούδα, ἡ ῥίζα ∆αυίδ, … ἀρνίον ἑστηκὸς ὡς ἐσφαγµένον could reflect at the formal level the jarring nature of the eschatological reality to which John seeks to bear witness. The Lamb had affected the normal apocalyptic conventions and hitherto accepted patterns of discourse are shattered, as well as the understanding and course of history. With the Book of Revelation we are in the midst of the world of apocalyptic mystery. Despite attempts over the years to play down the importance of this book, the indications suggest that its thought-forms and outlook were more typical of early Christianity than is often allowed. The fact that we possess no visionary material elsewhere in the New Testament accounts for some of the differences, but they are superficial. Beneath the surface we have here convictions about God, Christ and the world, which are not far removed from the so-called ‘mainstream’ Christianity of the rest of the New Testament. The synoptic eschatological discourses are an obvious example of a similar outlook but they are by no means alone. Revelation, with its indebtedness to a shadowy, perhaps embryonic, mysticism of the Second Temple period, prompts us to look closer at the other New Testament texts to see whether they too exhibit some of the tell-tale marks of mysticism which may enable us to pursue the mystical evidence further in less overtly apocalyptic texts.

16.3. Apocalyptic Themes in the Pauline Letters We know Paul was influenced by apocalyptic ascent ideas (2 Cor. 12:2ff.), and he emphasises the importance of this visionary element as the basis of his practice (Gal. 1:12 and 1:16, cf. Acts 22:17). His apocalyptic outlook enabled him to act on his eschatological convictions, so that his apocalypse of Jesus Christ became the basis for his practice of admitting Gentiles to the messianic age without the Law of Moses. His relegation of the Sinai covenant to a subordinate position to the new covenant in the Messiah contrasts with the firm subordination of the apocalyptic spirit of Ezek. 1 to the Sinai theophany in the rabbinic traditions (on Paul’s apocalypticism, see below, pp. 412–435).

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The mystical component in Paul’s life stands like a central pillar fundamental for his whole career.24 At the very start of that phase of his life he considered himself called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ. We are no longer in a position to know exactly whether Paul, as a Pharisee, may have been introduced to the arcane mysteries of apocalyptic. The so-called conversion (‘so-called’ because, as many have pointed out, this was not the change from one religion to another but from one sect within Judaism to another) is shrouded behind the matter-of-fact accounts of the Acts of Apostles and the suggestive glimpses behind the veil in Galatians. Yet, for all that, it is the mysterious world of apocalyptic vision which best explains that shattering moment in Paul’s life. According to Acts 26:19 Paul describes what he has seen as an ὀπτασία.25 In Galatians, Paul speaks of the moment of disclosure as an ἀποκάλυψις (Gal. 1:12) and 1:16 of ‘God being pleased to reveal his son to me’. In Galatians Paul affirms that he did not receive his commission by any human agency but δι’ ἀποκαλύψεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. His gospel is just as much the result of a direct confrontation with Jesus Christ as any that had been received by the ‘pillar’ apostles. Jesus of Nazareth, seated at the right hand of God but to be manifested in glory at the close of the age (1 Cor. 1:7), had proleptically revealed himself to the Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus. In line with the Jewish apocalyptic tradition Paul thinks of another dimension to human existence normally hidden from sight but revealed to the favoured few. When Paul sees the risen lord, he sees a being in heaven. It was an experience of a similar kind, as far as we are able to judge, to that recorded in 2 Cor. 12:2.26 Here in a confession, which events have squeezed out of him, the apostle speaks in oblique fashion about an 24 See A.F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven, SJLA 25 (Leiden: Brill, 1977); Fossum, The Name of God; idem, ‘Jewish Christian Christology and Jewish Mysticism’, VC 37 (1983): 260–287; Rowland, The Open Heaven, 94ff.; idem, ‘The Vision of the Risen Christ in Rev. i.13ff.’, JTS 31 (1980): 1–11 = above, pp. 185–194; J. Ashton, Studying John (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); J.E. Fossum, The Image of the Invisible God: Essays on the Influence of Jewish Mysticism on Early Christology, NTOA 30 (Freiburg, Switzerland: Universitätsverlag, 1995); Hurtado, One God; and M. Mach, Die Entstehung des jüdischen Engelglaubens: Entwicklungsphasen des jüdischen Engelglaubens in vorrabbinischer Zeit, TSAJ 34 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1992). 25 This is a term which is used in Dan. 10:16 (Theod.) of Daniel’s vision of the exalted heavenly being (cf. Luke 1:22 and 24:23). On Acts 26:19 see O. Betz, ‘Die Vision des Paulus im Tempel von Jerusalem’, in Verborum Veritas (FS G. Stählin), eds. O. Böcher and K. Haacker (Wuppertal: Brockhaus, 1970), 113–123. On Paul’s glory christology C.C. Newman, Paul’s Glory-Christology: Tradition and Rhetoric, NovTSup 69 (Leiden: Brill, 1992); and S. Kim, The Origin of Paul’s Gospel, WUNT 2.4 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1981). 26 See the discussion in J.D. Tabor, Things Unutterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise in Its Greco-Roman, Judaic, and Early Christian Contexts (Lanham: University Press of America, 1986). M.D. Goulder, ‘The Visionaries of Laodicea’, JSNT 43 (1991): 15–39.

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experience fourteen years before when ‘a man in Christ’ was snatched up into paradise or the third heaven. Although there are those who contend that Paul chooses to boast about a third person here, the reference to the abundance of revelations in 12:6 suggests that Paul has himself in mind, or perhaps that ‘apocalyptic/mystical self’ which experiences such awesome things. While Paul speaks of the ineffable words he heard on that occasion, it appears to differ from the Damascus Road experience in not having that life-changing quality about it. According to Acts (22:17 and 27:23) the visions and revelations mentioned in 2 Cor. 12:2 were not Paul’s only experiences. The nature of the experience related in 2 Corinthians has been much discussed. In a highly stylised account there is a case for supposing that Paul speaks in two different ways about the same experience. Others have argued for a two-stage experience, with Paradise and the third heaven being successive stages on the mystical ascent. It is not impossible that the experience, which is wrung out of him here, has a particular relevance to his weaknesses because he nowhere describes a vision of God.27 It may only be implied in the ‘unutterable words’. Such a failure to reach the climax of the mystical ascent would indeed have been an admission of weakness, which a mystic might have wished to conceal, though it would have suited Paul’s argument in this section where weakness and failure are the marks of a true apostle.28 That Paul is using traditional language and style of Jewish apocalyptic is apparent from the cosmological framework and language. His use of the Greek ἁρπάζω is particularly pertinent to our theme. It is a word used elsewhere in the New Testament to speak of the mysterious rapture of individuals, whether to heaven (1 Thess. 4:17; Rev. 12:5) or as the result of divine intervention (Acts 8:3929). The word is used of Enoch’s translation in Wisd. 4:11 (cf. LXX Gen. 5:24 and Sir. 44:16 where µετατίθηµι is used). The ‘things that cannot be uttered’ have their parallels elsewhere in the Pauline corpus. Paul seems to have had recourse to a number of divine secrets which were of fundamental importance for his theology. In 1 Cor. 15:51, for example, he illuminates the problem of the relationship between mundane existence and the resurrection life by resort to a mystery about eschatological transformation. Also, in the doxology at the end of Romans, whose authenticity is often disputed, there is reference to revelation of the divine mystery 27 See P. Schäfer, ‘New Testament and the Hekhalot Literature: The Journey into Heaven in Paul and in Merkavah Mysticism’, JJS 35 (1984): 19–35. 28 I am much indebted in the discussion of this passage and what follows on the Pauline material to the work of my colleague Paula Gooder in Oxford. 29 There are other echoes of the Enoch tradition in this verse after πνεῦµα κυρίου ἥρπασεν τὸν Φίλιππον. The disappearance of Philip is similar to that of Enoch attested in the targumim (οὐκ εἶδεν αὐτὸν οὐκέτι ὁ εὐνοῦχος; cf. Fragment Targum [ms. Paris]: ‫לית אנן‬ ‫)ידעין מא הוה בסופיה‬. Philip’s reappearance echoes LXX of Gen. 5:24 (Φίλιππος δὲ εὑρέθη εἰς Ἄζωτον; cf. LXX καὶ οὐχ ηὑρίσκετο, ὅτι µετέθηκεν αὐτὸν ὁ θεός).

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in an unusual formulation reminiscent of the language of Ephesians.30 Elsewhere he lets the Roman readers into the eschatological mystery of Israel’s destiny in Rom. 11:25. In 2 Cor. 3, Paul contrasts his apostolic ministry with the ministrations of Moses. The extent and apparent arrogance of the claims are at once apparent. Here is Paul not only placing his activity on a superior plane to that of Moses but subordinating the latter’s pivotal role in the divine economy to himself and asserting the temporary nature of it. What starts off as a contrast ends up as an assertion about the present transformative glory, which belongs to those who are ministers of the new covenant. These ministers do not need their faces veiled. The apostolic ministers reflect the divine glory. Such reflection of divine glory is apparent in 2 En. 22:8. Here the seer beholds the glory of God, and this results in his transformation so that he reflects the glory which he had been privileged to see.31 In 2 Cor. 3 it is not merely a future phenomenon, as elsewhere, but something which begins in the present age. The model of transformation of which Paul speaks in 2 Cor. 3 is nothing less than the divine image which believers share. The phrase ‘from glory to glory’ suggests a progressive transformation, similar to that in some of the apocalypses. In Asc. Isa. 8:14 and 11:22, for example, the descent of Christ through the heavens leads to a progressive diminution of the glory he had possessed in the highest heavens. This enabled him to mislead the heavenly powers at his descent. Similarly Isaiah’s ascent to the heavenly world brings about a transformation of his own body as he approaches the seventh heaven. In 2 Cor. 4:1ff. Paul indicates that there is a present possession of this heavenly glory in the ordinary ministrations of the apostle. Earth-bound witnesses should not be deceived, therefore, by the apparent humble persona into thinking that there is little of the glory of the highest heaven. This is nothing other than the knowledge of God’s glory, the highest privilege granted to the apocalyptic visionary, but now located in the face of Jesus Christ and reflected in the suffering apostle. Paul sees himself and his intimate companions to be mystagogues who are like stewards in the divine palace with the privilege of administering the divine secrets (1 Cor. 4:1). Access to divine secrets is typical of the apocalypses and forms a central feature of the authority granted to the Teacher of Righteousness at Qumran (cf. 1QpHab 7). Such mysteries do not only relate to the details of eschatological salvation and the reordering of conventional 30 On all this material see the survey in M. Bockmuehl, Revelation and Mystery in Ancient Judaism and Pauline Christianity, WUNT 2.36 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1990); and Collins and Charlesworth, Mysteries and Revelations. 31 C.R.A. Morray-Jones, ‘Transformational Mysticism in the Apocalyptic-Merkabah Tradition’, JJS 43 (1992): 1–31; and W.F. Smelik, ‘On Mystical Transformation of the Righteous into Light in Judaism’, JSJ 26 (1995): 122–144.

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wisdom about its fulfilment but also about the central item of the gospel. This is most apparent in 1 Cor. 2:6–7, where Paul talks of the content of the gospel itself as a mystery hidden from the rulers of the present age. It is this which is the essence of divine wisdom, perceived as foolishness to those who cannot understand the secret of the divine purpose. Here, in an argument reminiscent of the opening chapters of the Wisdom of Solomon, Paul contrasts the divine with the human wisdom and suggests that the clue to salvation is based upon the inability of those dominated by the epistemology of the present age to see the significance of what they were doing in crucifying the lord of glory (1 Cor. 2:9). This turns out to be the very heart of the divine mystery for the salvation of the world. So the Christ event itself is an apocalyptic mystery hidden before all ages but only revealed in the last days (cf. 1 Pet. 1:11–12; Luke 10:23–24). This terminology is taken up in the (deutero-?)Pauline Colossians and Ephesians. In Col. 1:26 (cf. Rom. 16:27 and Eph. 3:3), for example, God’s plan for the salvation of the gentiles is portrayed as a great apocalyptic mystery, which Paul has been privileged to receive and which forms the basis for the apostolic ministry in which he is engaged. So the apostolic task is not a parochial affair, for the apostles themselves are engaged in an enterprise on a truly cosmic scale (1 Cor. 4:10), as God’s fellow workers (3:9). Paul sees himself as an architect working according to a divine master-plan, parallel to Moses himself (Exod. 25:9 and 40: ‘According to all that I show you concerning the tabernacle, and of its furniture, so you shall make it. … And see that you make them after the pattern of them, which is being shown you on the mountain’, cf. 1 Chron. 28:18 and 2 Cor. 3:16–17). Indeed, that to which the apostles are bearing witness is itself an apocalyptic event. In Rom. 1:17–18 Paul can speak of the gospel and its content as that which is revealed from heaven, and in Rom. 3:22, using slightly different terminology, he summarises the saving event of Christ as something which was heralded by the law and the prophets but is essentially a fresh and definitive revelation from God. That divine wisdom to which the true apostle has access is a mystery taught by the Spirit and which can only be understood by others who themselves have the Spirit. Indeed, in 1 Cor. 2:10 Paul sets out most explicitly his claim that the truth to which he has access is one that is a divine secret understandable only by those who are themselves inspired by the same spirit. Moreover, there is an intimate link between the medium and the message. By virtue of his own knowledge and practice the gospel can be observed in his own person and conduct: Paul has the mind of Christ himself (1 Cor. 2:16) and speaks words which are not taught by humans but by God (2:13, cf. Gal. 1:1). Those who regard themselves as wise according to the wisdom of the present age, and are unaware of the content of the divine mystery, turn out to be babes. Those who are truly mature are the ones who, according to the criteria of the age which is passing away, seem to be fools (3:18–19). Under-

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standing comes through the Spirit, and it is the Spirit which enables those who truly understand to have access to the most profound truths about God (1 Cor. 2:10), the very heart of the mystical ascent. The material in 1 Cor. 2 is a reminder that discussion of Paul’s mysticism should not focus only on 2 Cor. 12:2ff., where Paul’s ambivalence is everywhere apparent. Such ambivalence is comprehensible if we recognise that for Paul the central mystery is the cross of Christ. That is the wisdom of which he speaks, not the exclusive mystery, which comes only via the heavenly ascent. Possible cultic background for the accounts of mystical ascent32 (most evident in 1 En. 14), as well as the explicit reference to impurity caused by menstrual blood in Hekaloth Rabbati 18,33 reminds us that access to holy places was limited to men. This was certainly true in the Temple. We presume that Paul’s communities consisted of women as well as men, in the light of the occasional reference to women such as Chloe in 1 Cor. 1:11 and the significant role given to Phoebe in Rom. 16. That being the case, the transfer of cultic imagery to a community which was of both sexes is a reminder that ritual impurity does not seem to have been a disqualification from access to the nascent Christian communities.34 Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians is that the supreme manifestation of divine wisdom is to be found in the crucified Christ, in complete contrast to what the wisdom of the world might have expected. It is a wisdom of which Paul claims to speak, but it is a wisdom which is such only among the τέλειοι and it is not clear that the Corinthians have demonstrated that they have reached that stage. The strife that exists among them means that they are still σαρκικοί and not πνευµατικοί; still babes who need the milk rather than the stronger food more appropriate for those adult in the faith. What is perceived as folly escapes the attention of those who think merely according to this age’s categories. Thus the rulers of this world would not have crucified the lord of glory if they had perceived his identity. It is of that wisdom which Paul speaks ἐν µυστηρίῳ. It has to be spoken of in this way because the fact that it is wisdom remains a mystery, hidden before all ages with God and remaining unrecognised. It would not be a mystery if it were evident, and yet in another sense, of course, it is a very accessible secret because it concerns an event in history rather than something hidden in heaven still waiting to be 32 See Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven, and on the social background of apocalyptic see P.R. Davies, ‘The social world of apocalyptic writings’, in The World of Ancient Israel, ed. R.E. Clements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 251–271; and the final chapters of P.F. Esler, The First Christians in Their Social Worlds: Social-Scientific Approaches to New Testament Interpretation (London: Routledge, 1994). 33 Discussed in Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, 19ff. 34 Though from later source we know that menstruation could be a bar on women being baptised. See Hippolytus’s Apostolic Tradition 20:6 (The Treatise on the Apostolic Tradition of St Hippolytus of Rome, Bishop and Martyr, ed. G. Dix [London: Alban, 1968], 32).

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revealed (like the Parousia in 1 Cor. 1:7). The historical character of the mystery is paralleled in the Wisdom of Solomon. Here too the identity of the significant object is apparent to all, though the precise significance is what is missed by the majority. In contrast with the exclusive character of the heavenly ascent texts, Paul offers a mystery which is open and accessible, even if its significance is hidden from the majority because of the darkened minds of those who persist in living according to an age which is perishing (1 Cor. 2:6; 1:18).

16.4. Apocalyptic Themes in the Synoptic Gospels As with many other New Testament books, there is an apocalyptic and mystical thread running through Matthew’s narrative. From the dreams of Joseph and the Magi, which protect the infant son of God, to the dream of Pilate’s wife before the crucifixion, which serves to comment on the miscarriage of justice taking place, knowledge through dreams and revelations, of a kind familiar to us from the apocalyptic tradition, are a significant element in this Gospel, notwithstanding that several of such accounts are held in common with the other two Synoptic Gospels. Of these the first is the account of the Baptism, in which there is a clear allusion to Ezek. 1:1 in all three Gospels. The heavens are opened, just as they were to the prophet Ezekiel by the river Chebar, thus fulfilling the prophetic longing for God to rend the heavens and reveal the divine purposes (cf. Isa. 64:1).35 And there are other links between the Baptism and the Jewish mystical tradition. The descent of the Spirit on Jesus is compared with that of a dove, and it may be possible to see hints of maʿaseh bereshith here, by linking the baptismal accounts with a rabbinic story concerning the early second-century teacher, Simeon ben Zoma.36 In this story Ben Zoma meditates on the first chapter of Genesis and in particular on the words at 1:6, and he sees a small gap separating the upper and lower celestial waters which he connects with the Spirit of God hovering on the face of the waters four verses earlier.37 This small gap he compares to the small gap which exists when a bird hovers over

35

See further Rowland, The Open Heaven, 358ff. Rowland, The Open Heaven, 323 and 361. 37 t.Hag. 2:5; y.Hag. 77ab; b.Hag. 15a; and Ber.R. 2:4. This was considered by I. Abrahams, ‘The Dove and the Voice’, in Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917), 47–50. Such ideas could have arisen from a comparison of Gen. 1:2 with the only other occurrence of the verb ‫רחף‬, ‘to hover’, at Deut. 32:11, where the bird hovers over her young. Whereas in the story of Ben Zoma the meditation was a detached piece of cosmological speculation on the nature of the heavenly waters, in the story of the Baptism the creative Spirit hovers over the head of the Son of God. 36

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its nest, and in the version of the story in the Babylonian Talmud the hovering of the Spirit of God is compared to a dove hovering over its young. In the Beatitudes at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus declares that the pure in heart will see God. Once again we have terminology familiar from the mystical tradition in which the seer is vouchsafed a glimpse of the divine kābōd, ‘glory’, after the heavenly ascent. Just as in the Jewish mystical tradition such a privilege comes only after a thorough grounding in Torah, Mishnah and Talmud, so here too in Matthew an ethical dimension is similarly stressed. Less obviously connected with the apocalyptic and mystical tradition is Jesus’ exposition of the significance of John the Baptist’s person and activity in Matt. 11. All the Synoptic Gospels link John with the messenger who is to precede the great and terrible day of the Lord, ‘Behold, I send my messenger to prepare the way before me’ (Mal. 3:1). John’s position is indeed exalted, in so far as the marginal figure baptising at the Jordan is identified with Elijah returned from heaven to announce the imminence of that great and terrible day. The significance of the allusion to the verses in Malachi, lost in our English translations, is the occurrence of the word ἄγγελος, usually translated ‘messenger’. Even allowing for some flexibility of usage, due account needs to be taken of the fact that elsewhere in Matthew ἄγγελος refers to a heavenly emissary from God (e.g. 1:20; 28:5). Moreover, the verse from Malachi applied to John is an allusion to Exod. 23:30, which speaks of God’s angel going before the people as they journey out of Egypt. Exod. 23:20 is a passage of some importance within Jewish mystical literature. It is used to support the belief in an exalted angel named Metatron whose greatness derives from the indwelling of the divine name in him (see b.San. 38b). Although references to that angel, who bears the divine name, are found only in texts later than the New Testament, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that such beliefs were current at the end of the first century, when early Christians were formulating their beliefs about Christ. One example of this comes in an apocalypse, which is dated towards the end of the first century CE. In it there appears an angel, the description of whom bears remarkable similarities with the vision of Christ in Revelation as well as with other Jewish texts (e.g. Apoc. Abr. 10:9): ‘I am called Jaoel by him who moves that which exists with me on the seventh expanse of the firmament, a power in virtue of the ineffable name that is dwelling in me.’38 Though this material may not at first sight seem to be relevant for the interpretation of the reference to John the Baptist in Matt. 11, the identification of John with an angel belongs to an ancient tradition (and, in the Orthodox East, a continuing one). It is discussed by Origen who, in his com38

See Rowland, ‘A Man Clothed in White Linen’, 99ff. = above, pp. 85ff.; see now the discussion of this material by Stuckenbruck, Angel Veneration, 211–212.

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mentary on the Gospel of John (2.31 on John 1:6), interprets ‘there was a man sent from God whose name was John’ with a quotation from the important Jewish pseudepigraphon The Prayer of Joseph.39 He offers this as an example of the belief that a human being could be an incarnation of an angel. I Jacob who am speaking to you am also Israel an angel of God and a ruling spirit. Abraham and Isaac were created before any work. But I Jacob … whose name is Israel … am he whom God called Israel, which means a man seeing God, because I am the first-born of every living thing to which God gives life. … I descended to earth and tabernacled among humanity, and I was called Jacob.

The importance of this Jewish work, which is quoted only partially by Origen, is that in it we learn that the patriarch Jacob is the incarnation of the exalted angel Israel. The terminology used here is reminiscent of that used of the incarnation of the Logos in John 1:14 and (if authentically Jewish) is testimony to a Jewish writing envisaging the possibility of a heavenly being becoming incarnate in human form. After the quotation there is a lengthy digression in which Origen argues for the belief that John the Baptist was an angel and took human form in order to bear witness to the light of the divine Logos. The Transfiguration,40 particularly in its Matthaean version, has several points of contact with ancient Jewish theophanies and the traditions which developed from them. It especially resembles the Christophany of Rev. 1:13ff. where the risen Christ appears to the exiled seer on Patmos, and where the links with the throne-theophany tradition, based on Ezekiel, are widely acknowledged. In the Transfiguration, alone of all the synoptic texts (and surprisingly so given the nature of the post-resurrection appearances), we come closest to the heavenly appearance of an exalted angelic figure.41

39 The authenticity and theological provenance is discussed by J.Z. Smith, ‘The Prayer of Joseph’, in Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, ed. J. Neusner, SHR 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 253–294. See also A. Böhlig, ‘Jakob als Engel in Gnostizismus und Manichäismus’, in Erkenntnisse und Meinungen, ed. G. Wießner, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1978), 2:1–14. 40 See W. Gerber, ‘Die Metamorphose Jesu, Mk 9,2f par’, TZ 23 (1967): 385–397; M. Mach, ‘Christus Mutans: Zur Bedeutung der Verklärung Jesu im Wechsel von jüdischer Messianität zur neutestamentlichen Christologie’, in Messiah and Christos (FS D. Flusser), ed. I. Gruenwald (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1993), 229–266; J.E. Fossum, ‘Ascensio, Metamorphosis: The “Transfiguration” of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels’, in idem, The Image of the Invisible God, 71–94; M. Sabbe, ‘La rédaction du récit de la transfiguration’, in La venue du Messie, ed. É. Massaux (Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1962), 65–100, and J.A. McGuckin, The Transfiguration of Christ in Scripture and Tradition (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986). 41 C. Rowland, ‘Apocalyptic, the Poor, and the Gospel of Matthew’, JTS 45 (1994): 504–518 = above, pp. 252–265.

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Matt. 18:10 presupposes some kind of link between the little ones and their angels.42 There is something special about the child. Once again, echoing the language of the apocalyptic tradition, we are told their angels have the privilege of beholding God’s face, the highest of all privileges. The climax of the heavenly ascent is the vision of God enthroned in glory, something normally denied not only to mortals but also to angels. Indeed, 1 Enoch (14:21) explicitly states that the angels are unable to look upon the face of God. The angels of Matthew’s little ones stand in close proximity to the throne of glory and share in that destiny which is vouchsafed to the elect in the New Jerusalem, described in Rev. 22:4, of seeing God face to face: ‘His servants shall worship him, and they shall see his face, and his name shall be on their foreheads.’ The little ones in Matt. 18:10, have a particular privilege just as in Matt. 11:25 it is ‘the babes’ to whom the significance of Jesus’ ministry is revealed while it is hidden from the wise. At the conclusion of the eschatological discourse (25:31–46), where we find a judgement scene, commonly called the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, with a parallel not in the other synoptics but in a Jewish text, ‘The Similitudes of Enoch’ (1 En. 37–71), where the heavenly Son of Man sits on God’s throne of glory, exercising judgement and vindicating the elect. A new element in the Matthaean scene, however, is the astonishment with which the righteous learn that they have in fact ministered to this glorious Son of Man in the persons of the naked, the poor, the hungry, the sick, the stranger and those in prison. Their destiny, they discover, was determined at the moment of responding to the needs of those who appeared to be nonentities, to those who were apparently the farthest removed in every respect from this heavenly judge, who now claims that what the righteous had done to them they had done to him. There are parallels to all this in the Jewish tradition, where respect for the human person created in God’s image, irrespective of nation or religious affiliation, is to be found. Most akin to Matthew’s sheep and goats is 2 En. 42:8ff., where clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, looking after widows and orphans, and coming to the aid of those who have suffered injustice, are criteria for blessedness.

42 Such a connection is found in the Jewish haggadah where the ancestors are regarded as the embodiment of the mysteries of God’s throne and person. So one source says: ‘The patriarchs are the merkabah, the throne-chariot’ (e.g. Ber.R. 47:6 and 69:3). Perhaps it is something similar which lies behind Paul’s assertion in 2 Cor. 3:18 that life under the new covenant means that ‘we all, with unveiled face, are beholding the glory of the Lord and being changed from glory to glory’. In Targum Neofiti on Gen. 22 angels compete with one another to catch a glimpse of Abraham and Isaac whose features are engraved on the throne of glory.

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16.5. The Apocalyptic Theme in the Gospel of John What is apparently the least apocalyptic document in the New Testament must now be considered.43 The link between the Gospel of John and the Jewish mystical tradition has had its proponents in the past, for example Hugo Odeberg’s commentary on the Gospel.44 He used later the Jewish mystical traditions as well as the Mandean texts to cast light on the first twelve chapters of the Gospel. But until recently the voices raised in support of a connection between the Gospel and the mystical and apocalyptic tradition of Judaism have been few and far between. The Gospel of John has frequently been regarded as an example of a type of Christianity, which firmly rejected apocalyptic. What is meant is that there is no imminent expectation of the End. While few would want to dissent from that particular interpretation, one must question whether this means a wholesale rejection of John’s indebtedness to apocalyptic. It must now be asked whether we can see the relationship between the Gospel of John and apocalyptic in a new light if we approach it in the way suggested already: how does the Gospel of John fit in with the quest for ‘higher wisdom through revelation’ to quote Martin Hengel’s very apt characterisation of apocalyptic?45 We should not be put off by the lack of apocalyptic terminology in the Gospel, for it is concerned with the revelation of divine mysteries, even if there is an almost complete dearth of typical apocalyptic terms (1:51 and 12:32ff. are exceptions). The mystery of the apocalypse is told in narrative form but that has the same ultimate and allembracing concern. When viewed from this perspective, the main thrust of its message appears to have a remarkable affinity with apocalyptic, even if we have to admit that the mode of revelation stressed in the Gospel differs radically from that outlined in the apocalypses. That is, the Gospel does not offer visions and revelations through the conventional medium typical of the apocalypses, in particular by means of an ascent to heaven. If we are right to assume that the goal of apocalyptic is the attainment of knowledge of the divine mysteries, 43 On this theme see N.A. Dahl, ‘The Johannine Church and History’, in Current Issues in New Testament Interpretation, eds. W. Klassen and G.F. Snyder (London: SCM, 1962), 124–142, at 131; P. Borgen, ‘God’s Agent in the Fourth Gospel’, in Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, ed. J. Neusner, SHR 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 83–96; Segal, Two Powers; and J.J. Kanagaraj, ‘Mysticism’ in the Gospel of John: An Inquiry into the Background of John in Jewish Mysticism, JSNTSup 158 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998). 44 H. Odeberg, The Fourth Gospel: Interpreted in its Relation to Contemporaneous Religious Currents in Palestine and the Hellenistic-Oriental World (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1929). 45 M. Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period, trans. J. Bowden, 2 vols. (London: SCM, 1974), 1:210.

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and in particular the mysteries of God, then it can be seen that much of what the Fourth Gospel says, relates to this theme. Jesus proclaims himself as the revelation of the hidden God. He tells Philip ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father’ (14:8) and at the conclusion of the Prologue, the Evangelist speaks of the Son in the following way: ‘No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known’ (1:18). The vision of God, the heart of the call-experiences of Isaiah and Ezekiel and the goal of the heavenly ascents of the apocalyptic seers and rabbinic mystics, is related in the Fourth Gospel to the revelation of God in Jesus. All claims to have seen God in the past are repudiated; the Jews have ‘neither heard God’s voice nor seen his form’ (5:37). Even when, as in Isaiah’s case, Scripture teaches that a prophet glimpsed God enthroned in glory, this vision is interpreted in the Gospel as a vision of the pre-existent Christ (12:41). No one has seen God except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father (6:46). The vision of God reserved in the Book of Revelation for the fortunate seer (4:1) and for the inhabitants of the ‘New Jerusalem’ who will see God face to face (22:4) is found, according to the Fourth Evangelist, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. For the Fourth Evangelist, the quest for the highest wisdom of all, the knowledge of God, comes not through the information disclosed in visions and revelations but through the Word become flesh, Jesus of Nazareth and through the activity of the Spirit/Paraclete who is ultimately dependent on the Son. Thus while the Fourth Evangelist sets himself resolutely against any claim to revelation except through Christ, he presupposes and uses the basic framework of apocalyptic for his own christological ends in order to affirm the uniqueness of the disclosure in Christ and the inferiority of all earlier claims to divine knowledge. A very important feature of the Gospel, long ago noted by Bultmann, is that the Gospel of John is permeated with a major theme of the apocalypses: revelation. This has been thoroughly investigated now by John Ashton in a study which draws together several important contributions to the understanding of the Gospel, which take seriously the apocalyptic and mystical background of the text.46 For John of Patmos it is the coming of the New Jerusalem from heaven which heralds an era when the dwelling of God is with humanity (Rev. 21:3). The verb (σκηνόω) is that used in John 1:14 of the dwelling of the divine Logos among humankind. The major difference between these two verses is that Revelation still thinks of that presence of God as part of a future eschatological bliss, whereas the author of the Fourth Gospel considers that this is an event which has already taken place at the incarnation. This suggests that the life of Jesus of Nazareth is already in some sense at least an anticipation of that eschatological glory which is to be revealed at the end of the age. The 46

J. Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 381ff.

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climax of Revelation is the description of the New Jerusalem where the throne of God is set and the elect are granted the privilege of seeing God face to face (Rev. 22:4). In Revelation and the rest of the apocalypses the vision of God is a glimpse of the divine glory which is hidden in heaven, for God’s ‘glory is inconceivable’ (indeed the form of God’s glory on the throne is not described by John, cf. Col. 1:15). The Fourth Evangelist agrees in insisting that God cannot be glimpsed through a door open into the heavenly court. Rather for him God has been revealed in a human person, Jesus, who is repeatedly described as the unique agent of the Father. No one else can see the things of God. The statement of Exod. 3:1 ‘no one can see me and live’ is hinted at in John 1:18 and is used as the basis of the new possibility which is offered in Christ alone to see definitively what Jews had claimed to see in an unmediated way in the past (5:39). The unveiling of the things of God comes authoritatively only through the one who has seen God (1:18 and 6:46). Christ is the revealer and the content of the revelation. He makes known the divine will (7:16) and is the embodiment of God (14:9). Jesus not only speaks the truth; he is the truth. He is both intermediary who acts as go-between (hence the central importance of the agency motif in the Gospel) and the intermediary who embodies the divine glory. The Fourth Gospel is at one with a trend in some apocalypses where there is a denial of heavenly ascent (at least of a conventional kind) to view the divine glory (4 Ezra 8:21). There is no vision of God unless it be a vision of Christ whether in his pre-existent or incarnate state (so John 12:41). All those visions to prophets of old cannot be understood without reference to Christ, therefore. Unlike Jesus, the Jews have never in fact seen God’s form or heard his voice (5:37, cf. Deut. 4:12). The goal of the heavenly ascent, to see the throne of God and the glory of God upon it, is located in Christ. Thus the means of gaining knowledge of God comes not through preparations for heavenly ascent but through recognition of the nature of Christ as the one sent from God who embodies the divine glory. One of the most unusual verses in the Gospel is 1:5147 – not least because here we have one of the two clear indications of use of the conventional language of the apocalypse. It comes at the climax of the first chapter, dominated as it is by christological themes (e.g. 1:1–18; 1:28; 1:37; 1:41; 1:45; 47 On this verse and its mystical connections see C. Rowland, ‘John 1.51, Jewish Apocalyptic and Targumic Tradition’, NTS 30 (1984): 498–507 = above, pp. 204–214, and on the link with the targumim J.E. Fossum, ‘The Son of Man’s Alter Ego’, in idem, The Image of the Invisible God, 135–151; M. McNamara, Targum and Testament (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1972), 146–147; J. Jervell, Imago Dei: Gen. 1,26f. im Spätjudentum, in der Gnosis und in den paulinischen Briefen, FRLANT 76 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960), 96ff. and 116; cf. M. Smith, ‘The Shape of God and the Humanity of the Gentiles’, in Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, ed. J. Neusner, SHR 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 315–326.

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and 1:49). It recalls other New Testament passages like Acts 7:56 and 10:11. The verse opens with an ‘Amen’, and a promise is granted to a group of people as the verb is plural (despite the fact that Jesus had been addressing Nathanael). The order of ascent followed by descent (similar to 3:13) suggests a link with Gen. 28:12. Whether the Son of Man is the means of the angels’ ascent and descent or the goal of that action is debated. Most commentators favour the former, seeing the Son of Man as the intermediary between heaven and earth. The precise significance of the link with Gen. 28:12 has been variously explained, but possible links with the mystical tradition have been accepted as the result of the recognition that it is an interpreted Bible that we should be attending to in exploring the links with Genesis. Ber.R. 68:12, although much later than the Fourth Gospel, indicates an earthly and heavenly dimension of humanity. What is important about the patriarch is that his features are those which are part of the divine merkabah and as such looking at Jacob would enable anyone who was aware of this to know something of the secret of the merkabah. This is made evident in the targumim on Gen. 28:12 where it is stated explicitly that Jacob’s features are those which are engraved on the throne of glory. There are four versions of this legend, three of which (Pseudo-Jonathan, the Fragmentary Targum and Neofiti) are substantially the same. The version in Pseudo-Jonathan is reproduced here: And he dreamed and behold a ladder was fixed on earth and its top stretched to the height of heaven. And behold angels who went to Sodom and who had been banished from them because they revealed the secrets of the lord of the world. And they went until the time that Jacob left the house of his father. And they escorted him in kindness to Bethel. And on that day they went up to the high heavens, spoke and said, ‘Come see Jacob the pious whose features (‫ )איקונין‬are fixed on the throne of glory which you desire to look on’. So the rest of the holy angels of the lord descended to look on him.

The significance of this passage is that it reflects the belief that the secret things of God, hidden even from the angels (1 En. 14:21, cf. 1 Pet. 1:12), were now public in the features of the patriarch. It is a view we meet elsewhere in the rabbinic tradition where all the patriarchs are identified with the chariot (see also b.Hullin 91b).48 In addition, we may recall that in The Prayer of Joseph, Jacob and other patriarchs are said to be incarnations of exalted angels. In the targumic passage it is possible that either Jacob was identified with the face of the man on the chariot or even possibly with that of the form of God seated upon it. However we interpret that, what we find in the targumim on Gen. 28:12 is a development of the original verse where Jacob 48 The significance of the form of the ancestors for understanding the likeness of God is stressed also in b.B.Bathra 58a: ‘R. Baʾanah used to mark out caves … When he came to the cave of Adam, a voice came from heaven saying, “Thou hast seen the likeness of my likeness [i.e. Abraham], my likeness itself [i.e. Adam] thou shalt not behold”.’

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is merely a passive recipient of a vision of angels. Thus the patriarch becomes an important figure in the story, the object of concern for the angels. If we compare this story with John 1 and transfer this understanding to the interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, we can see that it is the evangelist’s intention to stress that Jesus is the embodiment of divine secrets,49 and the testimony to his importance is to be found in the fact that angels should want to descend to look upon him, thereby witnessing (as John the Baptist had done) to his importance. The targumic tradition, in which a human figure is the embodiment of apocalyptic secrets, is a particularly apposite one for a text which is intent on the demonstration that humanity is the unique bearer and evidence of the divine glory. As the person in whom the secrets of God and his throne are to be found, Jesus is seen as the goal of the heavenly ascent and the quest for knowledge of God. The apocalypse is not to be found in the visions of the mystics and in the disclosures which they offer of the world beyond, but in the earthly life of Jesus Christ. There is in the Gospel narrative and its incarnational direction, a definite attempt to stress that revelation is found in this human story. There is thus an implicit challenge to the whole of the apocalyptic tradition, based as it is on the communication of heavenly secrets by visions and related revelations, in so far as those revelations are unrelated to the definitive revelation in Christ. The unequivocal emphasis on Jesus as the focal point of revelation, makes the heavenly ascent and the heavenly secrets superfluous. To know Jesus and to hear his words is to be in direct contact with God. John 1:51 indicates that the concern for the true visionary is not to raise eyes to heaven but to see revelation in the story that the evangelist is telling, because it is testimony to the supreme manifestation of the invisible God. Nathanael is promised a vision of greater things climaxing in the prediction that he will see angels ascending and descending. Nothing further is said about such an angelophany elsewhere in the text. Indeed, John’s Gospel notoriously excludes references to ‘supernatural’ events like the Transfiguration, the angelic appearances at the Temptation or the empty tomb. When they are referred to, it is in the context of a mistaken perception on the part of the crowd about the significance of a bath qol (John 12:29). The Gospel does not allow the reader to contemplate heavenly reality in any other place than Christ. ‘Greater things than these’ can be seen only in him. Or perhaps it is only once they have been found in him that the entrance to the heavenly mysteries can be ascertained. So, in John 3, Jesus confronts Nicodemus with the uncompromising statement that he needs to be born again. It is a strange response which hardly begins to engage with the 49 Whether the Son of Man is the goal of the angels’ journey or the means of their ascent and descent will depend on how we translate ἐπὶ τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου. Much will depend on how we construe passages like 1:33 and 6:16 (see further Rowland, ‘John 1.51’ = above, pp. 204–214).

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substance of Nicodemus’s concerns. But then Jesus cannot merely engage with the discourse of this world, for he has come to bear witness to truth (18:37) not to engage with the wisdom of the world. For Nicodemus to see the mystery of the Kingdom of God, focused as it is in Christ, there is need for a complete transformation, which can only be likened to a birth. There is required an epistemological change involving an ethical as well as intellectual conversion.50 Nothing less can allow the possibility of mystical enlightenment. But then seeing the angels will be to see them converging on the Son of Man. Recognition of his true identity is the prerequisite to the ultimate divine mystery. Rightly has John Ashton maintained that the Gospel of John is ‘an apocalypse in reverse’.51 Thus the Fourth Evangelist reiterates within his own distinctive theological language the theme we have found elsewhere in the New Testament. The divine mystery is located in the humiliation of the cross, or the life of the one who humbled himself, and was in solidarity with the meek of the earth, and yet the manifestation of the divine glory would be apparent to all on the last day (1 Cor. 1:7). The hidden lord, like the children of God, the identity of whom is only revealed in the messianic age (Rom. 8:19), will as the result of an apocalypse be unveiled. The righteous in Matt. 25:31ff. are only apparent at the very moment when it is pointed out to them by the eschatological judge that their ministrations to the hungry, thirsty, the naked and the imprisoned has been service to the heavenly Son of Man, though he had been seen, albeit incognito, in the persons of the outcast of the world.52 In the Gospel of John there is no apocalyptic denouement resembling that described in 1 Cor. 1:7 or Mark 14:62. The vision of the glory of the Son of Man is reserved for those with eyes to see (John 17:25) leaving the world, which refuses to see, still in darkness, without the eschatological opportunity in the future to be bathed in the illumination of what Adorno has called ‘the messianic light’.53

50 J.L. Martyn, ‘Epistemology at the Turn of the Ages: 2 Corinthians 5:16’, in Christian History and Interpretation: Studies Presented to John Knox, eds. W.R. Farmer et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 269–287. 51 Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel, 337ff. and 381ff. 52 Rowland, ‘Apocalyptic, the Poor, and the Gospel of Matthew’, JTS 45 (1994): 504– 518 = above, pp. 252–265. 53 T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 247.

17. The Lamb and the Beast, the Sheep and the Goats: ‘The Mystery of Salvation’ in Revelation The study of academic theology started for me in John Sweet’s study in the late 1960s. There was no theological fellow at my college, and so John was asked to look after the one new student embarking on the Theological Tripos. He duly did that and then taught me New Testament for the rest of my undergraduate career. I owe to him not only academic but also personal debts. The overawed and fearful Yorkshire state school boy coming to Cambridge, uncertain about whether he could keep up with the work, uncertain even about what theology might imply for faith and life, found in John, from such a different background, a friendly and supportive supervisor. I learnt to study the New Testament but more importantly I learnt how to study it – imbibing, in that way which only example can offer, a culture of prayerful and careful study, Christian living and the recognition that the Apocalypse must be at the heart of any New Testament theology.1 A perennial question for Christians is how they deal with that strong exclusive strand within their tradition, largely (though not entirely) due to the eschatological inheritance in which Jesus was the goal of the promises, not a stage in their fulfilment. The humanitarian instincts of Christians rightly shy away from consigning the majority of humanity to perdition, and a variety of more inclusive ways have been explored. The apocalyptic tradition, to which John Sweet has contributed so greatly by his writing, teaching and advice, deserves to be considered, though, as we shall see, a surprisingly more inclusive aspect emerges in the midst of its grim depiction of human delusion. In this essay I want to explore how the Book of Revelation prompts readers to a searching examination of assumptions concerning the identity of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ in the divine economy and compare it with the judgement scene in Matt. 25:31ff. Revelation, paradoxically one of the most ‘veiled’ texts of all in the Bible, makes great demands of those who read or hear it.2 We are tempted to ‘translate’ its imagery into a more accessible mode of discourse. John, as recipient 1

J.P.M. Sweet, Revelation (London: SCM, 1979), 51. Cf. J. Derrida, ‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy’, The Oxford Literary Review 6 (1984): 3–37. 2

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of a book from Jesus Christ, has left us an apocalypse or a prophecy – not a narrative or an epistle – a text requiring of its readers particular interpretative skills (imagination and emotion, for example) to help cast light on its images. Biblical exegetes long to be able to tie up loose ends. But often the texts and the resources available for interpretation deny them the ability to achieve that purpose. They are compelled, therefore, to use analogy (parallels from within and beyond the text studied). The use of analogy infrequently provides the satisfaction of interpretative certainty as it involves an appeal to the imagination rather than the presenting of a definitive logical case; ‘it persuades rather than coerces’.3 Like this method, the medium of apocalyptic may startle and disorientate, before possibly (though not inevitably) pointing to a fresh view of reality by its extraordinary imagery and impertinent verbal juxtapositions. However difficult it may be for us, we must learn to exercise those faculties which are needed to engage with such a medium. Unlike the philosophical essay which demands its readers’ intellectual submission by the force of argument, Revelation’s word pictures seek to address and involve readers and relocate them in the divine economy. In some respects its function is illuminated by the opening chapters of l Corinthians, where Paul renounces plausible words of wisdom (2:4) in favour of ‘God’s wisdom, secret and hidden’ … ‘revealed to us through the Spirit’ … (which) ‘we speak … in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit’ (1 Cor. 2:7, 10, 13). Apocalypse does not consist of ‘propositional, logical, [or] factual language’ but persuades by means of ‘the evocative … power of its symbolic language compelling imaginative participation’.4 Commentators on it also need to respond in order to be sensitive to its medium, as they seek to explore its distinctive wisdom. In Revelation’s imagery there are allusive hints of the way for those who wish to participate in the New Age: not worshipping the beast. Rev. 13 offers a terrible vision of the whole world seemingly following after in amazement (v. 4) and worshipping the dragon. In other words, amazement at the beast leads to worship of the dragon (perhaps unknowingly). People engage in activity which should be reserved for God. John is given strict instructions to worship God alone (22:9, cf. 19:10). The amazed question ‘who is like the beast?’ (reminiscent of similar sentiments expressed of God in Exod. 15:11) is followed by ‘who can make war on it?’. In other words, amazement is linked to a sense of awe at its military power. The apparent universality of worship offered to the beast is qualified, however, by the reference to the Lamb’s book of life. Those who are not written in the Lamb’s book of life will worship the beast. Until the books are opened (20:12) and judgement takes place, the identity of the names contained in it is 3

D. Nicholls, Deity and Domination (London: Routledge, 1989), 5. E. Schüssler Fiorenza, Revelation: Vision of a Just World, rev. edn. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), 31. 4

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unknown, and the threat remains that one’s name might be removed. Inclusion in the book of life means not worshipping the beast. In Rev. 13:11ff. John sees another beast but this time arising from the land. The similarities of its character with the Lamb are explicit, but the fact that it speaks as the dragon (v. 12) suggests that this beast acts as an agent of the first beast and exercises its authority as a kind of grand vizier in its presence (cf. 13:14). The whole earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast. John speaks not only of the human populace but also of the cosmos as if the created world as a whole is under the thrall of the beast and is affected by it (cf. 11:18; 13:3; 17:5; 19:2). The second beast works miracles (16:14, cf. Matt. 24:4–5, 11, 24, cf. 2 Thess. 2:9). The second beast is a deceiver, like Satan (cf. Rev. 20:3). Signs deceive in order to persuade the earth’s inhabitants to make an image for the beast which will be the object of worship, something that is to be resisted (Rev. 14:9, 11; 15:2; 16:2; 19:20; 20:4). The point at issue in Rev. 13 is not just about worshipping the beast and the dragon which stands behind the beast. The false marvels and bewitching words which come from the image presage a threat of death for those who do not worship the image of the beast (13:14, cf. Dan. 3:5–6) which is allencompassing and covers all strata of society (cf. 6:15; 19:5, 18; 20:12). The act of worship is not a private matter, for those who worship will be marked with a mark on their right hand and on their foreheads (cf. 14:9, 11; 16:2; 19:20; 20:4), contrasting with those who stand with the Lamb who are marked with the name of the Lamb and of God (14:1, cf. 22:4). It is something which is imposed on the worshippers of the beast (v. 16). There are public, social and economic consequences, therefore: exclusion from regular social intercourse. Without the name of the beast or the number of its name it becomes impossible to buy or sell. Those ‘bought’ with the blood of the Lamb (5:9, cf. 14:3) must behave differently, however (cf. Mark 10:42–43). There is, inevitably and, perhaps, understandably, pressure to conform (13:14). Those who refuse to do so are offered reassurance that being marked with the Lamb is a sign of righteousness even if it means social ostracism (13:16). In the present age those marked with the beast apparently have freedom to go about their activities, whereas those who refuse to be so marked and side with God and the Lamb are persecuted, and their deaths are greeted with glee by the inhabitants of the earth (11:10). In reality it is those who maintain their integrity, even at the price of their lives who will be vindicated, whereas those who have the mark of the beast ‘drink the wine of God’s anger’ (14:10). Those who persevere (whether they be inside or outside the churches) see that the might of state power is itself extraordinarily fragile, and its affluence, so attractive and alluring, is destined for destruction – destroyed by precisely that power which has maintained it (as we shall see when we look at 17:16). As the Beast has some of the characteristics of the Lamb (13:3, 14), one has to be watchful to avoid religion becoming a means of supporting or

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colluding with that which is opposed to the divine justice. The bewitching effects of a prevailing set of ideas to form outlooks cannot be underestimated. This is the function of ideology.5 It makes one think that the ideas which are widely held are ‘obvious’, ‘common-sense’ and ‘normal’, when in fact they often cover up the powerful vested interests of a small group which has and wants to retain power. In John’s vision the task of the second beast from the land is to persuade ordinary people that what they see in the first beast is normal and admirable, so that any deviation or counter-attraction is regarded as strange, antisocial and to be repudiated. John’s vision helps to unmask these processes and is a pointed reminder that what everybody does need not be right or be copied (13:3, 8). As with ch. 7 where the sealing is contrasted with the judgement on an unjust world, so ch. 14 offers the contrast to the previous chapter. Those who conform to the ways of the beast may achieve a temporary respite and prosperity but ultimately that cannot continue. John’s vision offers hope to those who stand firm (14:1, 12). The stress on integrity and truthfulness (14:5) contrasts with the duplicity and deceit manifest in the previous chapter where what is false (13:14) leads astray and is met by the self-serving response of the world’s inhabitants. Those who have compromised are urged to realise the error of their ways as the truth is revealed (14:6). In rather brutal fashion the vision brings home the ultimate character of apparently harmless actions. The odd bit of compromise in the old order is nothing less than being marked by the beast (14:9). For John all action, however small, is ultimately significant and of infinite value in the divine economy. The significance of human behaviour is expressed in ch. 15. When the people of Israel reached the other side of the Red Sea they sang a song of deliverance (Exod. 15). That is echoed in Rev. 15. ‘Those who had been victorious over the beast’ (15:2) is a metaphor of non-conformity and refusal to accept its dominion and way of life.6 That action becomes equivalent to the redemptive crossing of that threatening sea to God’s side. The problem of the apparently ‘innocent’ act of not conforming is well illustrated by this dialogue from the Martyrdom of Polycarp: Polycarp was brought before the governor … who tried to persuade him to recant. ‘Have some respect for your years’, he said, … ‘Swear an oath “By the Luck of Caesar” – Own yourself in the wrong and say, “Down with the infidels”’. Polycarp’s brow darkened as he threw a look round the turbulent crowd of heathens in the circus; and then, indicating with a sweep of his hand, he said with a growl and a glance to heaven, ‘Down with the infidels’. (Extracts from Mart. Pol. 10 and 12)

5

T. Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991). On the importance of worship as a counter-cultural act, see A. Kreider, Worship and Evangelism in Pre-Christendom, Alcuin/GROW Liturgical Study 32 (Cambridge: Grove Books, 1995). 6

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The apparently neutral, secular action is an event of supreme importance in the eyes of God on a par with that fundamental redemptive moment in Israel’s history. The redemptive moment means siding with the Lamb at the moment of testimony and standing firm in one’s convictions and commitment to the horizon of hope symbolised by the Lamb who bears the marks of slaughter. At the time when John was writing Rome had inspired his views, but because of the description of the city as Babylon the image can be of universal application,7 a symbol of military power, exile and, for those who witness to the ways of the Lamb, oppression. Babylon was the place of exile and alienation (Ps. 137 and 1 Pet. 5:13). Yet it is a place where the person with the eye of vision can see the glory of God as Ezekiel did (Ezek. 1), in whose footsteps John follows, as is evident throughout the book. John writes and readers read in the midst of the dominion of the beast and Babylon’s luxurious consumption. However strong the desire of the saints to ‘come out from the midst of Babylon’ (18:4), the Apocalypse is addressed to people who breathe Babylon’s ethos whether they like it or not, and who need a vision of how to live under her imperium though not to be part of it. There is no escape from exile this side of the millennium, except, that is, in the difference of perspective which this vision of a common life based on different values offers. In the end, the kings of the earth weep and wail over Babylon (18:9ff.) as they are the ones who have committed fornication with her. Babylon has been the means of their own enrichment and they lament from afar on account of fear (cf. 11:11) just as the sailors did over the fall of Tyre (Ezek. 27:30ff.).8 The merchants also weep and lament, ‘since no one buys their cargo any more’. Babylon had been at the hub of trade and the merchants had depended upon her. Those who refused to worship the beast had been excluded from buying and selling (13:17). The merchants did not suffer this ostracism but colluded with Babylon (they committed ‘fornication’) as they made their wealth (v. 15). There is a list of the commodities found in Babylon, culminating with the brief but dismal reference to ‘human lives’ (18:11, cf. Ezek 27:13). Slaves are just bodies, more commodities to add to the long list. But the Apocalypse cannot allow that to pass without glossing the word: they are ‘human lives’. The reference to souls at the end of v. 13 prompts a short refrain on Babylon’s loss: ‘the fruit for which her soul longed’ (v. 14). The word ἐπιθυµία is 7 See the approach of P.S. Minear, And I Saw a New Earth (Washington: Corpus Books, 1968); and K. Wengst, Pax Romana and the Peace of Jesus Christ, trans. J. Bowden (London: SCM, 1987). 8 J.N. Kraybill, Imperial Cult and Commerce in John’s Apocalypse, JSNTSup 132 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996); R. Bauckham, ‘The Economic Critique of Rome in Revelation 18’, in idem, The Climax of Prophecy: Studies on the Book of Revelation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), 338–383; and P. Garnsey, K. Hopkins and C.R. Whittaker, eds., Trade in the Ancient Economy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1983).

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used here, with its echo of Exod. 20:17 and the fruit in the garden in Gen. 3:6. Babylon’s soul is taken up with ‘dainties and splendour’ reminiscent of the attachment to affluence and property of the ‘antichrists’ opposed in 1 John 2:16. In that epistle the way of God based in love of the ‘brethren’ is contrasted with the way of Cain, who hated, oppressed and killed.9 The wealth of Babylon comes at the expense of millions (particularly 18:13). The description of Babylon (together with the account of its wealth) owes much to Ezek. 27–28 and Jer. 51. The goods are in large part luxuries, hardly the basic necessities which formed the subsistence of most people in John’s (or in our) day (Rev. 18:11ff., cf. Ezek. 27:12ff.). Luxury goods here gravitate to the centre to supply an insatiable need. This has the effect of making the rest of the world peripheral. Those on the periphery become merely means of supplying the needs of others.10 In the extravagant search of the few for luxury of life and wealth there lies a hidden cost to human lives and societies. Such sentiments are rudely interrupted, however, when there is a different kind of cry, one of rejoicing in v. 20 echoing the joy of heaven at Satan’s ejection in 12:12. Apostles, as well as saints and prophets, are commanded to rejoice, because God has given judgement in favour of them rather than of Babylon who has been drunk with the blood of the saints (17:6). The tone of sadness is resumed in v. 22, this time in the words of the mighty angel, and concerns the end of Babylon’s music. Babylon as a place of art, music, craft and trade is ended and the round of marriage and light which characterises the life of a city living normally is rudely interrupted (cf. Matt. 24:38). Her merchants were ‘the magnates of the earth’ (cf. Rev. 6:15). The readers receive a rude shock if they think that there is a neutral character to all the activity of trade, commerce and socialising. It is sorcery, which will be excluded from the New Jerusalem (21:8; 22:15) and of which humanity has refused to repent.11 God’s witness against sorcery is closely linked with the oppression of the hired labourer, the widow, the orphan and the stranger in Mal. 3:5, when the refining fire of judgement comes. The lament for her culture and sophistication and wealth cannot pass without the reminder that in her the blood of the prophets was to be found (6:10; 16:6; 17:6; 18:24, cf. Matt. 23:35ff.), together with that of all those slaughtered on the earth. Babylon is a place of vicious violence towards humans, as well as enabling a few kings and magnates to grow rich.

9

In Josephus, Antiquities 1.60, Cain’s sin is the enclosure of land and acquisitiveness. O. O’Donovan, ‘The Political Thought of the Book of Revelation’, TynBul 37 (1986): 61–94, at 85. 11 See P.F. Esler, The First Christians in Their Social Worlds: Social-Scientific Approaches to New Testament Interpretation (London: Routledge, 1994), 131–146. 10

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A feature of chs. 18–19 is the welter of different voices which confront the reader oscillating between triumph at Babylon’s fall and a searing lament at the end of her culture. The perspective of the beneficiaries of Babylon’s wealth is included. There is sadness expressed at the passing of the splendour of Babylon, though none from the heavenly voices. The perspective of those who have profited from Babylon’s greatness includes all of us who have become prosperous. The lament looks at the event from the perspective of the merchants and reminds those of us reading this text in the rich world that there is another world whose impoverishment is the price to be paid for our ease and wealth. As Allan Boesak has put it, it is ‘the viewpoint which is so typically the one of those who do not know what it is like to stand at the bottom of the list’.12 These verses make explicit that Revelation is full of competing voices, symbolic systems and world-views. We are called to John’s visionary voice, compared with which any claim to vision (such as that of Jezebel, Balaam or the false prophet) is to be rejected. Voices even within John’s own church which commend the eating of idol meat and compromise with the social mores have their echoes in the merchants and mighty who lament Babylon’s fall. It is a persisting voice in all of us which is never resolved at the end of the book. The ‘unclean’ still lurks at the gates of the city.13 This vision invites us to consider carefully the history of wealth and to assess the extent to which the trading which forms a part of the business of international ‘order’ is neutral in its inspiration and effects. Trade as much as violence and conquest can defile communities which become dominated by the benefits that it brings and the priorities it demands. Babylon with whom the kings and mighty have committed fornication demonstrates the lengths that are gone to in order to achieve wealth, status and power. This comes about through trade, which is fornication, ‘a cultural promiscuity by which one power exploits and drains the resources from many others’.14 There is no view here of economic and political activity as autonomous enterprises devoid of any theological meaning. Acts of trade and commerce are shown to be shot through with human interest (so also 13:14ff.). The supposition that politics and economics are impossible to interpret in the light of the gospel, have laws of their own and should be left to experts, is not encouraged by Revelation. However uncomfortable and however out of their depth they might feel, Christians are obliged to read and understand the 12

A.A. Boesak, Comfort and Protest (Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 1987), 121–122. Schüssler Fiorenza, Revelation, 132ff.; and T.M.S. Long, Narrator, Audiences, and Message: A South African Reader Response Study of Narrative Relationships in the Book of Revelation (Diss. University of Natal, 1995). 14 O’Donovan, ‘Political Thought’, 85, and his suggestive comments well summarising the challenge of apocalyptic in idem, ‘Humanity’s Last Flight from God’, in Decide for Peace: Evangelicals and the Bomb, ed. D. Mills-Powell (Basingstoke: Marshall Pickering, 1986), 100–107. 13

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nature of what confronts them through the lens of the story of Christ which casts its shadow over every human transaction. No activity can be regarded as morally neutral and beyond the critique and need for redemption of the Lamb who was slain. In the mundane situations of life there is present a challenge, threat and opportunity of the hidden life of God, a mix of the mundane and the heavenly. Neither membership of the Christian church nor credal assent is the criterion for faithfulness to God but resistance to Babylon. Matt. 25:31ff. is another text for those who want to find ‘elements which can be read in an inclusivist way in terms of the meaning of ultimate salvation’.15 In other words, service of the hungry, thirsty, naked and imprisoned is the criterion for a place among the sheep or the goats, not membership of the Church. That the weight of exegetical opinion, however, has favoured the exclusive interpretation in which the ‘brethren’ of the Son of Man are identified either with disciples or Christian missionaries, needs to be recognised.16 Francis Watson has challenged conventional wisdom which doubts whether this famous text can be appropriately used to justify an option for the poor and outcast, by pointing to features in the text which deconstruct the neat assumption that this passage serves a threatened Church needing assurance of vindication and retribution of its enemies.17 If we stay with the text of Matthew’s Gospel as we have it rather than the ‘hidden’ story of the community, which is the product of decades of patient historical reconstruction,18 a neat identification of ‘the least of these my brethren’ with Christian disciples becomes less clear. The letter of the text does not demand the ‘exclusive’ interpretation as the only possible reading, particularly when we read the Last Judgement in the context of the narrative as a whole. Rather, the Gospel leaves readers uncertain whether they can have assurance that they will be among the ‘sheep’ rather than the ‘goats’.19 Indeed, there is surprise at the identity of the children of God when the Last Assize takes place (25:37, 45, cf. Rom. 8:21). While it is not possible to demonstrate that Matthew’s Gospel is more inclusive in its attitude to the 15

The Doctrine Commission of the Church of England 1996, 168. C. Rowland, ‘“The Gospel, the Poor and the Churches”: Attitudes to Poverty in the British Churches and Biblical Exegesis’, in The Bible in Ethics: The Second Sheffield Colloquium, eds. J.W. Rogerson et al., JSOT 207 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 213–231. 17 F. Watson, ‘Liberating the Reader’, in idem, The Open Text: New Directions for Biblical Studies? (London: SCM, 1993), 57–84. 18 Some forms of historical criticism which rely on the reconstruction of another story ‘behind’ the literal sense of the text (authorial intention, community structures, historical Jesus, etc.) have an uncanny resemblance to ancient allegorical exegesis. The major difference, of course, is the referent of the hidden story; see J. Barr, ‘The Literal, the Allegorical, and Modern Biblical Scholarship’, JSOT 44 (1989): 3–17. 19 M. Davies, Matthew (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993), 127. 16

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weak and outcasts than much mainstream exegesis has allowed, the text of Matthew, like Revelation, does not allow the reader to be complacent in the face of judgement. In Matt. 25:31ff. there is a subtle relationship between the eschatological judge and his hidden presence in the least of his ‘brethren’ in the midst of the present age: final judgement indeed is now being gestated in the womb of history. All of life is an issue for the religious person, from eating to buying, words and deeds as well as what is narrowly regarded as worship. There is no area of existence which is neutral and unaffected by religious significance. Christianity inherited from Judaism a concern in this area. To use contemporary religious terminology, ‘spirituality’ is not a matter of private cultic devotion unconnected with the demands of ordinary life. It preserves an indissoluble link between the public and the private, the spiritual and political which has become such a central feature of catholic Christianity. Texts like Matt. 25 and Revelation do not so much offer a precise description of what is to come as a means of gaining a different perspective on the world, which challenges neat assumptions about priorities, inclusiveness and values in society. They are most disturbing for any ecclesiology. As the Letters to the Seven Churches indicate, who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ is not at all clear. Those who are most confident (the Laodiceans) turn out to be the least fit for inclusion. Confessing the name and being part of an ecclesial community is not what counts; it is whether one has worshipped the beast and drunk deep of the fornication of Babylon. What we find in these texts leads us to question whether the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England has got it quite right when its authors write, ‘this openness to the affirmation of the righteousness of some outside the believing community does not normally extend to an affirmation of their religious quest’. There is an unacceptable divorce between righteousness and religious quest as if the religion and the acts of mercy, etc. might in some way be divorced. Paul obviously thought that idolaters would find it enormously difficult to do God’s will but in principle it was not impossible. The habit of doing righteousness was (and is) a religious obligation and must not be separated from it. Relationship with God through Jesus Christ must not be interpreted solely or even primarily in terms of ecclesiastical, liturgical or spiritual acts and words – the religious narrowly defined. Matthew and Revelation suggest that to be in Jesus Christ means to follow in his footsteps, engaging in acts of mercy to the outcast and in humility sharing the lot of those who like the Son of Man have nowhere to lay their head (Matt. 8:20). Confession and membership of a specific religious group is less important than non-conformity with the mores of the beast and Babylon. Of course, that detachment from ‘false consciousness’ is assisted by the illumination which the perspective of explicit identity with the Lamb who is slain can offer, though it does not guarantee it. There remains the possibility that resistance to the beast and Babylon can be discerned by all

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those who instinctively do what is required of them by God (cf. Rom. 2:13– 14). Neither text allows that certainty or assurance of status or destiny. These texts, by virtue of their character and form, with all the vicissitudes and suggestiveness of narrative and symbol, do not allow readers to rest confident that they can be assured of ultimate vindication. There is an ambiguity in the refusal to allow that complacency in the face of judgement. The mix of parable, symbol and narrative functions like metaphor which should stop attentive readers in their tracks by the disturbing juxtaposition and get them to think about the world from another perspective, another set of experiences: Through being intractably uninterpretable metaphor demands, in terms of conventional modes of discourse, alternative methods of interpretation. … Through metaphor the speaker may attempt to represent the nature of her being … outside the rationalising and normalising tropes and figures of conventional language. … The interpreter … must attempt to identify with the speaker.20

Of course, we can ignore a text like Revelation and the experience of its author, or we can get used to it by familiarity with its contents or domestication of its concerns within a wider doctrinal framework, just as we become immune to the provocative and disturbing effect of metaphor, so that it becomes dead and lifeless in the midst of the familiarity of our discourse. John Sweet has reminded us of the need to take seriously the contribution of apocalyptic epistemology and the humility needed by all of us who have been formed by Western rationalism in approaching the interpretation of apocalyptic texts.21 Where an attempt is made to challenge convention, metaphor offers the attempt to exploit the crevice which opens up as language fails to do justice to the complexity of experience and the poet and visionary resorts to the disturbing, unconventional and bizarre to open our eyes to the reality of God and the world – ‘to open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes of Man into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the human Imagination’.22 Once those ‘Eternal Worlds’ are opened up, however, there are disconcerting things to learn about ‘the mystery of salvation’, namely a different ‘Vision of the Church’, and the identity of children of God.

20 I am grateful to C.M.F. Rowland for permission to quote from his unpublished essay, ‘Are there things that can only be said metaphorically?’; see also Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 193ff. 21 J.P.M. Sweet, ‘Revelation’, in Early Christian Thought in its Jewish Context, eds. J. Barclay and idem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 160–173, at 165. 22 William Blake, Jerusalem 8.

18. Apocalypse, Prophecy and the New Testament In the New Testament Apocalypse we find a text opening with a description of a book, which throughout suggests that it is a work of prophecy and commends the importance of the prophetic ministry.1 The neat distinctions, which modern scholars have made on the subject of the relationship between apocalypse and prophecy, seem not to be operative in this case.2 The Apocalypse offers the best example of a New Testament writing being regarded by its writer as prophecy as well as apocalypse (Rev. 1:3; 22:7, 18). Indeed, while there are peculiar characteristics in the biblical ‘apocalyptic’ texts (e.g. dreams, and dream-like imagery), Daniel and Revelation, there is little to suggest that they belong to a fundamentally different type of religion. Understanding the ways of God takes different forms, even in texts which are labelled ‘prophetic’ or apocalyptic. Thus, the extent of explanation of the dreams and visions in Daniel contrasts with the almost complete lack of this in the Apocalypse. Also, a comparison of 4 Ezra with both Daniel and the Apocalypse shows the way in which, in addition to the vision, 4 Ezra’s major component of revelation comes by discussion between Ezra and the angel Uriel (whose main concern is the impossibility of the adequacy of the human understanding of the ways of God). Such contrasts appear in the Hebrew Bible also, where visions jostle with proclamatory pronouncements by a human agent in which the word of God is spoken. The Apocalypse is a continuation of much of what has gone before. The Books of Ezekiel and Daniel have influenced the form and content of the Book of Revelation. The first chapter of Ezekiel, the merkabah chapter, has contributed to the visionary vocabulary of John (namely 1:13 and 4:1). Although the secrets which are revealed in the Apocalypse are largely concerned with the future hope, its outlook is at one with the mystical literature of Judaism. Its angelology, heavenly voices and preoccupation with the hidden, are precisely what we find in the mystical literature. We do not know what led to John’s dramatic meeting with the heavenly Son of Man on the isle of Patmos, even if conjectures may be made about the significance of the time (the Lord’s Day) and 1 F.D. Mazzaferri, The Genre of the Book of Revelation from a Source-Critical Perspective, BZNW 54 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1989). 2 J. Barton, Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1986).

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the place (possibly in exile as was the prophet Ezekiel). With the Book of Revelation we are in the midst of the world of mystery. Despite attempts over the years to play down the importance of this book, the indications suggest that its thought-forms and outlook were more typical of early Christianity than is often allowed. The fact that we possess little directly parallel visionary material elsewhere in the New Testament accounts for some of the differences, but they are superficial. Beneath the surface we have here convictions about God, Christ and the world which are not far removed from the so-called ‘mainstream’ Christianity of the rest of the New Testament. This essay concerns the New Testament evidence and the pervasiveness of the theme of access to divine secrets and the revelation of them as a fundamental component of its religion. To this end there is a consideration of the way in which resort to visions and seeing and hearing things from and about God are a thread which links disparate New Testament texts. The essay begins with a survey of the uses of the words προφήτης, ἀποκάλυψις/ἀποκαλύπτω, φανερόω. The problematic of the apocalyptic and prophetic in Acts offers an example of the way in which visions function in the structure of a narrative text. The importance of visions and the access to the heavenly mysteries recurs throughout the Pauline corpus as the basis of the authority of Paul and of the theological message which he communicates. In the Gospel of Matthew insight into the divine is used in the infancy narratives in particular but also at key moments elsewhere in the text as an indicator of contrasting attitudes to Jesus and the mode of christological understanding. The same is true of the Gospel of John. This text is largely devoid of explicit visionary terminology and yet its theology is best understood in the light of the access to divine secrets and their communication. The essay concludes with an attempt to sketch the distinctive hermeneutical perspective of this preoccupation with the divine mysteries. If Luke–Acts is any indication (and echoes in texts like 1 Cor. 12–14 and 1 Pet. 1:11–12 suggest that it is not unusual), there is a clear continuation between the prophets of old who spoke, and suffered for their testimony, and the prophets who had emerged such as Jesus and John (Luke 1:76; 7:26; 20:6 of John and Luke 4:24; 7:16, 39; 13:35; 22:65 and 24:19 of Jesus). Prophecy had ceased to be merely a phenomenon of the past belonging to the oracular utterances of those whose words were now Scripture, for it related to the present activity of men (Luke 1:67) and women (Luke 2:36), fulfilling the prophecy of Joel about the ‘last days’ in Acts 2:17. Prophecy was a phenomenon of early Christian experience (Acts 11:27; 13:1; 15:32; 21:9–10). Prophecy and vision are juxtaposed as related though different activities of the divine spirit poured out on all flesh. The additions to the quotation from Joel suggest both the eschatological character of this activity and the emphasis on prophecy (most manuscripts add the words ‘and they will prophesy’ at the end of 2:18) as a blanket description of the various phenomena described.

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The experience of many of the modern prophets is no different from those who had preceded them (Luke 11:49; Acts 7:52). Spirit prophecy and revelation are linked, for example in the description of Zechariah’s song (Luke 1:67) and the expectation that at moments of trial the Spirit will put words into the mouths of Christians (Matt. 10:21, cf. Acts 4:8; 7:55). New revelation is promised (John 16:13; 1 Cor. 2:10; 14:2) though this is tempered by reference to the decisive revelation in Christ (John 15:26; 16:13a; Eph. 1:17; 3:5; Rev. 19:10; 22:6). The widespread experience of the spirit led to the need for testing, which has both an ethical and a theological component (1 John 4:1, cf. Did. 11:7). That juxtaposition of spiritual insight with authoritative teaching is particularly evident in the Pastorals where the Spirit is linked with tradition (1 Tim. 4:14; 2 Tim. 1:5–7, 14). The end of a prophetic era is marked in passages like t.Sotah 13:3 though in Matt. 11:11ff.; Luke 16:16 the preaching of the Kingdom of God heralds a new time of prophecy. The examples of prophecy we have are of hymns (Luke 1:67), words of witness about God’s salvation (Luke 2:38) and words of warning (Acts 21:9– 10). There is little evidence of prophecy of vision, except by implication in the visionary experience of the ultimate prophet, Jesus, who saw Satan falling like lightning from heaven (Luke 10:18). The use of ἀποκάλυψις/ἀποκαλύπτω to describe revelation of God or divine secrets is relatively rare in literature written round about the time of the New Testament.3 In Theodotion’s Greek ἀποκαλύπτω is introduced in passages where the earlier Greek had other versions, for example Dan. 2:19, 47; 10:1; 11:35. The words are more common in the New Testament. In the Gospels ἀποκάλυψις is found at Luke 2:32 in Simeon’s song. That occurs in a context where already the revelation of a mystery, which angels desire to look upon, had been celebrated as part of the immediately preceding context (2:13, cf. 1 Pet. 1:11). The salvation is described by Simeon as light and glory. Ἀποκαλύπτω appears in contexts dealing with the eschatological revelation of human secrets (Matt. 10:26//Luke 2:35; 12:2), divine secrets (Matt. 11:25//Luke 10:21; Matt. 16:17 and of God in Matt. 11:27) and of the day of the Son of Man in Luke 17:30. Ἀποκάλυψις is central to Paul’s self-understanding (Gal. 1:12) and relates also to a future hope (1 Cor. 1:7, cf. 2 Thess. 1:7; 1 Pet. 1:7; 4:13). Revelations could be experienced both by himself and by members of the church (2 Cor. 12:2; Gal. 2:2; 1 Cor. 14:23; Phil. 3:15; Eph. 1:17). Ἀποκαλύπτω is used of the present manifestation of God’s wrath (Rom. 1:17–18) and the mystery prepared for the elect (1 Cor. 2:10). The mystery of hidden things made manifest is found in Col. 1:26, cf. Col. 3:4 and Eph. 3:3, 5 and Rom. 16:25. The coming of Antichrist has still to be revealed (2 Thess. 3 M. Smith, ‘On the History of ΑΠΟΚΑΛΥΠΤΩ and ΑΠΟΚΑΛΥΨΙΣ’, in Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East, ed. D. Hellholm, 2nd edn. (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1989), 9–20.

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2:3) and judgement of human works (1 Cor. 3:13) and the demonstration of the identity of the children of God (Rom. 8:18–19), a usage evident also in 1 Pet. 1:5 and 5:1. Parallel to the use of ἀποκαλύπτω is φανερόω. This is found in the hidden-and-revealed contrast in Mark 4:22, cf. Matt. 10:26//Luke 12:2. The Fourth Gospel uses φανερόω in John 1:31; 2:11; 7:4; 9:3; 17:6; 21:1 (it is also used at several key points in Paul’s letters like Rom. 1:19 and 3:21, where it is used of the decisive revelation of the divine righteousness).

18.1. The Acts of the Apostles: Prophecy and Visions as a Sign of Divine Providence Acts, like the opening chapters of Matthew’s Gospel, uses visions to enable the narrative of the church’s growth to be moved on. It is evident in the way in which Paul’s experience on the Damascus road changes the focus of the story (so much so that it is repeated three times as if to emphasise the strange hand of providence at work) and is also evident in this passage. Peter’s journey to Cornelius is dependent on the vision of the descending sail and the instruction to sacrifice and eat animals without regard for their ritual cleanness. Herein a major barrier to a common table and fellowship with pagans is removed and a possibility is opened up of extending that fellowship between the risen Jesus and his disciples (Acts 10:41, cf. Luke 24:30 and Gal. 2). The interesting thing about Luke’s account of Peter’s vision in Acts 10 is that, unlike other visions (say the visions in the second half of the Book of Daniel), there is no angelic interpretation of the meaning of the vision. Peter may initially be left at a loss as he is confronted with the need to make sense of what has appeared to him (10:19). That is precisely what has happened by the time we get to 10:28, for a link has been made by him between clean and unclean food and clean and unclean persons. Peter has drawn the conclusion that, if he is allowed to eat anything without discrimination, he is also obliged to regard all human persons in the same way, in the manner of the God who shows no favours (10:34). The implication is that the conjunction of the perplexity at the vision with the appearance of the Gentile has led to a moment of insight so that, on reflection, (and with the exercise of reason?) the meaning of the vision for that particular set of circumstances has become clear. A suggestion that Luke might have wanted to ‘explain’ how it was that Peter’s vision came about, is found in 10:10 where the circumstances in which Peter received the vision are set out. ‘Discrimination’ is evidently an issue. The critical attitude taken by the Jerusalem presbyterate in 11:2 contravenes the instruction of the Spirit to Peter in Acts 10:20 not to question and act on the implications of what has been revealed. The role of visions in this chapter contrasts with the deliberations described in Acts 15, where the issue of the conditions upon which Gentiles are ad-

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mitted into the community is discussed.4 Although there is little doubt that the debate is under the guidance of the Spirit (15:28), the authoritative pronouncement is of James, whose word seems to be decisive (15:18) and whose speech deserves the attention expected of the prophet like Moses (15:13, cf. Luke 9:35; Deut. 18:15, 19). The possibility cannot be excluded that this prominence is because of James’s blood relationship to Jesus.5 In James’s speech the justification is rooted in proof from Scripture and in this respect differs from the visionary and supernatural proof, which runs through Acts 10–11 and the appeal to experience, which is repeated in Peter’s speech in Acts 15:7. The problematic character of resort to visions and dreams as a way of settling ethical disputes, so important in Deut. 13, 18:20 and in the related and famous story in b.B.Metziah 59a,6 is hinted at only in the reserve expressed by the elders in Jerusalem. The fact that a dreamer of dreams might lead Israel astray (Deut. 13) is not contemplated by an author who has every confidence that the voice of God is to be heard in the experience of those heroes of Christian origins. This is not surprising, not only because the writer can, with the benefit of hindsight, have confidence that the movement is of God (cf. Acts 5:39) but also because his record of the significant role of the heavenly vision is used with discrimination. These are no ordinary people who receive visions. Even the radical Stephen is subtly woven into the fabric of the early Christian authority-structure by his role as one who served at tables, but ended up being an early protagonist for a radically disjunctive form of Judaism. Acts is a story primarily about apostles who are duly commissioned (and that even includes Paul who just manages to make the grade). As such they can be safely entrusted with visions because they would be no false prophets. There is no sense that any one in the mid-century could come along with an ‘apocalypse’ as contemplated by 1 Cor. 14:26 (though here too in 1 Cor. 14:30 discrimination is needed), or claim to be an authoritative prophet, like the Montanists were to do and claim the inspiration of the SpiritParaclete. Joel may have prophesied that the spirit would fall on all flesh and ‘your sons and daughters would prophesy’, but it is only chosen ‘sons’ whose stories are allowed to be recorded in Acts even if the daughters’ prophetic powers may be alluded to in passing (Acts 21:9). Agabus, it is true, emerges as a significant minor figure (mentioned in 11:28) but his intervention later in the narrative, predicting Paul’s capture, and which leads to fellow-Christians 4

L.T. Johnson, Decision Making in the Church (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983). C. Rowland, Christian Origins: An Account of the Setting and Character of the Most Important Messianic Sect of Judaism (London: SPCK, 1985), 266. 6 P.S. Alexander, ‘A Sixtieth Part of Prophecy: The Problem of Continuing Revelation in Judaism’, in Words Remembered, Texts Renewed, eds. J. Davies et al., JSOTSup 195 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 414–433. 5

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seeking to dissuade Paul from his chosen strategy, is not allowed to interfere with the working out of ‘the Lord’s will’ (Acts 21:14, cf. 11:18) as Paul goes up to Jerusalem. The account is a paradigm for an understanding of God’s activity, which remains in part faithful to the ecumenical spirit of the Joel quotation in Acts 2:17–21. Nevertheless, this is no ordinary person who is converted. Luke makes it quite clear in his description of Cornelius that he is just the sort of person that God might be expected to be happy with. Luke’s narrative is one that is pervaded with a sense of inevitability and conformity with the manifest purposes of God. Just as Josephus had introduced his description of the climax of his account of the First Revolt (War 6.289) in 70 CE, when Titus’s legionaries raised their standards in the Temple, by reporting the plain warnings of God in the form of prodigies and prophecies, so Luke’s narrative is peppered with visions and angelic appearances, which pointed in the direction of the veracity of the Christian claims for those with eyes to see them. Gamaliel perhaps voices the author’s desire to persuade his readers that there can be no brooking the divine purposes (Acts 5:39, cf. 11:17–18 and 21:14). Just as Josephus used the divine oracles of old to validate Roman imperial claims, the frequent insertion into the narrative of the visionary and angelic pronouncement serves to remind the reader that this is no ordinary story, however insignificant and unremarkable the participants.

18.2. The Pauline Corpus: Prophetic Commission and Mediation of the Divine Mysteries The revelatory component in Paul’s life stands like a central pillar fundamental to his whole career.7 We are no longer in a position to know exactly whether Paul as a Pharisee may have been introduced to the heavenly mysteries. The so-called conversion is shrouded behind the matter-of-fact accounts of the Acts of the Apostles and the suggestive glimpses behind the veil in Galatians. Yet, for all that, it is the visionary world which best explains that shattering moment in Paul’s life. In Galatians, Paul speaks of the moment of disclosure as an ἀποκάλυψις (Gal. 1:12) and of ‘God being pleased to reveal his son to me’ (1:16). In Galatians Paul affirms that he did not receive his commission by any human agency but ‘through a revelation of Jesus Christ’. His gospel is just as much the result of a direct confrontation with Jesus Christ as any that had been received by the ‘pillar’ apostles. Jesus of Nazareth, seated at the right hand of God, but to be manifested in glory at the close of the age, (1 Cor. 1:7) had proleptically revealed himself to the Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus. Paul thinks of another dimension of human existence normally hidden from sight but revealed to the favoured few. He uses 7

A.F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven, SJLA 25 (Leiden: Brill, 1977).

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prophetic call narratives in his autobiography in Gal. 1:15, where he alludes to Jer. 1:5 and Isa. 49:1. His self-designation as an apostle echoes the language used from time to time of the prophetic commission to act as God’s agent (Isa. 6:8–9; 48:16; Jer. 23:31; Ezek. 2:4; Zech. 2:11; Mal. 4:5).8 In 2 Cor. 12:2, in a confession which events have squeezed out of him, the apostle speaks in oblique fashion about an experience 14 years before, when ‘a man in Christ’ was snatched up into paradise or the third heaven.9 Although there are those who contend that Paul chooses to boast about a third person here, the reference to the abundance of revelations in 12:6 suggests that Paul has himself in mind, or perhaps that ‘apocalyptic self’, which experiences such awesome things. While Paul speaks of the ineffable words he heard on that occasion, it appears to differ from the Damascus road experience in not having that life-changing quality about it. According to Acts (22:17 and 27:23), the visions and revelations mentioned in 2 Cor. 12:2 were not Paul’s only experiences. That Paul is using traditional language and style, familiar to us from Jewish apocalyptic texts, is apparent from the cosmological framework and language. His use of the Greek ἁρπάζω is particularly pertinent to our theme. It is a word used elsewhere in the New Testament to speak of the mysterious rapture of individuals, whether to heaven (1 Thess. 4:17; Rev. 12:5), or as the result of divine intervention (Acts 8:39).10 The word is used of Enoch’s translation in Wisd. 4:11 (cf. LXX Gen. 5:24 and Sir. 44:16). In 2 Cor. 3, Paul contrasts his apostolic ministry with the ministrations of Moses. Here Paul is not only placing his activity on a superior plane to that of Moses but subordinating the latter’s pivotal role in the divine economy to himself and asserting the temporary nature of it. What starts off as a contrast ends up as an assertion about the present transformative glory, which belongs to those who are ministers of the new covenant. The apostolic ministers reflect the divine glory. Such reflection of divine glory is apparent in 2 Enoch, where the seer beholds the glory of God, and this results in his transformation, so that he reflects the glory, which he had been privileged to see.11 In 2 Cor. 3 it is not merely a future phenomenon as elsewhere but something which begins in the present age. 8 J.-A. Bühner, Der Gesandte und sein Weg im 4. Evangelium, WUNT 2.2 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1977). 9 C.R.E. Morray-Jones, ‘Paradise Revisited (2 Cor. 12:1–12): The Jewish Mystical Background of Paul’s Apostolate’, HTR 86 (1993): 177–217, 265–292; and J.D. Tabor, Things Unutterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise in Its Greco-Roman, Judaic, and Early Christian Contexts (Lanham: University Press of America, 1986). 10 The sudden disappearance of Enoch is attested in the Fragmentary Targum to Gen. 5:24 where the text indicates agnosticism about Enoch’s fate. 11 C.R.E. Morray-Jones, ‘Transformational Mysticism in the Apocalyptic-Merkabah Tradition’, JJS 43 (1992): 1–31; W.F. Smelik, ‘On Mystical Transformation of the Righteous into Light in Judaism’, JSJ 26 (1995): 122–144.

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The transformation of which Paul speaks in 2 Cor. 3 is nothing less than the divine image which believers share. The phrase ‘from glory to glory’ suggests a progressive transformation, similar to that in some of the apocalypses. In Asc. Isa. 9:13, for example, the descent of Christ through the heavens leads to a progressive diminution of the glory he had possessed in the highest heavens. This enabled him to mislead the heavenly powers at his descent. Similarly Isaiah’s ascent to the heavenly world brings about a transformation of his own body as he approaches the seventh heaven. In 2 Cor. 4, Paul indicates that there is a present possession of this heavenly glory in the ordinary ministrations of the apostle. Earth-bound witnesses should not be deceived, therefore, by the apparent humble persona into thinking that there is little of the glory of the highest heaven. This is nothing other than the knowledge of God’s glory, the highest privilege granted to the visionary, but now located in the face of Jesus Christ and reflected in the suffering apostle. Paul sees himself and his companions as mystical guides, who are like stewards in the divine palace with the privilege of administering the divine secrets (1 Cor. 4:1). Access to divine secrets is typical of the apocalypses and forms a central feature of the authority granted to the Teacher of Righteousness at Qumran (cf. 1QpHab 7). Such mysteries did not only relate to the details of eschatological salvation and the reordering of conventional wisdom about its fulfilment but also to the central item of the gospel. This is most apparent in 1 Cor. 2:6–7, where Paul talks of the content of the gospel itself as a mystery hidden from the rulers of the present age. It is this which is the essence of divine wisdom, perceived as foolishness to those who cannot understand the secret of the divine purpose. Here, in an argument reminiscent of the opening chapters of the Wisdom of Solomon, Paul contrasts the divine with the human wisdom and suggests that the clue to salvation is based upon the inability of those dominated by the epistemology of the present age to see the significance of what they were doing in crucifying the Lord of glory (1 Cor. 2:9). This turned out to be the very heart of the divine mystery for the salvation of the world. So the Christ event itself is a mystery hidden before all ages but only revealed in the last days (cf. 1 Pet. 1:11–12; Luke 10:23). Paul seems to have had recourse to a number of divine secrets, which were of fundamental importance for his theology. In 1 Cor. 15:51, for example, he illuminates the problem of the relationship between mundane existence and the resurrection life by resort to a mystery about eschatological transformation. Also in the doxology at the end of Romans, there is reference to revelation of the divine mystery in an unusual formulation. Elsewhere he lets the Roman readers into the eschatological mystery of Israel’s destiny in Rom. 11:25, which is then bolstered by a scriptural proof text. This terminology is taken up in the (deutero-?)Pauline Colossians and Ephesians. In Col. 1:26 (Eph. 3:3), for example, God’s plan for the salvation of the Gentiles is portrayed as a great mystery, which Paul has been privi-

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leged to receive and which forms the basis for the apostolic ministry in which he is engaged. The close relationship between believers and Christ, who is enthroned ‘in the heavenly places’, (Eph. 2:6) means that the role of the church is to make known the wisdom of God to the rulers and authorities (Eph. 3:6) and to be ready to engage in a struggle with these cosmic powers (6:11). The task of the apostle and the church is not a parochial affair, for they are engaged in an enterprise on a cosmic scale (1 Cor. 4:10) as God’s fellow workers (3:9). Indeed, the apostle sees himself as an architect working according to a divine master plan, parallel to Moses himself (Exod. 25:9 and 40: ‘According to all that I show you concerning the tabernacle, and of its furniture, so you shall make it. … And see that you make them after the pattern for them, which is being shown you on the mountain’, cf. 1 Chron. 28:18 and 2 Cor. 3:16). Indeed, that to which the apostles are bearing witness is itself an apocalyptic event.12 In Rom. 1:17–19 the gospel and its content are that which is revealed from heaven, and in Rom. 3:22–25, using slightly different terminology, Paul summarises the saving event of Christ as something, which was heralded by the law and the prophets but is essentially a fresh and definitive revelation from God. That divine wisdom, to which the true apostle has access, is a mystery taught by the Spirit and which can only be understood by others who themselves have the Spirit. Indeed, in 1 Cor. 2:10, Paul sets out most explicitly his claim that the truth to which he has access is one that is a divine secret understandable only by those who are themselves inspired by the same Spirit. Moreover, there is an intimate link between the medium and the message. By virtue of his own knowledge and practice the gospel can be observed in his own person and conduct: Paul has the mind of Christ himself (1 Cor. 2:16) and speaks words which are not taught by humans but by God (2:13, cf. Gal. 1:1). The Spirit enables those who truly understand to have access to the most profound truths about God (1 Cor. 2:10), the very goal of the mystical ascent. The material in 1 Cor. 2 is a reminder that discussion of Paul’s mysticism should not focus only on 2 Cor. 12:2, where Paul’s ambivalence is everywhere apparent. Such ambivalence is comprehensible if we recognise that, for Paul, the central mystery is the cross of Christ. That is the wisdom of which he speaks, not the exclusive mystery which comes only via the heavenly ascent. The visionary experience (Gal. 1:12 and 1:16, cf. Acts 22:17) enabled him to act on his eschatological convictions, so that his apocalypse of Jesus Christ became the basis for his practice of admitting Gentiles to the messianic age without the Law of Moses.

12

M. Bockmuehl, Revelation and Mystery in Ancient Judaism and Pauline Christianity, WUNT 2.36 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1990).

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18.3. The Gospel of Matthew: The Visionary Privilege of the ‘Little Ones’ As with many other New Testament books, there is an apocalyptic thread running through Matthew’s narrative. From the dreams of Joseph and the Magi, which protect the infant son of God, to the dream of Pilate’s wife before the crucifixion, which serves to comment on the miscarriage of justice taking place, knowledge through dreams and revelations is a significant element in this Gospel, notwithstanding that several of such accounts are held in common with the other two Synoptic Gospels. Of these, the first is the account of the baptism, in which there is a clear allusion to Ezek. 1:1 in all three Gospels. The heavens are opened, just as they were to the prophet Ezekiel by the river Chebar, thus fulfilling the prophetic longing for God to rend the heavens and reveal the divine purposes (cf. Isa. 64:1).13 In the Beatitudes at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus declares that the pure in heart will see God. Once again we have terminology familiar from the mystical tradition in which the seer is vouchsafed a glimpse of the divine kābōd, ‘glory’, after the heavenly ascent. Just as in the Jewish mystical tradition such a privilege comes only after a thorough grounding in Torah, Mishnah and Talmud, so here too in Matthew an ethical dimension is similarly stressed. The Transfiguration, particularly in its Matthaean version, has several points of contact with ancient Jewish theophanies and the traditions which developed from them.14 It especially resembles the christophany of Rev. 1:13 where the risen Christ appears to the exiled seer on Patmos, and where the links with the throne-theophany tradition, based on Ezekiel, are widely acknowledged. In the Transfiguration, alone of all the synoptic texts (and surprisingly so given the nature of the post-resurrection appearances), we come closest to the heavenly appearance of an exalted angelic figure.15 Matt. 18:10 presupposes some kind of link between the little ones and their angels. Such a connection is found in the Jewish haggadah, where the ancestors are regarded as the embodiment of the mysteries of God’s throne and person. So one source says: ‘The patriarchs are the merkabah, the throne13

C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982), 358ff. 14 W. Gerber, ‘Die Metamorphose Jesu, Mk 9,2f par’, TZ 23 (1967): 385–395; M. Mach, ‘Christus Mutans: Zur Bedeutung der Verklärung Jesu im Wechsel von jüdischer Messianität zur neutestamentlichen Christologie’, in Messiah and Christos (FS D. Flusser), ed. I. Gruenwald (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1993), 229–266; M. Sabbe, ‘La rédaction du récit de la transfiguration’, in La venue du Messie, ed. E. Massaux (Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1962), 65–100. 15 C. Rowland, ‘Apocalyptic, the Poor, and the Gospel of Matthew’, JTS 45 (1994): 504–518 = above, pp. 252–265.

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chariot’ (e.g. Ber.R. 47:6 and 69:3). Perhaps it is something similar which lies behind Paul’s assertion in 2 Cor. 3:18, that life under the new covenant means that ‘we all, with unveiled face, are beholding the glory of the Lord and being changed from glory to glory’. In Targum Neofiti, on Gen. 22, angels compete with one another to catch a glimpse of Abraham and Isaac whose features are engraved on the throne of glory. The angels of the little ones have the privilege of beholding God’s face, the highest of all privileges. The climax of the heavenly ascent is the vision of God enthroned in glory, something normally denied not only to mortals but also to angels (1 En. 14:21). The angels of Matthew’s little ones stand in close proximity to the throne of glory and share in that destiny, which is vouchsafed to the elect in the New Jerusalem, described in the Apocalypse, of seeing God face to face (Rev. 22:4).

18.4. The Gospel of John: ‘An Apocalypse in Reverse’ We should not be put off by the lack of apocalyptic terminology in the Fourth Gospel, for it is concerned with the revelation of divine mysteries even if there is an almost complete dearth of typical apocalyptic terms (John 1:51 and 12:32 are exceptions). For the Fourth Evangelist, the quest for the highest wisdom of all, the knowledge of God, comes not through the information disclosed in visions and revelations but through the Word become flesh, Jesus of Nazareth, and through the activity of the Spirit/Paraclete who is ultimately dependent on the Son. In the Fourth Gospel there is opposition to any claim to revelation except through Christ. Nevertheless there is presupposed the basic revelatory framework to expound Christology, in order to affirm the uniqueness of the disclosure in Christ and the inferiority of all earlier claims to divine knowledge. The Fourth Gospel is permeated with a major theme of the apocalypses: revelation. Its message has a remarkable affinity with apocalyptic, even if we have to admit that the mode of revelation stressed in the Fourth Gospel differs radically from that outlined in the apocalypses. Jesus proclaims himself as the revelation of the hidden God. He tells Philip, ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father’ (14:8), and at the conclusion of the Prologue, the Evangelist speaks of the Son in the following way: ‘No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known’ (1:18). The vision of God, the heart of the call-experiences of Isaiah and Ezekiel and the goal of the heavenly ascents of the seers and rabbinic mystics, is related in the Fourth Gospel to the revelation of God in Jesus. All claims to have seen God in the past are repudiated; the Jews have ‘neither heard God’s voice nor seen his form’ (5:37). Even when, as in Isaiah’s case, Scripture teaches that a prophet glimpsed God enthroned in glory, this vision is interpreted in the Fourth Gospel as a vision of the pre-

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existent Christ (12:41). No one has seen God except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father (6:46). The vision of God reserved in the Book of Revelation for the fortunate seer (Rev. 4:1) and for the inhabitants of the ‘New Jerusalem’ who will see God face to face (22:4) is found, according to the Fourth Evangelist, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. For John of Patmos it is the coming of the New Jerusalem from heaven, which heralds an era when the dwelling of God is with humanity (Rev. 21:3). The verb (σκηνόω) is that used in John 1:14 of the dwelling of the divine Logos among humankind. The major difference between these two verses is that Revelation still thinks of that presence of God as part of a future eschatological bliss, whereas the author of the Fourth Gospel considers that this is an event which has already taken place at the incarnation. This suggests that the life of Jesus of Nazareth is already in some sense at least an anticipation of that eschatological glory, which is to be revealed at the end of the age. The climax of Revelation is the description of the New Jerusalem, where the throne of God is set and the elect are granted the privilege of seeing God face to face (Rev. 22:4). In Revelation and the rest of the apocalypses, the vision of God is a glimpse of the divine glory, which is hidden in heaven, for God’s ‘glory is inconceivable’ (indeed the form of God’s glory on the throne is not described by John). The Fourth Evangelist agrees in insisting that God cannot be glimpsed through a door open into the heavenly court. Rather God has been revealed in a human person, Jesus, who is repeatedly described as the unique agent of the Father. No one else can see the things of God. The statement of Exod. 3:1, ‘no one can see me and live’, is hinted at in John 1:18 and is used as the basis of the new possibility, which is offered in Christ alone, to see definitively what Jews had claimed to see in an unmediated way in the past (John 5:39). The apocalypse is not to be found in the visions of the mystics and in the disclosures which they offer of the world beyond, but in the earthly life of Jesus Christ. There is in the Gospel narrative and its incarnational direction a definite attempt to stress that revelation is found in this human story. There is thus an implicit challenge to the whole of the apocalyptic tradition, based as it is on the communication of heavenly secrets by visions and related revelations, in so far as those revelations are unrelated to the definitive revelation in Christ. The unequivocal emphasis on Jesus as the focal point of revelation makes the heavenly ascent and the heavenly secrets superfluous. In the Gospel of John there is no eschatological denouement resembling that described in 1 Cor. 1:7 or Mark 14:62. The vision of the glory of the Son of Man is reserved for those with eyes to see (John 17:25). Rightly has John Ashton maintained that the Gospel of John is ‘an apocalypse in reverse’.16

16

J. Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 337 and 381.

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18.5. Prophecy and Apocalypse: Hermeneutical Questions It would be tempting to conclude with some rousing statement about the importance of revelation for New Testament theology. The programmatic statements in Rom. 1:16–19 and 3:21–23, where Paul writes of the revelation of God’s righteousness and wrath in the face of which all humanity stands condemned, stands in tension with passages like Rom. 2:14, where a more optimistic assessment of human capabilities is suggested. However we resolve this tension, the dominance of the revelatory theme is such that it does subordinate all other sentiments. The problem with the revelation is that it pointed forward to some future denouement, when all would at last be made plain. Meanwhile, to quote 1 Cor. 13:12, ‘we see in a glass darkly’. The form of the revelation can produce mystification as much as enlightenment. Visions may only offer answers if their enigmatic imagery is interpreted and this the New Testament apocalypse, for example, does not offer. Perhaps the origins of Christian theology lie in the inability to find in the revelation a transparency, which would have made hermeneutics redundant, but which required instead an exercise of human reason and imagination to discern the contours of the divine in words and events. The prophetic element which is so prominent in the New Testament became less prominent in subsequent centuries. The Montanist claims to new revelation, whatever the precise contours of its claims, dealt a heavy blow to its position in the late second century. The spiritual innovation, which was claimed by Montanus and his circle, was viewed with considerable suspicion in an institution in which tradition claimed an ever-higher place.17 Nevertheless the genre of the apocalypse became an important feature of different strands of early Christianity. It formed a significant component of texts from the Nag Hammadi library and the spirituality of the Pachomian monks as well as the fantastic speculation about the fate of the dead, which is evident in the developing legends about descents into hell and the Bosch-like accounts of the fate of the dead, already anticipated in Hellenistic-Jewish texts like the Testament of Abraham. A distinctive attitude to the early Christian interpretation of Scripture evinces a revelatory and prophetic quality. The emerging interpretative methods, influenced by both Judaism and pagan culture, led to a hermeneutic, which set great store by that quest for divine wisdom, which sacred texts were believed to contain.18 Paul thinks of another dimension to human existence normally hidden from sight but revealed to the favoured few, though the words of Scripture may function as a veil which prevents understanding. In 17 C. Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 18 M. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985).

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2 Cor. 3, for example, we see Paul’s conviction about the indispensability of such exegesis.19 The words are oracular in character and the reader or hearer, ‘at the end of the ages’, has the opportunity to find their meaning, even if those that remain uncomprehending find themselves on the way to perdition (1 Cor. 1:18, cf. 2 Cor. 2:15). It is that oracular character to which Papias seems to allude in his reference to the ‘divine oracles’, which Matthew arranged and all interpreted as best they could (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.3.14– 16: ‘Matthew collected the oracles in the Hebrew language and every one interpreted them as best he could’). Such a hermeneutic is the forerunner of allegorical exegesis, which presupposes that the letter of the text points to another level of reality, whereby one may have opened other dimensions of meaning. That should not surprise us given the explicit description of Paul’s method in Gal. 4:24, where the literal sense of Genesis yields a ‘deeper’, ‘transcendent’ meaning in the contrast between two cities and two covenants.20 Other levels of hermeneutical reality are available because of the allusiveness of the text and its terminological imprecision. Understanding demands a form of perception which pierces beyond the letter. This is the moment of apocalypse when the veil is removed and repentance and epistemological renewal coincide. For the ancient readers of Ezekiel, the prophet’s visionary report offered a gateway for visionary perception. According to Paul, the potential transparency of Scripture, which is the very stuff of ancient interpretation, has its particular wisdom located in Christ. The words of Scripture offered a gateway to Christ, a possible, though not necessary, means of discerning the divine mystery, which was, in the last resort, ‘apart from the Law’.21 Paul inherited from the Bible the belief in revelation, but, in his case, it was used to subvert dominant ways of reading, via a conviction that the Spirit enabled a deeper (christological) understanding of Scripture to come to the fore. The apocalypses were indirectly promoting the kind of hermeneutical dualism which necessitated, and indeed promoted, the quest for a deeper meaning, exactly what allegory seeks to promote. Imagination and allegory 19 B. McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, The Presence of God, Vol. 1 (London: SCM, 1991); J.J. Collins et al., eds., The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, Vol. 2: Apocalypticism in Western History and Culture (New York: Continuum, 1998). 20 D. Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity, Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 21 D.J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988); C. Rowland, ‘Apocalyptic, Mysticism, and the New Testament’, in vol. 1 of Geschichte – Tradition – Reflexion (FS M. Hengel), ed. P. Schäfer (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1996), 405–421 = above, pp. 266–289.

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are a gateway, a hermeneutical device, which opens up a way to eternal verities hidden with God in the heavens. Paul’s authority is rooted in the moment of commissioning, which he believes came directly from God. When it becomes the basis for a significant new departure then it inevitably becomes problematic. There are only occasionally Jewish apocalypses (or at least parts of them), which use the concept of revelation to offer a definitive solution to human problems, for example a work like Jubilees. The problem for Paul (and this could explain what is going on in 1 Corinthians) was that in claiming authority on the basis of a vision, as also did John of Patmos, what was to distinguish them from a Cerinthus or an Elchesai, where esoteric teaching is communicated bearing the garb of divine authority? The heart of early Christian self-understanding was its realised messianism authenticated by the apocalyptic insight. Eschatological conviction is the content of the message, but the means whereby individuals came to apprehend its meaning came through claims to visions from God. What we find in earliest Christianity is the world of prophecy and apocalypse functioning as the basis of its messianic convictions. One feature of the struggles in early Christianity seems to have been claims to authority, which were authenticated by appeal to direct divine mandate, a feature which rapidly became more circumscribed in a later age, which was more suspicious of the prophet and visionary. The distinctive ethos of early Christianity may be discerned in the ambivalence towards human reason, which is presupposed in the need for divine revelation in the apocalypses. The enigmatic discourse of the apocalypses, so familiar to us from Revelation, typifies much in the Gospels too. Jesus’ parables are hardly the commonsense transparent stories so beloved of interpreters, who find in Jesus a teacher of simple homely maxims. He describes himself in the Gospel of Matthew as one who ‘utters things hidden since the foundation of the world’ (Matt. 13:35), a parallel to the enigmatic teacher who bewilders and tantalises his hearers in the Gospel of John. Jesus, by his riddles, taxes the minds of the hearers, particularly the intellectuals (Matt. 11:25–27) who unlike the νήπιοι are unable to recognise the truth, which is being communicated to them. Indeed, the parables function like the visions of the apocalypses, offering revelation and illumination to those who are already being saved, but remaining obscure and perplexing to those who are outsiders. Parables may seem to be homely stories but in fact these always have a deeper, allegorical side. For the outsiders they remain homely stories, and the mystery of the kingdom of God escapes them. Divine disclosure in words of warning, ejaculations of praise, the revelation of divine secrets pervade the New Testament. For most of its writers mysteries are not matters of perplexity and bewilderment (as they were for Daniel). They are more like the words from God in the prophets, whose effectiveness is guaranteed whether they are understood or not. The expectation that there would be those who would speak on behalf of God by word,

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dream or vision is commonplace and sits, sometimes uneasily, with other patterns of community ordering, which were less charismatic. Early Christian literature is not only pervaded with visions and revelations, however. The very structure of the theology of major eyewitnesses to early Christian theology suggests that an apocalyptic framework provided its intellectual structure.22 This related both to the sense of the fulfilment of that which was expected and the revelation of that which had been unseen or mysterious. This is encapsulated in 1 Pet. 1:10–12, where the ‘apocalyptic’ and the ‘prophetic’ come together as in the Apocalypse: Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied of the grace that was yours made careful search and inquiry, inquiring about the person or time that the Spirit of Christ within them indicated when I testified in advance to the sufferings destined for Christ and the subsequent glory. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you in regard to the things that are now being announced to you through those who brought you the good news by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven – things into which angels long to look!

22

J. Daniélou, The Theology of Jewish Christianity, trans. and ed. J.A. Baker (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1964).

19. The Temple in the New Testament Initially, the early Christians shared the ambivalent relationship to the Temple evident in some circles in the Second Temple period (e.g. Acts 6:7, cf. Mark 14:58; John 4:25).1 Such ambivalence about the Second Temple is not just a Christian phenomenon, however, as it is manifest in passages like 1 En. 89:73, Ass. Mos. 4:5 and 2 En. 45:3. While most Second Temple texts indicate divine approbation for the Temple (Sir. 24; 1 En. 25:46), others suggest a less positive assessment of the successor to Solomon’s edifice (1 En. 89:73, cf. 91:12–13), itself the subject of an ambiguous oracle in 2 Sam. 7:5– 7, 13. Alongside this there was a longing for an eschatological Temple (Tob. 13–14; Jub. 1:15–18; 23:8–32; 25; 11QT, cf. Ezek. 36:26–28; Mal. 3:3) or a belief that the heavenly world was the dwelling place for God (1 En. 14). This meant that a parallel existed between the heavenly and the earthly in Jewish cosmology, in which the earthly was a pattern of the heavenly (cf. Exod. 25:40). Early Christianity is part of a wider social and theological trend evident in Jewish texts in which cultic language is used in a transferred sense of common life or individual holiness, so that the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, however catastrophic it might have been, did not leave Jewish groups, of whom the early Christians were one, without the resources to construct a religion which could survive without sacrifice and the ritual of the Temple. In the New Testament the words used of the Temple are ἱερόν, ναός and οἶκος. At first sight ἱερόν and ναός are used interchangeably in the New 1 R.J. McKelvey, The New Temple: The Church in the New Testament, Oxford Theological Monographs (London: Oxford University Press, 1969); H. Rosenau, Vision of the Temple: The Image of the Temple of Jerusalem in Judaism and Christianity (London: Oresko Books, 1979); W. Horbury, ed., Templum Amicitiae: Essays on the Second Temple Presented to Ernst Bammel, JSNTSup 48 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990); R.E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave. A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels, 2 vols. (London: Doubleday, 1994); P.W.L. Walker, Jesus and the Holy City: New Testament Perspectives on Jerusalem (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996); B.D. Chilton and C.A. Evans, Jesus in Context: Temple, Purity, and Restoration, AGJU 39 (Leiden: Brill, 1997); J. Ådna, Jesu Stellung zum Tempel: Die Tempelaktion und das Tempelwort als Ausdruck seiner messianischen Sendung, WUNT 2.119 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 2000); M. Bachmann, Jerusalem und der Tempel: Die geographisch-theologischen Elemente in der lukanischen Sicht des jüdischen Kultzentrums, BWANT 9 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1980).

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Testament. We find ἱερόν used in Mark’s Gospel, for example in chs. 11–13, οἶκος in Mark 2:26 and 11:17, and ναός in the Temple saying in 14:58, the allusion to it in 15:29 and the reference to the rending of the veil in 15:39. Ἱερόν is much more common in Luke than ναός (found at Luke 1:9, 21, 22; 23:45). All the really significant references, theologically, have ναός (John 2:19; Acts 17:24; 1 Cor. 3:16, 17; 6:19; 2 Cor. 6:16; Eph. 2:21; 2 Thess. 2:4; Rev. 21:22). It is the word preferred in the Apocalypse.2 Οἶκος is the word used in Stephen’s speech in the context of the discussion of Solomon’s interpretation of Nathan’s oracle in Acts 7:47–49.

19.1. The Gospels At the centre of Jewish religious life before the First Revolt in AD 66 was the Temple in Jerusalem. The complex of cultic activity carried on there in fulfilment of the cultic regulations of the Torah was a focus of devotion for Jews from all over the world. In the narrative of the last days of Jesus’ life in the Synoptic Gospels the Temple is a particular focus. The story of the cursing of the fig tree which sandwiches the ‘cleansing’ is probably a comment on the bankruptcy of the institution. All the Gospels record the fact that Jesus entered the Temple and drove out the traders from the outer court (Mark 11:15–19 and parr.). In the Gospel of John the incident is said to have taken place at the beginning of the ministry (John 2:13), though it may well have been placed here as part of the structure of argument of the Gospel as a whole (cf. John 4:22), in which the divine tabernacling emerges in the early chapters from 1:14 through to ch. 4. The ‘cleansing’ of the Temple may (at least at this stage, as the situation could have changed after Jesus’ rejection by the hierarchy) have been less a protest against the Temple as summons to reform, as the emphasis on it as a house of prayer (Mark 11:17) suggests a rather different emphasis from its being primarily a place of sacrifice. There has been much debate over the meaning of this incident. In interpreting it, much depends on the weight one attaches to the quotations from Scripture (Isa. 56:7; Jer. 7:11), and the implied fulfilment of Zech. 14:21 in Jesus’ dismissal of the traders. The background is the eschatological beliefs about a new Temple, to which the Gentiles would come, reflected in passages like Isa. 2:3, Mic. 4:1–4 and 1 En. 90:29. It is possible that the dramatic action against the Temple operatives may have symbolised the belief expressed in words elsewhere in the tradition (Mark 14:58, cf. John 2:17) that the old Temple had first to be destroyed to make way for the eschatological Temple, though the scriptural glosses suggest a less discontinuous and more 2

G. Schrenk, ‘ἰερός, τὸ ἱερόν, κτλ.’, TDNT 3:221–283; O. Michel, ‘ναός’, TDNT 4:880–890.

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reformist sentiment. There may be a hint in John’s version of the cleansing that it was seen as a protest against the sacrificial system, for in this version of the story Jesus ejects the sacrificial animals from the Temple also (John 2:15). If, however, the Last Supper was a Passover meal, we may suppose that, at least according to the evangelists, Jesus did accept the sacrificial system (Luke 22:15). The action against the Temple and the words, which Jesus may have spoken about its destruction, were probably offensive (so Mark 11:18), possibly a reason for their omission from the account of Jesus’ life in the Gospel of Luke, where the critique of the Temple is linked with Stephen in Acts 6–7. According to Mark 15:29, Jesus was reproached with his prediction about the Temple in the last moments of his life. While it is not easy to see how any of Jesus’ reported words about the Temple could be regarded as blasphemy, except in a very indirect sense, it was the kind of comment which was likely to have caused, at the very least, deep suspicion (e.g. John 11:47, cf. Josephus, War 2.397). A word against the Temple could have brought dire consequences for the one who uttered it, as we know happened in the case of another Jesus who predicted the destruction of the Temple and suffered for his pains (Josephus, War 6.300–301). If the initial foray into the Temple seems at first glance, in the versions which have come down to us, to be a plea for reform, the situation is different in the account of the last days in Jerusalem. Before leaving the Temple for the last time, Jesus gets his companions to note the way in which the widow, out of her poverty, puts in everything she had to live on while the rest contributed out of their abundance. The incident is described without comment. Nevertheless, in the light of Mark 12:40, where the scribes are condemned for devouring widows’ houses, the observation that an institution at the heart of Jewish life allows an impoverished widow to give all that she had, sits uneasily with the demand in the Torah to care for the widow. If this interpretation seems to be squeezing too much out of the text, the situation is different in the following verses. It is immediately followed by the eschatological discourse, at the beginning of which (Mark 13:2) Jesus tells his disciples that there will not be left one stone of the Temple on top of another (cf. Luke 19:47). A prophecy of doom now takes the place of a hope for a different kind of institution found in 11:17 (though the curse on the fig tree probably implies a less hopeful future). The doom-laden prediction (cf. Luke 19:41–44) is the sort of prediction of a prophet similar to Jeremiah’s prediction in Jer. 7:12 (cf. Jer. 26; Mic. 3:12). In the account of his questioning by the high priest in Mark 14:56–58 witnesses report a saying of Jesus, otherwise not recorded in this form in the Gospels, to the effect that Jesus would destroy the Temple and in three days build a Temple not made with hands (Mark 14:58, cf. Matt. 26:61). There is a version of this saying on the lips of Jesus in the Gospel of John (2:19), though it takes the form of a

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promise by Jesus to rebuild the Temple destroyed by others rather than a promise to destroy and rebuild (cf. Acts 6:14; 7:50). This is then glossed as a reference to the body of Jesus (John 2:21–22, cf. 1 Cor. 6:19). The judgement on the Temple and also implicitly its destruction is integral to one of the climactic moments of the Synoptic Gospels. At the death of Jesus the veil, which hides the innermost part of the Temple, is torn asunder. This portends doom for the institution and its ideology, which had dominated life, politically, religiously and economically. This moment in the Gospel harks back to the opening chapter, where, at the baptism, a heavenly voice had proclaimed Jesus as God’s son and the heavens are rent apart. Heaven and earth are then linked at the rending of the heavens (Mark 1:10 and 15:38). The rending of the veil of the Temple at Jesus’ death is by contrast a sign of judgement, not of promise. The juxtaposition of death and rending at the climax of Mark’s Gospel means that the moment of defeat of Jesus portends the institution’s collapse. It is left to a representative of the Roman military power to recognise in this moment the reign of another sort of king than Caesar. It resembles the situation where in the days of Israel’s exile the departure of the divine glory from the Temple was a sign of imminent destruction (Ezek. 1 and 10). But, unlike the prophecy of Ezekiel, there is here no promise that any building would ever again be set apart as a particular place of the divine presence and worship. The extremely compact sequence marks the very start of the ‘Christus Victor’ doctrine of the atonement in which the defeat of the son of God catches the powers, whether earthly or heavenly, unawares and leads to their discomfiture (1 Cor. 2:9; Col. 2:14–15; 1 Pet. 3:22).3 I have deliberately kept the discussion at the level of the New Testament texts as we have them. If I had to try to summarise what relationship these texts had with the last days of the historical Jesus my brief answer would be a fairly conservative one, in that I tend to accept what all the Gospels say about the sense of divine compulsion which led Jesus to go up to Jerusalem to provoke the crisis, which in the end led to his death. In Jerusalem a large popular following in the volatile atmosphere of Jerusalem at pilgrimage time was enough to set him at odds with the priests. In the final days of his life, possibly in the light of the hostility he encountered, he may have uttered prophecies of doom on the Temple and Jerusalem after initially entertaining hopes of reform. There are hints that he might also have begun to contemplate a separate sectarian existence for his followers, with distinctive rites and institutions in the words he uttered at the Last Supper. I think it quite plausible, 3

Cf. C. Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1988); R.A. Horsley, Hearing the Whole Story: The Politics of Plot in Mark’s Gospel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001); J.B. Green, ‘The Demise of the Temple as “Culture Center” in Luke-Acts: An Exploration of the Rending of the Temple Veil (Luke 23.44–49)’, RB 101 (1994): 495–515, at 514.

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therefore, that in the last days and hours of his life the lack of success of the Jerusalem expedition led Jesus from a more reformist position with regard to the Temple (it should be purified for a new age) to a less optimistic, more sectarian and ‘rejectionist’ position, in which he asserted that its end was in sight and that it might have no part in the divine plan. As we have seen, the opening chapters of the Gospel of John include several implicit links between Jesus and the Temple, in which Jesus takes the Temple’s place. At the climax of the opening chapter in John 1:51 Nathanael is promised a vision which echoes the account of Jacob’s vision at Bethel in Gen. 28:12.4 It is in this context, in which the Son of Man is the intermediary between heaven and earth, that the Temple incident is described. The manifestation of divine glory exemplified by the sign at Cana in Galilee means that the locus of that divine glory is now focused pre-eminently, and perhaps exclusively, in the Word become flesh and in the demonstration of glory in the lifting up of Jesus on the cross (John 3:14; 12:32–33). As Jesus tells the Samaritan woman, Gerizim and Zion have had their day. True worship is worship in spirit and truth (John 4:20–24). The Temple has to take second place to this definitive manifestation of divine glory. The divine presence continues in the community of believers as the Father and the Son make their home with the faithful disciple (John 14:23). The ‘tabernacling’ of the divine Logos as the definitive presence of the divine glory is a theme which we find in the other Gospels too. A motif right the way through Matthew is that God’s presence is found in Jesus (Matt. 1:23; 18:20; 28:19, cf. 25:31–45), for ‘one greater than the Temple is here’ (Matt. 12:8). The fact that Luke’s Gospel begins in the Temple should not disguise the fact that the Temple is linked with the birth of John, whose coming marks the end of the age of the Law and the prophets (Luke 16:16). The coming of Jesus in humble circumstances is discerned by the inspired insight of Simeon and Anna as they meet the infant Jesus in the Temple. The respect for the institutions of Law and Temple cannot mask the underlying thrust of the Gospel and Acts which moves away from allocating a special role for the Temple as the locus of the divine presence. To return to the Gospel of John: the theme of tabernacling not only has links with wisdom’s special location in Israel’s institutions (Sir. 24), for it is also linked with the incarnation of exalted angels in humans, as is evident from the Jewish pseudepigraphon, The Prayer of Joseph, quoted by Origen in his commentary on John 1:6.5 Such angelomorphism reminds us that a narrative like the Transfiguration, present as it is in all the Synoptic Gospels, offers an account of the 4 C. Rowland, ‘John 1.51, Jewish Apocalyptic and Targumic Tradition’, NTS 30 (1984): 498–507 = above, pp. 204–214. 5 J.Z. Smith, ‘The Prayer of Joseph’, in Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, ed. J. Neusner, SHR 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 253–294.

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presence of the divine glory apart from the Temple and particularly identified with the person of Jesus. These accounts (particularly the one in Matthew) are best interpreted in the light of passages like Dan. 10:2–9, Rev. 1:13–17, Apoc. Abr. 10–11 and Jos. As. 14,6 and complements the belief that Jesus is ‘God with us’ (Matt. 1:23), the one who is ‘greater than the Temple’ (Matt. 12:8).

19.2. The Acts of the Apostles According to Acts the first Christians continued to worship in the Temple, and this is often taken as an indication of a continued reverence for the Temple. Such continued practice would be understandable, even if the underlying trend was towards a religion which was separate from physical participation in the Temple cult. Life in Jerusalem without reference to participation in the Temple seems unlikely. However, the initial preoccupation with the Temple needs to be set in the context of a narrative in which the divine presence moves with the representatives of the new movements out of Jerusalem to Rome. Gamaliel’s words in Acts 5:38–39 express the author’s view that the priests and the representatives of the Temple who oppose the emerging Christian movement turn out to be rebels, as the solemn quotation of Isa. 6:9 in the final verses of Acts 28 indicates. Such a rebellion is a particular feature of Stephen’s speech in Acts 7. In this speech about the rebelliousness of the majority of his ancestors he points to Solomon, who built a house for God. In three ways Stephen’s speech challenges the divine approbation of the Temple: by making the command to Moses about the tabernacle the result of angelic revelation only; the implicit disobedience of Solomon; and the suggestion that the Temple was little better than the idolatrous places of the nations. God’s response to the calf cited in Acts 7:41–42 leads to false worship. The incident of the calf (Exod. 32) leads to God handing the people over to the worship of the host of heaven. The Greek of Amos 5:25–27 is used to prove that it was not to God that Israel sacrificed, but the host of heaven and Moloch. In some ways this passage echoes the theme in Ezek. 20:25–26, where the laws given by God were not good laws but the result of the people’s idolatry and disobedience. In the understated way, which is typical of his speech, Stephen then implicitly questions whether the tent of testimony was really the result of divine revelation. Despite the suggestion of NRSV’s translation of the following verse (‘Our ancestors had the tent of testimony in the wilderness, as God 6

C. Rowland, ‘A Man Clothed in White Linen: A Study in the Development of Jewish Angelology’, JSNT 24 (1985): 99–110 = above, pp. 85–96.

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directed when he spoke to Moses’, Acts 7:44) that the cult in the wilderness was the result of divine command, the Greek is more ambiguous. While it would at first sight seem natural to suppose that ὁ λαλῶν refers to God, the last time reference is made to converse between the divine world and Moses in Acts 7:38 it is the angel who speaks with him. Both verses subtly distance God from the ordinances for the wilderness cult, not to mention the Temple in Jerusalem. Angelic mediation in the giving of the Law is found in Jub. 1:27; 3:7; Gal. 3.19; and Heb. 2:2. It is not clear whether the doctrine is being used polemically in Stephen’s speech, as all that may be suggested here is that the Law was the product of mediation rather than revelation. Criticism of an altogether different kind is to be found in the most explicit and stinging criticism by Stephen, directed at Solomon’s Temple (Acts 7:46). He points to Solomon as the one who built a house, οἶκος, for God rather than establish the σκήνωµα for the house of Jacob, which is part of the promise to David. David found favour with God and asked God to find a dwelling for the house of Jacob (assuming that οἴκῳ is to be preferred in 7:46). But it was Solomon who built the house. Implicit in this description of Solomon’s act is a misunderstanding of what ‘dwelling place for the house of Jacob’ involved, which was concerned with the promise of the dwelling for Jacob in the land (as seems to be suggested by 2 Sam. 7:10, itself an ambiguous oracle). 2 Sam. 7:13 is merely a prediction of the Temple’s construction rather than any approbation of the Temple building. Indeed, the tension between the relative merits of the tabernacle as opposed to a permanent building is one that appears in 2 Sam. 7:6–7 and 1 Chron. 17:6–7 (cf. Isa. 66:1; 1 Kgs. 8:27). The quotation from Isa. 66:1 in Acts 7:49 suggests that Solomon’s building of a house for God marked a departure from the divine intention. The introduction of Acts 7:48 suggests a departure from the divine intention. The position of the negative underlines the extent of the misunderstanding by Solomon in his interpretation of the oracle in 1 Kgs. 8:20. What is more, the use of χειροποίητος, a word which is almost always linked with idolatry in the Greek Bible (cf. Acts 17:24), stresses the extent of the apostasy.7 This is a holy place like the high places of the surrounding peoples. So Stephen’s speech hints that the heart of Jewish religion is idolatrous, a point which was probably not lost on Stephen’s ‘hearers’ according to the Acts narrative, who reacted violently against what appeared to be a near blasphemous charge. So,

7

C.K. Barrett, ‘Attitudes to the Temple in the Acts of the Apostles’, in Templum Amicitiae: Essays on the Second Temple presented to Ernst Bammel, ed. W. Horbury, JSNTSup 48 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), 345–367; idem, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, 2 vols., ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 2:368–376, esp. 373; cf. S. Walton, ‘A Tale of Two Perspectives? The Place of the Temple in Acts’, in Heaven on Earth: The Temple in Biblical Theology, eds. S.J. Gathercole and T.D. Alexander (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2004), 135–149.

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while it is true that the early chapters of Acts have the apostles frequenting the Temple, this needs to be set in the context of the narrative as a whole. Stephen’s speech is pivotal and provides the reader with new interpretative horizons concerning the providential work of God, which points away from Jerusalem’s Temple (where the story in both Luke and Acts begins) to its providential destination at the ends of the earth. The themes of Stephen’s speech have their parallels in other early Christian texts. The idolatrous character of aspects of the religion is also taken up in the Epistle of Barnabas (16:7), which parallels some of the themes of Acts 7.8 Jewish cultic worship is condemned, and Barnabas implies that God has rejected that form of worship and compares it to its pagan equivalent (cf. Gal. 4:8–10). The true temple is the human soul in which God dwells, not a building of stone.9 The polemic we find in Stephen’s speech also typifies the emerging Christian polemic against Judaism, if Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho is anything to go by (Justin, Dial. 35). Justin’s answer repeats the Stephen tradition that Jews have always been idolaters from the incident of the calf onwards. Without appreciating the extent of acts of martyrdom in the Bar Kochba revolt, Justin points to Christian acts of resistance against idolatry even to death as proof of Christian rejection of idolatry (Dial. 34–35; 46:6–7).10 Finally, in Acts 21:18–26 we find Paul in the Temple with non-Jews with the collection (if this is what is referred to in Acts 21:19, cf. 2 Cor. 8–9; Rom. 15:25). Paul is ready to pass a stiff test of his obedience to the letter of the Torah in paying for the release of the Nazirite vows. In this Paul is asked not only to submit to the Law of Moses but also to accept the Temple, as Num. 6:9, 18 indicate. Paul accepts this but the Nazirite vow is hardly completed before Paul is rejected by the mob, an event which leads to his appeal to Caesar and the journey to Rome. Parallel to Jesus in the Gospel, Paul in Acts goes up to Jerusalem, explicitly driven by divine impulse, like Jesus according to Luke 9:51, and with prophetic warning of the impending rejection (Acts 21:11). In the case of both Jesus and Paul the reception in Jerusalem and the Temple is hostile. The chance is offered and rejected and the message goes to the ends of the earth leaving Jerusalem and its Temple behind. Acts may lack the ominous supernatural voices and portents which herald the destruction of the city in Josephus’s account of the years leading up to the First Revolt (Josephus, War 6.280). But, like Josephus, who has Jesus son of Ananias predicting a woe on Jerusalem and the Temple (Josephus, War 6.300), Luke includes a prediction of the destruction of the city immediately 8

J.N. Carleton Paget, The Epistle of Barnabas: Outlook and Background, WUNT 2.64 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1994). 9 Carleton Paget, Epistle of Barnabas, 172–174. 10 Cf. J. Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 115–117.

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preceding the entrance into the Temple (Luke 19:41–44). Nothing that happens thereafter, culminating in the rejection of Jesus’ emissary, Paul, in Acts 21, does anything to stave off the disaster which is to come.

19.3. The New Testament Epistles with Special Reference to Hebrews The Pauline letters continue the widespread way in Second Temple Jewish texts in which the transferred sense of temple and cult are applied to lives of service (Rom. 12:1; 1 Cor. 3:16; 6:19; 2 Cor. 6:14–7:1). In 2 Cor. 6:14–7:1 the sense of separation and counter-cultural character of the life of the nascent communities is well captured in what may be an earlier fragment of Pauline theology, influenced by the kind of dualistic ideas we find in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Similarly, according to 1 Cor. 3:17 to destroy God’s living temple is as serious a crime as perpetrated by those who defile the Temple, echoing the dire threat found at the entrance to the Temple, mentioned by Josephus and discovered at the end of the nineteenth century (‘Whoever is caught going beyond the barrier will have himself to blame if death ensues’). In Eph. 2:19– 21 temple imagery is used of the way in which the new building of the church emerges with Christ as cornerstone. This parallels the use of the body terminology from 1 Cor. 12 and Rom. 12 in Eph. 4:12, yielding a complex mix of imagery concerning organic and structural growth. Paul occasionally transfers priestly language to his own apostolic task in Rom. 15:15–16. Similarly in 1 Pet. 2:5, 9 and Rev. 1:6 (cf. 5:10; 20:6; Justin, Dial. 116:3) we find priestly terminology from Exod. 19:6 applied to the Christian community (cf. Isa. 61:6). Outside the Pauline corpus the most extended exposition of Christ’s relationship to the cultic institutions of the Torah is found in the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the discussion focuses on the tabernacle rather than the Temple. What sets Christ apart from the angels is his sacrifice, which establishes the ultimate link between heaven and earth. A new and living way is opened up (Heb. 10:20), brought about by a body of flesh and blood. Christ is the one who has passed through the heavens (Heb. 4:14, cf. 6:19; 9:24; 10:19; 12:2) and is now seated at the right hand of the majesty on high (1:5). From Heb. 7:1 onwards the writer explains the significance of the references to the high priesthood of Jesus already hinted at in Heb. 4:14 and 6:20. Jesus was not a high priest of the line of Aaron and was therefore not permitted to officiate in the earthly cult (Heb. 7:11). His high priesthood was according to the order of Melchizedek. His superior office is linked with the superior offering made only once (Heb. 7:27; 9:25; 10:11), unlike the offerings made by the Levitical priesthood which, it is stressed, could not bring into a right relationship with God (Heb. 9:9). Perfection was not to be found

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in the Levitical priesthood and was merely a shadow of a greater, heavenly reality (Heb. 10:1). The subtle interweaving of ideas about heavenly high priesthood and superiority to angels has its roots in speculation about the heavenly world and the angelomorphism which is so characteristic of Second Temple Jewish texts (Apoc. Abr. 10:9, cf. Exod. 23:20).11 The contrasts in Hebrews between the sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifices of the Levitical system and between the heavenly perfection and earthly shadow have been taken as indications of Platonic influence. This is unlikely. Hebrews is dependent on an apocalyptic cosmology to illuminate soteriology whose background is to be found in Jewish apocalypticism and mystical tradition.12 Any influence from this quarter may already have infiltrated the emerging apocalyptic tradition with its contrasts between the heavenly world above as the repository of God’s ultimate purposes and the world below, where those purposes might be fulfilled. Jewish writings offer evidence that the heavenly cult was something which reflected the activities on earth even to the extent of having a heavenly high priest offering sacrifice. In b.Hag. 12b, for example, Michael acts as the heavenly priest in one of the highest heavens, Zebul. There is reference to sacrifices made by angels in heaven in T.Levi 3:5. There the patriarch ascends to heaven, where God is enthroned in the highest heaven. Before God are the angels ‘who minister and make propitiation to the Lord for all the sins of ignorance of the righteous’. Heb. 8–10 presupposes a division between earthly and heavenly. According to Heb. 8:5 the earthly shrine was an exact copy of the heavenly. The earthly priests serve merely a copy of the heavenly sanctuary (Heb. 8:5), whereas Christ has entered heaven itself, not the sanctuary which has been made with hands (Heb. 9:24). It is the perfection of the heavenly cult which is the setting for Christ’s offering (cf. Heb. 8:5). Jesus, by virtue of the sacrifice 11 D. Hannah, Michael and Christ: Michael Traditions and Angel Christology in Early Christianity, WUNT 2.109 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1998); L.W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (London: SCM, 1988). 12 H.W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1989); C.K. Barrett, ‘The Eschatology of the Epistle to the Hebrews’, in The Background of the New Testament and its Eschatology: In Honour of Charles Harold Dodd, eds. W.D. Davies and D. Daube (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 363–393; A.N. Chester, ‘Hebrews: The Final Sacrifice’, in Sacrifice and Redemption: Durham Essays in Theology, ed. S.W. Sykes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 57–72; O. Hofius, Katapausis: Die Vorstellung vom endzeitlichen Ruheort im Hebräerbrief, WUNT 11 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1970); idem, Der Vorhang vor dem Thron Gottes, WUNT 14 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1972); L.D. Hurst, The Epistle to the Hebrews: Its Background of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); M.E. Isaacs, Sacred Space: An Approach to the Theology of the Epistle to the Hebrews, JSNTSup 73 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992).

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of himself, was able to enter, not the earthly, but the heavenly sanctuary (Heb. 9:23–24, cf. 9:13). Christ is permitted to go behind the veil into the inner sanctum of heaven and then sit at the right hand of God (Heb. 4:16; 8:1; 12:29), thus becoming the guarantor of the salvation of the faithful (Heb. 6:19–20). Christ’s death enabled him to ‘ascend’ to the divine presence, the climax, in other words, of the ascent of the apocalyptic seer, and he is a pioneer for those who would follow him (Heb. 12:1). For the author of Hebrews the heavenly sanctuary is the eschatological sanctuary, built (8:2) along with the city by God at the end of the age, an age that has now arrived according to Heb. 1:2. The climax of history has now occurred as Jesus is the first to enter the heavenly sanctuary. There is in Hebrews that oscillation between the ‘vertical’ and the ‘horizontal’, if one can use spatial metaphors to illuminate the theology of Hebrews. What is above, in heaven, is what is to come and which will be revealed in the end time; but what is to come is now already revealed (Heb. 9:26) and to which the recipients of the Letter to the Hebrews have access (Heb. 12:22). Even if Hebrews concentrates on the ‘vertical’ rather than the ‘horizontal’, the realised rather than the eschatological, the spatial dualism of the apocalyptic and mystical texts facilitates a dialectic, which enables the writer to communicate both the transcendence of present realities and the immediacy of the transcendent in the midst of history. The cross thus becomes the moment when the unmediated access to God becomes a possibility. Paradoxically the death outside the camp (Heb. 13:12) becomes the place where heaven and earth coincide. Access to the heart of heaven has been achieved by those who follow this heavenly high priest (Heb. 4:16). The cross has become a meeting-point between heaven and earth. The coming together of this age and the age to come (cf. 1 Cor. 10:11) has come at a point when Christ offered sacrifice of himself outside the camp. The place of reproach and rejection turns out to be the very gate of heaven. The moment of the offering of the sacrifice is in history, and yet entrance into heaven takes place at the moment of the death of Jesus ‘outside the gate’. The way to the innermost sanctum comes via crucifixion. In the letter the writer opens up access to the heavenly world for his readers. Like the community of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1QS 11; 1QH 3:20; 11:10) they are offered access to heaven and its inhabitants in the life of this marginal group, to the heavenly Jerusalem itself (Heb. 12:22), and have no need of participation in what the writer considers obsolete rituals. Readers are shown a picture of a heavenly pioneer who opens up access to this other dimension and enters that which transcends the limits of ‘the veil of the flesh’ to create the possibility of an alternative space for those who like Jesus journey with him in search of the eschatological rest, ‘outside the camp’. Hebrews is unequivocal that the religion of the tabernacle (and by implication the Temple also, according to Heb. 9:9) is redundant, made obsolete by

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a sacrifice which offers access to the very presence of God. Connections have been suggested between Hebrews and Acts 7. But if the reading of Acts 7 adopted in this essay is correct, Stephen’s speech is much more radical, for in Hebrews the religion of the tabernacle is simply part of the old aeon (1:4). Hebrews is in this sense more ‘Pauline’ than ‘Stephen-like’ in its understanding of the past.

19.4. The Apocalypse The contrasts between heavenly and earthly tabernacle pervade the Apocalypse (Rev. 6:19; 8:3; 11:19; 15:5). In John’s vision the tabernacle and Temple are situated in heaven, the source of the divine righteousness (Rev. 11:19), whose altar is the temporary abode of the souls of those who long for God’s vindication (Rev. 6:9–10, cf. 9:13) and who serve God day and night in the Temple (7:15). Compared with the anticipation of the New Age in 7:15 John reports that he saw no Temple at the end of his vision (Rev. 21:22). The explanation offered in the text is that Almighty God and the Lamb are the Temple (v. 22). If a Temple separates off a place of divine presence in the midst of a world, here the divine is immediately present and all pervasive which guarantees and identifies holiness (though in Rev. 21–22 the city as a whole becomes a holy precinct outside of which are the unclean, Rev. 21:8; 22:15). Rev. 22:11 has indicated there is little need of light because of the radiance of divine glory (cf. Rev. 22:5 and Isa. 60:19). The whole of the city is a space, pervaded with the glory of God and the Lamb. With the establishment of holiness in the midst of the world and in the lives of people of flesh and blood there will be no need for a Temple, either in heaven or on earth, for the tabernacling of God is with humans (Rev. 21:3) and they will see God face to face (Rev. 22:4).13 If there is a ‘story line’ to the Apocalypse, it is about the overcoming of the contrasts between ‘above’ and ‘below' and the separation from the divine presence in heaven from earth. The coming of the New Jerusalem from heaven heralds an era when the dwelling of God is with humanity (Rev. 21:3). The climax of the Book of Revelation is the description of the New Jerusalem where the throne of God is set and the elect are granted the privilege of seeing God face to face (Rev. 22:4). In Revelation (and for that matter in the rest of the apocalypses) the vision of God is a glimpse of the divine glory which is hidden in heaven. God’s throne in heaven is hidden by the closed door which is opened to the visionary (4:1). That glory and holiness are on earth in the New Jerusalem, where there need be no longer any Temple (Rev. 21:22). 13

Rowland, ‘The Book of Revelation’.

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The reference to the Jerusalem Temple in Rev. 11 led modern historical commentators to see the description of the measurement of the Temple, the inviolability of the sanctuary and the impending threat of the marauding nations, as a Zealot oracle from the days before the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in AD 70. Towards the end of the siege the Zealots took refuge in the sanctuary (Josephus, War 6.122) and were inspired by the testimony of a prophet who promised deliverance (War 6.285–287).14 Either John’s visionary imagination was suffused by the searing impact of this event, or we have here a Jewish oracle stemming from the beleaguered groups in Jerusalem, who put their trust in visions of deliverance; there is an inkling of a similar sort of expectation in Luke 21:24. This chapter has been linked with prophetic activity down the centuries, as individuals have identified themselves with the witnesses or others have seen their ministry as a fulfilment of the work of the two witnesses, reminding us that the ongoing life of biblical texts like the Apocalypse is a vital part of the interpretations of these texts.15

19.5. Concluding Reflections The persistence of the importance of the Temple as a model of the life of the church may be gauged by two examples which point to a rather different kind of appropriation. Firstly, in the early liturgy known as the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus we find language which leaves us in no doubt that priestly concepts had been transferred to the office of bishop.16 This is evident in this brief quotation from the prayer at the ordination of the bishop. This manifests a very different notion from the more ‘rabbinic’ pattern of activity ascribed to the bishop in the Pastoral Epistles, though it has analogies in 1 Clem. 40 and Did. 13:3: Father, who knowest the hearts of all, grant upon this thy servant whom thou hast chosen for the episcopate to feed thy holy flock and serve as thine high priest, that he may minister blamelessly by night and day, that he may ceaselessly behold and propitiate thy countenance and offer to thee the gifts of thy holy church.

Secondly, when Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, things began to change.17 Church buildings began to gain in size, something, which reflected the growth in the size of congregations, the result of ongoing church 14

D.E. Aune, Revelation 6–16, WBC 52B (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998), 594–595. J. Kovacs and C. Rowland, Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 16 C. Rowland, Christian Origins: An Account of the Setting and Character of the Most Important Messianic Sect of Judaism, rev. edn. (London: SPCK, 2002); cf. M. Barker, The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2003). 17 A. Kreider, ed., The Origin of Christendom in the West (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001). 15

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growth, and (after 313) of imperial favour. Ecclesiastical buildings became public; hitherto they had been more often domestic, although getting larger, and became beautifully decorated, reflecting imperial iconography. Because of the large congregations, the worship became large-scale rather than relational and communitarian. So there began to emerge a pattern of Christian activity which sits uneasily with the New Testament writers’ vision of the common life. At the risk of oversimplification, the life of Christian communities became more akin to the religion of the Temple than the synagogue. The immediately preceding paragraphs are a reminder that my interest in this discussion is not just a matter of reconstructing the history of ancient religious ideas. The significance of the discussion for New Testament theology has pervaded this essay. The imagery of the Temple was in the theological bloodstream of early Christians and through them became part of Christian identity. Even if at the end of the Second Temple period early Christian writers, like others, were using Temple imagery in a thoroughly transferred sense of their common life, it is clear that religious understanding, determined as it always is by context, came to involve a more literal application of Temple language to the practice of the Christian religion. But in the first century CE things were different. The Qumran sectaries lived in the desert and in their common life created a holy environment where the holy angels assembled and shared their life. The Pharisees had a view of holiness rooted in the practical living in the midst of the variety of human communities, both near to and far from the Temple. The detailed regulations of the Mishnah bear witness to the seriousness of the endeavour of their rabbinic successors to ensure the preservation of a holy space in all aspects of existence. It is that vision which enabled Judaism to survive the destruction of its holy place in AD 70. The emerging practice of religion based on the synagogue (which could meet anywhere and was not necessarily attached to particular places which were deemed to be holy) was a factor in enabling them to survive the events of 70. In 4 Ezra, for example, obedience to the divine law is paramount, without land or Temple. Rabbinic Judaism maintained a religion which did not depend on Temple, which in many ways parallels what the early Christian writer, Minucius Felix (Octavius 32) says of Christianity in the third century, ‘We have no temples; we have no altars’. Minucius Felix is writing in the context of Christianity’s arguments with paganism, but his theological inspiration comes from late Second Temple period and the theological developments of which early Christianity was a part. Minucius’s words can be paralleled in some words of a twentieth-century writer, Karl Barth, writing in the 1920s. In some respects they are an overstatement, but, as is often the case in Barth’s writing on the Bible, he manages to capture something of importance in what he writes. The tabernacle/ Temple contrast provides him with a way of describing the eschatological contrasts which are so typical of New Testament theology and which

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encapsulate the underlying thrust of the different New Testament writings in the priority given to Kingdom over church and institution: The church of the Bible is significantly the tabernacle, the portable tent. The moment it becomes a temple it becomes essentially only an object of attack. One gathers that for the apostles the whole of the Old Testament is summarized in Stephen’s apology. Undeniably the central interest of both Testaments is not in the building of the church but in its destruction, which is always threatening and even beginning. In the heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation nothing is more finally significant than the church’s complete absence: ‘And I saw no Temple therein.’18

In the variety of uses of temple imagery in the New Testament there is a degree of consistency. In the Pauline letters, John 4 and 1 Pet. 2 (as in the Dead Sea Scrolls) we find the temple and sacrifice used in a transferred sense of the life of the people of God. In Hebrews the problem with the tabernacle is not so much its important role in the divine economy as the fact that something superior has arrived which has made that which functioned well in the past obsolete. To this extent the words at the opening of the letter, in which the eschatological contrast explains what is distinctive about the offer in the Son, is the hermeneutical guide for understanding the importance of the Temple: ‘In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son’ (Heb. 1:1). The situation is different in Acts 7, where, as I have suggested, the problem with the Temple is not only that it is obsolete but also that it was an act of rebellion and even idolatry. This places Stephen’s speech at the far end of the spectrum of attitudes to the Temple in the level of its critique. While the Temple offers an important symbol for the people of God, it is the hope of heaven on earth, anticipated in Christ and in the common life of small groups of men, women and children. Their priority was the temple of the Holy Spirit. So, Immanuel, ‘God with us’, who is present ‘to the end of the age’ (Matt. 28:19) is found where two or three are gathered together in Christ’s name (Matt. 18:20) and in the persons of the hungry, thirsty, naked and imprisoned (Matt. 25:31–45). Heaven and earth have met in the moment of the death of a crucified man and not in tabernacle or temple, but outside the camp, a place of shame and reproach (Heb. 13:12–13). The gate of heaven opens up to a solitary visionary on a Greek island, just as the prophet Ezekiel saw the divine glory move from above the cherubim in Solomon’s Temple and encountered it in his place of exile by the waters of Babylon. For them all, the Temple had become superfluous as a locus of the divine presence even if it continued to offer the language by which that divine presence in the world could be articulated.

18

K. Barth, ‘Biblical Questions, Insights and Vistas’, in idem, The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. D. Horton (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1928), 51–96, at 72.

20. Prophecy and the New Testament 20.1. Introduction The New Testament is about prophecy from beginning to end, from the way in which Matthew looks back to the authoritative prophecy to authenticate Jesus’ birth in Matt. 1:23, to the experience of John on an Aegean island, who spoke in the language of the prophets of old, and described how he was called to be a prophet to ‘peoples, languages and nations’ (Rev. 10:11).1 There are contrasting understandings of prophecy in these two passages. Though it is not as pervasive as is often alleged, the sense of obligation, which drove early Christian writers to relate ancient prophecy, and other scriptures, to their convictions about Jesus Christ and their own experience, is a feature of the New Testament. In this respect it has its analogues in contemporary Jewish writings. The Teacher of Righteousness in the Habakkuk Commentary from the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, offered the definitive meaning of prophetic texts, long shrouded in obscurity. John’s prophetic text is rather different, however. It is full of allusions to the biblical prophets, but not to prove the authenticity of their prophecy. Those books offered him the language for his own prophecy as ancient words and images were reminted and indeed reformed in a new prophetic message. This is less an interpretation, therefore, than a word for his day, which needs no authorisation other than its visionary authentication, in which the original words are transcended, perhaps even to be replaced, or at least supplemented, by the new prophecy. Where does prophecy in the New Testament fit into the picture offered by the Hebrew Bible? The one prophetic book – the Apocalypse – is a vision, and to that extent resembles the earlier biblical visionary texts, such as Isa. 6 and Ezek. 1, but only in the first chapter does it resemble biblical prophecy where the prophet is the medium of the divine words. Here the heavenly Son of Man, described in words similar to those used to describe the angel in Dan. 10, commands John to write what he hears and sees in a book and to send it to the seven churches of Asia. In so doing, John overhears the words directed to the angels of the churches before the book’s more explicitly 1

Cf. D.E. Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983).

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visionary passages, which are more akin to Ezek. 40–48 and Dan. 7. In the New Testament, prophets are less communicators of divine words than divine agents, though words of warning and prediction are to be found (Acts 21:11). The New Testament picture focuses more on the prophets than the prophecy and is more akin to the stories told about the lives of the prophets, such as Elijah and Jeremiah. The former is explicitly linked with John the Baptist (Matt. 14:5; 17:14) and the latter is cited in the answer given by Peter to Jesus to the question he puts about his identity (Matt. 16:14). Thus, we shall see that prophecy is different, or variegated, but like what we find in the Old Testament, including words of warning, prediction, as well as critique, with that same enigmatic character of its biblical antecedents. But, the Apocalypse of John apart, which tells us little about the prophet, the actual lives of the prophets become a significant part of the medium of their message. The prophetic charisma imbued early Christianity with a sense (to use a phrase of Karl Mannheim) of being part of a ‘propitious moment’ in the divine economy. What the New Testament authors wrote about is the way ancient prophets relate to the present generation and how the key actors in the divine drama, to which they bear witness, are themselves imbued with a sense of vocation and special charisma, imitating, and indeed transcending, the prophets of old. Something special was happening which both linked with the past and set apart the present. This may be discerned in the Gospel of Luke, which exhibits that sense of the present being a time of fulfilment, an auspicious time: ‘Then turning to the disciples, Jesus said to them privately, “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it”’ (Luke 10:23–24, cf. 1 Pet. 1:10–12). Of all the texts in the New Testament relating to prophecy, Acts 2:17 encapsulates as well as any the view that prophecy is in some sense not just ‘fulfilled’ but actually renewed, and indeed, restarted. In Peter’s speech on the Day of Pentecost, Joel 3:1–5 (ET 2:28–32) is quoted. The introduction ‘in the last days’ sets the tone for the significance of what is happening and marks the moment as eschatological. Even if the speech is in foreign tongues, it is understood by the cosmopolitan audience, and its theological import is explained by reference to the distinctive quotation of Joel. In rabbinic sources, there is some evidence that the return of the Holy Spirit to the people of God was considered to be a mark that the New Age had in fact dawned. In a passage such as t.Sotah 13:3, the prophetic Spirit had departed from Israel with the last of the prophets, to return ‘in the last days’. Such a belief was probably based on such passages as Deut. 18:15 and Mal. 3:23 (ET 4:5, cf. Mark 8:28). Whether or not this was widespread, or represents the learned elite’s attempt to confine the activity of the divine Spirit to the eschatological events, and thereby implicitly undermines any claim to prophetic wisdom in this age, is a matter of debate. Some early Christians seem to have regarded

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prophecy as a mark of the return of the eschatological Spirit and as such a key element in what constituted their identity. The sources are varied. Indeed, in one text, the Gospel of Luke, we find the idea of an ongoing prophetic experience sitting alongside the belief in the climactic prophetic moment with John the Baptist and Jesus (cf. Luke 7:28; 16:16). Prophecy and its effects are everywhere in the New Testament, so that it becomes very difficult to disentangle it from the other strands of early Christian experience. Yet to make this essay manageable it is essential to do that. The synoptic witness to Jesus will be considered along with the, albeit muted, echoes of a sense of prophetic vocation in the Pauline understanding of his apostolate. The second part of this essay consists of a more detailed analysis of aspects of prophecy in the Johannine corpus, where the ambivalence towards prophecy sits alongside the clear enunciation of its importance, and the actualisation of that in a prophetic text, commanded to be seen and written about by the heavenly Christ. As with prophecy in the Old Testament, the New Testament Apocalypse is both part of, and is itself a fountainhead of, an important stream of political discourse in Christian theology and no account of it as a prophetic book would be complete without it. Like the prophetic words in the Old Testament, its words have their effect, even though, more often than not, they are pictures in words, whether in the clarity of their demand or the bafflement at its enigmas. In this latter respect I will suggest the Gospel of John is similar.

20.2. The Synoptic Gospels and Acts The synoptic evidence points in different ways. Thus, the synoptic eschatological discourses may be more foretelling than the ‘forth-telling’ we find in Matt. 5:21–48. The complex of traditions associated with the prophet, rooted as it is in the Torah (Deut. 18:15–22, cf. Acts 3:22) and in prophetic pronouncements, is of great importance for understanding the figure of Jesus. The visionary revelation as the basis of authority, the tradition of rejection and suffering, the hints that this suffering might be vicarious, and above all the eschatological character of both Spirit and prophecy, indicate how many themes converge on prophecy. The Gospels record that Jesus saw a close link between himself and John in his understanding of his ministry. The two different approaches of God’s messengers are both rejected (Luke 7:32), and in their different ways indicate the importance of the baptism of John. Indeed, John is described as a prophet, the like of which there has not been among those ‘born of women’ (Luke 7:28), and the baptism of John is evoked in a discussion about Jesus’ authority (Mark 11:30). In Luke 7:28 John is indeed a prophet but also ‘more than a prophet’. There is something special about his eschatological role, which sets

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him apart from those like Zechariah, who prophesied (Luke 1:67) and others before John (Luke 16:16). Thereby John is set apart as the prophet like Elijah, of unique eschatological importance (Matt. 11:10; Luke 7:26–27; Mal. 3:23, ET 4:5, cf. Luke 1:17). Jesus’ own call seems to have depended on heavenly acclamation (Mark 1:11, cf. 11:27–33). In this prophetic-type call there is an echo of Ezek. 1:1 in Mark 1:10, and he is presented as believing that he had been commissioned by God to speak and act in the way he did. The baptism accounts have affinities with the call-experiences of such prophets as Isaiah, Ezekiel and Second Isaiah (Isa. 6:1; 42:1; 61:1; Ezek. 1:1). Indeed, Mark’s version presents it as a personal experience, in which a vision of the Spirit and a divine voice proclaim the nature of his relationship with God. His speech resembles the authoritative divine pronouncement of the prophets, ‘Thus says the Lord’, prefaced as it is with the solemn ‘Truly, truly I say to you’. While the methods of scribal interpretation of Scripture as set out in Sir. 38 may be found in the Jesus tradition, that sense of one acting with authority, ‘not as the scribes’ (Mark 1:22), is prevalent throughout. There is a sense in which the authority claim, attributed to Jesus, goes beyond the ‘prophetic’ category. The ‘thus says the Lord’ of the prophets is almost an exact parallel to the authority claims of Jesus in the Gospels. Nevertheless, it is striking that one does not get the stereotyped formula in the Gospels. Elsewhere, inspiration by the Spirit is important (Matt. 12:28; Mark 3:28– 29, though the Luke parallel in Luke 11:20 does not mention the Spirit, cf. Acts 10:38). The account peculiar to Luke of Jesus’ preaching in the synagogue in Capernaum (Luke 4:16–30) is based on the fulfilment of Isa. 61. Other material in the Gospels seems to indicate that Jesus thought of himself as a prophet, which lends greatest weight to the view that he was inspired by the Spirit (Matt. 12:39; 13:57; Luke 1:33–34). He was thought to be a prophet by his contemporaries, as certain reports about reaction to Jesus indicate (Matt. 21:11; 26:68; Luke 7:16; 24:19; John 1:45; 6:14; 7:40; 9:17). Indeed, it is significant that at his trial Jesus is asked to prophesy by the soldiers (Mark 14:65), though it should be pointed out that in Matt. 26:68/Luke 22:64, ‘prophesy’ seems to mean ‘tell us who hit you’. Like the biblical prophets, Jesus challenges his generation, and places himself in the long line of prophets who have done the same (Luke 11:49– 51), and, like Elijah and Jeremiah, he is rejected by his contemporaries (Mark 6:4, cf. Jer. 15:10; 20:7–18; Luke 4:24; John 4:44). Indeed, arguably, the journey to Jerusalem represents the heart of a sense of prophetic vocation, if Luke is anything to go by: ‘Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not

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willing!’ (Luke 13:33–34) (On the suffering of the prophets see also Matt. 5:12; 23:29–38; Rom. 11:3; 1 Thess. 2:15.) The theme of the rejection of the prophets is important and is part of the oldest layers of the Gospel tradition, as Q scholarship has shown.2 Whether Jesus regarded himself as fulfilling the role of the figure, prophesied in Isa. 53, is not as clear as might appear. With the exception of Luke 22:37 (cf. Matt. 12:17–21), there is no explicit quotation from Isaiah on the lips of Jesus and the explicit quotations of it in the New Testament are notoriously few in number (Acts 8:32–33; 1 Pet. 2:22). A theme that makes only an isolated appearance in the Synoptic Gospels, but which is very frequent in the Gospel of John (and as we shall see is important in the Pauline letters), is that of Jesus as the emissary of God (e.g. John 7:16; 12:44–45). In Luke 10:16, Jesus speaks of himself as the one sent by God. The institution of agency in the Jewish sources concerns a situation where an individual is sent by another to act on the sender’s behalf: an agent is like the sender, with the latter’s full authority (Mekilta Exod. 12:3, cf. m.Ber. 5:5).3 Thus, to deal with the agent is to deal with the sender, as we see, for example, in Sifre on Num. 12:8: ‘With what is the matter to be compared? With a king of flesh and blood who has an agent in the country. The inhabitants spoke before him. Then said the king to them, “You have not spoken concerning my servant but concerning me”.’ This is a theme which is important in the Gospel of John and also may underlie Paul’s sense of his vocation as an apostle. A word or two needs to be said about the historical Jesus. In offering a summary in a survey essay of this kind, my primary focus would be in terms of Mannheim’s categories of the chiliastic mentality. By this he means the way ‘the absolute interferes with the world and conditions actual events’.4 In 2

C.M. Tuckett, Q and the History of Early Christianity: Studies on Q (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996). 3 See P. Borgen, ‘God’s Agent in the Fourth Gospel’, in The Interpretation of John, ed. J. Ashton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 83–96. 4 Mannheim’s summary of the characteristics of what he terms the ‘chiliastic mentality’ is as follows (K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. L. Wirth and E. Shils [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960], 192– 198): (1) ‘the impossible gives birth to the possible and the absolute interferes with the world and conditions actual events’ (192); (2) ‘for the real chiliast, the present becomes the breach through which what was previously inward bursts out suddenly, takes hold of the outer world and transforms it’ (193); (3) ‘the chiliast expects a union with the immediate present … He is always on his toes awaiting the propitious moment. … He is not actually concerned with the millennium to come; what is important for him is that it has happened here and now …’ (195); (4) ‘Chiliastic mentality severs all relationships with those phases of historical existence which are in daily process of becoming in our midst. It tends at every moment to turn into hostility towards the world, its culture, and all its works and earthly achievements, and to regard them as only premature gratifications of a more fundamental striving which can only be adequately satisfied in Kairos’ (198); (5) ‘For

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theological terms, what Mannheim sets out is a description of a realised eschatology at work, in which hopes for a changed world are set in the context of the present, and are not just articles of faith to be asserted. Instead, they pervade thought and action, and disrupt patterns of behaviour and relating, which is what we find in the ethos of earliest Christianity. It is a view epitomised by the saying, only extant in Luke’s Gospel, ‘I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem’ (Luke 13:33). I touched on Acts briefly at the beginning of this essay. The programmatic promise in Acts, about the prophetic Spirit inspiring men and women, is an important theme of Acts. Prophets such as Agabus and the daughters of Philip are mentioned, but the prophetic experience of key players in the narrative is even more significant. The threefold telling of Paul’s conversion (Acts 9; 22; 26) sets apocalyptic vision as a motor of divine providence. Also important is the account of the events leading up to Peter’s preaching to Cornelius in Acts 10. Hidden in the story is a guide to the workings of the prophetic Spirit, and a reminder that throughout early Christianity there is a warning not to be misled by false prophets (cf. Matt. 7:22; 24:11; 1 Tim. 4:1; 1 John 4:1). Luke’s account of Peter’s vision differs from other apocalyptic visions, for example, the visions in the second half of the Book of Daniel. There is no angelic interpretation of the meaning of the vision. Peter may initially be left at a loss as he is confronted with the need to make sense of what has appeared to him (Acts 10:19). Later in the chapter (Acts 10:28), however, he makes a link between clean and unclean food and clean and unclean persons. Thus Peter appears to have drawn the conclusion that, if he is allowed in the heavenly vision to eat anything without discrimination, he might also be obliged to regard all human persons in the same way (cf. Acts 10:34).5 Here a visionary applies his reason to the understanding of his prophetic experience. It was a test that was to become a criterion in the Pauline corpus, where the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets (1 Cor. 14:32), and where there was a growing suspicion of ecstasy, particularly in reaction to Montanism.

Chiliasm the spirit is a force which suffuses and expresses itself through us. For humanitarian liberalism it is that “other realm”, which, when absorbed in our moral conscience, inspires us’ (198); (6) ‘the chiliastic mentality has no sense for the process of becoming; it was sensitive only to the abrupt moment, the present pregnant with meaning’ (202). 5 The implication is that the conjunction of the perplexity at the vision with the appearance of the Gentile has led to a moment of insight, so that on reflection and possibly with the exercise of rational reflection, the meaning of the vision for that particular set of circumstances has become clear. The self-appointed, eighteenth-century prophet, William Blake, describes the relationship as follows: ‘This is shewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the comforter, or Desire, that Reason may have Ideas to build on’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 5).

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The problematic character of resort to appeals to direct divine inspiration is a feature of both emerging Christianity and Judaism. There is a famous story in b.B.Metziah 59a,6 in which, despite the approbation of heaven, the teaching of the eccentric Eliezer ben Hyrcanus is persistently rejected in favour of the majority opinion: It has been taught: On that day R. Eliezer brought forward every imaginable argument, but they did not accept them. Said he to them: ‘If the halakah [i.e. the correct interpretation of the Jewish Law] agrees with me, let this carob-tree prove it.’ Thereupon the carob-tree was torn a hundred cubits out of its place. … No proof can be brought from a carob-tree, they retorted. Again he said to them: ‘If the halakah agrees with me, let the streams of water prove it.’ Whereupon the streams of water flowed backward. ‘No proof can be brought from a stream of water’, they rejoined. Again he urged: ‘If the halakah agrees with me, let the walls of the school-house prove it’, whereupon the walls inclined to fall. But R. Joshua rebuked them saying: ‘When scholars are engaged in a halakic dispute, what have ye to interfere?’ Hence, they did not fall, in honour of R. Joshua, nor did they become upright, in honour of R. Eliezer; and they are still standing thus inclined. Again he said to them: ‘If the halakah agrees with me, let it be proved from heaven.’ Whereupon a heavenly voice cried out: ‘Why do ye dispute with R. Eliezer, seeing that in all matters the halakah agrees with him?’ … But R. Joshua arose and exclaimed, ‘It is not in heaven’. What did he mean by this? Said R. Jeremiah: That the Torah had already been given at Mount Sinai; we pay no attention to a Heavenly Voice, because Thou hast long since written in the Torah at Mount Sinai, After the majority must one incline. (b.B.Metziah 59a)

In this story (much embellished and whose historicity is not material to the point being discussed), even in those cases where a particular teacher could claim all kinds of miraculous vindications for the teaching which he adopted, that position must be viewed with considerable scepticism and indeed be rejected, if it did not coincide with the opinion of the majority of the rabbis. Despite the importance of visions and dreams for earliest Christianity, the later Acts account of Christian origins subtly indicates that those, which deserve to be given attention, are those of apostles including Paul. The author has every confidence that the voice of God is to be heard in the experience of those heroes of Christian origins. This is not surprising, not only because the writer can, with the benefit of hindsight, have confidence that the movement is of God, (cf. Acts 5:39) but also because his record of the significant role of the heavenly vision is used with discrimination. There are those, apart from apostles and other ‘authorised’ persons, who have dreams and visions as part of the providential work of God. Luke wants 6

C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982), 307; idem, Christian Origins: An Account of the Setting and Character of the Most Important Messianic Sect of Judaism, rev. edn. (London: SPCK, 2002), 208, 267; P.S. Alexander, ‘A Sixtieth Part of Prophecy: The Problem of Continuing Revelation in Judaism’, in Words Remembered, Texts Renewed: Essays in Honour of John F.A. Sawyer, eds. J. Davies et al., JSOTSup 195 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 414–433.

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to demonstrate the divine approbation of the movement, which he seeks to promote as Josephus did with the destruction of Jerusalem, which was predicted by supernatural signs (War 6.288). So, it is not just history, which proves that Christianity is of God (cf. Acts 5:39) but supernatural validation. While the conversion of Cornelius shows that the divine Spirit cannot be controlled by human intervention, the pattern of its transmission has certain norms of expectation. Normally, therefore, it is not ordinary people who receive visions, and there is little sense that anyone could come along with an ‘apocalypse’ as contemplated by 1 Cor. 14:26, or claim to be an authoritative prophet like the Montanists in the mid-second century and claim the inspiration of the Spirit, without apostolic approval (despite the occasional reference to such prophets as Agabus and the prophet daughters of Philip). Indeed, the dialectic between Agabus’s prophecy and Paul’s interpretation over the latter’s visit to Jerusalem (Acts 21:12–14) suggests that, notwithstanding the accuracy of the prophecy (as events subsequently proved), there is implied warning that Paul should not go (which Paul had already heard through the Spirit in 21:4). What Paul’s friends heard in the words, did not override the judgement (and the determination) of the apostle to maintain his conviction. After all, while Balaam could utter correct prophecy (Num. 24:17), he was above all remembered for leading Israel astray (Num. 25:1, cf. Jude 11; Rev. 2:14; on the struggle between prophets, see Rev. 2:20). As in Did. 11, the words of the prophets by themselves were never enough without the actions of the prophets and the effects of their words being regarded as leading to lives lived according to the will of God. To put it in the language of 1 Corinthians, the spirits of the prophets are always subject to the prophets. In this respect, Acts parallels the situation reflected in the Mishnah (m.Hag. 2:1), where it is assumed that many are engaged in visionary experience, but where there is a concerted attempt by the rabbis to ensure that, as far as possible, this involvement is restricted to those with the intellectual wherewithal to deal with it. The evidence of Acts is another form of the routinisation of charisma that we shall see in 1 Cor. 14.

20.3. The Pauline Letters Paul’s most outspoken letter, that written to the Galatians, evinces the prophetic character of the apostle to the Gentiles most clearly. Not only is there the uncompromising assertion of the rejection of human tradition in favour of the commission from the divine at the very outset, but his own experience is the measure of hermeneutical judgement and the necessary context for the subsequent engagement with his ancestral scriptures (Gal. 3–4). In the language used to describe Paul’s conversion in Galatians (Gal. 1:12–16; Acts 9; 22; 26), Paul draws on prophetic passages like Isa. 49:1 and Jer. 1:4–5. What

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is more, his sense of himself is as an agent of God, a shaliaḥ, with a distinctive role in the divine economy. ‘Whom shall I send and who will go for us?’, God had asked of the heavenly court, as Isaiah in the Temple described his vocation to be an emissary. To be a prophetic emissary is key to Paul’s self-understanding. Like Jeremiah, his sufferings are part of his lot as the divine agent (1 Cor. 4), though he relates this closely to identification with the suffering messiah (2 Cor. 4:10, cf. Col. 1:24). What is lacking in Paul’s writings is the distinctive ‘Thus says the Lord’ familiar from biblical prophecy. Rather, Paul looks back to another decisive figure, Christ, whose agent Paul is (Gal. 1:1–4), and, even more significantly, in whom Christ dwells (Gal. 2:20), though that indwelling of the divine is not only the prerogative of the prophet, as Rom. 8 and 1 Cor. 2 make clear. While there is no doubt about the importance attached to Paul’s words and an expectation that they will have their effect (1 Cor. 5:3), there is a more apologetic tone in defence of his authority; for example, in 1 Cor. 7:25 he gives his opinion as one, who by the Lord’s mercy, is to be trusted. There is less careful enunciation in what (I believe) is probably Paul’s earliest letter, Galatians, where Paul may suggest the portentous character of the words of a letter written in his own hand (Gal. 6:11), though these words are buttressed with defensive and exegetical argument. Paul seems to have had the conviction that he had been set apart as the apostle to the Gentiles, commissioned by the Messiah himself to preach the good news to the nations (Gal. 1:16). This was part of Paul’s eschatological belief, at the heart of which were the resurrection of Jesus and the presence of the Spirit, both of which are anticipations of the age to come. The present ‘inbetween’ stage is itself marked as an eschatological time. Paul can tell the Corinthians that they are the ones ‘upon whom the end of the age has come’ (1 Cor. 10:11). One sign of this is that believers now taste of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:13, cf. Heb. 6:4). Paul regarded the Spirit as itself a mark of the presence of the New Age. It is ‘the first fruits’, the seal placed in the hearts of believers as a guarantee (Rom. 8:23, cf. 2 Cor. 1:22; Eph. 1:14). The return of the Spirit coincided with an outburst of prophetic activity, and such activity was certainly characteristic of the Pauline communities (Rom. 12:6; 1 Cor. 12–14; 1 Thess. 5:19, cf. Eph. 4:11; Acts 11:28). Like the Book of Revelation, which marks the breaking in of the last things with the presence of the prophetic witness (Rev. 10–11; 19:10), Paul and his churches experienced the revival of the gift of prophecy, a sign that the promises of God were being fulfilled (though a major theme of 1 Corinthians is to challenge the preoccupation with realised eschatological fulfilment [1 Cor. 4:8]). The emphasis in 1 Cor. 13 is on the time of perfection as still future, when prophecy will be obsolete. Prophecy is a sign of the present ‘in-between stage’ in which those on whom the end of the age has come (1 Cor. 10:11) find themselves. As such, prophecy marks a sign of a new age but is not itself

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the mark of perfection (that is what the language about ‘down payment’ [2 Cor. 1:22] in connection with the Spirit implies). In 1 Cor. 13:12, perfection is seeing face to face. Words and hearing are replaced by vision and sight. The problem with words (and indeed biblical prophecy exemplifies this) is that they are obscure. The riddle of the prophetic oracle is nowhere better seen than in the Immanuel oracle in Isa. 7. The contrast between words and vision is found also in the Apocalypse of John (cf. 1 John 3:2), where what is seen is preferred to what is heard (Rev. 5:5–6) and the ultimate is ‘seeing God face to face’ (Rev. 22:4). The meeting for worship is characterised by prophetic spontaneity (albeit constrained with the apostle’s demand for ecclesial uniformity, 1 Cor. 14:34): prophecy, visions, revelations and hymns, all contributed by different members of the community (14:20). Even women, if properly attired, may participate in the prayer and prophecy of the meeting (11:5, 13). In a church such as that at Corinth, where glossolalia was particularly prized as a sign of participation in the language of the angels (cf. 1 Cor. 13:1), Paul stresses the importance of prophecy, particularly as the norm of communication between divine and human, for when someone speaks in the language of angels, another must interpret and thereby enable understanding of the deep things of God (cf. 1 Cor. 2:10–16). This is open to all in the Spirit-filled community and is a major means of comprehending the nature of the divine will, whose activity should never be inhibited (1 Thess. 5:19). But being inspired by the Spirit is no ecstatic activity (notwithstanding what Paul tells us about his own experience in 2 Cor. 12:2–4), as the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets themselves (1 Cor. 14:32). Understanding and reason are superior to the spontaneous action of the Spirit, therefore! Indeed, what we see in 1 Cor. 14 is the charismatic leader himself ‘routinising the charisma’ and enabling his fellow charismatics not only to attend to their relationship with those outsiders who may attend the Spiritfilled worship (14:22–25), but also to have regard for each other and their faith, which is both a constraint and a guide of faith (Rom. 12:6). In the guidance that Paul gives, prophecy along with mutual affection are the criteria for the marks of the Spirit’s activity, which are in many respects paralleled in the test for prophetic activity in Did. 11.

20.4. Prophecy in the Book of Revelation and the Gospel of John 20.4.1. Introduction The continuation of the prophetic tradition in Second Temple Judaism, in apocalyptic literature, has made a significant contribution to the Johannine corpus. The themes of prophecy, apocalyptic and eschatology come together most obviously in the Book of Revelation and help us to see how they might relate to one another. The word ‘apocalypse’ opens the Apocalypse of John,

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but the ethos of unveiling or unmasking pervades the book, even if ἀποκαλύπτω terminology is not used elsewhere. Following John Barton,7 I think that what we have in this apocalyptic text is the form that prophecy took at the end of the Second Temple period, infused with the realised eschatological convictions of early Christian belief. Like the later interpreters of the book, who located themselves in the divine purposes according to the conviction about the relationship of their times with the place in the (overlapping) sequences of seal, trumpet and bowls, John sees himself standing at a critical juncture in the unfolding of the messianic woes, the second of which is past (Rev. 11:14). This is not a text which simply predicts the future, for it also reads the signs of the times, which times are already in the midst of the tribulations leading to the coming of the messianic kingdom. To this extent, it is an attempt to situate and explain one’s place in eschatological history, just as one of its foremost expositors, Joachim of Fiore, understood so.8 The Apocalypse of John is, self-confessedly, a book of prophecy whose main message is in large part eschatological. John reports his vision of the present and the future, and indeed, the climax of history in the coming of heaven on earth. The Apocalypse of John is an authoritative book of prophecy, whose status is described in words echoing Deuteronomy (Rev. 22:18, cf. Deut. 4:2; 22:10), perhaps even supplanting the ancient prophecy, with whose contents it is replete. By implication John is a prophet, whose role model is the vision of the two witnesses who prophesy and suffer for their prophetic witness (Rev. 11:3–12). John acts out typical prophetic experiences. Like Isaiah and Ezekiel, he is vouchsafed visions of God (cf. Ezek. 1:1) and, echoing the experience of the latter (Ezek. 3:1–3), is commissioned to eat a scroll and perform as a prophet to the nations in the manner of Jeremiah (Jer. 1:4). John’s prophetic ministry consists of the communication of his visions and the letters he has heard and written down at the dictation of the heavenly Christ to the angels of the churches. In the Apocalypse of John, in the midst of the unfolding eschatological drama, the centrality of the role of prophecy is enunciated. We see it in the involvement of the seer in ch. 10, when he is instructed to eat the scroll, and commanded to prophesy. This is a direct call to participate actively as a prophet rather than merely be a passive spectator of it. Utilising the figures of Moses and Elijah, that prophetic witness takes place in a social arena and ends up with death of those bearing witness. Elsewhere in the Johannine corpus, in 1 John, the claim to new teaching which is based on revelation (1 John 2:20, 27), and which causes worry to the writer who prefers the 7 J. Barton, Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1986). 8 J. Kovacs and C. Rowland, Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

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appeal to the past, is no better exemplified than in the opening words (1 John 1:1). This retrospective emphasis contrasts with the Apocalypse of John, where the spirit and prophecy have a central role, as they were to have in the Montanist movement nearly a century later.9 As a result of Montanism, however, prophecy was viewed with suspicion, so much so that the place of the Apocalypse of John as part of the canon was challenged. The inspiration of this ‘new prophecy’ was in part the promise of the Paraclete in John 14–16, as well as heaven on earth in Rev. 21–22. Though the activity of the SpiritParaclete in the Gospel of John is largely retrospective (reminding of what Jesus had said, pointing to Jesus and continuing Jesus’ critical activity), there is a prophetic, revelatory, function, especially in John 16:13, where the Paraclete leads the disciples into all truth. There is new revelation expected, even if any revelation is in continuity with what Jesus has said. Prophets make their occasional appearance in the Gospel of John. Reference to the biblical prophets aside (1:23, 45; 6:45; 8:52–53; 12:38), the High Priest has prophetic powers; questions are raised about the prophetic character of John the Baptist (1:21, 25) and also of Jesus (4:19, 44; 6:14; 7:40, 52; 9:17). In the case of Jesus (5:36, cf. 6:14), and to a lesser extent John the Baptist (1:31), the prophetic activity is seen in connection with the performance of deeds, whereas in the case of the High Priest it is his words that are indicative of their prophetic role. Throughout the Gospel of John there is, however, another important theme, which links Jesus with the prophets. Jesus is a spokesman of the divine, a heavenly agent, akin to, but exceeding in authority and nature, the angelic agents. Jan Bühner has argued for a blending of the angel motif and the prophet motif in the Jewish tradition and suggests that this may be a key to answering the background of Johannine Christology.10 Like angels, prophets were regarded as speaking with the voice of God (e.g. Deut. 18:18–20; Jer. 1:9), and in later Jewish tradition we find the identity of the angel/messenger.11 The Gospel of John is what John Ashton has called ‘an apocalypse in reverse’,12 in that the heavenly mysteries are not to be sought in heaven or through access to a body of written knowledge but primarily, and uniquely, in and through Jesus, the revelation of the hidden God (1:18; 14:9). At the same time, the Gospel of John also reveals the mysteries of God (6:46: ‘Not that any one has seen the Father, except the one who is from God, he has seen the Father’). What we find in the Gospel of John relates to the theme of the 9 C. Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 10 J.-A. Bühner, Der Gesandte und sein Weg im 4. Evangelium, WUNT 2.2 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1977), 271, 427. 11 Bühner, Der Gesandte, 371–373. 12 J. Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 371.

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attainment of knowledge of the divine mysteries, and, supremely, the mysteries of God, though interpreted consistently christologically. One is tempted to suggest that when in 4QInstruction the reader is told to meditate on the raz nihyeh and study it always, we are encountering what John Collins describes as ‘the entire divine plan, embracing past, present and future’. That is now embodied in, and revealed by, Jesus.13 20.4.2. Towards an Understanding of the Exercise of the Prophetic Imagination John’s apocalyptic vision (Rev. 4–5) is one of the best examples we have of a vision based on Ezekiel’s merkabah from Second Temple Judaism. It is a good example of what David Halperin has in mind when he writes: ‘When the apocalyptic visionary “sees” something that looks like Ezekiel’s merkabah, we may assume that he is seeing the merkabah vision as he has persuaded himself it really was, as Ezekiel would have seen it, had he been inspired wholly and not in part’.14 The adequacy of the evidence prevents us from being completely sure how visions took place among ancient Jews and Christians during the Second Temple period.15 The kaleidoscopic way in which passages and underlying themes from the Bible come together, and merge in different ways in John’s vision, is reminiscent of what Mary Carruthers has written about memory in late antiquity and in the medieval period. She has shown how, in the process of memorisation and the recall of memory, there is a creative process of interaction of images.16 The monastic practice of meditation notably involved making mental images or ‘pictures’. Carruthers describes medieval memoria as a craft of thinking, in which ancient readers and hearers of texts could seek 13 J.J. Collins, ‘The Eschatologizing of Wisdom in the Dead Sea Scrolls’, in Sapiential Perspectives: Wisdom Literature in the Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. idem, STDJ 51 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 13–47, at 31; D.J. Harrington, Wisdom Texts from Qumran, Literature of the Dead Sea Scrolls (London: Routledge, 1996), 49–53. 14 D.J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988), 71; for further on visionary experience in the apocalypses, see M.E. Stone, ‘A Reconsideration of Apocalyptic Visions’, HTR 96 (2003): 167–180; V. MacDermot, The Cult of the Seer in the Ancient Middle East: A Contribution to Current Research on Hallucinations Drawn from Coptic and Other Texts, Publications of the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine 21 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). 15 I. Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, AGJU 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1980). 16 M.J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); eadem, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 68–69.

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to ‘visualise’ what they read.17 As a result, scriptural meditation opened up the gateway to a network of allusions together with personal context to effect an existentially addressed imaginative ‘lectio’. Meditation started from reading but is not at all bound by rules or precepts, for it can open up connections among a variety of biblical subjects.18 It is this kind of background that, I believe, may help us glimpse how the prophetic imagination worked in the case of John of Patmos. Indeed, Elliot Wolfson, among others, has rightly argued that it is impossible to isolate experience from its literary context.19 Thus, visionary experience was supported by, and indeed initiated by, exegesis of their scriptures. In rabbinic tradition there is evidence of the visualisation of some of the various parts of the merkabah (e.g. b.Meg. 24a). Exegetically, the meaning of ḥašmal was most obscure; the enigmatic word occurs three times in the early chapters of Ezekiel (Ezek. 1:4, 27; 8:2). In the traditions about the meaning of ḥašmal (b.Hag. 13b), warnings are given by means of stories about the effects on the inexperienced, of what appears to be imaginative engagement with aspects of Ezekiel’s text.20 In this, the meaning of obscure parts of the text may have come about as a result of the creative, indeed imaginative, in Carruthers’ sense, interpretation of the text, dangerous as it turned out to be in some cases. John’s prophetic vision, I would suggest, may have had its origin in this kind of imaginative exegesis of the Scriptures, an exegesis which may have been part of the early merkabah tradition.21 According to John, however, what distinguishes his vision is that it is prophecy rather than merely a mystical meditation on the merkabah, which enabled the adept to have access to the divine mysteries. John does not merely have access to the mysteries, therefore, but is also, to borrow Paul’s description, a steward of the divine mysteries, like Enoch, and indeed a prophet whose words have the same authority as Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel. It is to be proclaimed in the public arena, whatever the consequences (Rev. 10–11). 20.4.3. Prophecy and Politics That public, political character is evident from a glance at the history of the interpretation of the Apocalypse of John, indicating what a central role this book has played in the emergence of political theology, of whatever political hue. Its theology is at the heart of the Augustinian dualistic historical theol17

Or heard, Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 304. Hugh of St Victor, Didascalion 3.10. 19 E.R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 120. 20 Halperin, Faces of the Chariot, 130–136. 21 C. Rowland, ‘Imagining the Apocalypse’, NTS 51 (2005): 303–327 = below, pp. 510– 528. 18

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ogy of The City of God, and the eschatological timetables of those engaged in eschatological prognostication going back to Joseph Mede and beyond into Joachite apocalyptic exegesis. In its own historical context, the Apocalypse of John represents a point in the development of the interpretation of the foundational political apocalyptic visions, Dan. 2 and 7. Like the contemporary 4 Ezra, the Apocalypse of John evinces a lively interest in Daniel as the foundation text of a prophetic, political critique, which unmasks the pretensions of empire before looking forward to a different kind of polity. In Rev. 13 and 17 we find the Beast of Daniel taken up and related to the experience of oppression and state power, exercised by the Roman state of John’s day. The beasts function synchronically rather than, as in Dan. 7, diachronically. They show the way in which the prophetic originals are moulded in the vision to accommodate the political experience of the visionary, in which the focus of state activity impinge upon his consciousness, one imperial and foreign, the other local. Like the roughly contemporary 4 Ezra 6–7 and Syr. Bar. 25–30, the Apocalypse of John has a complex eschatology. Woe paves the way for heaven on earth in a divinely determined series of disasters. This is outlined in the Apocalypse of John, where we find a series of sevens throughout the prophecy. H.H. Rowley may have been wrong to characterise apocalyptic as the future breaking into the present, but in this prophetic book the way in which the future arises out of the present is altogether more ordered and determined than in earlier prophecy. What is more, and in this respect it also resembles 4 Ezra, the Apocalypse of John has a two-stage eschatological climax in which the Kingdom of God, on earth for a thousand years, precedes the new heaven and earth promised by Isaiah (65:17; 66:22). 4 Ezra may have a temporary messianic kingdom lasting 400 years only, but the eschatological structure is the same. By contrast, a hope for the future society is notably absent in the Gospel of John, where the longing for a different kind of polity, God’s Kingdom on earth, has almost completely disappeared. Here ‘going to be with Jesus in heaven’ seems to be the heart of the promise for those who might gain eternal life (‘Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world’, John 17:24). Nevertheless, even if this wider hope has ebbed, there is in the Gospel of John, as David Rensberger has pointed out, an implicit political discourse in which the public demonstrations of an alternative politics are rooted in following the one whom God has sent.22 It has always seemed to me that, formally speaking, one of the closest analogies to the trial of Jesus before Pilate is the martyro22

D.K. Rensberger, Overcoming the World: Politics and Community in the Gospel of John (London: SPCK, 1989).

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logical literature, whether of the pre-Constantinian church or of later nonconformity.23 20.4.4. The Impact of the Prophetic Word: Enigma and Revelation We have considered ways in which a prophetic text, inspired in large part by earlier Scripture, might have emerged and observed the outline of its political character. I now want to look at the different ways in which the Johannine texts might have functioned and the sense in which, as books, they could be seen as prophetic. The closure of the two books tells us much about the kind of authority that their authors believed they had (John 21:24–25; Rev. 22:18–19). Both in different senses involve claims to be linked with eyewitnesses, both, it is true, of a heavenly vision, one of that heavenly Word made flesh, the other of the awesome consequences of the heavenly vision of the enthroned divinity and the terrible lamb in the midst of the throne. But there the similarity ends. It would appear that in the Gospel of John there is a separation between the Divine Word and the words recorded in the book. What the Gospel offers is a witness to the one who spoke to God face to face like Moses (cf. John 6:46), and the book is the medium of revelation pointing ultimately to the Word, to which the words of John’s story bear witness (John 21:24–25). Any new revelation, therefore, as we have seen, points back to, and has to interact with, that ultimate revelation. It is the words of Jesus to which the Spirit-Paraclete calls attention when teaching the disciples after Jesus’ departure (John 16:13). So the Gospel of John contains the story about the Word. The words of Jesus, the Word made flesh, serve to elicit a response to the Eternal Word. In the Gospel of John, like Moses, who spoke to God face-to-face (Exod. 33:11), but explicitly exceeded him in authority and intimacy (John 1:17–18), Jesus is the intimate of God and speaks and embodies the divine mystery. He is not just an intermediary of the divine oracles, therefore, nor is he a mere channel or a lawgiver, as the different pictures of Moses suggest. He is the unique emissary of God who makes the invisible God known. Compare that with the Apocalypse of John, which contains the words from the Son of Man and a report of what John has seen. These become a book of prophecy of and about the divine mysteries. These new prophetic words have the authority of the Torah itself: ‘I warn every one who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if any one adds to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this book’ (Rev. 22:18). In the Apocalypse of John, the face-to-face moment of meeting with the enthroned God is only eschatological. Until then, it is only John who can come face to face with the divine 23 H. Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, OECT (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972); D. Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism, Figurae (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

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glory in heaven or ‘on the Lord’s Day’ in the vision of the divine human figure (Rev. 1:13–16). Both books are alike and resemble the profound and enigmatic character of the oracular. They bewilder, challenge and even disorientate the reader, whether to wean Nicodemus from his role as leader of the Jews, or, in the Apocalypse of John, to move readers/hearers from the culture of the Beast and Babylon. The Apocalypse of John’s reformulation of earlier prophetic language might bring hearers to repentance (e.g. Rev. 2:5, 16). Both books are not to be sealed up for ‘the time of the end’ (John 20:31; Rev. 22:10), unlike earlier prophecy (e.g. Dan. 12:9), for they are words for the present moment. Like the prophetic oracles, neither text is transparent, therefore. Indeed, Wayne Meeks’s description of the Gospel of John could equally well be applied to the Apocalypse of John: … the reader has an experience rather like that of the dialogue partners of Jesus: either he will find the whole business so convoluted, obscure, and maddeningly arrogant that he will reject it in anger, or he will find it so fascinating that he will stick with it until the progressive reiteration of themes brings, on some level of consciousness at least, a degree of clarity. … The book functions for its readers in precisely the same way that the epiphany of its hero functions within the narratives and dialogues.24

Obscure language is necessary in the present age, for, to quote Paul’s words, in this age one ‘sees in a glass darkly’ (1 Cor. 13:12). The mystery of the visions and the occasional call for divine wisdom (as with the number of the Beast in Rev. 13:18) are tokens of the obscurity of the apocalyptic imagery and the teasing Johannine aphorisms, whose allusiveness has offered such varied interpretative opportunities down the centuries. Luther rightly contrasted the Apocalypse of John with Daniel in his later introduction to the Apocalypse of John in his translation of the New Testament: ‘there are many different kinds of prophecy in Christendom. One type does this with images, but alongside them it supplies their interpretation in specific words – as … Daniel … [another] type does it without either words or interpretations, exclusively with images and figures, like this Book of Revelation.’ In the Gospel of John, Jesus’ words are often obscure, and only towards the end of the Gospel do his followers declare, ‘Now you speak to us plainly not in any figure of speech’ (16:29). Both the Apocalypse of John and the Gospel of John, like the prophetic texts before them, therefore offer, whether in visionary or narrative form, words which seek to bring about an epistemological and ethical transformation in readers/hearers, in preparation for that meeting ‘face to face’ in the New Jerusalem (Rev. 22:4) or in communion with the ascended Son of Man in heaven (John 17:24).

24

W.A. Meeks, ‘The Man from Heaven in Johannine Sectarianism’, JBL 91 (1972): 68– 69, emphasis added.

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If the Gospel of John is ‘an apocalypse in reverse’ and has at its heart the fact that the content of the revelation is not words but a person (following Bultmann’s famous dictum), that means two things. First, when considering the Gospel of John one should not be dealing with abstractions such as truth, for truth, life, revelation and mystery all have their focus in ‘the Word become flesh’, or, to paraphrase what the opening verses of Hebrews say, God may have spoken through prophets in words but now God has ‘spoken’ through a person. This has two consequences: first, an understanding of what the mystery is cannot be reduced to neat linguistic summaries. This means, secondly, that this kind of ‘apocalypse’ is always going to remain mysterious because it is ambiguous. Of course, one could say that, short of seeing God ‘face to face’, any mystery or truth is going to be obscure in this age. Daniel, after all, needed to have what he ‘saw’ explained to him. One of the reasons that apocalypse terminology is not used in the Gospel of John may be that the revelation is never ‘face-to-face’ (as it would be, eschatologically, say, in Rev. 22:4), for it is through a person, and as such, without the veil being removed, as in the Transfiguration in the Synoptic Gospels, there is ambiguity, indeed doubt, whether Jesus is from God (cf. John 9:16). This resembles the ambiguity of the mystery of the cross in 1 Cor. 1–2. It is folly to those perishing, but salvation to those who have faith. It is only when one discerns truth, mystery, etc. in the ambiguous event or person that one has discerned the divine reality, and apocalypse takes place. And yet, such moments are never compelling in the way a vision, say of the divine, is, rooted as it is in expectations of what might constitute a divine vision in the pages of the Bible (Isa. 6; Ezek. 1).

20.5. Concluding Comments Prophecy is one of the most important features in the New Testament, historically, theologically and hermeneutically, and a way of comprehending the diversity contained in them. The sense of present communion with the divine, in which tradition and accepted channels of authority are relativised by the prophet’s conviction that vision or word coming from the divine has to be spoken, or written, and has an authority at least as great as that of the authoritative texts from the past, typifies so much of what is central to the New Testament. Indeed, we cannot understand early Christianity as a movement in history without all the many facets of the prophetic. The theological stress on divine immanence and indwelling, whether applying to Christology, or the inspired person, is well summarised in the programmatic statement in Heb. 1:1–2: ‘In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son’. Hermeneutically, the emphasis on the present rather than the past, the spirit, rather

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than the letter, are characteristic of the New Testament texts, which evince a belief in a God speaking through men and women about the present, as well as the future and the past. Whatever the attempts of those who have sought to police them, prophetic texts have for two thousand years been the inspiration for many who have seen prophecy not as a phenomenon read about in the pages of a book but one to be actualised and emulated. In this respect they imitate a text like the Apocalypse of John, where biblical prophecy was less a matter of study than a language to speak, and whose claims, ironically, helped to turn the living prophetic voice into a thing of the past, into words to be studied rather than contemporary ‘oracles of God’.

21. ‘Intimations of Apocalyptic’: The Perspective of the History of Interpretation John Ashton’s remarkable contribution to Johannine scholarship has many facets. The one on which we focus in this symposium,1 is ‘intimations of apocalyptic’. Over the years I have found myself appropriating his words about the Gospel of John as ‘an apocalypse – in reverse’, as a key to Johannine Christology and its relationship with the Book of Revelation. According to Ashton, the divine plan is incarnate, a revelation of God’s grand design, which is now being realised. John Ashton, however, goes on to assert that during his life time Jesus’ words remain opaque, a mystery, ‘whose meaning cannot be grasped until the dawn of a new age, when in a second stage, it will at last receive its authoritative interpretation. Thus the Fourth Evangelist conceives his own work as an apocalypse – in reverse, upside down, inside out’.2 Those words just quoted form the framework of the treatment of the Gospel of John and its relationship with apocalypticism in ancient Judaism in the book, which Chris Morray-Jones and I published in 2009.3 In it I argued that the Gospel does not offer visions and revelations, by means of an ascent to heaven or communion with the world above (John 1:51 and 12:28 are solitary exceptions), though it does hint that Jesus has a privileged access of information from and sight of God. Jesus claims to offer revelation of God in his person and also in his words – from what he has seen and heard in heaven. Much of what the Fourth Gospel says, however, relates to the theme of the attainment of knowledge of the divine mysteries, and in particular the mysteries of God. Jesus proclaims himself as the revelation of the hidden God. He tells Philip, ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father’ (14:8) and at the conclusion of the Prologue, the evangelist speaks of the Son in the following way: ‘No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known’ (1:18). All claims to have seen God in the past are repudiated; the Jews have ‘neither heard God’s voice nor seen his form’ (5:37): even when, as in Isaiah’s case, Scripture teaches that a prophet 1

‘John’s Gospel and Intimations of Apocalyptic’, Bangor University, July 2010. J. Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 329. 3 C. Rowland and C.R.A. Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament, CRINT 12 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 2

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glimpsed God enthroned in glory, this vision has to be interpreted in the Gospel as a vision of the pre-existent Christ (12:41). No one has seen God except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father (6:46). The highest wisdom of all, the knowledge of God, comes not through the information disclosed in visions and revelations but through the Word become flesh, Jesus of Nazareth, whose authority relies on the communication he has received from his father. The goal of the apocalyptic seer and the visionary is the glimpse of God enthroned in glory (1 En. 14). This is to be found in Jesus (John 1:18; 6:46; 12:41; 14:9) and, to borrow from the letter to the Colossians, he it is ‘in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ (Col. 2:3). The Son of Man is the goal of the angels’ search for the divine mysteries (John 1:51, cf. 1 Pet. 1:11–12). Heavenly visions of God are not on offer in the Fourth Gospel, for claims to see God must be regarded as claims to see Jesus. Hence, the Gospel of John is indeed ‘an apocalypse – in reverse’. This essay takes one of William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job and seeks to show that Blake’s understanding of the Gospel of John evinces an understanding of Johannine themes similar to John Ashton’s understanding of the Gospel of John. For Blake the understanding of God comes as an ‘apocalypse – in reverse’ in the sense that God appears not as a transcendent being remote in the heavens but as Christ with him and in him. As such it offers a remarkable anticipation of the kinds of themes that John Ashton and I have treated, albeit in slightly different ways, in our writing.4 I then go on to consider other ‘intimations of apocalyptic’ relating to Johannine themes in the Blake corpus.

21.1. Exegesis of the Book of Job in His Engravings: An Epitome of Blake’s Approach Blake turned to the Book of Job throughout his life in sketches, watercolours and engravings. This series of engravings is the product of Blake’s last years. In them Blake’s artistic creativity is brought to bear on a biblical book in its entirety. As we shall see, Job’s words, ‘I have heard [of] thee with the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee’ (Job 42:5, Blake omitted the preposition in his quotation of the KJV) become the defining moment, and for Blake a key way of understanding the book as a whole. Blake’s engravings prioritise the images. The engraved images are similar in most ways to those we see in the watercolours, painted for Thomas Butts and John Linnell, but with the addition of the marginal biblical citations and additional illustrations, 4 Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel; Rowland and Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God, 123–131; C. Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), especially 58–62.

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the surrounding biblical, textual comment is often small. The primary focus of interest, the image, is at the centre surrounded by the various texts. Blake seeks to show how vision can cleanse ‘the doors of perception’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 14, E395) and can wean a viewer away from simplistic theological nostrums. For Blake, Job is a victim of habit and lack of awareness of the way in which the ‘memory’ of received wisdom has informed his life. Blake’s understanding of Job’s redemption focuses on two key texts: ‘I have heard thee with the hearing of the Ear but now my Eye seeth thee’ (Blake’s version of Job 42:5), and ‘And the Lord turned the captivity of Job when he prayed for his friends’ (42:10). The first demonstrates an epistemological, the second an ethical, change, and they stand as a paradigm for similar existential change in Blake’s readers as they engage with his exegesis. So, Blake’s reading of Job’s story is one of personal upheaval in which the past is taken up and read differently in the light of the apocalyptic vision.6 Job (Job 1:1), blameless and upright (cf. Phil. 3:6), comes to a new theological understanding on the basis of vision (Job 42:5, cf. Gal. 1:12 and 16). Apocalyptic themes pervade the Job series. The Eliphaz and Elihu engravings (Engravings 9 and 12), as well as the nightmare experience of Job (Engraving 11), in different ways bear witness to the importance of dreams and visions in Blake’s reading of the Book of Job, as Blake focuses on the verses which mention this theme as part of his interpretative programme (Job 4:12–13; 32:8; 33:15). This irruption of the imaginative into the habits of religion is of crucial importance. Blake’s exegetical insight focuses on the few passages about visions and dreams, which then become an interpretative framework for his reading of the Book of Job as a whole. The contrast between the earlier images of God enthroned in heaven and the moment when Job and his wife see God face to face on earth reflects a major theme of the Book of Revelation. At the climax of his vision John sees a new heaven and a new earth; but in the new creation the contrasts of the old creation have gone; heaven is no longer the dwelling place of the holy God separated from humanity, for God now dwells on earth (Rev. 21:3). In the ‘Job’ series (as is the case with John 1:14) the recognition of the communion of the human and divine, is seen as something which is possible in this life. In Engraving 17 (see Fig. 1, below), God and humanity combine and this is interpreted as a vision of Christ.7 To use the language of Rev. 22:4, not only do humans ‘see God face to face’ but the divine name is on their heads and they participate in the divine glory: ‘we shall be like him’, writes the author 5

E plus page number(s) refers to Erdman’s edition of Blake’s works, see below, p. 783. D. Bindman, Blake as an Artist (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 209–214. 7 B. Lindberg, William Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Job (Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1973), 86–90. 6

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of 1 John 3:2 (quoted at the top of Engraving 17). In the Job sequence, Job’s understanding of God changes from transcendent monarch exalted in heaven to immanent divine presence, with and in him, thus reversing the view of God implicit in the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Our Father who art in heaven’, printed on Plate 2. In the interpretation of the theophany (chs. 38– 41) Job discerns the divine as with (and in!) humans (cf. John 14:17, 20; Blake, Jerusalem 34:20–21, E180). The remarkable juxtaposition of Job 42:5 and passages from the Gospel of John comes immediately after an engraving which depicts ‘The Fall of Satan’. There are ten references to Satan in the opening two chapters of Job; then he is mentioned no more. Blake seems to have attempted to deal with this striking disappearance of Satan at the end of the book. Rather than being tormented by Satan Job meets the incarnate Christ, or as Blake puts it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Jesus as Jehovah (‘the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than he, who dwells in flaming fire. Know that after Christ’s death, he became Jehovah’). God is now no longer the tormentor but the divine in human. There is in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell a consistent attempt to take on aspects of Christian orthodoxy, particularly its dualism, and to understand the latter not as one principle negating another but as two contraries in dynamic relationship, without which, writes Blake, there can be no progression (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 3). As The Marriage of Heaven and Hell makes clear, dualism reduces Christianity to a religion of restraint and morality, in which the Spirit’s energy is evacuated of its dynamism and ends up being allied, and subordinated, to the sanction of conventional morality. Blake suggests that in Milton’s Paradise Lost we find an example of this negating of spiritual energy, with the Messiah featuring not as one who bestows the divine spirit, the spirit of prophecy, but as an agent of reason and restraint. Milton, in Blake’s view, misidentifies the nature of the messianic energetic principle and evacuates the true power of the messianic by making his Christ a principle of restraint. Nevertheless Milton recognises the ‘Prolific’ and the poetic genius but wrongly identifies it with Satan rather than Christ – hence the comment: ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.’ The energetic messianic figure is there in Paradise Lost, but it is not Christ but Satan. There is another side to Jehovah, therefore. God is ‘no other than he who dwells in flaming fire’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 3, cf. Ezek. 1; Exod. 19:16). It is this flaming Jehovah that Christ became after his death, as the one who sends out the divine Spirit, according to John 14:16; 15:26; Acts 2:2–3 and Rev. 4:5; 5:6. Plate 17 represents Job coming to see that he shares the divine and that the hitherto remote Jehovah, having descended to earth as Jesus Christ, is now with him and in him.

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Fig. 1. William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job, Plate 17, 1825. Johannine texts interpret Job 42:5 (B2005.16.18)

In Engraving 17 Blake interprets the divine theophany in the whirlwind (Job 38–41) as a vision of Jesus Christ. Job’s understanding of God changes from transcendent monarch to immanent divine presence, epitomised by the words quoted on Engraving 17: ‘At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you’ (John 14:20). ‘If ye loved me, ye would rejoice because I said I go to the Father’ (John 14:28). What we see in Engraving 17

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is an apparently divine figure surrounded by a bright halo of light, stretching out both hands to bless Job’s wife and Job, the former with hands raised in an attitude of prayer, the latter with hands on his lap. The three comforters have their backs to this event, all with heads in hands, but with the central figure taking a surreptitious glimpse at the event taking place behind him (but only in the engraving, not in the watercolours). The backdrop, vaguely visible, is of mountains, with the glimmer of light coming on the right (east). In the margins there is little but a cumulus cloud outline, and at the bottom an angel presiding with eyes closed over open books and a scroll. This is the first time in the sequence that the writing appears in books or scrolls, and also the first time the viewer sees what might be written in any books. But the important thing to note is that the books are situated in the margins of the image. They function as marginal comment on the images, which are central to what Blake wants to communicate. Words are now in their proper place. What is seen is given priority. The passages from the Gospel of John transform the interpretation of this scene. ‘Now my eye seeth thee’ means, according to Blake, that Job has a vision of Christ, as in patristic interpretations of biblical theophanies (cf. John 12:41) a vision of God has become a vision of Christ. Blake’s christomonism pervades the interpretation. The major caption underlines that subordinate place. It is made up of words from Job 42:5: ‘I have heard thee with the hearing of the Ear but now my Eye seeth thee’. These words are subtly different from the Authorised Version, which has ‘I heard of thee by the hearing of the ear’. Crucially, however, Blake omits the words ‘and I repent in dust and ashes’, thereby indicating that there is no subscription here to the notion of humanity having to grovel before a transcendent deity. This is insight, not submission. Above the picture there are quotations from 1 John 3:2, whilst above that 1 Sam. 2:6. In the centrally placed scroll below the image are the words ‘At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father & you in me & I in you’ (John 14:20). ‘If ye loved me ye would rejoice because I said I go to the Father’ (John 14:28, though omitting, crucially, ‘for my father is greater than I’ which would conflict with John 10:30).8 Below this major caption are other quotations from the Gospel of John: 14:9; 10:30 (above the book on the left in the margin); verses inscribed on the open book on the left of the page are 14:7, 11, 21b, 17b. This last is a verse about the Spirit-Paraclete, which Blake now links with the indwelling of Christ the Divine Image. Verses inscribed on the book, on the right, are 14:21b and 23, and 16–17a. Blake omits all reference to ‘keeping my commandments’ (14:21a), which might echo the religion of law which Blake sought to challenge. The quotation of John 14:17 (‘for he dwelleth in you & shall be with you’) differs from the King James Version,

8

Lindberg, Blake’s Illustrations, 324.

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which reads ‘for he dwelleth with you and shall be in you’.9 Blake hereby stresses that the Father is already in them. Here the mutual indwelling, which is such a prominent feature of the Farewell Discourses of the Gospel of John (John 14–17), glosses a scene in which Job and his wife are touched by the light of the divine glory. This engraving marks the moment when the contents of the books are actually seen by the reader, and we discover from the words written on the pages that the one whom Job and his wife have seen in the theophany is none other than Christ, the divine in human. Here is the proper ordering of text and image, that is, with the image being given priority and the text illustrating the dominant image. The identification of Old Testament theophanies with the pre-existent Christ resembles a familiar interpretative approach in early Christian writings to be found in the New Testament in John 12:41. In his rewritten Lord’s Prayer of 1827 Blake paraphrases the opening with the words ‘Jesus, our Father, who art in thy heaven call’d by thy Name the Holy Ghost’ (E668, cf. Jerusalem 96, 99).10 This indicates a similar identification of Christ with the Father, which is also typical of the Gospel of John (John 1:18; 14:9). Indeed, a major theme of the Gospel of John is Christ as the image of the invisible God. The quotation of the Gospel of John here is apposite. As we have seen, much of what this Gospel says relates to the theme of the Son being the revelation of the invisible Father, the revelation of the hidden God (John 14:9; 1:18, cf. Col. 1:15, which is quoted in part in Milton 2:12, E96). The vision of God, the goal of the heavenly ascents of the apocalyptic seers, is in this Gospel related to the revelation of God in Jesus. The vision of God reserved in the Book of Revelation for the fortunate seer (Rev. 4:1), and for the inhabitants of the New Jerusalem who will see God face to face (Rev. 22:4) is, in the Gospel of John, found in the person of Jesus of Nazareth the Divine in Human. He is the one ‘in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ (Col. 2:3), ‘for in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily’ (Col. 2:9). For Blake (as indeed in the Gospel of John and the Pauline letters), living in God means a particular kind of life. Theology and ethics are indistinguishable. Blake’s emphasis on mutual indwelling is not some kind of ecstatic state, for it is above all a way of life, a practice demonstrated in universal brotherhood and forgiveness of sins. Jesus speaks to Albion in Jerusalem: ‘I am not a God afar off. I am a brother and a friend; Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me’ (Jerusalem 4:18–19, E146). Blake’s understanding of the relationship between divine immanence and transcendence is complex. Though there are passages which seem to suggest 9

Lindberg, Blake’s Illustrations, 322. Davies, Theology of William Blake, 31–53; Lindberg, Blake’s Illustrations, 322–323.

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that God is to be identified with the world, and that divinity is a product of the human brain (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 11), Blake’s understanding in Jerusalem suggests that the ‘beyond’ and the ‘immanent’ are simultaneously active. In Plates 85 and 86 of Jerusalem, Jerusalem both descends (transcendent) and emanates from within Albion. This reminds us that what is outside coincides with what is inward in Job, the transcendent and the immanent come together. It is not that he sees something other than himself but his true self, as part of the Divine Body that God is, and has always been within, though it is from without, that he can come to know the glory that is within. Or to put it in John Ashton’s suggestive words: ‘an apocalypse – in reverse, upside down, inside out’.

21.2. Other Johannine Themes Relating to ‘Intimations of Apocalyptic’ in the Blake Corpus In his watercolour interpreting John 8:2–11 (1805; Boston Museum of Fine Art, B48611), we see Blake capturing the moment in vv. 7–8 when Jesus says ‘he that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her’, and stoops to the ground for the second time. The woman’s hands are tied. She has her left breast bare and her hair is dishevelled. The accusers retreat, and Jesus is left alone with the woman. Jesus stoops to the ground and bows before the woman. This is one of those places where we find Blake exploiting what is implicit in the biblical text in order to make his point about the divine image already being in the woman. Jesus the Divine in Human honours another with the divine image in her by seemingly bowing down before her. Jesus seems to point to the space where the woman can be, which the accusers have vacated. Excerpt from ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ (ca 1818, E521–522) Was Jesus Chaste or did he Give any Lessons of Chastity The morning blush’d fiery red Mary was found in Adulterous bed 5 Earth groan’d beneath & Heaven above Trembled at discovery of Love Jesus was sitting in Moses Chair They brought the trembling Woman There Moses commands she be stoned to Death 10 What was the sound of Jesus breath He laid his hand on Moses Law 11

B refers to Butlin’s edition of Blake’s paintings and drawings, see below, p. 783.

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The Ancient Heavens in Silent Awe Writ with Curses from Pole to Pole All away began to roll The Earth trembling & Naked lay In secret bed of Mortal Clay On Sinai felt the hand Divine Putting back the bloody shrine And she heard the breath of God As she heard by Edens flood Good & Evil are no more Sinais trumpets cease to roar Cease finger of God to Write The Heavens are not clean in thy Sight Thou art Good & thou Alone Nor may the sinner cast one stone To be Good only is to be A Devil or else a Pharisee Thou Angel of the Presence Divine That didst create this Body of Mine Wherefore has[t] thou writ these Laws And Created Hells dark jaws My Presence I will take from thee A Cold Leper thou shalt be Tho thou wast so pure & bright That Heaven was Impure in thy Sight Tho thy Oath turnd Heaven Pale Tho thy Covenant built Hells Jail Tho thou didst all to Chaos roll With the Serpent for its soul Still the breath Divine does move And the breath Divine is Love Mary Fear Not Let me see The Seven Devils that torment thee Hide not from my Sight thy Sin That forgiveness thou maist win Has no Man Condemned thee No Man Lord! then what is he Who shall Accuse thee. Come Ye forth Fallen Fiends of Heavnly birth That have forgot your Ancient love And driven away my trembling Dove You shall bow before her feet You shall lick the dust for Meat

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And tho you cannot Love but Hate Shall be beggars at Loves Gate What was thy love Let me see it Was it love or Dark Deceit Love too long from Me has fled. Twas dark deceit to Earn my bread Twas Covet or twas Custom or Some trifle not worth caring for That they may call a shame & Sin Loves Temple that God dwelleth in And hide in secret hidden Shrine The Naked Human form divine And render that a Lawless thing On which the Soul Expands its wing But this O Lord this was my Sin When first I let these Devils in In dark pretence to Chastity Blaspheming Love blaspheming thee Thence Rose Secret Adulteries And thence did Covet also rise My Sin thou hast forgiven me Canst thou forgive my Blasphemy Canst thou return to this dark Hell And in my burning bosom dwell And canst thou Die that I may live And canst thou Pity & forgive Then Rolld the shadowy Man away From the Limbs of Jesus to make them his prey An Ever devo[u]ring appetite Glittering with festering Venoms bright Crying Crucify this cause of distress Who dont keep the secrets of Holiness All Mental Powers by Diseases we bind But he heals the Deaf & the Dumb & the Blind Whom God has afflicted for Secret Ends

Blake returns to this story in a long section of The Everlasting Gospel (ca 1818),12 a series of verses about events in the Gospels. At several points it starts with questions, for example, ‘Was Jesus humble’, or, as in the case of the section we are looking at, ‘Was Jesus chaste?’ The answer to the question 12

J. Moskal, Blake, Ethics, and Forgiveness (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994).

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about chastity is given by a telling of the story of the woman taken in adultery in John 8, whom Blake identifies with Mary Magdalene (line 4).13 Blake interprets this as an apocalyptic, ‘earth shattering’, event, in which Jesus’ actions not only challenge, but also revolutionise, the hegemony of the religion of law (lines 5–14). The setting of the biblical passage in the Temple (John 8:2) makes the climactic focus of the story even clearer – the presence of God is not in the Temple, the Holy Place, but in the act of forgiveness and reconciliation taking place in the environs of Jesus. Blake portrays the Pharisees forcing Jesus to occupy Moses’ seat, thereby being asked to make a judgement on the case (Matt. 23:2 in line 7). To describe Jesus’ response, Blake evokes the language of cosmic disturbance, such as happened at the crucifixion, to mark the moment (lines 10–14). Echoes of texts like Rev. 6:14 may be heard in line 14. In the words ‘Cease finger of God to Write’ (line 23), Jesus pronounces the end of the era of Law (cf. Rom. 10:4), written on Sinai with the finger of God (Exod. 31:18) and condemns the way in which the moral law makes people ashamed, tyrannising human lives (lines 63–68). Briefly in the rest of the poem we read of the judgement which Jesus passes on the Angel of the Presence for his part in bringing Mary into the predicament in which she found herself (lines 29–40). After that, Mary’s experience of release prompts her to confess her shortcomings. Mary’s sin turns out to be the pretence to chastity in conformity with a moral law. The conclusion of the poem moves from the particular incident in John 8 to the general question of the mode of redemption and forgiveness, the involvement of Christ in humanity’s ‘dark Hell’ (line 77), and the way in which his death marks the putting off the clothing of Satan’s power. It is in effect a meditation on complex verses from Col. 2:13–15 (particularly in lines 81–83, 91– 93). The basis of these remarkable verses is Blake’s conviction that Jesus acted ‘from impulse not from rules’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 23– 24, E43) and seems impelled by some higher call. This appeal to a higher authority is a central assumption of the presentation of Jesus in the Gospel of John, and it becomes the criterion for his action. Jesus claims to offer revelation of God (in his person) and also in his words – from what he has seen and heard in heaven. There is an authority independent of previous tradition, for ‘the father who sent me has himself given me a commandment about what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I speak, therefore I speak just as the father has told me’ (John 12:49–50). It is what Jesus sees with the Father that is the basis of his authority (5:19; 6:46; 8:38).

13

J.W. Knust, Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

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21.3. Cross, Glory and Judgement One of Blake’s depictions of the crucified Jesus (‘The Soldiers casting Lots for Christ’s Garments’ [Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 1800, B495] puts in the foreground the casting of lots over Jesus’ garment. We do not actually see the crucified Jesus who is a looming presence, casting his shadow over the preoccupations of the all too human behaviour in the foreground. Plate 76 from Blake’s Jerusalem (Yale Center for British Art, ca 1821) illustrates Blake’s grasp of Johannine theology. Here Albion (Britain) and Jesus are brought face to face. Albion imitates the pose of the crucified Jesus. The radiance proceeding from the crucified Christ touches Albion. The glory of Christ crucified is an important theme in the Gospel of John (especially John 3:14 and 12:33), and this glory Christ shares with those whom the father has given him (John 17:22). In the picture ‘Angels hovering over the Body of Jesus in the Sepulchre’ (Victoria and Albert Museum, ca 1805,14 inscribed with ‘Exod: cXXV v20’, B500), there is an attempt to depict the presence of Christ as a meeting place between human and divine, though this time between humanity and God, reflecting on the words: And the cherubims shall stretch forth their wings on high, covering the mercy seat with their wings, and their faces shall look one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubims be. And thou shalt put the mercy seat above upon the ark; and in the ark thou shalt put the testimony that I shall give thee. And there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat. (Exod. 25:20–22, KJV)

This is a theme which has affinities with the editorial gloss in John 2:19 (‘But he spake of the temple of his body’) in reference to the destruction of the Temple by his opponents. Blake’s reference to Exod. 25 gives us the one clue that is needed in order to enable the viewer to see that the body of Jesus is the space where one can meet with God. Here is the Human Form Divine inherent in, and embracing, all people, being given pictorial articulation. Blake illustrated the theme of the Last Judgement, for example, in the picture now at Petworth House, Sussex (1808, B642, commentary in The Design of The Last Judgment, E552ff.). In the Petworth House picture, the subject of this discussion, there is movement clockwise indicated by the direction of the bodies and the change in the colours from dark to light. Christ sits impassively and is the point around which the whole picture seems to revolve, a witness to the crisis which has been opened up for those who are part of the picture or would enter into it. The moment of judgement and the awesome consequences are set out. The contrast in colour between the two sides of the picture emphasises the movement of descent into Hades on the right, and the ascent back up to the throne of God on the left. The process of 14

Bindman, Blake as an Artist, 131; Heppner, Reading Blake’s Designs, 197–200.

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judgement depicted in this picture is always happening, with eternity always ready and available, which is in line with the eschatology in parts of the Gospel of John (John 5:24). As Blake put it, ‘whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual’ (A Vision of The Last Judgment, E562). In a remarkably insightful utterance S.T. Coleridge said that Blake was a ‘man of Genius – and I apprehend, a Swedenborgian – certainly, a mystic emphatically. You perhaps smile at my calling another Poet, a Mystic; but verily I am in the very mire of common-place common-sense compared with Mr. Blake, apo- or rather ana-calyptic Poet, and Painter!’15 In this assessment Coleridge probably picked up on the complex interpretation of Paul in 2 Cor. 3:14 and 18: But their minds were hardened; for to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted (µὴ ἀνακαλυπτόµενον), because only through Christ is it taken away. … And we all, with unveiled (ἀνακεκαλυµµένῳ) face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

Coleridge suggests either that Blake himself was ‘anacalyptic’, in the sense that his mind was unclouded and able to discern things that other poets or painters could not see, or that his poetry and paintings enabled those who engaged with them to have that ‘anacalyptic’ experience, in which the veil is removed from the mind to discern the deeper things about God and the world. Blake would surely have appreciated this insightful judgement by one of his peers.16 Notwithstanding that positive assessment by Coleridge, I will not be the last reader and viewer who has come away from Blake’s prophetic books perplexed, frustrated at times, confused by the welter of idiosyncratic mythical figures. Indeed, but slowly, the truth dawns that entering his world, probably intentionally, leads to disorientation before it brings illumination. When this lecture was given, a member of the audience commented on how repulsive he found the depiction of God as an elderly male with a long beard; indeed, this affected the ability to deal with other aspects of the presentation. In one sense, that reaction is an entirely appropriate response, and one that Blake would have welcomed. Blake’s images and words were deliberately allusive, as he regarded ‘what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction because it rouzes the faculties to act’ (‘Letter to Dr Trusler’, 1799, E702). Such reaction to images of God remind us that key to Blake’s work was questioning the theological assumptions which depicted God as a rational being who 15 Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. E.L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–1971), 4:833–834. On this see M. Ferber, ‘Coleridge’s “Anacalyptic” Blake: An Exegesis’, Modern Philology 76.2 (1978): 189–193. 16 Ferber, ‘Coleridge’s “Anacalyptic” Blake’.

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promoted order. Instead Blake sought very deliberately to offer another aspect to the understanding of God rooted in ‘enthusiasm’, the Spirit of Prophecy and the life of the imagination. To find ourselves repelled by the God ‘as an old man’ is to be affected in such a way that we are ready to share Blake’s questioning of views of theology which do not allow the wind of the divine Spirit to disturb the order of the ancient and conventional. In Wayne Meeks’s now classic 1972 article ‘The Stranger from Heaven in Johannine Sectarianism’ words about the Gospel of John are particularly applicable to Blake’s work: … either he will find the whole business so convoluted, obscure, and maddeningly arrogant that he will reject it in anger, or he will find it so fascinating that he will stick with it until the progressive reiteration of themes brings, on some level of consciousness at least, a degree of clarity.17

Similarly, there are some who will find that they are hooked by Blake’s textual world, others put off by its obscurity. Blake believed the Bible was in the grip of a theological interpretation which seemed monolithic and unyielding, in which the Bible was used as a rulebook and as a support to quench the Spirit. His myths and text/image juxtaposition were part of a sophisticated attempt on his part to dismantle the monolith. Blake is one of the premier exegetes of what ‘intimations of apocalyptic’ might mean in the Bible, as is indicated by the link between vision of the divine and the Gospel of John in Plate 17 of the Job series. The Gospel of John is a key part of Blake’s theology on the divine presence in human life, which he merges with his understanding of the universal divine body based on Colossians and Ephesians, which embraces all humanity. John Ashton’s suggestive way of enabling us to understand how the Gospel of John relates to ‘intimations of apocalyptic’ is captured in his words. Blake’s ‘Job’ series of engravings anticipates what it is that John’s figurative language is aiming to elucidate. In the Job illustrations, Blake finds in the Book of Job an apocalyptic world in which the cosmological dualism of divine world above and human below is turned upside down as Job comes face to face with the vision of God in Christ and not only sees this on earth but also in the divine in himself and in the different perspective on the nature of the theological that is opened up to him.

17

W.A. Meeks, ‘The Stranger from Heaven in Johannine Sectarianism’, JBL 91 (1972): 44–72, at 68–69.

22. Joachim of Fiore and the Theology of the New Testament It was an enormous privilege to have the work of Joachim of Fiore and the scriptural interpretation which he initiated introduced to me by Marjorie Reeves. A life-time’s research and delight in this underestimated, medieval, scriptural scholar infused a series of wide-ranging tutorials, in which Marjorie Reeves, with an enviable lucidity and the economy of presentation, expounded the Figurae,1 and explained the distinctiveness of Joachim to me. Reeves’s tuition pointed me towards writers of whom I had never even heard, such as Peter John Olivi, yet whose names have since become a familiar part of the apocalyptic story that I have been exploring in recent years. This reminiscence is the context of this essay. Marjorie Reeves enabled me to glimpse why Joachim of Fiore deserves to be placed with the ‘greats’ in the history of Christian theology. This is not because of the complexity of his thought, his extraordinary ability to relate the Old and the New Testaments in a synthesis, or his use of the doctrine of the Trinity to understand human history. It is more the fact that in Joachim’s work, there is a reading of the Christian tradition, which, while standing alongside Augustine’s and Aquinas’s, is at odds in key respects with theirs, managing to encapsulate things about that tradition which are missed by them and their successors, whether protestant or catholic. Joachim therefore offers an understanding of the heart of New Testament theology, which few had grasped.2 Joachim’s interpretation of the Apocalypse is not easy to categorise. The origin of his understanding of it occurs in a visionary or even mystical experience, akin to the later visionaries, when he, like John on the Lord’s Day, understands the meaning of the text, as mystical insight comes to him after a long period of struggling to make sense of the text. Joachim’s Casamari experience echoes the importance of a divinely initiated insight into the meaning of both events and Scripture in New Testament writings. This was 1 M. Reeves and B. Hirsch-Reich, The Figurae of Joachim of Fiore (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972). 2 Further: C. Rowland, Christian Origins: An Account of the Setting and Character of the Most Important Messianic Sect of Judaism, rev. edn. (London: SPCK, 2002); D.C. Allison Jr., The End of the Ages Has Come (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987); J.J. Collins et al., eds., The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, 3 vols. (New York: Continuum, 1998).

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an important moment in his life, when he was struggling to make sense of the Apocalypse, yet, in the middle of the night, as he was meditating on the text of the Apocalypse, ‘the fullness of this book and of the entire agreement of the Old and New Testaments was perceived by a clarity of understanding’.3 By means of this gracious insight, Joachim describes how he found in the Apocalypse the key to the inner meaning of Scripture and the whole history of salvation, an experience paralleled later in what happened to Joachim’s major interpreter Peter John Olivi.4 For Joachim, the Apocalypse itself, its structure and visions, became the key to the interpretation of the whole of Scripture. In the meditation upon the Apocalypse, the spiritual insight that informed the prophets of old was again at work; as Joachim explained to the Cistercian abbot, Adam of Perseigne, ‘God who once gave the spirit of prophecy to the prophets has given me the spirit of understanding to grasp with great clarity in his Spirit all the mysteries of sacred Scripture’.5 This approach to the meaning of Scripture is echoed in the New Testament, where insight into the divine mystery does not always come by means of ingenious or sophisticated scriptural exegesis. The wisdom to understand the mystery of Christ is a gift from God. In the Gospel of Matthew, for example, according to Peter’s Confession, perception of the identity of Jesus comes through divine revelation (Matt. 16:17), and in the infancy narratives, dreams open the mystery of the divine purposes (Matt. 1:20; 2:13, 19, cf. 27:19).

22.1. Visionary Insight Visionary insight has a foundation of religious understanding running like a thread through the New Testament. Jesus’ report of seeing ‘Satan fall like lightning from heaven’ (Luke 10:18) suggests a visionary anticipation of all that was being experienced in the struggle with the evil powers in the actions of both himself and the disciples. This is an indication that a moment of ultimate apocalyptic importance has happened with Jesus and his immediate 3

Joachim of Fiore, Expositio in Apocalypsim, pars I (Venice, 1527; repr., Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1964), fol. 39va; B. McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 130. 4 D. Burr, Olivi’s Peaceable Kingdom: A Reading of the Apocalypse Commentary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 122–124; W. Lewis, Peter John Olivi, Prophet of the Year 2000: Ecclesiology and Eschatology in the ‘Lectura super Apocalipsim’. Introduction to a Critical edition of the Text (PhD diss., Tübingen, 1976). 5 Ralph of Coggeshall, Chronicon Anglicanum, ed. J. Stevenson (London: Longman & Co., 1875), 68; B. McGinn, Apocalyptic Spirituality: Treatises and Letters of Lactantius, Adso of Montier-en-Der, Joachim of Fiore, the Franciscan Spirituals, Savonarola (London: SPCK, 1979), 100; G.L. Potestà, ‘“Intelligentia Scripturarum” und Kritik des Prophetismus bei Joachim von Fiore’, in Neue Richtungen in der hoch- und spätmittelalterlichen Bibelexegese, ed. R.E. Lerner (München: Oldenbourg, 1996), 105–112.

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companions (Luke 10:21–24).6 In the Acts of the Apostles, as with the dreams in the opening chapters of Matthew’s Gospel, visions provide the dynamic for the spread of the gospel. Paul’s experience on the Damascus road, repeated three times, emphasises the providential nature of this event in the divine economy. Likewise Peter’s vision of the descending sail and instruction to sacrifice and eat animals without regard for their ritual cleanness prepares him for his journey to Cornelius, explanation of which is required by the elders in Jerusalem in Acts 11. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul emphasises the importance of visionary elements as the basis of his practice (Gal. 1:12 and 1:16, cf. Acts 22:17). It is the mysterious world of apocalyptic vision, which explains that shattering moment in Paul’s life. He believed that Jesus of Nazareth, seated at the right hand of God, and ‘who will be manifested in glory at the close of the age’ (1 Cor. 1:7), had been revealed to him already in the old age. This revelation had ceased to be something just for a learned elite, but was available to all who could discern the wisdom of God in the crucified Christ (1 Cor. 1:18, cf. Matt. 11:25–27). In the revelation of this mystery, Paul regarded himself and his companions as stewards in the divine palace, with the privilege of administering the divine secrets (1 Cor. 4:1). The struggle to make sense of the significance of his ancestral traditions required an epistemological shift matching the shift in the ages that Paul believed he had seen in Christ.7 In this age, when one can only see in a glass darkly, one needs Scripture as assistance in the search for the gateway to divine truth. It is the revelatory, divine Spirit, however, which guides into all truth and announces that which is to come (cf. John 16:13). Scripture thereby points to this greater truth and provides a resource for the discernment of the character of life ‘at the end of the ages’ (1 Cor. 10:11; Rom. 15:4). Nevertheless, its meaning is opaque, and it might also be a veil that prevents understanding (2 Cor. 3:14–18). With the benefit of the divine Spirit, however, the reader can pierce the letter to see what the Spirit might be saying through the words (2 Cor. 3:6). This kind of hermeneutic should not surprise us given Paul’s mention of what he calls an allegorical use of Scripture in Gal. 4:24. Here, the literal sense of Scripture points to a ‘deeper’, ‘transcendent’, perhaps we should say ‘allegorical’, meaning in the contrast between two cities and two covenants, and Paul challenges

6 C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982), 365. 7 J.L. Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 33A (New York: Doubleday, 1997).

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readers to identify with the Jerusalem, which is above, while also that which is to come.8 This particular approach to Scripture has its context in Second Temple apocalypses that offer examples of those moments when perceptions of other dimensions of existence and other perspectives on ordinary life are opened up.9 At first sight, they suggest modes of reading that may differ from those typical of the various midrashic methods, within which interpretative ingenuity is required to ‘penetrate the subtleties of parables, seeking out the hidden meanings of proverbs and being at home with the obscurities of parables’, to quote Jesus ben Sira’s sketch of scribal activity (Sir. 39). With some forms of apocalyptic interpretation, however, Ben Sira was much less comfortable: ‘Do not meddle in what is beyond your tasks, for matters too great for human understanding have been shown you’ (Sir. 3:23). Among such matters ‘too great for human understanding’ might be the visionary exegesis of the first chapter of Ezekiel. Here, in some forms of the interpretation, the meaning of the text involved a ‘seeing again’ of what Ezekiel saw.10 For John the visionary on Patmos, instead of an explanation of the details of what Ezekiel saw, the visionary’s own experience becomes context itself for the interpretation of the text. This prompted its own creative interpretation, such as the Lamb sharing the throne, absent from the original. Such an exercise of imagination involves the visualisation in the mind of objects, inspired by what is read in texts or in the external world. In this kind of interpretation, we are not dealing with a kind of careful, analytical exegesis. Instead, it is a rather indirect relationship with the scriptures, one in which the words become the catalyst for exercise of imagination; text is taken up and the imagination infused. Such imaginative exegesis has always been an important part of the reading of Scripture.11 In antiquity and the medieval period, memorisation and meditation were closely linked. Recalled texts

8

D. Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity, Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 86–105. 9 M. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). 10 See D.J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988), 70–78; E.R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); A.D. DeConick, ed., Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism, SBLSS 11 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006). 11 See M.J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); eadem, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images 400– 1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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yielded new meaning by process of spontaneous interconnections through meditation. This started from deliberate thought, as in the case of Joachim. The very process of recollection is conceived of anew in meditative imagination. In the interpretation of the merkabah vision of Ezekiel (Ezek. 1), indeed, from the very beginning of its interpretation, there has been an imaginative appropriation by visionaries; in some circles, this opening chapter has been the springboard for visionary experience. Such an exercise of imagination probably involved the visualisation in the mind of the various objects described in Ezekiel’s vision: the parts of the chariot, the living creatures, the throne, the meaning of the enigmatic word, ḥašmal, and, particularly, the human figure. John’s apocalypse is itself part of the story of the visionary ‘appropriation’ of Ezekiel’s merkabah vision.12 Ezekiel’s vision is a crucial part of John’s vision, and is the means whereby John sees the eschatological role of the lamb, who opens the book with seven seals. John’s vision is itself also an interpretation of the biblical text, where the language of Ezekiel merges with other parts of Scripture, as well as, possibly, aspects of a merkabah tradition which are now extinct, so to offer that particular amalgam of images in John’s vision of heaven. This resembles, and yet differs in several respects from, contemporary visions of God in the apocalypses. A key difference, however, is the decisive impact of Jesus Christ on the visionary’s imagination: in the insertion of ‘the lamb that was slain’ into the merkabah scene, and also the eschatological judgement, which ensues from that heavenly event.

22.2. The Apocalypse as a Key to New Testament Theology The Book of Revelation seems at first sight to stand apart from the rest of the New Testament, as it is the only full-length apocalypse. It has the reputation for preoccupation with the cataclysmic, the penultimate as well as the ultimate, extravagant symbolism and the fantastic retreat from reality.13 The Apocalypse’s link with the end of the world has obscured other preoccupations, perhaps more evident in contemporary Jewish apocalypses. While one should not ignore the preoccupation with endings, its contents should not be reduced solely to the eschatological, if by that we mean only the distant future. Apocalypse is not primarily about cataclysmic events, however. It is, as the word implies, about revelation and concerns the unmasking of the reality 12

C. Rowland, ‘The Visions of God in Apocalyptic Literature’, JSJ 10 (1979): 137–154 = above, pp. 29–45; idem, The Open Heaven, 269–358; and idem, ‘The Book of Revelation’, in NIB XII (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), 501–743. 13 For a survey of interpretations, see J. Kovacs and C. Rowland, Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

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lying beneath the surface of the society and personal attitudes. The Apocalypse sets out to reveal things as they really are in both the life of the tiny Christian groups and the world at large. In so doing it gives little comfort to the complacent adepts or the powerful world. For both, it has a prophetic message of judgement and doom. The work is hardly a detailed social analysis, but its evocative images are pregnant with meaning, ready for use in numerous situations of a similar kind. It is a critique of ideology. The iniquity of the present is offered by the use of a contrast between the glories of the future and the inadequacies of the present. It manifests, perhaps more than any other New Testament book, an interest in human history. The fact that these purposes reveal themselves in divine judgement against humanity is a consequence of the alienation of human society from the justice of God. Unseen to the human eye, yet laid bare by the apocalyptic seer, the hand of God is seen to be behind the dissolution of the stability of the cosmos and society. The Apocalypse has characteristics, which mark it off from the utopian tract that offers its readers a blueprint of some future, ideal society. Hope inspires action, readiness to suffer and urgent need of repentance in the face of catastrophe. Acceptance or rejection of its message is nothing less than the difference between heaven and hell. That demand is evident in the letters to the churches, which introduce the vision of hope, and in the concluding admonitions, which stress the authority of the text and the imminence of the fulfilment of its message. The readers of the Apocalypse are not allowed to dream about eschatological bliss without being brought face to face with the obstacles that stand in the way of its fulfilment, and the costly part to be played by them in that process: they have to wash their robes and make them white in the blood of the Lamb, and avoid being marked with the mark of the Beast. The Book of Revelation thus offers a timely reminder about supposing that its preoccupation with eschatological matters offers an opportunity to avoid the more challenging preoccupations of the present. The involvement of the seer in Rev. 10, when he is instructed to eat the scroll and commanded to prophesy, is a direct call to participate in a cosmic drama, rather than merely be a passive spectator of it. The present is a penultimate time when there is the groaning and travail, which must precede the messianic age. The theme of witness in the period of penultimacy is expounded in Rev. 11.14 The vision of the two witnesses comes immediately after a renewed commission to John to prophesy again about many peoples and nations, languages and kings (Rev. 10:11). In the space between the sixth and seventh trumpet blasts, John is called to prophesy. Like the Lamb, he is instructed to take a scroll, though 14

R. Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, New Testament Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 84–88.

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this time he consumes it. The character of the prophetic witness is exemplified by the two witnesses, who offer their testimony in the midst of the time of the trampling of the holy places by the nations. In the penultimate period, prophetic witness is necessary as a central part of the life of the community. This is despite the letters to the angels of the churches revealing the extent of their incapacity to fulfil this role, and John and his companions’ function as a prophetic remnant, an example of endurance as they keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus (Rev. 14:12). Even if no firm date is offered for the fulfilment of the various events described, the reader is left in no doubt that the present moment is one of great significance that demands a response in order to ensure that readers do not find themselves identified with the Beast and the destruction predicted for it and its followers. Revelation is insistent that the role of the martyr or witness is of central importance. Jesus of Nazareth is the paradigm, ‘the faithful witness’ (Rev. 1:5), and his followers have to continue that testimony of Jesus (Rev. 19:10). The appreciation of this aspect of the Apocalypse enables us to see why it proved to be such a subversive book. Not only did it offer hope of a better world, and set out to criticise in the starkest way possible the contemporary order, but it also gave to the present moment in history a critical, indeed eschatological, importance. Christianity has for most of its history, and in most of its manifestations, come to a reasonable accommodation with the powers that be, and has viewed with suspicion or downright hostility those of its number who would shake that accord. The problem with the Book of Revelation is that it has provided the resources to do precisely that. It is a book which many have sought to tame. Its remarkable views are not merely an aberration from the norm of early Christian eschatology, in which its adherents steadfastly rejected a historical resolution of their hope.15

22.3. Kairos: New Testament Theology and the Sense of the Opportune Moment in the Divine Economy In Joachim’s, and later, Olivi’s, interpretations of the Apocalypse, the sixth and seventh penultimate ages assume great importance as a time of anticipation and struggle.16 The period represents a space for conflict with the forces of Antichrist, which evokes an outburst of spiritual activity in the form of spiritual renewal. In this penultimate period, persecution and renewal, exile and prophetic witness, jostle one with another. The sense of anticipation 15 For a summary of the pervasiveness of this-worldly expectation, see B.E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 5–32. 16 Burr, Olivi’s Peaceable Kingdom, 117–118.

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prompted various patterns of moral renewal, and this should remind us that Olivi’s eschatological reading of Scripture was not about learned prognostications but, instead, intimately linked with the renewal of the church as the witness to the coming Kingdom. A glance at Joachim’s figura of the dragon with seven heads indicates that, alongside the historically sequential explanation, there is also a recognition that this threat is both eschatological and historical: what will be the case at the end time is a constant part of human history.17 As such it needs to be part of that ongoing engagement with the Apocalypse of every generation, an engagement that enables it to see its part in that struggle between good and evil at the heart of human history.18 Joachim of Fiore’s figurae sought to encapsulate imagery from the Apocalypse in diagrammatic form. The inspiration for the figura of the dragon with seven heads, was provided by Rev. 12:3. The seven heads are identified as Herod, Nero, Constantius, Mohammed, Mesemoth, Saladin, and one yet to come. The final Antichrist, indicated by the tail of the dragon, is Gog.19 Between the long necks of the dragon’s heads appear captions detailing the seven persecutions of the church; Saladin, the contemporary tyrant, is represented as a larger head. Joachim interprets history, relating the pressing crisis of his own time as a sign of the eschatological times. It is this decisive move which initiates that extraordinary outburst of self-aware eschatological enthusiasm, in which persons and events became the signs of hope, or agents of Antichrist. The illumination of history, by mystical insight and revelation, and the presenting of the critical significance of the present, are characteristic most particularly of the Book of Revelation. Joachim’s eschatological reading of the Apocalypse represents key elements of the heart of New Testament theology. His strong sense of his time as of great significance in human history, and in particular the emphasis on penultimacy, is crucial to most New Testament writers’ sense of their role and identity in the divine purposes. Messianic and eschatological doctrines are central to early Christianity also (e.g. 1 Pet. 1:11–12; Heb. 1:1–4). The first Christians, in their diverse social settings, were encouraged to believe 17 The best representation of the dragon is to be found in Oxford, Corpus Christi College, ms. 255A, fol. 7r; cf. http://image.ox.ac.uk/show?collection=corpus&manuscript=ms255a; the dragon of the manuscript in Reggio Emilia is depicted in L. Tondelli, M. Reeves and B. Hirsch-Reich, Il libro delle figure dell’Abate Gioachino da Fiore, 2 vols. (Torino: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1953), 2:tav. XIV. 18 Reeves and Hirsch-Reich, The Figurae of Joachim of Fiore, 146–152 and plate 21. 19 On Gog as the last and ultimate Antichrist, see R.E. Lerner, ‘Antichrists and Antichrist in Joachim of Fiore’, Speculum 60 (1985): 553–570; J.E. Wannenmacher, Hermeneutik der Heilsgeschichte: De septem sigillis und die sieben Siegel im Werk Joachims von Fiore, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 118 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), 210–230.

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that they were privileged to be ‘the ones on whom the ends of the ages had come’ (1 Cor. 10:11). For them, the present had become the critical moment; history and eschatology had become inextricably intertwined. Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed the present as decisive in God’s purposes and himself as the messianic agent. In a similar vein, Paul regarded himself as God’s agent whereby the nations are offered their part in the last days, possibly the role that made him such a problematic figure to some of his Jewish and Christian contemporaries. This sense of present history as one pregnant with eschatological opportunity waned, however. By the time the Montanist movement appeared,20 which was in effect a recrudescence of the earliest Christian practice and expectation, such an outlook proved to be incompatible with an understanding of history. Eschatological agency was by then a matter of past and future, but not of the present. In the New Testament we have documents which are saturated with hope and the conviction that an insight of ultimate significance has been vouchsafed; an insight that relativises all other claims. Eschatology was a controlling and dominant theme in early Christian belief: for most New Testament writers there is still an unfulfilled element in the process of salvation. The believer may have tasted of the heavenly gift, and participated in the Holy Spirit (Heb. 6:4), yet the fullness of salvation is still to be experienced by the individual and manifested in the world (Rom. 8:18–25; 1 John 3:2). In the early Christian writings, the eschatological dimensions of salvation are apparent. The belief in the resurrection of Jesus, for example, has become a cornerstone of Christian faith within the New Testament itself. It was a proleptic event, in which a feature of the end-time becomes a reality in the old aeon. Thus the first Christians were affirming that for them the future hope was already in the process of fulfilment; it was not merely an item of faith still to be realised at some future point. The early Christians believed that the eschatological salvation was not wholly future, particularly since the New Age had broken into the old in the resurrection of Jesus. Many Jews thought of the Spirit’s activity as part of the past, the Spirit frequently being linked with prophecy. Inspiration by the Spirit was confined to the era of the prophets and would therefore only be operative again when new prophets arose, in the Messianic Age. Paul hints that experience of the Spirit is closely linked with the eschatological hope. Thus, in outlining the present period of travail, in Rom. 8:18–23, he speaks of Christians being the ones who have the first-fruits of the Spirit (8:23). In Acts 2:17, the writer of Acts indicates that the pouring out of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost is a fulfilment of an eschatological promise from the Book of Joel (Joel 2:28–29). The quotation in Acts interprets the phrase ‘afterwards’ 20

C. Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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by the words ‘in the last days’, an indication that the phenomenon at Pentecost was a fulfilment of the eschatological promise of the return of the Spirit. The experience of the Spirit was thus seen as the present expression in the life of the individual and the community of that eschatological reality, which had been manifested in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead. Throughout the New Testament there is a strong sense of being part of the penultimate, being on the brink of the fulfilment of anticipated eschatological events, that are seen as, at least in part, already taking place. That sense of anticipation qualifies certainty in a situation, for there is still waiting to be done before knowledge and fulfilment finally come. The sense of the ‘not yet’ does not, therefore, allow the complete closure of hermeneutical possibility in engaging with the scriptural narratives. Eschatological reading of Scripture does have a tendency to exclusivity. The sense of fulfilment and anticipation therefore brought their own problems. It is not surprising that in various texts the need for discernment (1 Cor. 12:10, 30; 14:5, 13), testing the spirits (1 John 4:1; 1 Thess. 5:21–22; 1 Tim. 4:1) and a communally balanced reading are all stressed (if that is what is meant by 2 Pet. 1:20). A central component of the future hope in Second Temple Jewish texts was the belief that, before the age to come finally arrived, there must be a time of great distress on the earth, when the elect may be expected to suffer. It is a theme echoed in the eschatological discourses in the Gospels (Mark 13 and parallels, especially vv. 7–13). Paul often writes of tribulations, as, for example, in Rom. 2:9, 8:18–23 and 35, and in 1 Thess. 3:3 and 7 (cf. Rev. 2:22; 7:14). The travail and persecution endured by believers is viewed by Paul as their undergoing of that tribulation, which is a necessary prelude to the arrival of the New Age. Christians can therefore rejoice in their present sufferings (Rom. 5:3). There are significant strands within the New Testament exhibiting an outlook, which invests present persons and events with a decisive role in the fulfilment of the Last Things. In various texts of the New Testament there are signs that the present becomes a moment of opportunity for transforming the imperfect into the perfect, history and eschatology become inextricably intertwined, and the elect stand on the brink of the millennium itself (not a term it should be noted, used by New Testament writers themselves). Of course, the event of Jesus’ life in due course became hallowed as the irruption of the divine into history. Nevertheless, in many of the stories told about him, he is presented as proclaiming the present as decisive in God’s purposes and himself as the messianic agent for change. Not, though, as some dreamer awaiting the apocalyptic miracle wrought by God alone. It has been wrongly assumed that Jesus’, and the early Christians’, eschatological expectation was for an act of God brought in by God alone, without any human agency; humankind being, according to this view, merely passive spectators of a vast divine drama with the cosmos as its stage. The foundation documents of

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Christianity suggest a different story. For many of the New Testament writers, history is illuminated by apocalypse; vision opens ultimate possibilities and responsibilities, which others could only dream of. They are thereby equipped with insight hidden to others and privileged to enjoy a role in history denied even to the greatest figures of the past. 1 Pet. 1:11–12 speaks for the outlook of many other New Testament documents in its emphasis on the privilege of the writer’s time: ‘It was revealed to the prophets that they were serving you in the things that have been announced to you … things which angels long to look on.’ Paul had the burning conviction that he had been set apart as the apostle to the Gentiles, commissioned by the Messiah himself, to preach the good news to the nations (Gal. 1:16). Paul believed that he and the communities of believers, dotted around the Eastern Mediterranean, were themselves living in a critical period (1 Cor. 10:11). The belief that a quota of Gentiles would be allowed to participate in the New Age was shared by Paul (Rom. 11:25) with other Jews. Paul, however, claimed the right to bring the Gentiles into the divine covenant himself, since he considered himself the agent of the divine plan to fulfil this eschatological event as a result of his call. What is more, he considered that it was not necessary for those Gentiles, whom he brought into the covenant, to practise the totality of the Jewish Law, as the Law was part of a past aeon and now obsolete in the light of Christ. This was even if they recognised that Law as a general guide to practice (Rom. 15:4). The New Testament writings communicate to their readers that they are in a time of historical transition, in which the coming age of salvation is not imminent yet intrudes into, and already affects, life in the present. There is an important proviso: the time of perfection in knowledge, insight and practice is still to come. A distinctive genius of New Testament theology is the puzzle of the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet’, and the sense that accompanies this of being on the brink of something important, an anticipatory mode if you will. In this sense, Joachim and the New Testament writers want people to live in the light of that conviction. A characteristic of the theology of the New Testament is precisely this sense of anticipation, of the present as a decisive moment in God’s saving purposes and the opportunity, which exists for the people of God to act in the present, as they wait for the coming of the messianic reign. It is the time when the Spirit of prophecy offers testimony to the ‘now’ of the day of salvation (2 Cor. 6:2). This situation led to a radically new outlook and approach to the religious life. The penultimate age was the age of the divine Spirit, in Paul’s language, the ‘down payment’ of the glory, which is to come (2 Cor. 1:22; Rom. 8:23). The Pauline communities enjoyed the new age of the Spirit that Christ’s coming had initiated. This age was marked by prophecy, and communities living under the guidance of the Spirit (1 Cor. 12–14; 1 Thess. 5:19–20). Evidence of the work of the eschatological Spirit can be found throughout the

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New Testament; what is distinctive about the Pauline letters is that the Spirit is regarded as the motor for moral change and the ethical life. Rom. 8:1–11 and 1 Cor. 2:10–16 commend a life prompted by the indwelling, eschatological Spirit that places them above the obligations of any external Law code (though Paul expects that the life of the Spirit will be in some sense in continuity with the obedience due to God that the Law required, cf. Rom. 8:3). In 1 Cor. 2:10–16, Paul claims that life in the Spirit enables a person to have the mind of Christ and to understand the deepest things of God. Consequently, there is now no need for a law code for such a person, for they have the Spirit to guide them, akin to the law written on the heart prophesied by Jeremiah (31:34) and Ezekiel (36:26–27, cf. 2 Cor. 3:3). This is antinomian in the strict sense of that word, a life without the Law, lived in accord with the divine, at work in the human heart, prompting and directing.21 Such a Spiritled life could easily produce the kind of discord found in Corinth, however, manifesting characteristics which Paul regards as antithetical to the life of the Spirit (Gal. 5:16–26). Therefore, in the second half of 1 Corinthians, Paul resorts to the role of a rabbi, and offers, in the apostolic counsel, to guide his Corinthian readers, as he seeks to oversee the consequences of their eschatological enthusiasm. Eschatological convictions had practical consequences in the ways writers viewed the crises within their communities. What goes amiss is a sign of the work of Antichrist or the fulfilment of dire eschatological predictions (e.g. 1 Tim. 4:1–2; 1 John 4:1; Jude 18). In 1 John, for example, the presence of dissent and separation marks out the identity of Antichrist as an all too human presence in the midst of the community. The application of apocalyptic imagery to contemporary institutions and events is one of countless examples from the Christian tradition. Antichrist, therefore, is no remote supernatural figure, but stalks the earth confronting those with the insight to behold the apocalyptic danger. This is exactly what we would expect when the solitary New Testament appearance of Antichrist refers not to supernatural figures but the heretical and immoral opponents of the writer of 1 John. In this work the language of eschatology is appropriated for the understanding of the contemporary world: ‘Children it is the last hour and so you know that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come … they went out from us … that it might be plain that they all are not of us’ (1 John 2:18–20). Such an application is daring and potentially far more dangerous than its relegation to de facto irrelevance in a remote eschatological future. The present has a critical character; it is a moment of utter significance within history and cannot be regarded with detached equanimity. 21 For the antinomian currents in late medieval piety, see, for example, R.E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).

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The sense of eschatological destiny, which pervades Paul’s selfunderstanding and activity, actually enabled his thinking to cohere. This is the outlook of one who believed himself called to be an agent in the dawn of the New Age, the means by which the Gentiles became fellow heirs of the commonwealth of Israel. This is most clearly expressed in Ephesians, where not only the apostle’s, but also the church’s role, as the bearers of the divine mysteries, is stressed (Eph. 3:5–12). As Ephesians indicates, it was possible for a later generation to keep alive that framework of thought, provided that there was a clear understanding of the soteriological role of apostle and community. Once that sense of being part of the ‘propitious moment’ disappeared, however, the understanding of present activity as an integral part of that drama and its relationship with the future consummation of the divine purposes gradually disappeared also. Paul’s theology reflects the conviction that God had revealed the mystery of salvation to him and his part in it (Gal. 1:12 and 16).22 In that penultimate period beset by the messianic woes, a peculiar fulcrum in history has witnessed a significant change and a new era has forced itself upon both apostles and their communities. They are the ones ‘upon whom the ends of the ages have come’ (1 Cor. 10:11). The mission to the Gentiles, and probably also the collection for the saints in Jerusalem, are intimately linked with the framework of an eschatological drama in which Paul is a crucial actor.23 Just as the coming of John the Baptist had signalled to Jesus a shift in the aeons (Luke 16:16), so for Paul, the vision of the resurrected Christ event was intimately linked with Paul’s own sense of mission within the overall scheme of salvation history. Paul thinks of himself as an, perhaps even the, eschatological agent, like the Twelve, who were told by Jesus that they would sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel (Matt. 19:28). John 21:23 indicates the shock that the community suffered when the death of the one who received that promise from Jesus took place. Paul, like the Beloved Disciple, places himself as part of the special group who ‘had seen the Lord’ (1 Cor. 15:3–7, cf. 9:1). For Paul, the present moment is the moment to take decisive, eschatological action. We can find, therefore, an area of early Christian experience where the passing of time led to a diminution of that special moment Kairos, which characterised the age of the apostles. With their passing, we find a different ethos emerging, one in which the present becomes less infused with eschatological significance, and where the eschatological came to be linked only with the far distant future, and not with the day of salvation, 22

J.C. Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1980), 114–123; and Martyn, Galatians. 23 D. Georgi, Remembering the Poor: The History of Paul’s Collection for Jerusalem (Nashville: Abingdon, 1992), and J. Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind, trans. F. Clarke (London: SCM, 1959).

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which had dawned in the present. Inaugurated eschatology gradually diminished, to be replaced by that longing for the Kingdom whose coming was detached from the life of the Christian communities in the present. This peculiar characteristic of early Christian writings, which is shared by interpreters in the Joachite tradition, is captured in Karl Mannheim’s sketch of the characteristics of what he terms ‘the chiliastic mentality’.24 It is this kind of character that social circumstances, theological conviction and the belief that religious hopes were being actualised that connects the world of the New Testament writers and the followers of Joachim. Admittedly, Mannheim based his assessment on late medieval radicals like the Hussites, and on Müntzer and the Anabaptists. Nevertheless there are strong links between them and both the early Christians and those who espoused Joachim’s historical apocalypticism. Mannheim’s summary of the characteristics is as follows: i. ‘the impossible gives birth to the possible and the absolute interferes with the world and conditions actual events’.25 ii. ‘for the real Chiliast, the present becomes the breach through which what was previously inward bursts out suddenly, takes hold of the outer world and transforms it’.26 iii. ‘the Chiliast expects a union with the immediate present. … He is always on his toes awaiting the propitious moment. … He is not actually concerned with the millennium to come; what is important for him is that it has happened here and now … the chiliastic mentality has no sense for the process of becoming; it was sensitive only to the abrupt moment, the present pregnant with meaning’.27 iv. ‘Chiliastic mentality severs all relationships with those phases of historical existence which are in daily process of becoming in our midst. It tends at every moment to turn into hostility towards the world, its culture, and all its works and earthly achievements, and to regard them as only premature gratification of a more fundamental striving which can only be adequately satisfied in Kairos.’28 v. ‘For Chiliasm the spirit is a force which suffuses and expresses itself through us. For humanitarian liberalism it is that “other realm” which when absorbed in our moral conscience, inspires us.’29 vi. ‘Whereas originally Chiliastic experience manifested a robust and corporeal drive, when repressed it became rather sweetly innocuous and

24

K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. L. Wirth and E. Shils (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960). 25 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 192. 26 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 193. 27 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 202. 28 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 198. 29 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 198.

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vaporous, it became watered down into mere enthusiasm, and the ecstatic element came to life once more, though in a gently soothing form, only in the Pietistic experience of awakening.’30 In theological terms, what Mannheim sets out here is a description of a realised eschatology at work, in which hopes for a changed world are set in the context of the present and are not just articles of faith to be asserted. They pervade through action and disrupt patterns of behaviour and relating, which is exactly what we find in the ethos of earliest Christianity. What is more, time is in some sense hallowed, as the present becomes a particular ‘propitious’ moment. For both the New Testament writers, and those who followed Joachim, the present moment might not be the climax of history, yet was of peculiar importance along the way. To the extent that he grasped the revolutionary potential of this millennial spirit, Norman Cohn was correct to see in it a powerful force in Western religion.31 What he failed to do was to differentiate both the violent from the non-violent and those who espoused an entirely realised eschatology from those who, whatever their conviction about the eschatological significance of the present moment, did not consider that the totality of millennial glory had already arrived.

22.4. Concluding Comments One of the features of messianic and millenarian thinking and practice is that it represents a clear alternative to conventional wisdom and custom. To be part of a messianic movement means to be part of social change, often of an unpredictable form. However well mapped out future hopes may have been, and however strong conventional practice, the eschatological experience challenges that belief system and leads to new responses that push adherents along an uncharted path of religious and social experiment. In most cases, however, there is probably little guidance. Indeed, if the Jewish material now extant is anything to go by, primitive Christians, who believed that a new order had dawned with Jesus, had little information to go on, as they set out to explore the implications of what they were doing and saying for the culture they were a part of. The heady enthusiasm that characterises the initial outburst tends to be quenched by disappointment or the need for consolidation and accommodation, not least as the radicalism of the Jesus movement moved into the urban environment of the Eastern Roman Empire.32 The fiery radical30

Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 213. N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Secker & Warburg, 1957). 32 W.A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, 2nd edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); D.G. Horrell, The Social Ethos of the Corinthian Correspondence: Interests and Ideology from 1 Corinthians to 1 Clement, 31

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ism of Galatians is significantly tempered in the Corinthian correspondence, and even more in the, probably deutero-Pauline, Pastoral Epistles. In Joachite tradition, and in the early Christian texts, the nature of hope differs markedly from the character of hope within other areas of Christian tradition. It is a hope for this world rather than some transcendent realm. The future does not function merely as a regulative ideal, which acts as a stimulus to action; it is also an inner dynamism, which acts as a driving force to bring about radical change and fulfil the hope for a new order in the present. When the hope for God’s kingdom on earth was not realised, the present ceased to be the moment of Kairos for the world. Instead, it offered a realisation of that future hope, in the individual’s communion with God or in the common life of the worshipping community as it shared in the foretaste of the heavenly banquet. Within the Pauline corpus of writings in the New Testament, there is a clear shift from the horizontal to the vertical, evident in the Letters to the Colossians and the Ephesians. In the Gospel of John, the destiny of the believer to share in the vision of God in heaven (John 17:24) paves the way for the classic eschatological doctrine of the Christian church, in which eschatology is equated solely with life in heaven. The Kingdom of God becomes a celestial entity, and the ‘pilgrim’s progress’ is not to seek a new order in this world, but through this vale of tears in the life hereafter. The conviction that the divine indwells the human and the process of human history is, nevertheless, manifest in Paul’s doctrine of the Spirit, and his conviction that the believer is closely identified with Christ: ‘Not I but Christ in me’ (Gal. 2:20). With an inaugurated eschatology, hope is not merely an article of faith for the future, but in some sense already present either in the life of the elect group, or as a phenomenon within the historical process, which demands a response from them. There is a refusal to remain content with the letter of Scripture, and at times a subordination of it to the inner understanding that comes through the Spirit. This is backed by the prophetic consciousness of being called by God, and the references to visionary experience are typical. The medieval apocalyptists, in Joachite tradition, understood something absolutely central about the eschatology of the New Testament. They took seriously aspects of the early Christian reading of Scripture, in which God’s address to humans, and the inspiration of the Spirit, were central to their understanding of that Scripture. What characterised early Christianity was its genius of allowing the immediate and the inspirational to complement the received wisdom of tradition. This is evident throughout the New Testament. Whatever may have been the case in the earliest phase of Christianity’s Studies of the New Testament and its World (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996); and idem, ed., Social-Scientific Approaches to New Testament Interpretation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999).

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existence (and we can only surmise from various hints of enthusiasm that we find in passages like Acts, such as the utopian practice in Acts 2:44 and 4:34, and 1 Cor. 12–14), by the time Paul was writing his letters, his eschatological beliefs had been tempered with an expectation that the nascent communities must await a consummation still to come. Some indeed may have thought that the time was already present (as 1 Cor. 4:8 suggests),33 and others thought that it was imminent (2 Thess. 2:3–6).34 The various layers of the theology and ethics of the New Testament are saturated with a perspective, which recognises the peculiar ‘penultimacy’ of the Kairos, and the ‘extraordinary’ privilege belonging to those who found themselves at that significant moment in history. Visionary experience was a motor of the early Christian movement. Early Christianity was not only indebted to apocalyptic terminology, but its very identity was also formed by the dialectical tension between the above and below, the seen and the unseen, in addition to the eschatological tension of the now and the not yet. All of these are typical features of the language and genre of the apocalypses. Furthermore, one cannot understand Christian origins, or New Testament theology, without attention to eschatology. There is hardly a central theological theme that does not owe its inspiration to the complex of hopes for the future found in Second Temple Jewish texts. Joachim’s theological insight was to have grasped this fact and the understanding of history, which he held in common with the New Testament writers. His trinitarian view of history led him to a view of the activity of the Spirit, which, in its emphasis on the present, innovatory role of the divine Spirit and the future changes to which it opened up, captures that forwardlooking character which is at the heart of early Christian religion and made it the subversive force it was in the dying years of Second Temple Judaism.

33

A.C. Wire, The Corinthian Women Prophets: A Reconstruction through Paul’s Rhetoric, 2nd edn. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995); A.C. Thiselton, ‘Realised Eschatology at Corinth’, NTS 24 (1977–78): 510–526. 34 R. Jewett, The Thessalonian Correspondence: Pauline Rhetoric and Millenarian Piety (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986).

23. The Apocalypse: Sensitivity and Outsiders 23.1. Introduction The Apocalypse (the Book of Revelation) is a visionary text which resists neat systematisation into categories such as ‘insiders and outsiders, mission and ethics’. The apocalyptic genre, with its dualistic contrast between heaven and earth, this age and the age to come, and God and the beast, prompts the one engaging with the text to take sides. That is not to say that the text offers an asylum free from the consequences of choice, rather, it challenges the listeners to opt for the way and the values of the ultimate in preference to the penultimate, which pretends it is ultimate. But in writing thus, one must acknowledge that one has failed to avoid the temptation to ‘translate’ the welter of imagery into a more prosaic and more easily accommodated mode of discourse. Rather, the apocalyptic medium capitalises on the disorientation of the visions as a way of generating a fresh view of reality, by its extraordinary imagery and impertinent verbal juxtapositions. Apocalypse does not consist of ‘propositional, logical, [or] factual language’ but persuades by means of ‘the evocative … power of its symbolic language compelling imaginative participation’.1 If one is expecting to come away with neat answers to its stark challenges, one is going to be disappointed. In one important respect Revelation disorientates ecclesial readers of any generation. It is the least ecclesiological text in the New Testament. It stands alongside the Gospels of Matthew and Mark in problematising the boundaries between insider and outsider, disciple and unbeliever. Nowhere can this be seen better than in the letters to the angels of the seven churches, most of which take an uncompromising line towards those who might think that they are on the inside. For example, it is the weak and those who are on the point of extinction, like the slaughtered lamb (Rev. 5:6), to whom is held out hope. The faithful are not churches but prophets and witnesses who find themselves suffering ‘outside the gate’ (Heb. 13:12), where also their Lord was crucified (Rev. 11:8).

1

E. Schüssler Fiorenza, Revelation: Vision of a Just World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 31.

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This essay resists neat solutions about the theology of the Apocalypse, recognising the way the multi-valence of its imagery has its effect on readers and hearers, whether ancient or modern. But, if its effect is inevitably variable, there can be little doubt about its authority as a voice from beyond, painting in words the doom in store for a world which is in thrall to the culture of the beast and Babylon. In this situation prophetic witness is central. This is what counts as mission in Revelation.2 It is an appropriate way of describing the prophetic task, not least because John himself saw his mission as having to share what he had seen and heard as a result of his commission from the Son of Man. The Apocalypse is a deeply unsettling text, nowhere better appreciated than in the theological contribution of Tyconius, the enormously influential Donatist interpreter of Revelation, whose approach to the dualistic language of the Bible, and particularly its apocalyptic texts, problematised any tidy understanding of the relationship between insiders and outsiders, and thereby underlined a central thrust of the Apocalypse. The ‘conquest’ of the Lamb is a moment of crisis for the cosmos as a whole. It is the perspective from which all else is viewed – culture, economics, religion, power and status. The churches of Asia have been privy to the words addressed by Christ to their angels which John writes down. The revelation of the heavenly reality of a slaughtered lamb sharing the throne of God has profound implications for all the inhabitants of the earth, irrespective of their religious affiliation. It problematises the structures of the cosmos, and throws into the sharpest relief (as apocalyptic imagery especially can do) the injustices and iniquities of the era of the beast and of the culture of Babylon. The political character of this critique is evoked in Rev. 13 and 17, both visions being indebted to Daniel and his image of Babylon as an empire under judgement. The political vision, which is so central to Revelation, relativises the binary opposites of a dualistic outlook, which is reassuring to those who believe themselves safe, as elsewhere in the New Testament. This essay starts with a consideration of the great Christian interpreter of the Apocalypse, the fourth-century Donatist writer Tyconius. It does so in order to suggest that his perspective on the nature and identity of insiders and outsiders not only grasps something which is central to the Apocalypse, but to much of the New Testament as a whole. The essay moves on to examine the ways in which the Apocalypse focuses on the nature of political, economic and cultural power, and on the fragility of what passes for society. In a way, Revelation demands of all, whether inside or outside the haven of church, a 2

On mission in early Christianity, see A. Kreider, Worship and Evangelism in PreChristendom, Alcuin/GROW Liturgical Study 32 (Cambridge: Grove Books, 1995); idem, The Change of Conversion and the Origin of Christendom, Christian Mission and Modern Culture (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999); R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (London: Viking, 1986), 265–335.

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recognition of their obligation in the face of the judgement of God represented by the coming of the New Jerusalem on earth.

23.2. Tyconius: Problematising Language about ‘Insiders’ and ‘Outsiders’ Tyconius (fl. 380) was a Donatist commentator who understood that apocalyptic and prophetic texts had not just a future, but also a present application.3 We have few of his works extant, but his influence has been pervasive, given the way in which his approach to apocalyptic imagery affected the theology of the mature Augustine. His interpretative rules enable the application of prophetic and apocalyptic texts to the contemporary situation of the church in particular.4 He challenges the sectarian model of the church, a view which put him at odds with his fellow Donatists. The separation between sheep and goats, wheat and tares, would not take place before the Last Judgement. So, certainty about one’s ultimate destiny is impossible until the eschatological separation. There is no assurance that one is on the side of Jerusalem rather than Babylon, or of the Lamb rather than the beast. The application of the Tyconian method means that the present is a time of struggle and ignorance about one’s ultimate destiny. As such it captures the subject matter of the Book of Revelation. Tyconius’s concept of the bipartite church is the heart of his theology.5 It avoids a clear distinction in this present world between true and false churches, insiders and outsiders, instead highlighting the doctrine of the two cities, the City of God and the City of the Devil. It is within this pattern of thought – ‘the struggle of the true Church, the City of God, against the City of the Devil, whose members include both open enemies of the Church without and false friends within’ – that one sees a brilliant encapsulation of so much in the Book of Revelation.6 The apocalyptic images of the Bible cease to be primarily about some external eschatological event, in which the church is uninvolved, and are seen to address the present experience of tribulation and persecution, which was the lot of Tyconius’s Donatist community. He would have agreed very much with Paul’s words in 1 Cor. 10:6: ‘these things occurred as examples for us’, a sentence repeated again a few verses later (1 Cor. 10:11). Tyconius’s 3 M.A. Tilley, The Bible in Christian North Africa: The Donatist World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 112–127; P. Bright, The Book of Rules of Tyconius: Its Purpose and Inner Logic, Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity 2 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). 4 Tilley, The Bible in Christian North Africa, 116. 5 Bright, The Book of Rules, 182. 6 G. Bonner, Saint Bede in the Tradition of Western Apocalyptic Commentary, Jarrow Lecture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bealls, 1966), 5.

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church, with its tradition of persecution and harassment, looked to martyr stories, especially the martyr stories in the Bible, such as the death of Jesus. These are not just things that happened ‘back then’, but are models, catalysts for life. They are not prescriptions, but intellectual and ethical stimuli, and a means of encouragement. The ‘actualising’ of biblical texts means going beyond the preoccupation with ‘what it meant back then’, to the essential text, as it comes to life in the midst of the community reading, and seeking that continuity of experience and action with the communities whose stories are reflected in the Scriptures. As the writer of 1 John reminds us, Antichrists are active here and now, in places we least expect (1 John 2:19). For the writer of 1 John they were to be found in beloved members of the community, who disagreed and left the church, prompting dissension and division. Revelation refuses to allow us the satisfaction of certainty about the location of Satan’s acts. Revelation has no truck with the branding of others as satanic without noting the evil in oneself. The struggle against evil is one that needs to be recognised and identified. Its positive outcome can be assumed if it is rooted in the triumph of the Lamb (12:17; 14:12; 15:2). The unmasking of the beast and Babylon suggests that apparently benign institutions and those involved in supporting them can be exponents of that which is most profoundly opposed to God. Tyconius’s major concern was with the church; he challenged those from his own ecclesial background who presumed that inside the ambit of their church was a refuge from a hostile world. He did this by emphasising the present application of apocalyptic language, which challenged complacency. None could be sure where they stood at the Last Assize. There was no point in thinking of the church as a safe space somehow immune from a world that was falling apart.

23.3. Revelation 11: Prophetic Witness ‘In the Street of the Great City’ There is one group of humans who seem to be commended – those who bear witness or prophesy. This turns out to be no easy task, just as such ministry was an agony for Jeremiah and other prophets (cf. Luke 13:33). Revelation is insistent that the role of the martyr or witness is of central importance. Jesus of Nazareth is the faithful prophetic witness, and his followers have to continue that testimony of Jesus (19:10). That will involve suffering in the great tribulation. The prophetic commission is followed, in Rev. 11, by a vision in which the church is offered a paradigm of prophetic witness as it sets out to fulfil its vocation to prophesy before the world. In Rev. 10–11, John is involved in the unfolding eschatological drama of the apocalypse, when he is instructed to eat the scroll and commanded to prophesy. Here, as in 1:19,

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there is a direct call to participate as a prophet rather than merely be a passive spectator. It is a commission which comes in a context of much urgency. Like the Lamb in Rev. 5, who has suffered for his witness, the prophet takes the scroll and shares in the same kind of activity. Prophecy is not merely an uttering of oracles but involves the whole of life. The message is internalised (10:9) and forms part of the very being of the prophet. This actualisation of prophecy contrasts with Balaam. He uttered the words of God but the character of his life was not what God expected (Num. 22:22, cf. Rev. 2:14). In Rev. 11 the prophetic role encompasses every aspect of life (and death). That was something experienced by all prophets of God (Luke 11:49), particularly Jeremiah, whose call is evoked in 10:11 (cf. Jer. 1:10). Prophets could expect a life of witness, suffering and death, so that whether they lived or died, they would recapitulate what their Lord had suffered (11:8). The irony is that in the story of Jesus the holy city is the site of profanity, in which there is continued the rejection of the prophets (Matt. 23:35–37). The holy city, which according to 11:2 is profaned, is also a place of profanity on the same level as Sodom and Gomorrah. It is a telling reminder that there is no unambiguously holy place. That will apply to churches and holy places anywhere. They are all potentially sites of human conflict and the possible profanation of God’s way. Rev. 11 is an important reminder that the vast eschatological drama unfolding before John’s visionary gaze leaves neither him nor his companions as passive spectators, uninvolved or unaffected. In the midst of super-human forces, humans have a role. There is a prophetic vocation, ideally for the church as a whole, though, in reality, the holy community itself is riddled with compromise with Babylon, as the letters to the angels of the churches indicate. The plagues with which the two witnesses are able to strike the earth remind us of chs. 6, 8–9 and 16 (especially 16:4). The prophets have the power to bind and loose (cf. Matt. 16:17). Their actions torment humanity in a way similar to the plagues of the eschatological judgement of God (cf. 16:10). The life of prophets is not one of niceness and respectability, therefore. The prophets are received as tormentors by those who cannot cope with God’s justice and prefer not to acknowledge it (cf. Luke 8:28).

23.4. Revelation 13 and the Beasts: Non-Conformity in a World of Conformity In a chapter inspired by Dan. 7, John’s vision offers allusive hints of the way for those who wish to participate in the New Age: not worshipping the beast. Rev. 13 offers a terrible vision of the whole world seemingly following after in amazement (13:4) and worshiping the dragon. In other words, amazement at the beast leads to worship of the dragon (perhaps unknowingly). People engage in activity which should be reserved for God. Elsewhere, John is

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given strict instructions to worship God alone (22:9, cf. 19:10) – not to be interpreted as narrowly religious activity, but also distancing himself from the conformity of a society, which demands worship of other gods, whether Caesar or Mammon. The amazed question ‘who is like the beast?’ (reminiscent of similar sentiments expressed of God in Exod. 15:11) is followed by ‘who can make war on it?’. In other words, amazement is linked to a sense of awe at the beast’s military power. The apparent universality of worship offered to the beast is qualified, however, by the reference to the Lamb’s book of life. When the books are open, those who are not written in the Lamb’s book of life will worship the beast. Until the books are opened (20:12) and judgement takes place, the names contained in it are unknown, and the threat remains that one’s name might be removed. Inclusion in the book of life means not worshipping the beast. For the first time we have the mention of the beast in 11:7, which will become the focus of attention in ch. 13. It comes from the abyss, whose smoke had darkened creation and had produced the plague of locusts (9:3). God’s restraint of those dark and destructive forces (see Ps. 104:9, where God fixes the waters of chaos so that they may no longer threaten the earth, cf. Rev. 9:14) has enabled a semblance of order, but that period of order has been abused and the coming of the messiah means an end to the illusion of order and the manifestation of the full extent of disorder and suffering. The time has come when God would take the power and reign (11:15, 17–18). The beast seeks to make war on the witnesses (cf. 17:14; 13:7; 16:14; 19:19). The destructive potential of the beast is, however, limited because it has been defeated (12:7). Vindication is promised (11:11), but this demands faith from the witnesses. Just as every eye will see the central importance of the crucified messiah (1:9), so also will the enemies of God’s witnesses (11:12). The mention of the beast here indicates that the prophecy is no hole and corner affair but attracts the attention of political power and its antagonism (so 10:11, cf. Mark 13:9). The lack of concern for human dignity is evident in the refusal to bury the bodies of the prophets (11:8) and the profanity of the rejoicing over their deaths. The inhabitants of the world are under the misapprehension that the removal of God’s witnesses will mean an end to torment. Beliefs of that kind are commonplace. The beast is the incarnation of the powers of the Devil (‘the dragon conferred on it his own power’; 13:2) and attracts universal admiration for acts which appear to be beneficial (‘the whole world went after the beast in wondering admiration’; 13:3). They have the hallmarks of what passes for civilisation. The plausibility of the beast is seen as it is like the Lamb and appears to deserve worship. The wonder of the world is rooted in its military power (13:4). In Rev. 13:11–16 John sees another beast but this time arising from the land. Verse 12 suggests that this beast acts as an agent of the first beast (cf.

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13:14). The whole earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast. John speaks not only of the human populace but also the cosmos as a whole, as if the created world as a whole is under the thrall of the beast and is affected by it (cf. 11:18; 13:3; 17:5; 19:2). Public opinion goes along with the propaganda of the beast and its supporters. The pressure is to conform and be marked with the mark of the beast (13:14). Those who persevere (whether they be inside or outside the churches) see that the might of state power is itself extraordinarily fragile, and its affluence, so attractive and alluring, is destined for destruction, destroyed by precisely that power which has maintained it (as we shall see when we look at 17:16). In the present age those marked with the beast apparently have freedom to go about their activities; by contrast, those who refuse to be so marked and side with God and the Lamb are persecuted, and their deaths are greeted with glee by the inhabitants of the earth (11:10). In reality it is those who maintain their integrity, even at the price of their lives, who will be vindicated, whereas those who have the mark of the beast ‘drink the wine of God’s anger’ (14:10). The act of worship is not a private matter, for those who worship will be marked with a mark on their right hand and on their foreheads (cf. 14:9, 11; 16:2; 19:20; 20:4), in contrast to those who stand with the Lamb, who are marked with the name of the Lamb and of God (14:1, cf. 22:4). It is something which is imposed on the worshippers of the beast (13:16). There are public, social and economic consequences, therefore: exclusion from regular social intercourse. Without the name of the beast or the number of its name it becomes impossible to buy or sell. Those ‘bought’ with the blood of the Lamb (5:9, cf. 14:3) must behave differently, however (cf. Mark 10:42–45). There is pressure to conform (13:14). Those who refuse to do so are offered reassurance that being marked with the Lamb is a sign of righteousness, even if it means social ostracism (13:16). Being marked with the beast involves conformity, whereas those who are not marked are the objects of violence. As the beast has some of the characteristics of the Lamb (13:3, 14), one has to be watchful to avoid religion becoming a means of supporting or colluding with that which is opposed to the divine justice. The bewitching effects of a prevailing set of ideas to form outlooks cannot be underestimated. According to Marx, ideology makes one think that the ideas, which are widely held, are ‘obvious’, ‘common-sense’ and ‘normal’, when in fact they often cover up the powerful vested interests of a small group which has, and wants to retain, power.7 In John’s vision the task of the second beast from the land 7

K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology: Including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998); cf. also C. Rowland, ‘Social, Political and Ideological Criticism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies, eds. J.W. Rogerson and J.M. Lieu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 655–674, at 656–659.

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is to persuade ordinary people that what they see in the first beast is normal and admirable, so that any deviation or counter-attraction is regarded as strange, anti-social and to be repudiated. John’s vision helps to unmask these processes at work which pressurise into conformity (13:3, 8). The issue of the apparently ‘innocent’ act of not conforming is well illustrated by this dialogue from the Martyrdom of Polycarp: Polycarp was brought before the proconsul … [who] tried to persuade him to recant. ‘Have some respect for your age’, he said. … ‘Swear by the Genius of Caesar; repent, say, “Away with the atheists!’” So Polycarp solemnly looked at the whole crowd of lawless heathen who were in the stadium, motioned toward them with his hand, and then (groaning as he looked up to heaven) said, ‘Away with the atheists!’ But when the magistrate persisted and said, ‘Swear the oath, and I will release you; revile Christ’, Polycarp replied, ‘For eightysix years I have been his servant, and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?’8

This apparently neutral, secular testimony is an event of supreme importance sub specie aeternitatis, on a par with that fundamental redemptive moment in Israel’s history. The redemptive moment means siding with the Lamb at the moment of testimony and standing firm in one’s convictions and commitment to the horizon of hope symbolised by the Lamb who bears the marks of slaughter. State or society is not a neutral enterprise devoid of conflict of interest or human self-aggrandisement. Political theorists from Hobbes to Marx have shown how the state is a means of controlling or masking deep-seated conflicts of interest, and it is important that structures of society be subjected to the same searching critique as is individual desire. As human agents we are prone to use power (or acquiescence by our lack of resolve) in promoting institutions which will serve individual or sectional interests. That can lead to blasphemy when they do not acknowledge the interest of God. That does not mean a nod in the direction of religion but a substantial practical implementation of just ways of behaving in human relationships and an attempt to create institutions which will give effect to the goals of God’s justice.

23.5. Revelation 17: The Veneer of Culture and the Forces of Chaos In an extraordinary vision, whose influence on Christian history and politics has been enormous, John sees the beast again but this time carrying Babylon, depicted as a harlot, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication (Rev. 17:2, 4; 18:3). 8

Mart. Pol. 9, trans. M.W. Holmes, J.B. Lightfoot and J.R. Harmer, The Apostolic Fathers in English (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 150.

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Babylon is also drunk from the blood of the saints (17:6). The mighty of the earth are intoxicated by her power, and their collaboration is so intimate that it can only be described in sexual terms. John writes, and readers read, in the midst of the dominion of the beast and Babylon’s luxurious consumption. The wealth of Babylon comes at the cost of human lives (see particularly 18:13). It is a telling reminder that world power is an oppressor and a place of exile, not one of comfort and real prosperity. It may seem to the nations of the world that they have achieved great prosperity as a result of Babylon’s power (18:3), but in God’s estimation things are very different. The description of Babylon (together with the account of its wealth) owes much to Ezek. 27–28 (the prophecy against Tyre) and Jer. 51. The passage from Ezekiel is important. There the emphasis is on the economic activity and success of Tyre. The description of the city’s greatness revolves around its role as a centre of trade. It is this element that is to the fore in both chs. 17 and 18 with the long lists of goods, which are part of the commerce, which Babylon’s greatness encouraged. The goods are in large part luxuries, hardly the basic necessities, which formed the subsistence of most people in John’s day (Rev. 18:11–13, cf. Ezek. 27:12–36). The description of Babylon in 17:4 suggests conspicuous consumption. This self-indulgence comes at a cost to the many parts of the world. Luxury goods gravitate to the centre to supply the insatiable needs. It has the effect of making the rest of the world peripheral. Those on the periphery become merely means of supplying the needs of others. Yet Babylon, while being the place of exile and alienation (Ps. 137; 1 Pet. 5:13), was a place where the person with the eye of vision can see the glory of God, as did Ezekiel (Ezek. 1) in whose footsteps John follows. John is taken to a desert place (17:3, cf. 21:10), and in that place of desolation one can see Babylon for what it is. The wilderness is a place for seeing things in their proper perspective (cf. Hos. 2:14), untrammelled by the lures of surrounding culture and the intoxication of power, all of which seem so overwhelming. The stark clarity of the iniquity, true character of Babylon, and its relationship with the beast can be seen for what they really are. Babylon is seated on many waters (17:1, 15), the myriad of nations (17:15) from whom the great multitude comes (5:9; 7:9). She is supported by the beast (17:2), a relationship that is inherently unstable (17:1), destined for collapse and destruction. That which has caused intoxication and power will itself be turned on and destroyed. Babylon will be seen in her pitiable state of nakedness (17:16), just as the reality of the Laodicean church’s life is shown up for what it really is (3:17). In Hos. 2:3 and 2:9 nakedness, and the shame that accompanies it, is the judgement of God on an unrepentant people. There it seems to be conceived of as the devastation of Israel’s economy with the result that all those who have been Israel’s ‘lovers’ will see her poverty (2:9).

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In similar vein God will allow Babylon’s poverty to be seen for what it really is. Her wealth and false clothes mask her need and destitution. The kings of the earth weep and wail over Babylon, as they are the ones who have committed fornication with her. Babylon has been the means of their enrichment, but they lament from afar on account of fear (cf. 11:11), just as the sailors did over the fall of Tyre.9 The merchants also weep and lament, ‘since no one buys their cargo any more’ (18:11). Babylon had been at the hub of trade and the merchants had depended upon her. Those who refused to worship the beast had been excluded from buying and selling (13:17). The merchants did not suffer this ostracism but colluded with Babylon (they committed ‘fornication’) as they made their wealth (17:2; 18:15). There is a list of the commodities found in Babylon, culminating in the brief but dismal reference to ‘human lives’ (18:11, cf. Ezek. 27:13). Slaves are just bodies, more commodities to add to the long list. But the Apocalypse cannot allow that to pass without glossing the word: they are ‘human lives’ (18:13). In the extravagant search of the few, who experience luxury of life and wealth, there lies a hidden cost to human lives and societies. Such sentiments are rudely interrupted, however, when there is a different kind of cry, one of rejoicing in Rev. 18:20, echoing the joy of heaven at Satan’s ejection in 12:12. Apostles, as well as saints and prophets, are commanded to rejoice, because God has given judgement in favour of them rather than Babylon, who has been drunk with the blood of the saints (17:6). The tone of sadness is resumed in 18:22, this time in the words of the mighty angel, and concerns the end of Babylon’s music. Babylon as a place of art, music, craft and trade is ended, and the round of marriage, civilisation and culture, which characterises the life of a city living normally, is rudely interrupted (cf. Matt. 24:38). Her merchants were ‘the magnates of the earth’ (cf. 6:15). Readers receive a rude shock if they think that there is a neutral character to all the activity of trade, commerce and socialising. It is sorcery, which will be excluded from the New Jerusalem (21:8; 22:15) and of which humanity has refused to repent.10 God’s witness against sorcery is closely linked with the oppression of the hired labourer, the widow, the orphan and the stranger in Mal. 3:5. The lament for Babylon’s culture, sophistication and wealth cannot pass without the reminder that, in her, the blood of the prophets was to be found (Rev. 6:10; 16:6; 17:6; 18:24, cf. Matt. 23:35–37), as well as the blood of all those slaughtered on the earth. Beyond enabling a 9 Ezek. 27:30–36; R. Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy: Studies on the Book of Revelation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), especially 342–351; cf. J.N. Kraybill, Imperial Cult and Commerce in John’s Apocalypse, JSNTSup 132 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). 10 P.F. Esler, The First Christians in Their Social Worlds: Social-Scientific Approaches to New Testament Interpretation (London: Routledge, 1994), 131–146.

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few kings and magnates to grow rich, Babylon is also a place of vicious violence towards humans. Rev. 18–19 offers ‘the viewpoint which is so typically the one of those who do not know what it is like to stand at the bottom of the list’.11 These verses make explicit that Revelation is full of competing voices, symbolic systems and world-views. We are called to John’s visionary voice, compared with which any claim to vision (such as that of Jezebel, Balaam or the false prophet) is to be rejected. Voices even within John’s own circle, which commend the eating of idol meat and compromise with the social mores, have their echoes in the merchants and mighty, who lament Babylon’s fall. It is a persistent voice in humanity which is never resolved at the end of the book. The ‘unclean’ still lurk at the gates of the city.12 John’s vision invites readers to consider carefully the history of wealth and to assess the extent to which the trading, which forms a part of the business of international ‘order’ (18:13), is neutral in its inspiration and effects. Trade, as much as violence and conquest, can defile communities, which become dominated by the benefits that it brings and the priorities it demands. Babylon, with whom the kings and mighty have committed fornication, typifies the lengths that are gone to in order to achieve wealth, status and power. This comes about through trade, which is fornication, ‘a cultural promiscuity by which a dominant power exploits and drains the resources from many others’.13 There is no view here of economic and political activity as autonomous enterprises devoid of theological meaning. Acts of trade and commerce are pervaded with human self-interest and promotion (so also 13:14–17). The Gospel casts its shadow over every human transaction. No activity can be regarded as morally neutral and beyond the critique and need for redemption of the Lamb who was slain. In the mundane situations of life there is present a challenge, threat and opportunity of the hidden life of God, a mix of the mundane and the heavenly, to convey the deeper character of what it is they seek to communicate. Not only is it a fulfilment of Scripture, but it is a moment of eschatological significance. One is reminded of a similar modern prophetic text, John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, inspired by Matt. 20, a little book which was later to inspire Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Junior.14

11

A.A. Boesak, Comfort and Protest (Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 1987), 121. Schüssler Fiorenza, Revelation, 132. 13 O. O’Donovan, ‘The Political Thought of the Book of Revelation’, TynBul 37 (1986): 61–94, at 85. 14 J. Ruskin, Unto This Last. With a New Introduction by Peter Cain, The Social and Economic Works of John Ruskin (London: Routledge, 1994). 12

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23.6. Prophecy: Unmasking the Exercise of Political Power There is a consistent refusal of texts like Revelation to offer any consolation of certainty and self-righteousness. Indeed, Revelation, as well as contemporary texts like 4 Ezra and the Gospel of Matthew, hardly satisfy the lust for certainty and the self-satisfaction of an elect group, nor do they offer security to the readers. Arguably they are among the least reassuring texts of the first century CE. Matt. 25:31–45 is another text which can be read in an inclusivist way in terms of ultimate salvation. In other words, service of the hungry, thirsty, naked and imprisoned is the criterion for a place among the sheep or the goats, not membership of the church. The letter of the text of the Gospel of Matthew leaves readers uncertain whether they can have assurance that they will be among the ‘sheep’ rather than the ‘goats’. Indeed, there is surprise at the identity of the children of God when the Last Assize takes place (Matt. 25:37, 45, cf. Rom. 8:21). So, in Matt. 25:31–46 there is a subtle relationship between the eschatological judge and his hidden presence in the least of his ‘brethren’ in the midst of the present age: final judgement indeed is now being gestated in the womb of history. All of life is an issue for the religious person, from eating to buying, words and deeds, as well as what is narrowly regarded as worship. There is no area of existence which is neutral and unaffected by religious significance. Christianity inherited from Judaism a concern in this area. ‘Spirituality’ is not a matter of private cultic devotion unconnected with the demands of ordinary life. Texts like Matthew (especially Matt. 7:21–23; 18:21–25; 25:31–46) and Revelation do not so much offer a precise description of what is to come but a means of gaining a different perspective on the world, which challenges neat assumptions about priorities, inclusiveness and values in society. They are most disturbing for any ecclesiology. As the Letters to the Seven Churches indicate, who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ is not at all clear. Those who are most confident (the Laodiceans; Rev. 2:15–19) turn out to be the least included. Confessing the name and being part of an ecclesial community is not what counts; what matters is whether one has worshipped the beast and drunk deep of the fornication of Babylon. Matthew and Revelation suggest that to be in Jesus Christ means to follow in his footsteps, engaging in acts of mercy to the outcast and in humility, sharing the lot of those like the Son of Man, who had nowhere to lay his head (Matt. 8:20). Confession and membership of a specific religious group is less important than non-conformity with the mores of the beasts and Babylon. Of course, that detachment from ‘false consciousness’ is assisted by the ‘cleansing of the doors of perception’ (to quote William Blake); identification with the way of the Lamb who is slain may offer such epistemological change, even though it does not guarantee it. There remains the possibility that resistance to the beast and Babylon can be discerned by all

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those who instinctively do what is required of them by God (cf. Rom. 2:13– 16). Neither text allows certainty or assurance of status or destiny. These texts, by virtue of their character and form, with all the vicissitudes and suggestiveness of narrative and symbol, do not allow readers to rest confident that they can be assured of ultimate vindication. There is an ambiguity in the refusal to allow that complacency in the face of judgement. The mix of parable, symbol and narrative functions like metaphor, should stop the attentive readers in their tracks by the disturbing juxtaposition and get them to think about the world from another perspective, another set of experiences. Any discussion of insiders and outsiders cannot ignore the image of woman in Revelation. Revelation is an androcentric text. It glorified the holy (male) celibate (14:4). Throughout there is a negative strand in the portrayal of women (Jezebel, the New Jerusalem portrayed merely as an adjunct of the bridegroom) whose lives are governed by pleasing ‘him’; Revelation supports celibacy and utilises the depiction of woman as a seductress, as a key part of its imagery. The book seems to exude all those negative images of women which have done so much damage to a balanced perspective on relationships between women and men in the history of the Church. The picture is more complicated, however. The ultimate inspiration for the immoral behaviour lies with the beast supporting the woman; Babylon is herself at the mercy of the beast. The vision of the woman clothed with the sun in Rev. 12 offers a contrasting image. Yes, there is a passive role accorded to the acceptable feminine images but this is in line with the way in which the Lamb, apparently dead, is the key to the Apocalypse. Prophets in Revelation seem to be men, but the remarkable thing about the Apocalypse is that it is a book whose prophetic genre has inspired women prophets down the centuries. They have found their voices because it is precisely through prophecy (1 Cor. 11:5) that they have been allowed to speak and bear witness, whereas otherwise they would have lacked authority. Rev. 11 foregrounds a key theme in the book. Like the other major Johannine text in the New Testament, where Jesus bears witness to what he has seen and heard, so in the Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, which he gives to John, the Seer bears witness to what he has seen and heard. This is encapsulated in the public activity of the two witnesses in Rev. 11, a role model for all the prophets, where the call is not to existence in some privileged religious comfort zone. They, no less than those to whom they bear witness, cannot expect to escape the upheavals that afflict the earth. The prophetic role means resisting the hegemony of the beast and Babylon, which emulates the witness of the paradigmatic prophet, ‘the Lamb who was slain’. Those who follow him, and who resist, share the same fate as him and ‘wash their robes and make them white in the blood of the Lamb’ (Rev. 7:14). In so far as there can be any sense of community in Revelation, it is a community of prophets, for the churches themselves are compromised (a point

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which, as we have seen, was rightly noted by Tyconius). Revelation is the least ‘churchy’ text in the New Testament. Christ stands outside the door of the church, never to be co-opted to the values of those in the comfort of the ecclesiastical ghetto. The political and economic challenge Revelation presents includes the church members. They are not exempt from the judgement meted out on those taken in by the political and economic injustice of the imperial beast and its Babylonian culture. There is no escape from having one’s nose rubbed in the brutality of imperial power and the harsh realities of the nature of the injustice of the political system of John’s day, which is imagined and evoked in this awesome example of word painting. A perennial question for Christians is how they deal with that strong exclusive strand within their tradition, largely (though not entirely) due to the eschatological inheritance, in which Jesus was the goal of the promises, not a stage in their fulfilment. The humanitarian instincts of Christians rightly shy away from consigning the majority of humanity to perdition, and a variety of more inclusive ways have been explored. The apocalyptic tradition deserves to be considered, though, as we shall see, a surprisingly more inclusive aspect emerges in the midst of its grim depiction of human delusion. In this essay I wanted to explore how the Book of Revelation prompts readers to a searching examination of assumptions concerning the identity of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ in the divine economy, and compare it with the judgement scene in Matt. 25:31–46. The Gospel of Matthew is uncompromising in its ethical demand and in prioritising the forgiveness of sins. Revelation, like Matthew, sees a direct link between what is done in this age and in the life of the age to come. The central point of the Gospel is the forgiveness of sins in Matt. 6:12. The refusal to practice this brings the inevitability of judgement. Similarly in Revelation there is no escape from the fact that easy identification with the beast and Babylon brings its ultimate reward. The ultimate seriousness of the nature of things is central to ‘the strange world of the Bible’, but nowhere is this truer than in the case of the Book of Revelation. To our sensitive modern ears the threats of Revelation towards both outsiders and the supposed (ecclesial) insiders strike a discordant note. Apart from anything else, what is the point of making the effort to be an insider and be part of an ecclesial community when the same threats hang over the ‘insiders’ too? But that comes back to the sense of alarm that the book engenders. It is not that of a rather excited street preacher, who threatens people with hell fire if they don’t turn to the Lord. It is more a warning to what passes for civilisation, a warning that its structures are deeply flawed, and that the complacent cannot any longer see what makes for their peace. Such apparent ‘insensitivity’ actually serves a central purpose, aiming to waken people to what is happening. Business as usual is no longer any option. The coming of a new age does not come inexorably with better standards of living, often at the expense

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of the majority of the world’s population or the depredation of its resources. The words of Jesus capture the sense of urgency and warning of the Apocalypse’s imagery: ‘They were eating and drinking, and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed all of them’ (Luke 17:27). So what seems like insensitivity towards outsiders, and lack of respect for those who flee to the ark of the church, is but a warning that life cannot remain business as usual. As Walter Benjamin famously put it in the 9th of his Theses on the Philosophy of History, the greatest apocalyptic text of the twentieth century, written at the beginning of the Second World War as Benjamin fled persecution by the Nazis: A storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in [the Angel’s] wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.15

The Church grew in the pre-Nicene period, not because Christianity was a way to prosperity or respectability, but because Christians seemed to embody an alternative way of living. Christian communities bore witness to another human reality in this world and another kind of culture. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the last book in the canon of the New Testament, where the reader’s gaze is fixed on the New Jerusalem on earth. Here, above all, we find the motor of early Christianity, where, to quote Jürgen Moltmann’s memorable words, ‘Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present’.16 The Lamb who has been slaughtered becomes the key to the interpretation of history. The Lion of the tribe of Judah, the King Messiah, turns out to be a weak, dead creature. The Lamb that was slain is key to the unmasking of the pretensions of the political power in which military might and economic power of the few are unmasked. This is what apocalypse is all about: revelation/unveiling. The story of Jesus, who suffered a violent death at the hands of a colonial power, is the lens through which all else is viewed. That is what the Apocalypse is about – and that includes insiders as well as outsiders.

15

W. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations: Walter Benjamin, ed. H. Arendt, trans. H. Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), 245–255, at 249. 16 J. Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. J.A. Leitch (London: SCM, 1967), 21; cf. K. Wengst, Pax Romana and the Peace of Jesus Christ, trans. J. Bowden (London: SCM, 1987).

24. The Book of Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ 24.1. Revelation Among the Apocalypses Revelation shares with several other texts from the beginning of the Common Era a concern with the unveiling of divine mysteries, including those that relate to the future (see, e.g., 4 Ezra and the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Enoch [1 Enoch], Slavonic Enoch [2 Enoch], the Apocalypse of Abraham and the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch). The discoveries known as the Dead Sea Scrolls have confirmed the vitality of this kind of interest in the coming of a messianic age, which is largely absent from the earliest rabbinic sources, such as the Mishnah, even if it does make its appearance in the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds and other later Jewish texts. While there are distinctive features about the future hope set out in Revelation, not least its juxtaposition of a millennial messianic reign and a new heaven and earth, when God would dwell with humanity, most of these texts share a common pattern of expectation in which a time of travail and upheaval will precede the coming of the messianic kingdom. The time of travail (Dan. 12:1; Mark 13:8; Rom. 8:28; 1 Cor. 7:29–31; 1 En. 93:4; 4 Ezra 6:17–28; Syr. Bar. 26–27), given the description of ‘messianic woes’, is periodised in Revelation by means of the sequences of seals, trumpets and bowls, but such periodisation has its analogs in other texts. So Revelation adds its testimony to those of other apocalyptic texts and to the convictions about the coming of the messianic age, which pervade the whole of the New Testament, albeit in much more fragmentary form.

24.2. Understanding ‘Apocalypse’ Revelation is closely related to various writings from ancient religion that are revelatory in quality. They correspond to this definition, which has been widely used: 1 1

J.J. Collins, ‘Introduction: Toward the Morphology of a Genre’, in Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre, ed. idem = Semeia 14 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979), 1–20, at 9.

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‘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.

This definition is fine as far as it goes. One may question the application of the description ‘transcendent reality’ to both the revelation of the supernatural world and eschatological salvation, however. While it is true that the revelation offered of salvation is at the time it is revealed in a vision or audition, a transcendent reality, that ‘transcendent reality’ was believed to be realised on earth, not in heaven or some transcendent world. In popular usage, largely conditioned by the Book of Revelation, there are two main ways of construing ‘apocalyptic’. By far the more common is a definition by content such as that found in the Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse: cosmic and social upheavals, graphic depictions of sudden cataclysm, eschatological hope and related mythic features. Less common, but arguably more consistent with what we find in the apocalypses, Jewish and Christian, is a definition by the revelatory genre, namely, that the key to understanding the texts is that it is a revelation, an ‘unveiling’ vision, whether it be about heavenly realities or about the nature of human history, past, present or future. In the latter way of looking at the apocalypses, what is crucial is not the future hope but the revelatory nature of the mode of understanding and the authority that it conveys. The word apocalypse is used only once in Revelation, in the opening words, summarising a disclosure in visionary form of that which is and that which is to take place hereafter (cf. 1:19). Throughout the rest of the book, it is the words prophet and prophecy that dominate, describing the book (22:18–19) and by implication the recipient of the apocalypse (22:9). The prominence of the visionary element is important, as it separates Revelation from texts with which it is widely believed to be contemporary, namely, 4 Ezra and the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch. While the latter both contain some visionary material, they are largely verbal exchanges or predictions. Revelation also contrasts with the dominant and arguably most influential apocalyptic text in ancient Judaism, the apocalypse ascribed to Enoch. Many fragments of this have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the complexity of its textual history has long been recognised. Compared with the Enochic literature, especially that which is known as 1 Enoch, Revelation has a coherence and focus that is lacking in the Jewish work, which appears to be an amalgam of traditions put together over a considerable period of time. The interpretation and reception of Revelation are closely linked. Like other biblical prophetic books, it became a reservoir for understandings of the future, but alongside it there developed a role for the book as a way of unmasking the imperfections in church and society. Evidence from the history

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of its reception helps us understand the nature and meaning of the book, its theological antecedents and its relationship to other early Christian writings.

24.3. Revelation and Its Centrality for Understanding the Origins of Christian Theology The Book of Revelation is crucial to our understanding of the character of early Christianity. Revelation may come from the Roman province of Asia Minor, but its theological themes are those we find in different words and phrases throughout the New Testament. Indeed, it may well be one of the earliest writings in the New Testament and bear witness to earliest Christianity’s apocalyptic character. Tradition dates the book during the reign of Domitian, but its internal evidence suggests that it may have originated at a moment of crisis in the Roman Empire on the death of Nero in AD 68 (cf. Rev. 17:10).2 There are two major themes in the book that are key to understanding Christian origins. As its opening word implies, it is an apocalypse, a revelation or unveiling of divine secrets, particularly about the consummation of all things, when the New Jerusalem is established on earth and God is all in all. The key to the outworking of divine purposes is the Lamb who was slain and who shares the throne of God and is the key to the meaning of history (Rev. 4–5). No one captures the shocking juxtaposition found in the words of these two chapters better than William Blake in The Four and Twenty Elders Casting Their Crowns before the Divine Throne (Tate Gallery London, ca 1803– 1805). It is a dramatic picture dominated by the bearded Almighty holding a scroll with seven seals in his right hand and radiating glory. His head is surrounded with a beautiful sea blue, topped by a rainbow; above and around his head are creatures with the heads of an eagle, a lion, an ox and a man, merging one into another. The whole scene is full of eyes, reminiscent in colour and appearance of a peacock in full plume. At the forefront of the picture are figures doing obeisance, laying their crowns before the Almighty, while right at the front of the picture are seven heads with tongues of fire. The whole picture brilliantly captures the ‘jasper and carnelian’, the emerald rainbow and the twenty-four elders clad in white garments, the seven torches of Pentecostal fire burning before the throne – all of which are mentioned in John’s first heavenly vision. In Rev. 4 there is no mention of the scroll in the hand of the Almighty. That is in the next chapter. After seeing the glory of God, John sees the Almighty with a scroll and hears one of the twenty-four elders asking ‘who 2

C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982), 403–413.

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will open the scroll’. At this point John weeps because no one is found worthy to open the scroll. He is told not to weep, because ‘the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals’. Then John notices something, which hitherto slipped his attention: And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders, I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain. … He went and took the scroll from the right hand of him who was seated on the throne and … the twenty-four elders … sang a new song, saying, ‘Worthy art thou to take the scroll and to open its seals’. (Rev. 5:6–9)

Just like John, who saw first a throne and the glory of the Almighty, a viewer of Blake’s picture too would be forgiven for not noticing what appears to be the points of a crown and under it, almost invisible in the glorious surroundings, what at first sight seems to be a comatose animal. In the picture the creature is readily ignored as we gaze at the colourful image, which underlines the key element not only of Rev. 5 but of the New Testament Apocalypse as a whole. In Revelation the Lamb who has been slaughtered becomes the key to the interpretation of history. The Lion of the tribe of Judah, the King Messiah, turns out to be a weak, dead creature. The Lamb that was slain is key to the unmasking of the pretensions of political power, in which the military might and economic power of the few are shown up. The values of the world are turned upside down as the meaning of the messianic promise is interpreted by the Lamb that was slain. This is what ‘apocalypse’ is all about: revelation; unveiling. The story of the Lamb bearing the marks of slaughter, Jesus, who suffered a violent death at the hands of a colonial power, is the lens through which history is viewed, as political power in the world is also unmasked (Rev. 13 and 17).

24.4. Revelation and the Visionary Tradition The link between Revelation and the prophetic books of the Bible is seen in the indebtedness to Daniel and Ezekiel, in particular. The striking imagery of John’s vision sets it apart, however, from much of the prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible, where the visionary imagery is exceptional (e.g. Amos 7:7; 8:1; Jer. 1:11, 13). That changed in the postexilic prophecy of Zechariah (e.g. 1:8, 18; 2:1; 3:1; 4:2; 5:1), whose imagery, along with the visions of Ezekiel (Ezek. 1, cf. 8:2 and 10; 37; 40–48) and Daniel (especially 7:1–14 and 8:3– 12), provide the antecedents for the visual images of Revelation. We cannot know what led to John’s dramatic meeting with the heavenly Son of Man on the island of Patmos, even if conjectures may be made about the significance of the time (the Lord’s Day) and the place (possibly, though not certainly, in exile, as was the prophet Ezekiel). Given the widespread existence of the visionary and mystical in the Christian material of the first

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century or so, not to mention its profound importance for the growth of the movement, it would be an excessively suspicious person who would deny that authentic visions lie behind some or all of these brief literary records. It is possible that the visions that follow may have been prompted by imaginative exegesis in which the images were visualised by the seer. Revelation is part of a visionary tradition. Ezekiel and Daniel have influenced the form and content of the Book of Revelation. From the christophany at its opening via the visions of heaven, the dirge over Babylon, the war against Gog and Magog (cf. Ezek. 39), and, finally, the vision of the New Jerusalem, Revelation bears the marks of the written forms and ancient prophecies influencing the more recent prophetic imagination of John of Patmos. Daniel’s beasts from the sea, for example, become in John’s vision a terrible epitome of all that is most oppressive and eerily akin to the way of perfection symbolised by the Lamb that was slain. This unique example in the early Christian literature of the apocalyptic genre is profoundly indebted to Jewish apocalyptic and mystical ideas. In Revelation, the first chapter of Ezekiel, which describes the chariot (merkabah) on which God is enthroned (Ezek. 1:22–26), has contributed to the visionary vocabulary of John in two crucial parts of his vision (namely 1:13 and ch. 4) and in the references to the throne, divine, and demonic, which run like a leitmotif throughout the book. This remarkable chapter has been the inspiration for mystics and seers in Judaism and Christianity down the centuries.3 What we have in Revelation is a glimpse of a distinctive use of the prophecy, parallel to, but in significant respects an independent variant of, other apocalyptic texts. In addition to Ezekiel, Revelation stands near the start of a long tradition of interpretation of Dan. 7, in which both the apocalyptic beasts and the human figure are taken up in an emerging political apocalypticism. While the Revelation imagery picks up on the tradition of representing nations by beasts found in Dan. 7, only one beast is described as incorporating characteristics of the other beasts. As in Dan. 7, one beast arises from the sea, but two creatures are described in Rev. 13 (vv. 1 and 11). The second emerges from the land, reflecting the local, indigenous promoter of the imperial cult, while the first is the official representative from Rome. The beast is the incarnation of the powers of the Devil (13:2) and attracts universal admiration for its acts (13:3). The plausibility of the beast is seen, as it is like the Lamb and appears to deserve worship. Imperial power is rooted in its military might (13:4). The beast is given some of the characteristics of the Lamb (1:3, 14). In addition to Dan. 7, the political vision is informed by the oracles against Tyre and Babylon, in Ezek. 27 and Jer. 51. 3 G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1955); and M. Lieb, The Visionary Mode: Biblical Prophecy, Hermeneutics, and Cultural Change (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991).

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24.5. Differing Patterns of Interpretation The shifting fortunes of the Apocalypse can be traced in the history of interpretation. The main contours of apocalyptic interpretation were already set within the earliest period of Christianity. The Book of Revelation points the way in three major respects, some of which are paralleled elsewhere in the New Testament. There is, first, that visionary appropriation of Scripture in which the words offer the opportunity to ‘see again’ what had appeared to prophets and seers in the past or to become a means of prompting new visions whereby there can be a discernment of higher spiritual realities. Second, Revelation, although it only occasionally prompts that quest for the meaning of the mysteries (e.g. 17:9, cf. 1:20 and 4:3), has prompted scores of ingenious attempts to unlock its mysteries, most comprehensively in the interpretative tradition of Joseph Mede and Isaac Newton.4 Third, there has been the ‘actualising’ of Revelation in which particular visions are believed to be identified with or embodied in contemporary events. These range from the more mystical (and indirect) appropriations by visionaries such as Hildegard of Bingen to the militant ‘acting out’ of the Münsterites.5 In addition, the visions of Revelation have been related to their ancient, first-century context. In this interpretative approach, questions are concerned with the meaning for the original author and readers and with the need to decipher the complex symbolism and its relationship to the particular circumstances in which Christians found themselves in Asia Minor in the late first century CE. The images have been regarded as an allegory of the struggles facing the individual soul in its quest for God, and the wider political ramifications of the text are subordinated to an individual religious piety. Finally, and related to that tradition of ‘actualisation’, there has been an application of the text to an interpreter’s own circumstances, but rather than the text of Revelation being ‘decoded’, so that the apocalyptic imagery is translated into a less exotic narrative of persons and events, the imagery of Revelation is used as an interpretative lens through which to view history. In this way of using the text of the Book of Revelation, encouraged by the interpretative method of the fourth-century Christian exegete Tyconius, the interpretative perspective has ceased to be solely about the eschaton and becomes instead a means of interpreting every age of human existence.6 To quote the words of the twentieth-century Christian activist William Stringfellow, ‘Babylon is an allegory of the condition of death, the focus of apocalyptic judgement where4

F. Carey, ed., The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come (London: British Museum Press, 1999), 232. 5 K. Deppermann, Melchior Hoffman, trans. M. Wren (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987). 6 Tyconius, The Book of Rules, trans. W.S. Babcock, SBLTT 39 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989).

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as Jerusalem is about the emancipation of human life in society from the rule of death, an anticipation of the end of time’.7

24.6. Plotting Differing Interpretations The differing interpretations of the Apocalypse may be expressed in diagrammatic form (see below).8 On one hand, there is a chronological component (the vertical axis): Does the interpretation relate to the past, present or future? On the other hand, there is a hermeneutical component: the allegorical method ‘decodes’ the text and renders it in another, more prosaic form compared with the colourful language of the apocalyptic imagery; the analogical method juxtaposes the imagery of the Apocalypse with the situation of the readers, thereby enabling them to look at their situation in a new way. Whereas the allegorical method tells one what the text really means and reduces its applicability to one time and place, the analogical method can be used over again at different times and places. The latter is closest to the method of Tyconius, and the former is similar to the kind of interpretation that we find in Joachim’s interpretation of the dragon, whose heads are identified with specific rulers. Past Allegorical

Analogical Future

Plotting the varying interpretations of the Book of Revelation

24.7. A Survey of the Interpretation of the Apocalypse Early patristic appropriation of the Apocalypse took several forms. In the struggle with what might be loosely termed Gnosticism on the part of those writers who were later to be deemed pioneers of Christian orthodoxy, insistence on the materiality of the doctrine of the Resurrection and this-worldly eschatology played their part in the writings of both Justin (Dial. 80) and 7 William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (Waco: Word Books, 1973), 114. 8 J. Kovacs and C. Rowland, Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

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Irenaeus (Adv. haer. 5.26.1 to 5.36.3). It is the future hope for which Revelation is best known. The millennium, at once puzzling and embarrassing to many generations of Christians, was central to the hope of the first Christians and continued to be part of the pattern of hope for this world, as is evident from traditional material in the writings of Papias of Hierapolis (who lived in the early part of the second century). Included in his now-lost work is a saying, attributed to Jesus, in which the fruitfulness of the earth would be dramatically increased in the New Age (preserved in the writings of Irenaeus in Adv. haer. 5.33.3–4). The popularity of such eschatological ideas among movements like the Montanists led to a growing suspicion of the book, but suspicions about the Apocalypse emerged only at the beginning of the third century CE. Questions about the apostolic origins of the book, echoed by Martin Luther in his ‘Preface to the New Testament’ centuries later, were part of that growing suspicion of its theology. According to Eusebius, Dionysius of Alexandria regarded the expectation of a reign of God on earth as evidence of authorship by the heretic Cerinthus, rather than the apostle John.9 In contrast, elsewhere in the relics of early Christianity the ‘gnostic’ texts from Nag Hammadi focus less on the eschatological content of Revelation and more on its apocalyptic genre. The revelatory form is an important part of guaranteeing the worth of the content of what is contained in the text, attributed, as it often is, to an authoritative figure like a Christian apostle such as Peter or Paul. Although in several key respects Origen had anticipated him, Tyconius’s reading of the Book of Revelation (ca 400) had a profound influence on the mature Augustine and thence on later Christendom, stressing the contemporary rather than the eschatological import of the visions. Tyconius reads Revelation as having a contemporary application to the life of Christians living in the midst of ambiguity and, just as important, as part of a community that contained both those on their way to salvation and those on their way to perdition. As such, Revelation is a key hortatory resource informing contemporary practice, rather than an eschatological map to the climax of all things. The mature Augustine continued in that tradition. Indeed, Revelation offered him an interpretative key, which helped him to expound the complex struggle between the heavenly and earthly cities in the present age in which Christians had to live.

9

Eusebius of Caesarea, Hist. eccl. 3.28.3; I. Backus, Reformation Readings of the Apocalypse: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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24.8. The Interpretative Tradition Initiated by Joachim of Fiore The main outlines of the Augustinian interpretation held sway for centuries. The later Middle Ages saw the emergence of the influential reading by Joachim of Fiore, which was to use Revelation as a hermeneutical key to understanding both Scripture and the whole of history. Joachim broke decisively from the Augustinian tradition in being willing to find significance in history.10 In Joachim’s interpretation of the Apocalypse, the sixth and seventh penultimate ages assume great importance as a time of anticipation and struggle. The period represents a space for conflict with the forces of Antichrist (a term that does not occur in Revelation and is found in the New Testament only in the First and Second Epistles of John, e.g. 1 John 2:18, 22; 2 John 7), which evokes an outburst of spiritual activity in the form of spiritual renewal. In this penultimate period, persecution and renewal, exile and prophetic witness, jostle one with another. The sense of anticipation prompted various patterns of moral renewal, and this should remind us that this was not about learned prognostications but instead was intimately linked with the renewal of the Church as the witness to the coming kingdom. Joachim’s figura of the dragon with seven heads indicates that, alongside the historically sequential explanation, there is also the recognition that this threat is both eschatological and historical: what will be the case at the end time is a constant part of human history. The seven heads are identified as different persecutors of the Christian Church through history (Herod, Nero, Constantius, Mohammed, Mesemoth, Saladin, and one yet to come). The final Antichrist, indicated by the tail of the dragon, is Gog. Between the long necks of the dragon’s heads appear captions detailing the seven persecutions of the church; Saladin, the contemporary tyrant, is represented as a larger head. Joachim interprets history, relating the pressing crisis of his own time as a sign of the eschatological times. It is this decisive move that initiates that extraordinary outburst of self-aware eschatological enthusiasm, in which persons and events became the signs of hope or agents of Antichrist.

24.9. Revelation in the Early Modern Period Even if Revelation did not dominate the interpretative horizons of the principal magisterial reformers, the sense of the propitious moment, of the time being ‘apocalyptic’, pervaded the sixteenth century and the climactic events 10 R.K. Emmerson and B. McGinn, eds., The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992); and M. Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969).

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that it witnessed. Luther initially outlined his reasons for relegating the book to a subordinate place within the canon of the New Testament in words that echo much earlier (and later) assessments in the Christian tradition. He believed that it was not ‘apostolic or prophetic’ because ‘Christ is not taught or known in it’ and ‘to teach Christ is the thing which an apostle above all else is bound to do’.11 He modified his view on Revelation in the later editions of his New Testament, from 1530 onward. From his summary of its meaning, he regards its images as indicative of the heretical threats to the Church down the centuries, and, in Rev. 13 and 17, the comprehension of the unmasking of papal power in the beast, and Babylon seated on the beast is an important resource in his intellectual battle with the Roman Catholic Church. Extensive use of Revelation was made in the writings of Melchior Hoffman (d. ca 1534), who was a significant influence on radical Anabaptism at Münster.12 He saw Revelation as key to the understanding of history, the meaning of the secrets of which had been revealed to him. The Melchiorite interpretation of Revelation, relatively unusual in the practice of a millenarian politics, like the revolutionary actions of Thomas Müntzer a decade earlier, did not remain at the level of utopian idealism but resulted in violent attempts to establish an eschatological theocracy. Despite the sense of an expectation of imminent fulfilment, what one finds in post-Münster Anabaptism is the sense of being in the penultimate period rather than in the eschatological commonwealth on earth. The place of Revelation in radical religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries needs little explanation. Perhaps more surprising is the rich tradition of interpretation in which careful exposition of the book was carried out in a more measured and less heated atmosphere. For example, Joseph Mede (1586–1638) viewed the book as a series of ‘synchronisms’ or recapitulations. Isaac Newton’s commentaries on Revelation, written a century and a half later, were explicitly indebted to Mede’s work, manifesting a concern to discern evidence of divine providence in history.13 From another academic setting we find Revelation inspiring the utopian politics of Mede’s contemporary Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1654), the German exegete whose Christianopolis (1619) evinces a speculative architecture that is indebted to Rev. 21–22 and part of a series of actualised utopian projects in the early modern period. There was also the emergence of a rise of historical awareness, which led to a perspective on the book and which focused more on past meaning than present application, an interpretative approach used by Roman 11

M. Luther, ‘Preface to the New Testament’, 12. Deppermann, Melchior Hoffman; and N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Secker & Warburg, 1957). 13 C. Burdon, The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unravelling, 1700–1834 (London: Macmillan, 1997). 12

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Catholic critics as they struggled to reject the links between the Babylon of Rev. 17 and the Roman Church. Similarly, the early modern interpreter Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) argued that the book’s meaning was almost entirely related to the circumstances of John’s own day. The Book of Revelation had an important role in inspiring, in many different ways, the radical politics of the period of the Civil War in England in the seventeenth century.14 One of the most powerful examples of a social critique, inspired by the Apocalypse and related parts of the Bible, emerge in the writings of Gerrard Winstanley. Between 1649 and 1651 Winstanley wrote tracts while he was actively involved in creating a community in Surrey, England, known as ‘the Diggers’, because they claimed the right to live on and work the common land in the aftermath of the Civil War in Britain, anticipating a time when there would be community of goods. Winstanley had a strong consciousness of his own prophetic vocation. He believed that the prophetic spirit was again active in the momentous days in which he lived, after the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a commonwealth.15 Winstanley used the imagery of Daniel and the Apocalypse to interpret the oppressive behaviour of the wielders of political and economic power of his day.16

24.10. The Apocalypse as a ‘Map’ of the End of the World As we have seen, there are contrasting patterns of interpretation of Revelation, each with ancient pedigrees. On the one hand, there is a figurative application, which uses the apocalyptic language as a way of challenging and exhorting those who read, which might apply in any situation. On the other hand, there is a form of interpretation that uses Revelation, along with other biblical prophecies, to piece together a detailed account of the events leading to Christ’s Second Coming and the outworking of God’s eschatological purposes. The interpretation of the Apocalypse as a repository of prophecies concerning the future has existed from the beginning of the exegesis of this book, reaching a high point in the influential interpretation of Joseph Mede. It was given a particular impetus in the eschatological movements set in train 14 C. Rowland, ‘English Radicals and the Exegesis of the Apocalypse’, in Die prägende Kraft der Texte: Hermeneutik und Wirkungsgeschichte des Neuen Testaments, ed. M. Mayordomo, SBS 199 (Stuttgart: Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk, 2005), 160–177 = below, pp. 493–509. 15 G. Winstanley, The True Levellers Standard Advanced; and T.N. Corns, A. Hughes and D. Loewenstein, eds., The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2:13. 16 G. Winstanley, Fire in the Bush; and Corns, Hughes and Loewenstein, eds., The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 2:190–194.

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by the exegesis of Joachim of Fiore in the later Middles Ages and was then fanned into flame in the early modern period in the intense eschatological expectation that is to be found in Europe, and was given intellectual basis by the researches of Joseph Mede. The role of Revelation in helping to create a map of the end of the world has been a feature of many modern appropriations of biblical prophecy. While Revelation is by no means the only text that has been used in this way – Daniel and 1 Thessalonians are of equal importance – it has its own important role to play in the eschatological scheme. What distinguishes modern eschatological speculation is that it sees the Apocalypse as one piece of a larger biblical jigsaw, the whole of which provides resources for constructing the exact sequence of events in the last days.17 John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), Anglican clergyman and founder of the Plymouth Brethren, interpreted the book as unfulfilled prophecy, a reading followed by the widely influential Scofield Reference Bible, first published in 1909, which reflects the peculiar fears of the late twentieth century. This kind of interpretation offers encouragement for the elect, who will enjoy a miraculous rescue through the ‘Rapture’, Christ’s return to take the elect to himself (an idea based on 1 Thess. 4:17 and Luke 17:34).18 The Apocalypse is seen to contain prophecies of contemporary institutions and events. For example, the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear installation in the USSR in 1986 was identified by some with Rev. 8:11.

24.11. The Apocalypse and Art Unsurprisingly, the Apocalypse, as the most suggestively visual text in the Bible, has appealed to many artists. Illustrated Apocalypse manuscripts from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries indicate connected cycles of illustrations.19 One of the earliest such surviving manuscripts, the Trier Apocalypse, produced near Tours, France, around the year 800, has a cycle of seventy-four full-page illustrations.20 A different kind of artistic representation is found in the Liber Figurarum of Joachim of Fiore, already mentioned, which contains sixteen diagrams apparently drawn under Joachim’s direction and collected 17

P. Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1992). 18 J.J. Collins et al., eds., The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, vol. 2 (New York: Continuum), 1998. 19 G. Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst, Part 5: Die Apokalypse des Johannes, 2 vols., Textteil (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1990), 117; and Emmerson and McGinn, The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages. 20 Trier, Stadtbibliothek, ms. 31; Schiller, Apokalypse: Textteil, 142–144; F. van der Meer, Apocalypse: Visions from the Book of Revelation in Western Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978), 92–100.

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after his death in 1202.21 These detailed drawings, which incorporate explanatory words of Joachim, do not illustrate specific scenes of the Apocalypse but instead express in symbolic pictures the essence of Joachim’s views on history and eschatology. Over the centuries the Apocalypse has also inspired countless painted panels. These include altarpieces such as that painted by Jan van Eyck for a chapel of Saint John in the Cathedral of St. Bavo in Ghent.22 Its central panel, known as the ‘Mystical Lamb’, exemplifies an interpretation that goes back to Tyconius and Augustine, which emphasises relevance for the church in the present time. Here the division between heaven and earth is transcended in the Eucharistic feast, as the Lamb in the midst of the throne (Rev. 5) is found on an altar on earth. Another fifteenth-century altarpiece, a triptych made by Hans Memling for St. John’s Hospital in Bruges (1475–1487), features numerous scenes from the life of John as well as a depiction of the seer experiencing the vision on Patmos. Scenes that appear frequently in painted panels include John’s vision in Rev. 1 (e.g. Hieronymus Bosch, ‘St. John on Patmos’, Staatliche Museen Berlin, ca 1500). The link between the Apocalypse, art and history is nowhere better seen than in Sandro Botticelli’s ‘The Mystic Nativity’ which is inspired by Revelation, despite its depiction of the Nativity. The caption, written in Greek capitals, indicates that the picture links to Rev. 11–12 and also to the political upheavals in Italy and Florence, which came about as the result of the apocalyptic preaching of Savonarola: I, Alexandros, was painting this picture at the end of the year 1500 in the tr[oubles] of Italy in the half time after the time according to the eleventh chapter of St. John in the second woe of the Apocalypse in the loosing of the devil for three and a half years. Then he will be chained, and we shall see him [trodden down], as in this picture.

In the inscription he links the ascent of the beast from the bottomless pit in 11:7 with the loosing of the devil after the millennium (20:3, 7). Botticelli writes of the second woe of 11:14, after which, in Rev. 11, the loud voices in heaven proclaim that the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of the Lord and of the Messiah. It parallels the kind of overcoming of the forces of darkness referred to in John Milton’s ‘Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ (1629): ‘And then at last our bliss / Full and perfect is, / But now begins; for from this happy day / Th’ old Dragon under ground, / In straiter limits bound, / Not half so far casts his usurpéd sway, / And, wroth to see his

21

M. Reeves and B. Hirsch-Reich, The Figurae of Joachim of Fiore (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972); B. McGinn, Apocalyptic Spirituality: Treatises and Letters of Lactantius, Adso of Montier-en-Der, Joachim of Fiore, the Franciscan Spirituals, Savonarola (London: SPCK, 1979), 103–111; Schiller, Apokalypse: Textteil, 168–171. 22 Schiller, Apokalypse: Textteil, 307–311; van der Meer, Apocalypse, 236–257.

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kingdom fail, / Swinges the scaly horror of his folded tail’ (cf. Rev. 12:4).23 Botticelli reads Rev. 11–12 as a prophecy of the eschatological realities of his day, in which the period of Antichrist prefigures the return of the Messiah and the overcoming of the powers of darkness, signified by the vision of the woman in Rev. 12 who gives birth to the Messiah. The bruising of the serpent’s head of Gen. 3:15 may be depicted in the form of the little beaten devils that crawl away into their holes, reflecting Rev. 6:15. Viewers are led up the path to the central scene of the picture framed by the dawn sky. Angels and humans embrace in the eschatological glory now revealed, as Florence becomes the focus of this apocalyptic deliverance. Nowhere is John’s visionary state better captured than in Diego Velázquez’s work St John the Evangelist on the Island of Patmos. Velázquez depicts John ‘in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day’ (Rev. 1:9). The ecstatic prophet fills the whole picture.24 John ‘in the Spirit’ responds to the command to write, as the empty page offers him the space for the divine words, which have so much import (‘I warn every one who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if any one adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book’; Rev. 22:18). There is a glimpse of what John sees in his vision in the top corner of the image, where the vision of the Woman being pursued by the dragon may be glimpsed.25 William Blake explicitly traced a line of continuity between his own idiosyncratic myth and John’s vision, for John, too, had seen what Blake had seen.26 Both manifested the ‘Poetic Genius, the Spirit of Prophecy’.27 Blake’s imaginative engagement with Revelation reflects the kind of actualising exegesis of Tyconius. Contemporary events become a part of Blake’s creative engagement with Revelation and inform Blake’s understanding of his own political situation. For example, in 1798, in the margin of his copy of the Bishop of Llandaff’s Apology for the Bible, he wrote: ‘To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life. The Beast and the Whore rule without controls.’28

23

J. Milton, ‘Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, xviii.165–172. H.O. Maier, Apocalypse Recalled: The Book of Revelation after Christendom (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002). 25 I. Boxall, Patmos in the Reception History of the Apocalypse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 205–207; and Rowland, ‘Imagining the Apocalypse’, 310–312 = below, pp. 516–519. 26 William Blake, The Four Zoas 8:592–620; and Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 146. 27 William Blake, All Religions Are One, Principle 5 (D.V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, newly rev. edn. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982], 1). 28 Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 611. 24

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The ‘picture-making words’ of the Apocalypse have stimulated the imagination and its translation into visual images and representations in paintings.29 Artists down the centuries have offered their understanding of the problems posed by the text as they sought to visualise and express it in their images. While images offer a stimulus to the imagination, through visualisation as a path to engagement with and interpretation of Scripture, parallel to the ways in which the language of the Apocalypse itself functioned, every image is itself a fossilisation of that stimulus and, as such, can restrict imagination as much as stimulate picture making in the imagination of those who engage with it. That said, there is something particularly apt about visual exegesis of the Apocalypse, which is in continuity with what this text seems to provoke by its comparisons and allusiveness. Botticelli describes his ‘Mystic Nativity’ as a γραφή (graphē), and his picture not only includes words but also is ‘writing’ in pictorial form, offering an exegesis of Revelation exploring the imaginative space that an allusive text like Revelation may offer. The images are more a gateway opening up the text to new interpretative possibilities.

24.12. Review of the Literature Despite its link with expectations about the cataclysmic end to history, Revelation has had an important part to play in Christian intellectual history. Its framework contrasting the earthly and heavenly cities is the inspiration for Augustine’s classic statement of Christian theology, and it has proved to be one resource, along with other biblical prophetic texts, for prognostications about the eschatological future. As the present article indicates, there are two major approaches to the interpretation of Revelation: (a) one in which the book is translated from the dramatic apocalyptic images into key persons and events in history, whether past, present or future, and (b) another in which it is interpreted figuratively as the struggle that goes on in the individual and society between competing sets of values. Scholarship on the book has often reacted against its varied use. Thus, at the time of the Reformation, there emerged an interpretative approach that has held sway in subsequent historical scholarship, which relates Revelation solely to the politics, history and circumstances of writing in the final decades of the first century CE whether that be during the reign of Nero (as seems likely in the light of Rev. 17:9–11) or of Domitian (which is what Irenaeus suggests in Adv. haer. 5.30.3). Alongside this there have been many attempts to see its events being acted out in history and its images speaking to the shortcomings of society, whether 29 M.J. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 152–153.

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ecclesial or political. The Apocalypse has played a significant role in Christian iconography and has been a feature in modern culture and film.30

30 Schiller, Ikonographie; J. Walliss and K. Newport, The End All around Us: Apocalyptic Texts and Popular Culture (London: Equinox, 2009); and J. Walliss and L. Quinby, Reel Revelations: Apocalypse and Film, Bible in the Modern World 31 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press), 2010.

25. Paul as an Apocalyptist When Ed Sanders’s epoch-making book on Paul came out in 1977,1 I recall being struck by a passing reference to ecstatic mysticism and thinking that there was a dimension of Pauline thought which was relegated to relative insignificance. Indeed, I gave a response to Ed’s book when it was discussed at the New Testament seminar in the early 1980s. It was an issue that mattered to me, particularly at that time, as I had devoted the previous decade trying to explore the implications of apocalyptic/mysticism for the New Testament. Perhaps I was over optimistic in hoping that this doyen of the relationship of ancient Judaism to the New Testament might have seen what I had seen. Sanders knew Scholem’s work as well as I did, but it was as refracted through Ephraim Urbach’s view of the rabbinic material that counted.2 That meant that the Scholem line on the importance of the mystical, in the sense of an experiential dimension, in ancient Judaism was downplayed. A theologically orientated view of Paul, which plays down the apocalyptic dimension and stresses continuity with Jewish traditions, omits something crucial from the understanding of the Pauline corpus. Reading Paul in the light of ‘normal mysticism’, or Urbach’s entirely plausible construal of the rabbinic traditions about the merkabah, or, for that matter, Peter Schäfer’s,3 reduces the significance of the ‘apocalyptic Paul’ who subordinated human traditions and convention to ‘the apocalypse of Jesus Christ’ (Gal. 1:16) and lived with the consequences for himself and those whom he influenced by his testimony. It is not that Paul is far removed from the rabbis. In many ways, his writing resembles their sentiments with regard to the management of the ecstatic and revelatory very closely. But that similarity was born in a situation where the ecstatic, the revelatory, the disruptive threatened to wreak havoc and some1 E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (London: SCM, 1977), 220. 2 E.E. Urbach, ‘Ha-mesorot ʿal torat ha-sod bitequpat ha-tannaim’ (‘The Traditions about Merkabah Mysticism in the Tannatic Period’), in Studies in Mysticism and Religion: Presented to Gershom Scholem on his Seventieth Birthday by Pupils, Colleagues and Friends, eds. idem et al. (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1967), 1–30; and further, D.J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988). 3 P. Schäfer, The Origins of Jewish Mysticism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009).

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thing else was needed which would bring some kind of order to what seemed like an apocalyptic chaos, the divisiveness of whose power politics, rightly or wrongly, had alarmed Paul in Corinth. In the case of the rabbis, it was immersion in the tradition; that was true to some extent in Paul’s case too (cf. 1 Cor. 14:33–34) but there was also appeal to the authority of one who had seen the Lord (1 Cor. 9:1) and carried in his body Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:10, cf. Gal. 2:20) to demand submission to his words. ‘The apocalyptic Paul’ is now a popular construal, but in a way different from what I then understood – and still understand. J.C. Beker and J. Louis Martyn, inspired by Ernst Käsemann, have trodden in Schweitzer’s footsteps, as did Sanders to some extent in following Schweitzer in his advocacy of ‘participationist eschatology’, in arguing for an ‘apocalyptic’ Paul.4 But apocalyptic in this context meant the cataclysmic disruptive eschatology, which Käsemann believed was typical of apocalyptic. When ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘eschatological’ are merged and have similar meanings, both lose their heuristic value for understanding the intellectual history of early Christianity, and Paul’s thought, in particular. On the margins of Pauline scholarship, there have been dissenting voices, many of whom have, in recent years, been linked with the religious experience seminar at the Society of Biblical Literature. The late Alan Segal, in particular – and in a parallel but more overtly history of religions mode, John Ashton – argued for locating Paul in mystical and apocalyptic traditions.5 As far as I am concerned, apocalyptic as eschatology, and apocalyptic as mysticism are not an either/or, as the eschatological Paul is every bit as crucial as the apocalyptic/mystical Paul. But, in nuce, I find it as impossible to understand Paul’s activity without his belief in the breaking in of a new age as I do to understand that conviction without recourse to the life-changing vision which brought it about. As Martyn has pointed out, the epistemology of ‘the turn of the ages’ is crucial for understanding.6 That epistemology is intimately linked with the ‘apocalyptic’. Apocalyptic epistemology – in the sense of the ways in which claim to visionary experience has consequences for the way in 4 J.C. Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1980); J.L. Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 33A (New York: Doubleday, 1997); E. Käsemann, ‘The Beginnings of Christian Theology’, and ‘On the Subject of Primitive Christian Apocalyptic’, in idem, New Testament Questions of Today, trans. W.J. Montague (London: SCM, 1969), 82–107 and 108–137. 5 A.F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); J. Ashton, The Religion of Paul the Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 6 J.L. Martyn, ‘Epistemology at the Turn of the Ages: 2 Corinthians 5.16’, in Christian History and Interpretation: Studies Presented to John Knox, eds. W.R. Farmer et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 269–287.

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which one lives – may confirm prejudices or overturn them, for visions offer a mode of knowing which can either complement received wisdom or turn it on its head, and Gershom Scholem suggested that ‘the most radical of revolutionary mystics are those who not only reinterpret and transform a religious authority, but aspire to establish a new authority based on their own experience’. According to Scholem, Paul is ‘the most outstanding example known to us of a revolutionary Jewish mystic’.7 This article is about the importance of the apocalyptic element in understanding the writings and life of Paul. The consideration begins with a short survey of the change in the understanding of ‘apocalypse’ and ‘apocalyptic’ in writing over the last forty years before moving to consideration of ‘apocalypse’ in Pauline texts. Particular consideration will be given to 1 Corinthians where the clash between the apocalyptic and community cohesion is particularly sharp and Paul’s own apocalyptic authority comes into conflict with others who could make similar claims to be ‘taught by God’ (cf. 1 Thess. 4:9; John 6:45). The essay concludes with a hermeneutical perspective informed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s discussion of different types of mysticism and its possible implications for the study of Jewish apocalyptic in the thought of Paul the Apostle. This is not an exercise which seeks to explain the totality of Paul’s thought by reference to apocalyptic but more an attempt to show that without attention to the ‘apocalyptic’ in addition to the eschatological, we shall not understand what Paul writes, whether in terms of his positive assertions about the importance of the apocalypse of Jesus Christ for his own authority or the effects of apocalypse on the nascent Christian communities which had come together as a result of his activity as one who believed himself called by God to be the apostle to the gentiles. The Paul of the extant letters does not come across as an interpreter of apocalyptic or prophetic oracles with a divinely given wisdom so much as a figure whose authority in this phase of his life owes everything to an apocalyptic conviction. Such a claim seems to have puzzled his contemporaries (Acts 26:24) and inspired their claims and continued to inspire individuals down the centuries – for example, Mani.8 The focus of this discussion is on Galatians and 1 Corinthians, but letters attributed to Paul, such as Colossians and Ephesians, should be taken into account in any discussion of ‘the apocalyptic Paul’. The apocalyptic background of the cosmology of Ephesians was recognised long ago, and apocalyptic issues pervade the Letter to the Colossians with concern for the activities of

7 G. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 11, 14. 8 R. Cameron and A.J. Dewey, The Cologne Mani codex (P. Colon. inv. nr. 4780): Concerning the Origin of his Body, SBLTT 15 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979), 47–49.

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the angels and the emulating of them (Col. 2:16–18, cf. 2:21).9 We know from the apocalypses and later Jewish mystical material that strict preparation was a necessary prerequisite for the receipt of visions. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, just as the angels in heaven have their allotted place in the heavenly liturgy (4Q405 23 i, cf. 2 En. 20:3–21:1), so the earthly community is given a position corresponding to God’s everlasting purpose (1QS 2:22–26; 5:23–24; 6:8–10). It is possible that the problem addressed had two components: the ritual preparations and the visions themselves and an unhealthy concentration on other, lesser, heavenly beings, rather than Christ. In the light of this, the remarkable words in Col. 1:15–20 and 2:9 become comprehensible. Passages such as Justin, Dial. 114, where Christ is identified with the human figure on the throne of glory, suggest that Christ as the image of the invisible God is the concrete expression of God, the divine kābōd (cf. John 12:42; and 1:18, cf. 2 Cor. 4:6; 1 Cor. 15:49). He took the form of a slave who had put on a heavenly, glorious body (Phil. 2:6, cf. 3:21).10

25.1. Apocalyptic as Revelation and the New Testament In 1976, Michael Stone published a landmark contribution to the debate about apocalypticism.11 The apocalyptic writings had to be seen not simply in a stream of tradition that flowed from the prophets; they bore some of the characteristics of Jewish wisdom literature. Stone argued that, if we take the opening chapters of 1 Enoch seriously, and particularly, the introductory miscellany preceding the story of the seduction of the women by the Watchers, the wisdom elements parallel lists of revealed things in other apocalyptic texts. The legends and the cosmography, which we also find in the opening chapters of 1 Enoch, might give us pause for thought before we emphasise 9 See the collection in F.O. Francis and W.A. Meeks, eds., Conflict at Colossae: A Problem in the Interpretation of Early Christianity, Illustrated by Selected Modern Studies (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1975); C. Rowland and C.R.A. Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament, CRINT 12 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 156–166. 10 Rowland and Morray-Jones, Mystery of God, 156–166; J.E. Fossum, The Image of the Invisible God: Essays on the Influence of Jewish Mysticism on Early Christology, NTOA 30 (Freiburg, Switzerland: Universitätsverlag, 1995); M. Bockmuehl, ‘“The Form of God” (Phil 2:6): Variations on a Theme of Jewish Mysticism’, JTS 48 (1997): 1–23; G. Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah, trans. J. Neugroschel (New York: Schocken, 1991), 278, n. 19; and G. Stroumsa, ‘Forms of God: Some Notes on Metatron and Christ’, HTR 76 (1983): 269–288. 11 M.E. Stone, ‘Lists of Revealed Things in the Apocalyptic Literature’, in Magnalia Dei, the Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, eds. F.M. Cross et al. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976), 414–452; also, ‘A Reconsideration of Apocalyptic Visions’, HTR 96 (2003): 167–180.

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eschatology as the interpretative key of ‘apocalyptic’. His definition of apocalypticism began not with Daniel, but with 1 Enoch. That is, so-called apocalyptic eschatology and its prophetic roots could no longer be privileged in discussions and definitions of apocalypticism. Moreover, with the early dating of parts of 1 Enoch, one had to completely rethink the shape of Jewish religious and intellectual life in the third century BC. In the report of the Apocalypse Group of the SBL Genres Project, with references to apocalypses in antiquity, which included works of Jewish, Early Christian, Gnostic, Greek and Latin, Rabbinic and Mystical, and Persian origin, it offered the following definition: ‘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.12

This definition is the basis for a scholarly consensus. The only thing from which I would possibly dissent is the lack of clarity concerning the phrase ‘transcendent reality’. While it is true that the revelation offered of salvation is at the time it is revealed – whether through vision or angelic mediation – a transcendent reality, that ‘transcendent reality’ would be realised on earth, not in heaven or some transcendent world. I wonder if there is here still too much of a residue of the legacy of the influence of neat definitions of ‘Apokalyptik’ in this otherwise acceptable definition. The strength of the SBL project is the more ‘emic’ approach to what constitutes apocalyptic. The same issue applies with mysticism. Bernard McGinn’s definition in The Foundations of Mysticism arises out of a detailed historical study not only of the texts but also the terminological discussion. He summarises his view under three headings: ‘a part or element of religion … a process or way of life … an attempt to express a direct consciousness of the presence of God’.13 He rightly argues that mysticism should not be hived off into a separate category but should be part and parcel of the fabric of religion, a particular dimension of its theological claim, which is encapsulated by his words ‘direct consciousness of the presence of God by whatever means, vision, a sense of being caught up into the divine or some other immediate apprehension of divinity’.

12

J.J. Collins, ‘Introduction: Toward the Morphology of a Genre’, in Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre, ed. idem = Semeia 14 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979), 1–20, at 9. 13 B. McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, The Presence of God, Vol. 1 (London: SCM, 1991), xv–xvi.

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25.2. Paul and Jewish Mysticism It is the name of Albert Schweitzer’s which is linked with the discussion of Paul and mysticism.14 Indeed, his study includes reference to eschatological texts in the apocalypses, but I want to begin this section by referring to an important study by John Bowker, which offered a detailed analysis of the different versions of Eleazar ben Arak’s exposition of the merkabah chapter of Ezekiel before his teacher Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai. Bowker suggests that Paul in the ‘perfectly ordinary process of merkabah contemplation reflected the voice of commission to Ezekiel in Ezek. 2’.15 Whereas Ezekiel was told to go not to strangers but the house of Israel, Paul became convinced that it was not the Christians who were the rebellious people but the Jews who had commissioned him.16 What may have happened is that Ezek. 1–2 offered a coherent context for the sudden reversal of his beliefs. Ezek. 2 took on a dramatic new meaning. Bowker notes that Ezek. 2:1, 3 is quoted in part in Acts 26:16. The lack of explicit reference to the merkabah in the testimonies about Paul is the result of the fact that Saul’s occupation at the time of the vision paled into insignificance compared with the transformative effects of the vision itself. Though visions were often regarded with suspicion, these were part of rabbinic orthodoxy, a form of ‘higher education’, to be undertaken only by the very well trained (as stated in the Mishnah). The engagement with the merkabah chapter was exegetical as much as it was visionary, but the attempt to understand the meaning of the passages (particularly the ‘chariot’ chapters) might lead the exegete to ‘see again’ the vision of the original prophet: in a sense, the vision is the meaning of the passage. Hence the ‘seeing again’ of the vision might well arise from contemplation on the ‘chariot’ chapters, but it did not necessarily do so on every occasion that the chapters were contemplated; … the answer to uncontrolled and privately inventive apocalyptic was apocalypse which arose from a total exegesis of Scripture, with the part remaining a part, and not becoming an independent end in itself.17

Ulrich Luz protests against the consequences of dialectical theology and Reformation suspicion of mysticism and enthusiasm and points us to the ‘etic’ character of the word ‘mysticism’.18 He argues that it is a phenomenon 14

A. Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, trans. W. Montgomery (London: A&C Black, 1931). See further now G. Macaskill, Union with Christ in the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 15 J. Bowker, ‘‘Merkabah” Visions and the Visions of Paul’, JSS 16 (1971): 157–173, at 160; D.C. Allison Jr., ‘Acts 9:1–9, 22:6–11, 26:12–18: Paul and Ezekiel’, JBL 135 (2016): 807–826. 16 Bowker, ‘“Merkabah” Visions’, 172. 17 Bowker, ‘“Merkabah” Visions’, 158 (emphasis added). 18 U. Luz, ‘Paul as a Mystic’, in The Holy Spirit and Christian Origins: Essays in Honor of James D.G. Dunn, eds. G.N. Stanton et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 131–143.

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which only since the eighteenth century has come to be seen as an independent form of piety (more of that anon). ‘Mysticism’, he suggests, is a modern term and he sees in its emergence what he calls ‘the fate of modernity in the field of intellectual history: the concept of “mysticism” arose as a result of a particular type of piety’s gaining independence from theologia’. For Luz, mysticism signifies the overcoming of distance between human and divine. He is opposed to the narrowing down of the discussion of Pauline mysticism to the ecstatic phenomena of 1 Cor. 12–14 and insists that the discussion of Pauline mysticism embraces the gift of the Spirit which he considers, Schweitzer-like, to be the experiential basis of Pauline Christ-mysticism. Another passage to which he draws attention is Gal. 2:19–20, where in Luz’s view, Paul applies his own path to Christ to all Christians. Luz sums up his point in the words: ‘All Christians are mystics!’ Baptism is fundamental, and the identification with the suffering of Christ becomes an epiphany of Christ in the present. ‘If we understand by mysticism, the significance and cultivation of particular experiences of the absolute, then Paul is certainly a mystic.’19 Like Luz, Colleen Shantz considers discussions of Pauline mysticism and the ways in which Paul has been seen as an opponent of the ecstatic.20 She outlines how ecstatic experiences are a key part of Paul’s public discourse, and the way in which his claims about the gospel enable the crucified messiah to be a transformative force in Paul’s own life and in the lives of those to whom he writes. Shantz has put her finger on a tension in much Pauline scholarship. In the way in which most of us write about the Pauline corpus, there is readily evident a tension between that sense of dealing with a person, Paul, while all we have are his words. It is the preoccupation with the latter, and the profound unease with the quest for the man, and even more what might have been going on in his head and his heart which Shantz gets us to reconsider in a welcome contribution to the study of the religion of Paul and of the widespread phenomena of visionary and ecstatic experience in antiquity.

25.3. Paul and the Apocalypse of Jesus Christ According to Gal. 1:16, Saul now understood that the glorious human figure seated on the throne was Jesus.21 There is an affinity of Paul’s views with those known in rabbinic sources, where a second power is given authority

19

Luz, ‘Paul as a Mystic’, 132. C. Shantz, Paul in Ecstasy: The Neurobiology of the Apostle’s Life and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 21 S. Kim, The Origin of Paul’s Gospel, WUNT 2.4, 2nd edn. (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1984), esp. 242–253. 20

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alongside God (e.g. b.Hag. 15a; 3 En. 16).22 These were exactly the views which were typical of the early Christians, including Paul, who on the basis of Ps. 110:1 (‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand”’) gave the exalted Christ a position of prominence and divine authority, albeit derived from God the Father (1 Cor. 15:24–28, cf. Matt. 22:44). The problem posed for his contemporaries by Paul, was that he seemed to have engaged in what might have appeared as an ‘undisciplined’ apocalyptic exegesis, whose christological consequences were at odds with the total exegesis of the Scripture he inherited from his Pharisaic teachers. Thus, for Paul, the Law of Moses and the culture in which he had been brought up took a subordinate place to the exalted messiah whom he had met in an apocalyptic vision. However much Paul may have protested, as the accounts in Acts suggest that he did, the basic challenge he posed was that it was not the tradition handed down from Moses through the elders and teachers to the ancient ‘fathers’ which mattered, but the exercise of ‘apocalyptic imagination’ which authenticated that tradition. That was the decisive move: first experience, and only then, the tradition. The problems of apocalyptic thought are arguably as central to our understanding of the apocalyptic Paul as their positive contribution. In 1 Corinthians, especially, we find passages, which expound the revelatory, but in such a way that it is managed or qualified, and the attempt is made to impose the authority of the apostle on a community whose own apocalyptic ethos made acknowledgement of heteronomy problematic. Arguably, 1 Corinthians is all about the hegemony of the apocalyptic and the attempt to confine its impact. Despite the fact that Paul was himself a visionary, he sought to circumscribe the power of the apocalyptic, by stressing his own authority at the expense of the apocalyptic freedom of the Corinthians. Apart from Gal. 1:12–16, the most obvious link with the Jewish mystical tradition is the experience recorded in 2 Cor. 12:2–4.23 While Paul speaks of the ineffable words he heard on that occasion, the experience appears to differ from the Damascus Road experience in not having that peculiar life-changing quality about it, or if it did, Paul has chosen not to divulge it. If Acts is to be believed, it was not the only such experience which Paul had (Acts 22:17; 27:23). The experience in 2 Corinthians is obviously a highly stylised, fragmentary, account. Several explanations of it are possible. Paul may describe in two different ways the same experience, or two different events, or two stages of the same experience, or even two attempts to reach heaven with differing results on the same occasion. It is possible that the experience was embarrassing to Paul as it is linked to his weakness. It could be a ‘failed’,

22 C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982), 331–340. 23 Rowland and Morray-Jones, Mystery of God, 137–142, 341–420.

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mystical ascent.24 Such a failure to achieve the climax of the mystical ascent would indeed have been an admission of weakness and would have few parallels in the extant texts. Normally, the climactic moment of the vision is reached when the seer beholds the glory of God in the highest heaven. That Paul is using traditional language and the style of Jewish apocalyptic is apparent from the cosmological language and rapture. His use of the Greek ἁρπάζω is particularly pertinent. It is a word used elsewhere in the New Testament to speak of the mysterious rapture of individuals whether to heaven (1 Thess. 4:17; Rev. 12:5, cf. Wisd. 4:11; LXX Gen. 5:24), or from one place on earth to another (Acts 8:39). In 2 Cor. 12, the mystical raptures are not the qualifications on which the apostle grounds his authority boast, but rather his suffering and humiliation. Another important apocalyptic theme is divine secrets and hidden wisdom. In 1 Cor. 15:51, for example, he explains in climactic style the problem of the resurrection by resorting to the revelation of a mystery about eschatological transformation. Even more importantly, as a steward of the divine mysteries (1 Cor. 4:1), he lets his Roman readers into the eschatological mystery of Israel’s strange destiny in Rom. 11:25. Such mysteries are hidden from the rulers of the present age (1 Cor. 2:6–8). In Col. 1:26 (cf. Rom. 16:27; Eph. 3:3), for example, God’s plan for the salvation of the Gentiles is portrayed as an apocalyptic mystery which Paul has been privileged to receive and which forms the basis for the apostolic ministry in which he is engaged. It is an enterprise on a truly cosmic scale (1 Cor. 4:10, cf. Rev. 14:6) as God’s fellow workers (1 Cor. 3:9). Indeed, Paul sees himself as an architect working according to a divine master plan, parallel to Moses himself (Exod. 25:9, 40, cf. 2 Cor. 3; 1 Chron. 28:18). The foundation of the divine mystery is the revelatory event (Rom. 1:17–18). In Rom. 3:22, this apocalyptic event was heralded by the Law and the Prophets, but is essentially a fresh and definitive revelation from God. The revelation of that divine wisdom to which the true apostle has access is a mystery taught by the Spirit, and can only be understood by others who themselves have the Spirit (1 Cor. 2:10). The divine mysteries, knowledge of which is the goal of the mystical ascent, are available now through the Spirit and in the proclamation of the cross. 2 Cor. 3–4 give us a glimpse of beliefs about the present transformation which takes place not through heavenly ascent to the angelic realm but through identification with the pattern of Christ whose path to glory involved affliction and death. The mystery hidden from before the foundation of the world is one that is now revealed, but this apocalypse is of the crucified Christ, a stumbling block to many. The divine is revealed in the world of flesh, not through heavenly ascent but in the cross of Christ and the lives of 24

P.R. Gooder, Only the Third Heaven? 2 Corinthians 12.1–10 and Heavenly Ascent, LNTS 313 (London: T&T Clark, 2006).

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his followers, especially his apostle, whose path involves affliction and death. The revelation remains a mystery to those on the way to perdition (2 Cor. 2:16).25 The goal of salvation is to become like the resurrected Christ (Phil. 3:20). Paul’s apocalyptic vision had devastating effects on his conventional assumptions and practice, which led him to advocate a new covenant, not merely a reaffirmation of what had gone before. As the one who outshone Moses in his διακονία (2 Cor. 3), Paul had access to greater mysteries than were received by Moses but which rendered those obsolescent (hence, the repeated καταργούµενον) even if they were seen to be a herald of that greater glory. 2 Cor. 3, as a contrast between Moses and Paul, ends up as an assertion about the present transformative glory which belongs to those who are ministers of the new covenant. These ministers do not need their faces veiled, for they have nothing to hide, as the apostolic ministers reflect the divine glory. There is uncertainty about the precise meaning of κατοπτριζόµενοι in 3:18. Its middle form suggests the translation ‘reflect’, but there could be ideas here that those reflecting the divine glory do so as a result of beholding it (cf. 2 En. 22) where the seer beholds the glory of God, and this results in his reflecting the glory which he had been privileged to see. Paul is both a steward of the divine mysteries (1 Cor. 4:1) and the one who bears the glory of the crucified Jesus. As such, he is both a beholder, and a reflector, of the divine glory. The pattern of the transformation of which Paul speaks in 2 Cor. 3:18 is the divine image, and the means by which it takes place is the Lord who is the Spirit. The phrase ‘from glory to glory’ suggests a progressive transformation. It is the kind of pattern of development described in the Ascension of Isaiah, for example, where there are different levels of glory in the different heavens. Isaiah’s ascent to the heavenly world brings about a transformation of his own body as he approaches the seventh heaven. In 2 Cor. 3–4, Paul gives us a glimpse of beliefs about the present transformation which takes place not through heavenly ascent but through identification with the pattern of Christ whose path to glory involved affliction and death. The visionary perspective of messianism and apocalyptic, prompting as it does the freedom of the Spirit in both Galatians and in Romans, sits uneasily with a different ethic evident in the Pauline corpus. But even there, the challenge to conventional religion, supported by an appeal to mysticism, sets these texts apart from the merely predictable and conformist and may explain something of their innovativeness and continuing effects. It is no coincidence that the author of Romans and Galatians should have been deemed an antinomian by his opponents (a fact that he is compelled to deny in Rom. 3:8; 6:1, cf. Acts 21:17–26). The heart of his religion has ceased to be the Torah, and its 25

Rowland and Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God, 150–156.

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place has been taken by ‘the revelation of Jesus Christ’, with all that came to mean for belief about God and halakah (though the Torah is not abandoned so much as seen in a new – perhaps one should say, mystical – light). That point is affirmed in the climax of his argument in the opening chapters of Romans, where he contends that ‘without the Law God’s righteousness has been revealed’. Apocalypticism explains Paul’s new reading of inherited traditions. Of course, visions and revelations may only have confirmed accepted patterns of belief and practice, and need have offered no threat to conventional wisdom about the character of the covenant. The subversive element in early Christianity owes much to that apocalyptic inheritance.

25.4. The Consequences of Apocalypse: ‘Apocalyptic Faith Consummated in Active Life’ There is a dramatic moment in the trial of Anne Hutchinson in New England in 1637 when she explains to her interrogator the priority she gives to ‘speaking what in my conscience I know to be truth’ and that the Lord ‘hath let me see which was the clear ministry and which the wrong’ by ‘an immediate revelation’. She appeals to Gen. 22 and Abraham’s conviction that it was ‘an immediate voice’ that bid him offer his son. This she took as an analogy to the way in which ‘an immediate revelation’, ‘By the voice of [God’s] own spirit to my soul’, a crucial matter was settled for her. In the opinion of those judging her, this clear enunciation of her convictions, at the climax of what had hitherto been a very measured response, condemned her. So, John Winthrop, in his summing-up, thanked divine providence for making Hutchinson ‘lay open her self and the ground of all these disturbances to be by revelation’.26 The 1630s’ Antinomian Controversy in New England is the tip of the iceberg of a network of beliefs, influenced in part by Paul’s letters and biblical apocalyptic passages and claims to direct experience of the divine, which reverberated around New (and Old) England for a century or so. It is strange to describe this controversy as ‘antinomian’, because at its heart it is ‘apocalyptic’, the appeal of God’s own spirit to my soul, a reference which echoes 1 Cor. 2:10–11, a passage to the consideration of which we now turn.

26 D.D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History, 2nd edn. (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1990), 337, 341; and A.S. Lang, Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of Dissent in the Literature of New England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), esp. 27.

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25.4.1. First Corinthians One of the most apocalyptic passages in the Pauline corpus is found in 1 Cor. 2. It deserves to take its place alongside the Book of Revelation as one of the apocalyptic passages in the New Testament. It is chock full of language about revelation (2:10), of mystery (2:1), of things hidden and things revealed (cf. 2:7), and at the heart of this apocalypse is the Spirit of God, enabling humans to understand the deep things of God (2:10). Paul comes to the Corinthians engaged in making an announcement which filled him with the fear and trembling which often accompanied accounts of apocalyptic moments (cf. Rev. 1:16–17; 1 En. 14:9, 24; Apoc. Abr. 10). This is the Pauline chapter to which early Christian writers turned more than any other when they used Paul. It encapsulated for them the nature of the gospel and the truth which they too had been privileged to see.27 The language in 1 Cor. 2:2 about ‘mystery’ echoes apocalyptic elements such as we find in Dan. 2:28 (and elsewhere in the New Testament, e.g. Mark 4:11; Rom. 16:25; Eph. 1:9; 3:3; Col. 1:26; 1 Tim. 3:16). In 2:7, we have the sharing of secrets, reminiscent of the kind of apocalyptic hermeneutical mediation claimed by the Teacher of Righteousness in 1QpHab 7 ‘to whom God made known all the mysteries of the words of his servants the prophets’ (1 Cor. 14:2; 15:51, cf. Matt. 11:25–27; 13:35; Col. 1:26; Rom. 8:30; 16:25; Eph. 1:4; 3:1–13; 1 Pet. 1:20; Rev. 13:8). Elsewhere in 1 Corinthians, Paul too is a broker of divine mysteries (1 Cor. 4:1). The exploration of the ‘deep things of God’ (1 Cor. 2:10) once again takes us back to the paradigmatic apocalyptic chapter (and its ‘deep mysteries’, Dan. 2:22). Possibly, it is a parody of this theme in either Dan. 2 or 1 Corinthians that the Son of Man alludes to in the reference to the ‘depths of Satan’ (Rev. 2:24). The context is the critique of the woman, Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet and is ‘teaching and beguiling my servants to practise fornication and to eat food sacrificed to idols’ (Rev. 2:20). It may be the Pauline ethos in 1 Cor. 8 which is implicitly criticised in Rev. 2, notwithstanding that the advice comes from one who regarded himself as a steward of the divine mysteries. Paul would probably have fallen foul of the visionary condemnation of the prophet of Patmos for calling himself an apostle of Christ, and yet, teaching people to eat food sacrificed to idols (cf. Rev. 2:20). 1 Cor. 2 is, in part, an insistence on the contrast between human and divine wisdom, and the content of the supreme divine mystery being that which the Spirit reveals, the cross of Christ. This section outlines a very different 27

J.R. Strawbridge, ‘A Community of Interpretation: The Use of 1 Corinthians 2:6–16 by Early Christians’, in Papers Presented at the Sixteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 2011, StPatr 63 (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), 69–80; eadem, ‘According to the Wisdom Given to Him’: The Use of Pauline Epistles by Early Christian Writers before Nicaea (Diss. phil., Oxford, 2014).

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epistemology which is based on divine knowledge, divine language, and judgement, which contrasts with human wisdom (2:5), which led the obsolescent rulers of this age to crucify the lord of glory. The consistency of theme and the distinctiveness of the apocalyptic pneumatology, not only fits Paul’s argument in the opening chapters of 1 Corinthians but is of a piece with his assertion of the contrast between human and apocalyptic authority (Gal. 1:1– 16) and the role of the Spirit of God in Rom. 8:5, 16. Apocalyptic enthusiasm pervades the passage, whether Paul is echoing the language of his Corinthian opponents or adapting it for his own ends. In Paul’s view, human and divine wisdom have been confused by the Corinthians and what they need to understand is that the criterion of the true divine mystery is a crucified messiah. This is the mystery hidden from the foundation of the world and which Paul now asserts as the heart of his preaching (2:1–6). The revelation of this mystery is the hallmark of the action of the divine Spirit. The Corinthians were possibly excluded from the privilege of access to the divine mystery in v. 6, but by 2:10, the ἡµῖν does seem to include them, who after all have responded – however inadequately in Paul’s view – to the ‘things God has revealed to us through the Spirit’. What follows about life in the Spirit in 2:10–16, therefore, applies to them too, even if the wider context of 1 Corinthians suggests that, in Paul’s estimation, the Corinthians have not exemplified this in the lives that they have lived, and in particular, in the divisions that exist among them. In 2:16, possessing the mind of Christ, but here, the first person, means that it probably applies only to the apostles, over against the majority of the Corinthians, who are still ‘babes’ (3:1). These verses in which Paul begins to set up a hierarchy about imitation of Christ to which he returns later in the letter (1 Cor. 11:1, cf. Rom. 15:5; Phil. 2:5) encapsulate the problem posed by apocalyptic epistemology. Claim to visions or the knowledge of God through the Spirit is all well and good when it affirms that which is conventional and already received. The problem comes, as it probably had for Paul in his dealings with the Corinthians, when the recipients of his letter claimed that knowledge too, and Paul seeks to work out some criteria for deciding who did – and who did not – possess such knowledge. But this is the problem Paul himself posed, not only to those who were followers of Christ before him but also to his erstwhile companions as Pharisees as a result of ‘the apocalypse of Jesus Christ’ (Gal. 1:12). Paul’s own position epitomises the problem of giving priority to the heavenly call and the subordination of other authorities which may result. In 1 Cor. 2, the tables are reversed as Paul seeks to counter those who claimed apocalyptic knowledge. It is one thing to be like Eliphaz in Job 4:17, whose vision confirmed his previous theological position; it is altogether different when the apocalyptic vision not only turned one’s world upside down but also inherited patterns of belief and practice, leading to different ways of living on the basis of such apocalyptic wisdom, however much the ethical advice may be related

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to received wisdom. The famous story of Elisha ben Abuyah (alias Aher) told in b.Hag. 15a demonstrates the catastrophic effects of a heavenly vision on received wisdom and its hegemony.28 As Margaret Mitchell has shown with regard to one example from the early reception of these verses, they indicate the importance of this crucial additional channel of interpretative insight rooted in the work of the apocalyptic indwelling Spirit, and not dependent on the Bible and tradition. In the following passage, Origen (Commentary on John 13.5–6) appeals to 1 Cor. 2 to make his point: If we say that someone knows ‘that which is beyond what stands written’ (1 Cor. 4:6), we are not saying that these things can be known by many … but the things which Paul learned, the ‘unspeakable words’ (2 Cor. 12:4) ‘beyond what stands written’ (1 Cor. 4:6), if indeed human beings have spoken the things that stand written. And ‘what the eye has not seen’ (1 Cor. 2:9) is beyond what is written, and ‘what the ear has not heard’ (1 Cor. 2:9) is not able to be written. And the things ‘that have not arisen in the heart of a human being’ (1 Cor. 2:9) are greater than the well of Jacob [John 4:11]. This is because from the well of water springing up to eternal life [John 4:13] they are made manifest to those who no longer have a human heart, but who are able to say, ‘We possess the mind of Christ’ (1 Cor. 2:16) ‘so that we may know the things that have been given to us by God’ (1 Cor. 2:12) which also speak, ‘not in teachings of human wisdom but in teachings of the spirit’ (1 Cor. 2:13).29

Hermeneutics here is not solely, or even primarily, about engagement with what is written on the page of Scripture, but that which comes to the believer independent of what is found in Scripture. ‘The things that have been given to us by God which also speak not in teachings of human wisdom but in teachings of the spirit’ underlines the limited character of what was written, and the reference to necessary additional fructifying of the life-giving water of the Spirit (cf. John 7:37) indicates that the great biblical scholar, Origen, did not allow himself to be confined to what the words of the Bible said in order to understand the ways of God’s Spirit. What is most extraordinary about 1 Cor. 2, however, is how it fits with the rest of 1 Corinthians, especially 1 Cor. 5. Indeed, one might ask why do those who are taught by the Spirit require any one to teach them as they are themselves subject to no one else’s scrutiny? Why does Paul write eloquently about the guidance of the Spirit, and out of the blue, offer his stern advice about how to treat one whom he believes to be a wrongdoer? As far as one can ascertain, the problem mentioned in 1 Cor. 5:1–5 does not seem to have been a problem for the Corinthians who have asked Paul’s advice (this may have come from Chloe’s people or the household of Stephanas, cf. 7:1). In

28

Rowland, The Open Heaven, 331–340. Translation in M.M. Mitchell, Paul, the Corinthians and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 36–37. 29

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this chapter, I believe that Paul betrays his continuing Jewish theological and cultural assumptions as he questions the spiritual character of the Corinthians (3:1). Lev. 18:8 is alluded to in 5:1 (‘You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s wife; it is the nakedness of your father’) and Deuteronomy alluded to at the end of the chapter. Paul vehemently opposed circumcision as an entry requirement into the Christian community, and like Jeremiah before him, was quite capable of interpreting it of the moral life (Col. 2:2–11). When it came to sexual mores as in 1 Cor. 5–6, the Gentile Church in Corinth was treated to full-blown levitical religion without so much as a word of explanation, other than the assertion of the authority of the apostle whose presence brooked no dissent (1 Cor. 5:3–5). The sexual impurity had to be rooted out of their midst, just as it had to be out of the midst of the people of God. Paul was intent in creating a holy temple (1 Cor. 3:16; 6:19; 2 Cor. 6:14–7:1) – a purified space, an extension of the Temple in Jerusalem – in the Corinthian community.30 Linking the believer’s body with a temple, which must be kept holy, means linking to purity laws. Grave sins, including sexual sins, defile the temple. If these sins are not expunged, God’s presence will depart. The injunction to be holy is a central concern of the purity codes (Lev. 10:10; 20:26). Πορνεία both defiles the land and the Temple as well as the offender, so believers, as the temple of God, the locus of the Holy Spirit, had to stay pure. Biblical holiness was now on the ethical agenda. The ‘quotation’ (if that is the right way of describing it) of Deuteronomy at the end of 1 Cor. 5:13 has become part of Paul’s rhetorical exposition and not, at least in the first instance, an authoritative proof. This is a remarkable phenomenon and significant for the nature of biblical hermeneutics, it seems to me, in that the words of the Bible are part of an act of persuasion and not in themselves, directly, a source of authority or a court of appeal. I can see that Paul’s giving voice to the Deuteronomy quotation here (as elsewhere) may, in addition to being part of the power of rhetorical appeal, reinforce his authority, for those with ears to hear an echo of Scripture in Paul’s words. Paul does not solve the problem here by appealing to the Bible as an authority even if it pervades the answer he gives. It is an example of what Ed Sanders has pointed out, namely, that when it came to how converts stayed in the nascent Christian community (rather than getting into it), the Law of Moses had its (albeit severely constricted ethical) part to play. If there is any scripture to which he appeals, it is his own words and the proper exegesis of them:

30 Cf. also the way in which communion with heaven is found in the life of the Christian community, similar to what we find in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls and in Eph. 2:6; 3:10. See Rowland and Morray-Jones, Mystery of God, 173–177.

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I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral persons – not at all meaning the immoral of this world, or the greedy and robbers, or idolaters, since you would then need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother or sister who is sexually immoral. (1 Cor. 5:9–11)

What seems most important is to get the correct meaning of Paul’s words rather than the right interpretation of the Bible! While Paul the Christian halakist is a little more lenient than letter of law, the fact is that he sets himself up as a teacher when he has said that those who have the Spirit need no one to teach them. What we have in the opening verses of 1 Cor. 5 is Paul uttering things, which would be ethical commonplace for Hellenistic Judaism, apparently assuming that the recipients of his letter would have shared his Jewish assumptions, and expressing shock that they do not. Paul seems to press the panic button of his cultural prejudices. How this relates to his powerful evocation of life in the Spirit in 1 Cor. 2, which he nowhere denies that the Corinthians share, is not made clear. 25.4.2. Wrestling with the Primacy of Apocalypse Debates about antinomianism have a long history31 but became an explicit part of theological vocabulary with the dispute between Luther and Johannes Agricola in the 1530s. Milton, while speaking dismissively of the ‘sort of men who follow Anabaptism, Familism, Antinomianism and other fanatic dreams’ goes on to make the perceptive point that this kind of approach to ethics, all this ‘proceed not partly, if not chiefly, from the restraint of some lawful liberty which ought to be given Men, and is deny’d them’ (On Divorce 14). The significant antinomian tradition in Judaism prompted by the life of Sabbatai Sevi (1626–1676), has prompted comparisons with early Christianity. W.D. Davies, among New Testament scholars, and Jacob Taubes have noticed the antinomian parallels with early Christianity, but there has been little significant exploration of its impact, whether historically or in terms of the potential in the New Testament texts themselves.32 The reception of the Pauline corpus has been responsible for the emergence of antinomianism at various points in Christian history.33 The Pauline texts are themselves com31

M. Mayordomo et al., ‘Antinomianism’, EBR 2:233–236. W.D. Davies, ‘From Schweitzer to Scholem: Reflections on Sabbatai Svi’, JBL 95.4 (1976): 529–558, repr. in idem, Jewish and Pauline Studies (London: SPCK, 1984), 257– 278; G. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973); J. Taubes, ‘The Price of Messianism’, JJS 33 (1982): 595–600, repr. in Essential Papers on Messianic Movements and Personalities in Jewish History, ed. M. Saperstein (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 551–558. 33 See D.R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre–Civil-War England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 32

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plex and seemingly contradictory, and while there are many warnings against antinomianism in the New Testament, including the Pauline corpus (Matt. 7:23; 13:41; 23:28; 24:12; Rom. 3:5–7; 6:1; 2 Cor. 6:14; 2 Thess. 2:3–8; 1 John 3:4), there is also rhetoric against law, and alongside it, assertions about the response to internal prompting rather than obedience to an external guide to behaviour, echoing Jer. 31:33. So, for example, Paul seems concerned to show how ‘the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled’ (Rom. 8:3–4). The issue was raised forty years ago and is now largely forgotten but deserves to be more than a footnote in the history of modern New Testament scholarship. It raised historical and hermeneutical problems, with regard to the interpretation of New Testament ethics and the emergence of Christianity. John Knox juxtaposed the ethic of Jesus and that of Paul, and found the latter wanting because of the lack of the dynamic of repentance and forgiveness, and what he considered was the inadequate theoretical structure of the theology underpinning Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith, which failed to offer a coherent theological response to antinomianism.34 Knox’s challenge received a response in the Festschrift which was presented to him, including essays by Paul Schubert and C.F.D. Moule.35 The latter analysed Paul’s understanding of identification with Christ and showed convincingly that even if Paul did not use the language of repentance and forgiveness, the Pauline language of submission to another lordship – say, in Rom. 6 – had an implicit notion of the dynamic of repentance and forgiveness, which paralleled that which Knox had identified in the Jesus tradition. That was the major concern of the Knox essay. What Moule failed to answer adequately, however, was the subsidiary point that there is inherent in the Pauline position a theological tendency which may lead to antinomianism. Even if the New Testament cannot in any overall sense be regarded as antinomian, the later reception of Pauline texts suggest that there are very strong elements in the New Testament which push in that direction. Paul’s textual legacy is ambiguous.36 On the one hand, at some points, Paul suggested that followers of Christ were free from the Law (Rom. 7:6). On the other hand, he made statements that even if believers were free from the Law, they were not free from moral duty to God. So, his letters are full of 2004), 104–112, for a concise statement of the problem; also C. Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 203–207. 34 J. Knox, The Ethic of Jesus and the Teaching of the Church: Its Authority and Relevance (London: Epworth, 1962). 35 C.F.D. Moule, ‘Obligation in the Ethic of Paul’, in Christian History and Interpretation: Studies Presented to John Knox, eds. W.R. Farmer et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 389–406. 36 See the interesting discussion of the positive contribution of antinomian elements in the Pauline letters by the distinguished legal and political theorist J. Waldron, in ‘“Dead to the Law”: Paul’s Antinomianism’, Cardozo Law Review 28 (2003): 301–332.

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instructions to avoid the works of the flesh (e.g. 1 Thess. 4:3–8). Paul’s most morally didactic statements were handed down to the community in Corinth, where certain renegade teachers (very probably Paul’s own converts) appeared to have deployed the rhetoric of Christian freedom to claim that Christians were free to determine how they lived. To counter this threat, Paul referred his readers to commands of the Lord (e.g. 1 Cor. 7:10) and lists of vices as a warning (e.g. 1 Cor. 6:9–10, cf. Rom. 1:29–30; Gal. 5:19–21). There is a tension, perhaps even an outright contradiction; Christ may have been the end of the Law (cf. Rom. 10:4), but that did not mean the end of any kind of moral rectitude. Paul’s favourite self-designation is the agent, or apostle, of Jesus Christ. As the peculiarly called agent of the Christ, he subordinates all human tradition to that. But he is not only an agent, for he is the one who imitated Christ (1 Cor. 11:1). Rarely, he uses language about Christ indwelling (e.g. Gal. 2:20), and can occasionally include fellow Christians also (Rom. 8:3–9), though Gal. 2:20 is an unusual passage and contrasts with the more inclusive ‘Christ in us’, which we find in passages such as Rom. 8:20 and Col. 1:27. 1 Cor. 2 encapsulates Paul’s apocalyptic Gospel. The understanding of the divine will, and indeed, knowledge of God, are not primarily dependent on obedience to a written code, but on the apocalypse of Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, Paul expounds the way in which Christ is formed in people through a subtle blend of being taught by God (1 Thess. 4:9), imitating the apostolic example (1 Cor. 11:1), altruistic concern for brothers and sisters in Christ – a prominent theme in 1 Corinthians as we shall see (cf. 1 Cor. 13; 8:9–13) – and obedience to injunctions inherited from the Mosaic Law (1 Cor. 5:1, 13). So, 1 Corinthians is testimony to the way Paul qualifies the revelatory potential of the indwelling spirit, as he outlines a pattern of life for ‘the temple of the Holy Spirit’ (1 Cor. 6:19), which, understandably enough, reflects Jewish attitudes to holiness, including the avoidance of idolatry (1 Cor. 10:14). The theological dynamic of Paul’s apocalyptic theology prioritised being indwelt by the divine (cf. Gal. 2:20) or inspiration, which comes from the Spirit within, not from obedience to any external authority (1 Cor. 2:10–16, cf. Rom. 8:1–14). This theological epistemology is characterised by action ‘from impulse not from rules’ as the English apocalyptic writer William Blake put it with regard to Jesus (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 23–24, E4337). The mature Paul came to link the evidence of the indwelling presence of the divine with the life of righteousness set out in the commandments of God (Rom. 8:3), echoing the ‘new covenant’, found in passages such as Ezek. 36:25–27 and Jer. 31:31–34 (cf. 2 Cor. 3:3).

37

E plus page number(s) refers to Erdman’s edition of Blake’s works, see below, p. 783.

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1 Cor. 2:10–16 has long been a favourite with the Christian radicals.38 In 1 Cor. 2, the knowledge of God comes through possession of the divine spirit. Those who are taught by the Spirit do not require any human teacher, nor for that matter any scripture, and are subject to no one else’s scrutiny (1 Cor. 2:15). The beneficiaries of divine wisdom in the Spirit, however, possess the power of knowing God and the things of God and possess a discrimination that transcends the requirement of any human teacher. It is in a chapter such as 1 Cor. 2 that we see the ways in which the ‘apocalyptic’ and the ‘gnostic’ overlap, and we begin to understand the New Testament Apocalypse as a revelation of the deepest structures of cosmos. We need to recall the mystical, gnostic, dimension of this, which may help to explain the emergence of a ‘vertical’ relationship with the divine world, which may compensate for the historical disappointment, once the synergism of human and divine in realising apocalypse does not come about. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul is confronted with groups who regarded themselves as elite because of their heavenly or angelic language. In 1 Cor. 13, he explicitly contrasts a community of language, which ends up fragmenting and alienating, with the practice of charity: Paul deals with the issue by underlining the way in which the practice of human relating is the ultimate test of community, and the Babel whose currency in words can never match a basic human instinct of altruism and concern. Language – and that includes theology – must be shaped by the practice of love. Paul contrasts words and actions, the ‘tongues of angels’, typically private rather than public theology, with prophecy and the action of charity. Prophecy is to be preferred, so that if ‘an unbeliever or outsider enters, he is convicted by all, he is called to account by all, the secrets of his heart are disclosed’ (1 Cor. 14:25). Prophecy is for edification and encouragement. The need to be understood is paramount so the hermeneutical responsibility is essential (1 Cor. 14:5, 13). Thus, Paul demands that the Corinthians attend to life in the public sphere, in the meat market, for example, and the ancient places of idolatry (1 Cor. 8 and 10) away from the comfort of the holy huddle, and see that not only the esotericism of their language but also their behaviour demand critical scrutiny. There is nothing to be gained from a language that provides no hard currency to purchase engagement with the wider public (cf. 1 Cor. 1:23–25). In the final analysis, it is not the quality of theology that counts, but love, as the most famous passage in the New Testament makes clear (1 Cor. 13). First Corinthians is a letter which is full of authoritative advice (e.g. 7:10; 11:2; 14:37) from one who rather disarmingly describes himself as ‘one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy’ (7:25), and includes apostolic pronouncements (7:6, 8, 12; 11:33; 16:1) and references to Paul’s example (4:16; 9:1– 38

E.g. A.C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2000), 276–286; Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 157–180.

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23; 11:1). It is a curious mix of the pragmatic, the rhetorical and the apologetic, apparently so far removed from apocalyptic writings. At the time Paul was writing 1 Corinthians, he was seeking to challenge a way of life which may be mystically sublime but not ethical enough. Paul offers himself as a role model, in a way like the stories that are offered in Jewish texts, like the tractates Hagigah in the Mishnah and Tosefta, with the further explications of the themes in the talmuds where Yohanan ben Zakkai gives his seal of approval to Eleazar ben Arak for his ability to expound well and perform well. The problem with the Corinthians, to paraphrase the encomium of Eleazar ben Arak, is that exposition and ethical performance did not coincide. High-flown angelic words, for example, are not matched by deeds. What is needed is following the example of the apostle/teacher who imitates Christ, accepting his authority and the halakah-like instructions he offered. So Paul states clearly who is disqualified from inheriting the kingdom of God (1 Cor 6:9), and outlines the holiness necessary for the life of those who would be part of the temple of the Holy Spirit. Paul lays out clear guidance expected of those who had access to the divine world in their midst and the measures needed to ensure that this holiness was not compromised. Peter Tomson’s words perfectly sum up the Paul of 1 Corinthians, ‘truly Jewish and Pharisaic, Paul’s apocalyptic faith is consummated in active life’.39

25.5. Concluding Comments In his Aids to Reflection, S.T. Coleridge discusses the nature of mysticism. Coleridge tries to make a distinction between what Douglas Hedley describes as disciplined speculative form of thought aimed at the vision of God and self-indulgent visionary enthusiasm, from which Coleridge wants to dissociate himself.40 Coleridge was suspicious of any attempt on the part of the mystic to persuade others to enjoy similar experiences. What Coleridge prefers is the harmless mystic who is able to discern the difference between fantasy and reality and is able to distinguish a dream of truth, whereas ‘in the bewildered tale of the former there is truth mingled with the dream’. Coleridge’s words written about Jacob Boehme, of whose mysticism he was suspicious, could equally well apply to Paul:

39 P.J. Tomson, Paul and the Jewish Law: Halakha in the Letters of Paul, CRINT 1 (Assen: Van Gorcum; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), 80. 40 D. Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 282.

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the craving for sympathy, strong in proportion to the intensity of his convictions, impels him to unbosom himself to abstract auditors; and the poor quietist becomes a penman, and, all too poorly stocked for the writer’s trade, he borrows his phrases and figures from the only writings to which he has had access, the sacred books of his religion.

Coleridge’s suspicion is anticipated by Festus in his comment to Paul: ‘Too much learning is driving you insane’ – an interesting comment on Paul’s account of his ‘heavenly vision’ to which he ‘was not disobedient’ (Acts 26:19–24, cf. Gal. 1:12–16). Even though Paul’s extant writings are epistles, not accounts of ecstatic apocalyptic experiences, 2 Cor. 12:2–4 excepted, there is implicit throughout an apocalyptic claim to authority. Alongside it are an ethical pragmatism and a rhetoric of persuasion linked with an exposition of, and apologia for, his authority. For Paul, the mystery of the divine economy in the crucified messiah is manifest for all even if it remains hidden from those on the way to perdition (2 Cor. 2:16); it is not esoteric, therefore, even if it is enigmatic, and to some, it remains foolishness (1 Cor. 1:18). Like the Lamb in the midst of the throne in Rev. 5:6, the mystery of the crucified messiah stands at the fulcrum of the ages and is the eschatological key which unlocks the meaning of history. Of this mystery as far as it affects the nations, Paul is mediator (1 Cor. 4:1). Similar to the Teacher of Righteousness, who could make sense of the enigmas of the prophetic word (1QpHab), Paul is not only the steward of the divine mystery but also himself the interpreter of its meaning and agent of its eschatological fulfilment. We are only offered glimpses of the ecstatic and mysterious, in passages such as 2 Cor. 12:2–4.41 The veil hides the precise moments of mystical ascent or visionary insight from us. What Paul chooses to reveal in his written words, however, is directed largely to the maintenance of community and his authority, as the apostle of Jesus Christ rather than the chain of tradition which went back to the Fathers (m.Aboth 1:1). In this respect, Paul maintains the pattern of religion which is evident in the tannaitic sources when it comes to the mystical: present revelation is subordinate to ensuring that the demand for the stable conformity to ‘traditional’ patterns and habits of life (cf. 1 Cor. 14:33–34) are maintained. The ‘routinisation of charisma’ is nowhere better exemplified than in 1 Cor. 14, where the ecstatic words of the spirit are subordinated to the rational communication of the comprehensible words of prophecy, or interpreted glossolalia, which have the effect of building up the community. Paul nowhere denies the force of that religious power, which had turned his world upside down, but at least in the Corinthian correspondence, we find repeated attempts to contain the effects of the kind of disturbance in a community’s common life which had previously caused the personal upheaval in his life. Obedience to the apostolic behest, and above all else, mutual 41

Rowland and Morray-Jones, Mystery of God, 341–420; Shantz, Paul in Ecstasy.

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charity, take precedence over the individual moments of ecstasy or other exercises of spiritual power. I started with Ed Sanders’s brief reference to ecstatic mysticism, and I end with his succinct description of Pauline understanding of religion: when it came to how converts stayed in the nascent Christian community (rather than getting into it), the Law of Moses had its part to play.42 These words, which are widely accepted, contain the seeds of the problem posed by the Pauline writings for his contemporaries and are germane to our thesis. Ed Sanders picked up on a fundamental tension in the Pauline corpus which is never resolved, between what Sanders terms ‘participationist eschatology’ on the one hand, which has little to do with Law, ‘although the Law and the prophets bear witness to it’ (Rom. 3:22) and ‘covenantal nomism’, or, more accurately, the Pauline version of it, on the other. The revelatory moment, which points to participation in the messianic life, is not dependent on Law, even if its novelty and its unpredictable outcomes required managing. Like any rabbi, Paul showed himself capable of making new rules relevant for a new situation, but he did it by virtue of an authority which had come to him ‘neither by human commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father’ (Gal. 1:1), and what applied to him applied, at least in principle, to those who shared this messianic life. He acted (to quote Blake’s memorable words about Jesus) ‘from impulse not from rules’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 23–24, E43). But what we find in his letters is a qualification of Blake’s words with regard to those whom he influenced. In the letters, the bottom line was the ordering of the nascent community in the spirit of mutuality, with individual claims to apocalyptic knowledge subordinate to mutual concern, and most importantly, to the admonitions of the authoritative inspired apostle who was himself indwelt by the Messiah (Gal. 2:19–20). That is the basis for his authority. His admonitions do not appeal to the tradition of the fathers, or rarely even the Bible, however influenced they might have been by both. Rather, central to Paul’s position is an apocalyptic religion and communion with the divine through the Spirit. The ambiguities, even contradictions, in his thought owe much to it. Whence he derived his position on the place of gentiles in the messianic age, for example, we shall never know, but his advocacy of his rule for gentiles ‘getting in’ to the community of the New Age was at odds with much of what was prevalent in mainstream Judaism and typifies the radical break he encouraged and which accelerated the separation from Second Temple Judaism.

42 Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 424; on ‘participationist eschatology’, 453– 463; also Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul; Macaskill, Union with Christ; and earlier C.F.D. Moule, The Origin of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 54–69.

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It may be thought that social cohesion and the needs of the community eclipse messianism, but it is not quite as simple as that. It may appear from the Pauline corpus that changing society is not necessary because the imminent eschatological crisis is at hand: ‘in view of the impending crisis, it is well for you to remain as you are … the appointed time has grown short … for the present form of this world is passing away’ (1 Cor. 7:26–31). The ‘impending crisis’, however, does not mean that there should be no change; far from it, as the rest of 1 Corinthians (and elsewhere) indicates. This is not being an ordinary member of society while inwardly living as if part of the age to come, as was the case with some later Christians.43 Like Jews, there was a degree of distance and nonconformity in belief and practice, which Paul explores in 1 Cor. 8–10. Messianic life, according to Paul, seems to be socially conservative, but that initial assessment conceals the complex mix of negotiating the time waiting for the impending crisis, which required the implementation of certain patterns of life to characterise life as ‘the temple of the Holy Spirit’ (1 Cor. 6:19). The messianic, the apocalyptic tradition and community cohesion are in constant tension in the Pauline letters. The eventual priority of the community is unsurprising, given the perhaps inevitable investment that Paul had in the ‘success’ of the communities he had established to maintain some kind of credible identity. By the time that Paul writes Romans, the criterion of the work of the messianic spirit is that ‘the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit’ (Rom. 8:4). A certain ethical standard, in large part determined by the Law of Moses, becomes critical. ‘Staying in’ for the Paul of the extant letters requires a form of pattern of adherence based on the Torah, even if somewhat less demanding than that laid down in the Torah as a whole. The impetus for the Pauline injunctions is intimately linked with the messianic dynamic and how that works itself out in lives lived in the midst of a world passing away. Being in the world means inhabiting the present age; not being of the world indicates that ‘our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Saviour’ (Phil. 3:20). The apocalyptic vision offered the seer communion with eternity. The presence of God and communion with the angels enabled the transcendence of time.44 While we cannot know for certain what the position of the Corinthians is on this matter, we do know from 1 Corinthians that Paul accepts the centrality of the apocalyptic knowledge of God through the Spirit in 1 Cor. 2, he insists that it must be informed by attention to life in time and space. That 43

D. MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History (London: Allen Lane, 2013). Rowland, The Open Heaven, 113–120; Rowland and Morray-Jones, Mystery of God, 167–177, 303–340; A.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: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 44

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historical perspective is one that, in different ways, pervades what Paul writes. Not only does he draw attention to the ethical but also in his discussion of the resurrection, the injection of a necessary temporal perspective demands that the communion with eternity must be set in the context of time, a dimension the importance of which Loren Stuckenbruck has drawn to our attention.45 There can be no escape from history, therefore. The Paul of the extant letters insists on an eschatology which still looks forward to the coming of the messianic age (1 Cor. 15:20–28). I do not think that one can understand the fabric of Christian theology and ethics unless one grasps the significant role that antinomian elements linked with apocalyptic thought play in both the New Testament writings and in the history of Christianity. The antinomian, the apocalyptic and the eschatological together are key to comprehending the structure motor of Paul’s thought. They help us to see why Paul relativised the place of the Bible and tradition in the light of his apocalyptic and eschatological convictions; and the possibilities and problems they engendered are part of the account we must give of Paul’s theology. In sum, the resistance to adherence to an external theological and moral code, and the conviction that it was possible to be taught by God through revelation, do not get the consideration they deserve.

45 L.T. Stuckenbruck, ‘Posturing “Apocalyptic” in Pauline Theology: How Much Contrast with Jewish Tradition?’, in idem, The Myth of Rebellious Angels: Studies in Second Temple Judaism and New Testament Texts, WUNT 335 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 240–256.

26. ‘Eschatology properly understood, and acted on’: A Perspective on Eschatology in Honour of Andrew Chester I am very pleased to have this opportunity to honour a dear friend of more than forty years. During that time I have learnt much from him. Andrew’s wide-ranging knowledge of ancient Judaism and Christianity, social and political theory, and his deep immersion in the broad context of intellectual debate about his research puts him in a unique place among biblical scholars. In the conclusion of his book on eschatology Andrew writes: a vision of a world that is controlled by justice and righteousness … can in itself … have a potentially transforming effect for the present situation, and for those caught up in it. Hence if this kind of vision is properly understood, and acted on, then it opens the possibility of humans being able to play a creative part in the bringing about of the world as it should be; in that case, it would be very far from the sort of fantasy dream that is so easily derided.1

The words ‘properly understood, and acted on’ call to mind a sentence from Marx which Andrew himself quotes: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from their past’ (‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’).2 Humans make history but it must be ‘properly understood’ including an understanding of, and sensitivity to, the particularity of historical context. Nowhere are the words ‘properly understood, and acted on’ more relevant than in the application of the Christian eschatological and apocalyptic inheritance in Christian history. Norman Cohn’s epoch-making book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, put these features firmly on the scholarly map, and, since its publication, all of us who have been interested in the history of eschatology and apocalypticism have been in his debt, even if in different ways I and others may have dissented from key aspects of his thesis. But there are other scholars who have explored the pervasive apocalyptic and eschatological spirit especially in the New Testament itself. Andrew himself devotes an 1 A. Chester, Future Hope and Present Reality, Vol. 1: Eschatology and Transformation in the Hebrew Bible, WUNT 293 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 331. 2 Chester, Future Hope, 111.

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illuminating excursus in his book on utopianism and on the importance of Ernst Bloch’s writing. My offering seeks to recognise Andrew’s extraordinary learning and insight and is in effect an extension of Andrew’s excursus, to complement what he has already written and to anticipate the subject matter of Andrew’s second volume. In addition to Bloch, I shall particularly focus on the insights into the impact of the apocalyptic and eschatological tradition of Christianity offered by Jacob Taubes, with a brief reference in the context of the discussion of Taubes to the views of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, both of whom appreciated the importance of messianism. In the last decade or so, thanks to the inspiration of Jacob Taubes, the Pauline letters have been studied by a group of philosophers, literary critics and cultural commentators, including G. Agamben, A. Badiou, S. Žižek and T. Eagleton.3 I do not think one can fully understand this development without attending to the influence of Taubes’s work.4 Whatever the reservations one may have, there is a clear grasp in these writings of the issue of the possibilities and problems of messianism and its disruptiveness, epistemologically and socially.

26.1. Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) Bloch, like Taubes, understood what made primitive Christianity tick. As with the New Testament writers, for him utopia is not primarily a cause for fantasising about a different world. It is primarily about this world and the discernment of a different kind of world and society latent within it. Throughout Bloch’s work, he appreciated the political significance of the eschatological and utopian. He had a special interest from his earliest days in the religious manifestations of this. So Bloch picked out the revolutionary theology of Thomas Müntzer, and to Müntzer he returned again in later writing. Müntzer embodied a mixture of a strong sense of a prophet’s communion with the divine, which challenges tradition and established institutions, and a willingness to act in the political world on the basis of those convictions. Unlike Luther, however, Müntzer did not manage to persuade the princes of his day that he was ‘the new Daniel’ who would advise them at this critical eschatological moment. Luther turned out to be politically much cannier! Bloch found in Judaism and Christianity anticipations of that which is to come, which involved moments of ecstasy, standing outside oneself getting a glimpse of what we could become, not just as fantasy but as practised anticipation. Such looking, and moving forward on a journey to something new, 3

T.W. Jennings, Outlaw Justice: The Messianic Politics of Paul (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 212. 4 J. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. D. Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); idem, Occidental Eschatology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

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may assist the ultimate liberation. The desire to become, to seek fulfilment on a forward journey to an as yet not fully known destination, is central to Bloch’s work. In stressing this, Bloch echoes a more sympathetic understanding towards experiments in this age found also in Engels’s study of American communalism. For example, Engels wrote that communism ‘is not only possible but has actually already been realised in many communities in America … with the greatest success’5 so different from the pungent criticism ‘the anticipation of communism by fantasy’ he used of earlier radical movements in ‘The Peasant War in Germany’.6 In the most succinct statement of his position with regard to Christianity, in Atheism in Christianity, Bloch sought to trace its ‘messianic/utopian’ thread.7 It is rather a pity that the title of Bloch’s most succinct statement of the centrality of hope in the Bible should have the rather provocative and somewhat misleading title, Atheism in Christianity. Although it represents Bloch’s view, this is not what the book is principally about. Jesus the Son of Man is the paradigm for this eschatological humanity. It is a sustained exposition of an alternative ‘Exodus’ pattern in the Bible, one that is not nostalgic but determined on the winding quest for full human potential for all. The sub-title, ‘The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom’ aptly summarises a challenge to the marginalisation of eschatology in Christian doctrine by a sustained exposition of biblical themes which look forward to the moment when ‘God will be all in all’ from both parts of the Christian canon. This is far from being a systematic theology – Bloch does not write like that – but it is a determined attempt to place this-worldly eschatology at the centre of Christian belief and practice. Bloch teases out the contradictory threads in the Christian tradition, not least in respect of Christology. By picking in particular on the liberative potential of the Exodus, he showed how the ways in which early Christians understood Christ developed from the eschatologically orientated figure, the Son of Man, to the divine Kyrios, who, as celestial despot, validated human monarchy. Such a critique has many similarities with the theology of William Blake, whom Bloch approvingly called a ‘chiliastic mystic’,8 though without recognising the way Blake had anticipated his ideological critique. In language which is reminiscent of New Testament inaugurated eschatology, Bloch stresses the importance of the ‘not yet’ and the process of becoming which is not an individual journey but includes a

5

Karl Marx and Friedrih Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 4: 1844–1845 (Moscow: Progress, 1975), 214–222 (1844). 6 F. Engels, Marx and Engels on Religion (Moscow: Progress, 1972), 91, quoted by D. Turner, Marxism and Christianity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 167. 7 E. Bloch, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom, trans. J.T. Swann (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972). 8 Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, 44.

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wider social group. For Bloch utopia is not just a matter of speculation but is also a potent impulse challenging and inspiring here and now, albeit only available in fragmentary and difficult to interpret glimpses. What is true of the present moment in this age is its inadequacy, and hope for a better world only impels one on the ongoing journey towards true human flourishing. The complex relationship between Andrew’s words ‘Future Hope and Present Reality’ is at the heart of what Bloch seeks to tease out. Few have better understood the deeply unsettling, subversive call of hope and the consequences of living by and in it than Ernst Bloch. He manages to capture the struggle and the temptation to be satisfied with the ready made and the easy option, struggles which one can find throughout the New Testament and more widely in Christian tradition, as the following extract indicates: The only thing one can really hold on to is the search for a handhold – the constant feeling that one is on the way to finding it, and the faithful following of the signs. Only that can stand up to disappointment – indeed it needs it if it is to grow in truth. There is no place for children here; they need their ready cooked food from on high. On this road discontent lasts best; its hope is in itself a handhold for the hoper. The best things must be left to simmer slowly, in anticipation, if their promise is ever to be enjoyed. There is something still open to us in the distance. But the gap has not been closed, and to fill it falsely is to provide a treacherous handhold that will lead to an even greater fall – that will lead one to one’s knees, gambling on a false and fabricated trust, only to have one’s hopes shattered along with one’s ready-made faith. As if somewhere, somehow, things could be good in themselves, without the constant, ever-undecided struggle. Undecided, that is, except for its all the more decisive determination to stay, despite everything, in open ferment; its determination to remain in an open traversable Way, foreshadowing the future. Out of the future shadows on this Way there comes a continuous call; but no more faith is needed than faith in discontented hope. Such hope is active: it contains the seeds of a conscious, outward-reaching pact with the objective pole of tendency.

Then he goes on, in typical vein, to write, This is admittedly less than being in really good, safe hands; but it is more than any prescribed (and therefore false) handhold can provide, and it has a far higher view of man [sic]. It is better, too, than any of those ready-made, pre-flavoured foods that only go to ruin one’s real appetite – the appetite for more.9

26.2. Jacob Taubes (1923–1987) Another striking voice from outside the Christian tradition, and a voice which has been more widely heard in New Testament circles in the last decade, has been that of Jacob Taubes. I had been aware for many years of a brilliant short article by Taubes which I had come across in the early 1980s in which he takes issue with Scholem’s differentiation between Jewish and Christian 9

Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, 220.

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messianism. He rightly pointed out that the evidence suggests that the two strands which Scholem interprets as different properties of the messianism of Judaism and Christianity have from the start been endemic to the messianic and eschatological doctrines of Christianity. Taubes challenges Scholem’s claim that while in Judaism redemption takes place in the political realm and in history, in Christianity it takes place only in the individual. In so doing Taubes makes an interesting comparison between Paul and Shabbetai Zvi,10 a subject to which W.D. Davies also devoted an important essay in 1975.11 At the time of writing Radical Christianity in the mid-1980s I had not been aware of Taubes’s doctoral thesis, Occidental Eschatology, which had lain in relative obscurity (even now there are still few copies of the 1947 edition available in libraries in the UK and there were none in 1986). The end of the story he tells is different from the one I sketched in 1988. Taubes’s is a narrative of the origins of Jewish and Christian eschatology rooted in what he understands by apocalyptic and its contribution to modernity. For me, it was not the apocalypticism so much as trying to understand the intellectual roots of what I discovered in Brazil in 1983 and the affinities between the dialectic of experience and tradition, particularly the Bible, in both liberation theology and what I had discovered in the writings of the seventeenth century writer, Gerrard Winstanley a few years previously. Also close to the thesis of Radical Christianity is a book by Rosemary Radford Ruether which covers similar ground, though its time of writing meant that the issues which prompted my research on the origins of Christian radicalism are different, even if her book too has many affinities with mine.12 In Occidental Eschatology, as the title suggests, Taubes traces the theological heart of Western culture, the rise of apocalypticism, its importance for a Christian understanding of history and its contribution to modern thought. Taubes notes the demise of chiliasm in the early church, the rediscovery of Revelation and its contribution to an understanding of history in the writings of Joachim of Fiore on to the Radical Reformation, particularly Thomas Müntzer. What Taubes writes about is a neglected strand, which is a central part of the fabric of the intellectual history of Christianity. Augustine’s brilliant theological treatise, The City of God, by its use of Tyconius’s apocalyptic hermeneutics, not only infused Christian theology with a key apocalyptic

10 J. Taubes, ‘The Price of Messianism’, JJS 33 (1982): 595–600, repr. in Essential Papers on Messianic Movements and Personalities in Jewish History, ed. M. Saperstein (New York and London: New York University Press, 1992), 551–558. 11 W.D. Davies, ‘From Schweitzer to Scholem – Reflections on Sabbatai Svi’, in Essential Papers on Messianic Movements and Personalities in Jewish History, ed. M. Saperstein (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 225–276. 12 R. Radford Ruether, The Radical Kingdom: The Western Experience of Messianic Hope (New York: Harper and Row, 1970).

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element but also succeeded in containing its chiliastic elements.13 Nevertheless even this theological tour de force never quite managed to tame their ongoing effects. As Taubes succinctly puts it: The chiliastic prophecy of the Apocalypse of John, which, as a vision of future events, threatened time and again the foundation of the church, was integrated by Augustine into the context of the church. Christ’s kingdom on earth should not be expected in the future, and the ‘thousand years’ describe in fact the reign of Christ and the saints in the church. Since Christ the history of the world has become irrelevant. Christian eschatology does not wait for a theatrical spectacle in the arena of history, and its interest shifts to the destiny of the soul at the end of its earthly journey. Man’s earthly journey is a transitory pilgrimage ‘progressing’ toward the heavenly city that is not on earth. … The history of the Civitas Dei is only a pilgrimage on earth, and it would have seemed absurd to Augustine to plot out the history of the world since Christ in any pattern of stages, progressing towards a goal beyond the event of Christ. Since Augustine the eschatology of history was relegated to the outskirts of popular belief, superstition, and – heresy. The theology of Joachim of Fiore contained the dynamite that was to explode the foundations of medieval religion and society that had been drawn in the light of Augustine’s theology of history. In Joachim’s theology of history there emerges a principle that will challenge the ‘chiliastic’ religion of the Catholic Church. He envisages a new era in human history that will supersede the era of the church … [it] marks a change in the theological pattern itself. Joachim’s theology denies the ‘central’ position of Jesus Christ … the goal of Joachim’s theology is not in Christ but in the Holy Ghost, which supersedes Christ.14

It is an ambitious thesis suggestively characterising the debt of aspects of modernity to patterns of thought deeply rooted in the Bible, which have not always been central to mainstream theological thought. To borrow the words of Rosemary Radford Ruether, he suggests a ‘prophetic’ or ‘messianic’ principle as a pattern which is central to the Bible as a whole.15 Taubes’s historical survey seeks to support that thesis by indicating that it is apocalypticism and eschatology, which are a crucial counterpoint to mainstream theology and have inspired key figures in the history of Christianity from Joachim of Fiore via Müntzer to Kierkegaard and Marx. In some ways it both echoes (Taubes lists Bloch’s book on Müntzer and commends it, 106) and anticipates later studies by Ernst Bloch, such as Principle of Hope and Atheism in Christianity. Taubes argues that the imminence of the future fulfilment lends an aura of urgency and ultimate significance to the apocalyptic mind-set. It is akin to the points made by Karl Mannheim about the ‘chiliastic mentality’ (whose work is alluded to, but only in passing16). Like Mannheim and later 13

Also J. Taubes, From Cult to Culture: Fragments towards a Critique of Historical Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 14 Taubes, From Cult to Culture, 167–168. 15 R. Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk (Boston: Beacon, 1983); eadem, ‘Feminist Interpretation: A Method of Correlation’, in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, ed. L.M. Russell (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985), 111–124. 16 Taubes, From Cult to Culture, 106–107.

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Cohn, Taubes focuses on instances where the epistemological potential of apocalypse, as well as its imagery, have been particularly prominent. It is that underworld of eschatology fed by the apocalyptic conviction that knowledge of the divine purposes came to the favoured individual, man or woman, by means of visions and revelations, licensed as they are by the Scriptures themselves. Thomas Müntzer was not alone in pointing out the importance of dreams and visions as the motor of theology and as an impetus to challenge the status quo. That said, the thread which links that tradition which formed the New Testament, via Joachim of Fiore to the early modern period, is one with which I resonate and is a theme to which I have found myself returning again over the years. I don’t pretend to grasp all the subtleties of Taubes’s philosophical discussion, but I sympathise with the basic thesis of his sweeping intellectual history about the centrality of apocalyptic and eschatology in Christian thought, though in relation to apocalyptic I would put things somewhat differently from him! My perhaps too simplistic view of apocalyptic is primarily much more about epistemology than eschatology, the revelatory mode through which ancients came to comprehend, among other things, their eschatological convictions. But Taubes too recognises this dimension when he rightly notes the similarity of outlook between apocalyptic and gnosis. Although Taubes is working with an understanding of apocalypticism which focuses almost entirely on eschatology, he also points out the ways in which this kind of thinking has a strong interior, as well as exterior, dimension, the inner light which ‘sets the world on fire’.17 What Taubes offers is a wider contextualising and construal of the effects of the rediscovery of eschatology in New Testament scholarship, so helping both to understand the intellectual threads with which commentators in the Weiss/Overbeck/Schweitzer tradition, have really struggled to discern what import it may have for New Testament theology. As I have said to Bob in our conversations about Schweitzer (1875–1965), the problem for Schweitzer was that, unlike Bultmann, he had no mediating hermeneutic to be able to deal with the centrality of eschatology which he had identified, and, unlike Overbeck, he didn’t throw up his hands in despair at it. I am not sure that the tradition identified by Taubes solves the problem, but it does offer a way of comprehending how the central eschatological elements might be worked out in contemporary theological terms, as Jürgen Moltmann, inspired as he was by the thought of Ernst Bloch, was to explore. Both Taubes and Bloch have a breath-taking sweep and grasp philosophically, theologically and historically. Even if one parts company in details, their insights into Christian intellectual history in their different ways are always worth reading. There is a clearer

17

Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 85.

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grasp of the nature of ideology in Bloch’s work, but that is not surprising given his indebtedness to Marx. Despite this, I am not entirely sure that Taubes fully grasps that sense of the anticipation of the messianic which is there in Bloch’s work. Theodor Adorno’s (1903–1969) Minima Moralia expresses a similar view to Ernst Bloch when he writes: The only philosophy that can be responsibly practised in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things, as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.18

Taubes is scathing about these words of Adorno, dismissing them as the ‘aestheticisation’ of the problem.19 He prefers instead Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), in particular Benjamin’s ‘Theologico-Political Fragment’, an early fragment which at first sight at least does not allow any impact of the messianic on the history of this age. Indeed, Taubes believes that ‘Romans 8 has its closest parallel’ with this text,20 though I am not entirely convinced by the parallel: Only the Messiah himself consummates all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation to the Messianic. For this reason nothing historical can relate itself on its own account to anything Messianic. Therefore the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic; it cannot be set as a goal. From the standpoint of history it is not goal, but end.21

I can understand why Taubes wrote what he did about some of Benjamin’s last extant written words, for, similar to Paul’s words, they were forged in the midst of the terrible experiences that Benjamin endured at the end of his life. Also, they probably resonated with the dying Taubes, and in comparison, Adorno’s words, written in the comfort of academic detachment, seemed to him nothing more than an ‘aestheticisation of the problem’. But this ignores the fact that the fragment by Benjamin was probably not written in Benjamin’s last months but dates from twenty years earlier. At first sight, it suggests a view of the relationship between the messiah and history which Taubes himself had rightly criticised in Scholem’s work (he noted in passing on p. 7). The clear-cut contrast between history and the messianic time does not do justice either to Benjamin’s words or even to the New Testament. The latter, albeit in a much less optimistic way, suggest, like those of Bloch, that 18

T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 247. 19 Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 75. 20 Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 70. 21 Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 70, quoting Benjamin.

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elements of messianic latency contribute to the messianic and are found in history. As Jacobson wrote of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theologico-Political Fragment’, ‘activity in this world which may seem commonplace … is simultaneously the cornerstone from which the next world is itself built’.22 What Benjamin writes is very nuanced (e.g. the words ‘all history’ and the addition of the phrase ‘on its own account’). Of course, Pauline passages do not have any idea of human agency independent of the messiah, but human agency inspired and informed by the messiah, are part of Paul’s self-understanding as a divine agent (‘Christ in me’ from Gal. 2:20 springs to mind). It is that element from the New Testament, wrestling with the notion of the messianic era as in some sense already present and active, which is lacking in Taubes’s exposition. I am an enthusiastic devotee of Benjamin’s work, especially the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, one of the great messianic texts of the twentieth, or indeed any other, century, probably written shortly before his death. Taubes understandably suggests that ‘Theses’ contains: ‘a messianism of a despairing kind, not the assertion of one who believed that the divine was at work in and through humans’. But in writing that ‘this reflects the catastrophic character of the New Testament apocalypse … is close to despair in that the hope for a happy outcome is almost completely lost’ … one can up to a point see why ‘there is something profoundly Pauline about this in its pessimism about human wisdom which was so real to Benjamin fleeing from the “progress” of Fascism and ending up squeezed into a corner on the French-Spanish border from which there seemed to be no escape’. Yes, ‘the echoes of 1 Cor. 1–2, where Paul contrasts human wisdom with the scandal of the messiah, receives its modern treatment. The high-flown organised arguments of the academy and the pretensions of its exponents are questioned in the soul-searching enigmatic words.’ But in writing thus I think Taubes was in danger of neglecting the evidence for the immanent messianic presence in history in the New Testament. One can understand why in the light of his appreciation of the work of Franz Overbeck, who distinguished between world-denying ‘Christianity’ and ‘theology’. In so doing, Taubes evinces the same kind of influence of Christian intellectual culture for which he criticises Rosenzweig.23 Elsewhere Taubes better captures something of the contraries of the dialectic of apocalyptic and eschatology, its potential for creativity and renewal on the one hand and its possibilities for leading to chaos on the other. Indeed, what Taubes writes about here reminds me very much of what Blake writes

22 Quoting E. Jacobson, ‘Understanding Walter Benjamin’s Theologico-Political Fragment’, JSQ 8 (2001): 227–228. 23 Taubes, From Cult to Culture, 48–51.

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about the ‘Prolific’ and ‘the Devourer’ in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (16, E40), about which Rowan Williams has written so insightfully.24 Apocalypticism is revolutionary because it beholds the turning point not in some indeterminate future but entirely proximate. Apocalyptic prophecy thus focuses on the future and yet is fully set in the present. The telos of the revolution binds the forces of chaos, which otherwise would burst all forms and overreach established boundaries. Even revolution has its forms and is ‘formalized,’ particularly when it shatters the rigid structures of the positivity of the world. The apocalyptic principle combines within it a form-destroying [gestalt-zerstörend] and a forming [gestaltend] power. Depending on the situation and the task, only one of the two components emerges, but neither can be absent. If the demonic, destructive element is missing, the petrified order, the prevailing positivity of the world cannot be overcome. But if the ‘new covenant’ fails to shine through in this destructive element, the revolution inevitably sinks into empty nothingness [leere Nichts]. If the telos of the revolution collapses, so that the revolution is no longer the means but the sole creative principle, then the destructive desire becomes a creative desire. If the revolution points to nothing beyond itself, it will end in a movement, dynamic in nature but leading into the abyss [ins leere Nichts]. A ‘nihilistic revolution’ does not pursue any goal [telos], but takes its aim from the ‘movement’ itself and, in so doing, comes close to satanic practice.25

The long quotations from Bloch and Taubes which I have offered you indicate differing but complementary aspects of the practice of a religion of hope, particularly where hope is in the process of realisation. For Bloch it is the fragility and uncertainty of negotiating the path, the possibility of following false trails but the necessity of the recognition of the indispensability of discontent while avoiding the temptation to anticipate too much too quickly. For Taubes there is the recognition of the ever-present risk of the chaos which lurks in the destructive forces which are unleashed and the repressive reaction which manage their forces by a form which can petrify. In their different ways they touch on hermeneutical and practical problems, which run through Christian texts. Bloch concentrates on the ὑποµονή necessary to remain ‘in an open traversable Way with discontented hope and without resorting to a precipitate solution’. Taubes stresses the indispensability of the form-destroying and a forming power and the constant danger of one eclipsing the other, leading to petrification on the one hand or the chaos of the abyss on the other. Paul is engaged in negotiating the tension between the disruptive effects of the messianic impulse, and the constraints of community which prompt much of Paul’s advice, particularly in a text like 1 Corinthians, where arguably he sought to ‘bind the forces of chaos’.

24 R. Williams, ‘“The human form divine”: Radicalism and Orthodoxy in William Blake’, in Radical Christian Voices and Practice: Essays in Honour of Christopher Rowland, eds. Z. Bennett and D.B. Gowler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 151–164. 25 Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 10–11.

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26.3. On Earth as in Heaven: Dealing with Eschatology Andrew has written that ‘earliest Christianity is overwhelmingly eschatological from its very inception’.26 The messianic dynamic is what made Christianity such a strange, counter-cultural movement and has not always been given the recognition it deserves. While the apologetic concerns of the author of the Acts of the Apostles, suggest that the charge of ‘turning the world upside down’ (Acts 17:6) was inappropriate, and even false, any reader of Acts cannot fail to note the disruptive elements in the story, in the later chapters about Paul in particular. Equally, in the early chapters of Acts the disruptive feature of Christian action and proclamation are at issue. The presentation of Stephen only served to confirm the views of those who believed him to be speaking against ‘this holy place’ (Acts 6–7). In the Pauline letters there is none of the critique of the politics of empire evident in the florid language of the Apocalypse. Paul may still have looked forward to the πολίτευµα from heaven (Phil. 3:20) but already that was being anticipated and embodied in the common life of the communities he initiated, or, as Bloch puts it, they offered anticipatory glimpses of a utopian society, visible to any one who begins to think differently about the world. Taubes and more recently Agamben have understood the importance and character of the messianic/eschatological impulse, which runs like a thread through the letters of Paul, and the impact it had on the emergence of the nonrevolutionary, but non-conformist, politics which characterised most of what we know of emerging Christianity. The letters of Paul indicate the difficulties posed by the necessary contextual improvisation; necessary for communities living in anticipation of the New Age and enduring the travails of its coming, seeking to live ‘as if’ a new age had come but having to take account of the competing demands of the old age. In them we find Paul juggling the different parts of his life: apostolic prophet, community organiser, renegade Jew and theologian. In sum, Paul was both a messianic thinker and more and more one actively engaged in shaping and holding together embryonic communities, so that social cohesion takes precedence over human freedom, a theme particularly explored in 1 Cor. 8–9; 13, cf. Rom. 14, especially 14:19. If his letters are anything to go by, at this stage of his career the cohesion of the community is his dominant concern. The messianic moment is not just a matter of words, but is embodied in the life of the messianic community, not writing but a form of life (cf. 2 Cor. 3:2).27

26 A. Chester, ‘Eschatology’, in The Blackwell Companion to Modern Theology, ed. G. Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 243. 27 G. Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. P. Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 122.

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The messianic and community cohesion are a constant dialectic in the Pauline letters, and the prioritising of the community is unsurprising given the perhaps inevitable investment that Paul had in the ‘success’ of the continued existence of the communities he had established. So, what constituted ‘the messianic’ became tied up not only with the cohesion of a particular community, but some kind of emerging uniformity across the communities (cf. 1 Cor. 14:33–37), for which end, the apostle of the messiah was a crucial broker. What we find in Pauline texts like Romans and 1 Corinthians is that the understanding of what constitutes the messianic is bound up with how the messianic is embodied in the common life of a fledgling community in which concern for the other based on the principle ‘not I but Christ’ becomes the criterion for understanding how messianic life is anticipated in this age. By the time that Paul wrote Romans we find the criterion of the work of those who ‘walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit’ (Rom. 8:4). Part of the content of the emerging ethical norms was in no small part determined by the Law of Moses, which became essential for ‘staying in’, to use Ed Sanders’s terminology,28 possibly reflecting the influence of Jer. 31:33. Life in these communities involved both ‘perspectives … that displace and estrange the world’29 and practical solutions in which community cohesion and messianic conviction are in dialectic with each other. Nicholas Lash’s words are an apt description of what we find in the pages of the New Testament, particularly the Pauline epistles: ‘To surrender the struggle for the transformation of patterns of human behaviour and relationship, to cease to grapple with practical problems – moral, social and ecclesial – of the organisation of redemptive love, would be to surrender hope’.30

26.4. Conclusion To conclude: I was struck by these words of Ernst Käsemann: For the New Testament scholar apocalyptic is a basic phenomenon of the discipline. Without it the history of early Christianity cannot be understood. For theology bound to the Bible the question must be put as to whether Christian proclamation may ever forget that its roots reach deeply and stoutly into such native soil.31

28 E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (London: SCM, 1977). 29 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 247. 30 N. Lash, A Matter of Hope: A Theologian’s Reflections on the Thought of Karl Marx (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1981), 278. 31 E. Käsemann, On Being a Disciple of the Crucified Nazarene: Unpublished Lectures and Sermons, ed. R. Landau in cooperation with W. Kraus, trans. R.A. Harrisville (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 4–5.

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I think Taubes understood that very well indeed as in his own way did Bloch. But no one has done more in recent years to illuminate this ‘basic phenomenon’ than Andrew, and I am profoundly grateful to him – and Susan too – for our friendship of over forty years, for all I have learnt from him, not least about apocalyptic and eschatological matters. It is a privilege to be able to honour him today. What has always been distinctive about his scholarship is his wide knowledge and understanding of ancient Jewish and Christian sources linked with those intellectual currents which have fructified his biblical exegesis as his magisterial treatment of eschatology makes clear. Today’s offering is a small expression of gratitude for what he has given us all and to wish him God-speed as he sets out on writing ‘the book that will follow this one – the second volume, that is, of Future Hope and Present Reality’, and for the opportunities and rest that retirement will bring.

27. Why Albert Schweitzer’s Writing on the New Testament Is So Important 27.1. Introduction This lecture is an appreciation of Albert Schweitzer as an interpreter of the New Testament and involves a discussion of the wider ramifications of Schweitzer’s views and their place in the history of the study of apocalyptic, with some comments on where I dissent from what Schweitzer wrote. In his book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer charted the history of this study, from the end of seventeenth century until his own day. He was preceded by others, but Schweitzer sought an explanation not only of Jesus, but also Paul, in the light of apocalyptic and eschatological ideas. For him, making sense of Christianity necessitated engaging with the apocalyptic and eschatological ideas of ancient Judaism which he rightly considered to be crucial to grasp the nature of Christian thought and how that evolved, as Christians began to interpret the apocalyptic and eschatological legacy bequeathed by the New Testament. This lecture starts with a reminiscence of New Testament study in the 1960s in British New Testament scholarship and how marginal that perspective was then, indicating the enormous resistance there was in much British New Testament scholarship to the eschatological view of Schweitzer. There is an important digression about contrasting ways in which the word ‘apocalyptic’ was used at the beginning of the nineteenth century, one as a way of speaking about eschatology, and another which linked it with the visionary and the mystical. Arguably, what precipitated the emergence of eschatology as a key to the New Testament was the translation of the Apocalypse of Enoch, for centuries part of the canon of the Ethiopic Church, and discovered by James Bruce in the eighteenth century. Albert Schweitzer’s biblical studies have contributed greatly to the shape of much modern study of the early Christian intellectual history, in particular understanding the issues surrounding the eclipse of eschatological beliefs in early Christianity and the consequent evolution of Christian theology. He not only demanded that we take seriously the New Testament’s eschatological inheritance, and in this respect he had a similar pioneering role to other contemporaries, but where he differed from them was that he indicated in his life and thought that one did

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not have to despair at that legacy or, like many British New Testament scholars, find a way of reinterpreting it or ignoring it completely.

27.2. 1966–2016: Reminiscence of New Testament Study Fifty Years On I studied theology as an undergraduate in Cambridge fifty years ago. Study of the New Testament was dominated by Charlie Moule, who lectured three days a week every term in the old Divinity School, now part of St John’s College, forming our understanding of the New Testament, which made up a quarter of my final examination papers. He was part of a generation led by scholars which included Charlie Moule, and John Robinson of Honest to God fame, who was Charlie’s successor as Dean of Clare College and, after retiring as Bishop of Woolwich, ended his career as Dean of Trinity, with whom I lectured on the New Testament shortly before his death. Fifty years ago I went to Charlie’s lectures on the Theology and Ethics of the New Testament for two years running and can honestly say that Schweitzer’s name was hardly mentioned, except in passing, to stress that his views were marginal to New Testament study, but that was true of other New Testament lecturers in my day. The Son of Man was not really an apocalyptic or eschatological figure. Charlie’s line was that Schweitzer wrote much the same thing after The Quest of the Historical Jesus and that there wasn’t much to learn from him. Schweitzer’s belief about an imminent end to the present world order, presided over by the Son of Man, was pretty much anathema to him. Charlie rather despised the apocalyptic tradition of Judaism and played down its influence on the New Testament. In his last years in post he contracted out the lectures on the New Testament’s apocalyptic book to a colleague. It was a religious perspective, which he found very distasteful. That has changed, though even now Schweitzer is not always given the recognition he deserves in having brought this about. The work of one of the leading New Testament scholars of the late twentieth century, Ed Sanders, followed Schweitzer in seeing eschatology as absolutely central in understanding not only Jesus but also Paul. His book on Paul1 saw the centre of Paul’s theology not in ‘justification by faith’ but, like Schweitzer, in the sharing of the believer in the life of Christ here and now, what Sanders termed ‘participationist eschatology’ – a very Schweitzerian concept. For Charlie Moule the heart of the New Testament was ‘the corporate Christ’, Christ’s body being ‘more than an individual entity’. Yet there was no mention of Schweitzer’s enormous contribution to this way of understanding Paul’s 1

E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (London: SCM, 1977).

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theology in his definitive book on the subject.2 Schweitzer’s view of Paul has exerted a profound influence on modern study of Paul in recent years, particularly outside Germany. Ed Sanders then wrote a book on Jesus,3 which sketches a picture of Jesus’ message and which is similar to that of Schweitzer, emphasising the pervasiveness of eschatology in his message. There have been others, who to a greater or lesser extent have acknowledged their affinities with Schweitzer’s views, so that it is now possible to say that Schweitzer’s basic thesis about the centrality of eschatology in the New Testament, has been vindicated by most New Testament scholars. It was nearly a decade after I had completed my undergraduate degree that I discovered Schweitzer’s writing, but by then I had been on another journey into apocalyptic, which took me on a different intellectual journey into the origins of Jewish mysticism, which helps explain parts of this lecture.

27.3. Apocalyptic and Eschatology But first some brief comments to explain the way in which apocalyptic and eschatology might be related to each other. I use the word apocalyptic to speak of the revelation of the secrets of heaven and earth, past and future, and eschatology, to speak of the divine future of the world and humanity. ‘Apocalyptic’ is a word which has its origins in the opening word of the Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse, in Greek ἀποκάλυψις, a word which never appears thereafter; the book is elsewhere described as prophecy. ‘Apocalypse’ means unveiling or revealing, and the adjective ‘apocalyptic’ concerns that which is to do with unveiling, so ‘revelation’. However, ‘Apokalyptik’ in German came to be a way of designating the peculiar form of eschatology, found in the apocalyptic texts.4 ‘Apocalyptic’ as a noun described a particular form of future hope, characterised by cataclysmic, and disruptive eschatological religion, and the hope for another world breaking into and replacing this world. A contrast was offered between the future hope in the prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible as compared with later Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts. That view has pervaded scholarly, and indeed popular, understanding ever since. Indeed, it was the word APOCALYPSE which provided the banner headline on the day after 9/11 and the Japanese earthquake.

2 C.F.D. Moule, The Origin of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 3 E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (London: SCM, 1985). 4 J.M. Schmidt, Die jüdische Apokalyptik: Die Geschichte ihrer Erforschung von den Anfängen bis zu den Textfunden von Qumran (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1969).

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By contrast, at the same time as this development took place in German biblical studies at the beginning of the nineteenth century S.T. Coleridge assessed the writings of William Blake and judged that they were produced by a man who was both ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘mystic’. In other words this was not about ‘the end of the world’ or ‘cataclysm’, but about mysticism and vision. Coleridge called William Blake, ‘a mystic emphatically’ and, ‘apo- or rather ana-calyptic Poet, and Painter!’.5 Coleridge used the words ‘mystic’ and ‘apocalyptic’ virtually synonymously. Coleridge saw these as related ways of talking about a similar phenomenon, which he found in Blake’s work. The emphasis is not at all on the end of the world but on the visions and mysteries opened up to the mystic – different from what ‘apocalyptic’ was coming to mean in mainstream scholarship, and indeed has become the norm in common parlance. Both the visionary and the eschatological are crucial components for the understanding of the New Testament. One other matter: from the nineteenth century to the present day, Christian ‘apocalyptic’ means the irruption of the divine, unexpectedly, and the establishment of a world beyond this one. So, there is a widespread assumption that Christian eschatology is otherworldly in contrast to Jewish eschatology, which is this-worldly and political.6 In my view the evidence suggests that a messianic age in this world, brought in by human actors such as we find in the prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible and in later Jewish sources, is exactly what we find in the earliest Christian sources.

27.4. Enoch and Apocalyptic The Book of Revelation had, of course, been known about for centuries and had influenced a variety of millenarian groups from the Middles Ages onwards,7 but what gave a particular stimulus to the emphasis of the importance of apocalyptic and eschatology in the New Testament was the discovery of a book, which remains part of the canon of Scripture of the Ethiopic Church, the Apocalypse of Enoch, translated into English in 1821 by the Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, Richard Laurence, and a decade or so later into German. Blake was probably one of the earliest commentators on this Book in the presumably unfinished sketches, some of which clearly bear the title ‘Book of Enoch’ (National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1944.14.98). The 5

S.T. Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. E.L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–1971), 4:833–834. 6 M. Saperstein, ed., Essential Papers on Messianic Movements and Personalities in Jewish History (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 521. 7 N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Secker & Warburg, 1957). 8 M. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 2:827 5.

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influence of the Apocalypse of Enoch has been great ever since. The reasons are not difficult to see. It has many affinities with parts of the New Testament, and it heralded the recognition that eschatology, the hope for a new age on earth, was part of the thought world of the New Testament, and perhaps Jesus himself. The Enoch apocalypse bears witness to an underworld of apocalyptic, mystical and eschatological ideas in ancient Judaism, perhaps in the view of some, a counterpoint to the mainstream traditions, which found expression in later Jewish sources. Since its publication, and the discovery of many fragments of the Apocalypse of Enoch in Aramaic among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the ebb and flow of scholarly research has seen the constant recognition that eschatology and apocalyptic are a key to understanding the origins and evolution of Christianity. The diminution of the eschatological energy, which impelled the first Christians, was replaced by a more institutional and doctrinally based religion, more akin to what we know today.

27.5. The Impact of the Discovery of Eschatology After the discovery of the Apocalypse of Enoch and its translation into English and German in the nineteenth century we have what is perhaps the greatest step forward in the understanding of the New Testament, namely, that it was not just Revelation, but Jesus and also Paul who were influenced by apocalyptic ideas. Schweitzer understood this well and his biblical scholarship takes that as its starting point. In his classic book, translated into English as The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer charted the history of this study, from the end of seventeenth century until his own day. Schweitzer sought an explanation not only of Jesus but also Paul in the light of apocalyptic and eschatological ideas. For Schweitzer, making sense of early Christianity necessitated engaging with the apocalyptic and eschatological ideas of ancient Judaism, as these ideas are indispensable to grasp the evolution of Christian thought. In 1892 there appeared the first edition of a little work by Johannes Weiss on the preaching of Jesus, which still forms a central component of the discussion of the Gospels.9 In it, he challenged the theological liberalism of his day by denying that the Kingdom of God in the teaching of Jesus referred to the evolution of a more moral society; that, argued Weiss, was far removed from the world of the Jewish apocalypses, which he considered the proper context for the understanding of the teaching of Jesus and in which there was a fierce longing to see a new world come about. So a picture of Jesus began to emerge as a strange apocalyptic figure, a man possessed by the belief that 9

J. Weiss, Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, trans. R.H. Hiers and D.L. Holland (London: SCM, 1971).

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the end of all things was at hand. It was a landmark development as Albert Schweitzer stressed. Johannes Weiss’s Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God has an importance equal to that of Strauss’s first Life of Jesus. He lays down the third great alternative which the study of the life of Jesus had to meet. The first was laid down by Strauss: either purely historical or purely supernatural. The second had been worked out by the Tübingen school and Holtzmann: either Synoptic or Johannine. Now came the third: either eschatological or noneschatological!10 In F.C. Burkitt’s fitting tribute to Weiss, written in the midst of the First World War,11 he described him as a ‘grateful tribute to the memory of a regretted fellow-worker’. The essential point of his work is found in the following words by Weiss: I learnt the importance of the idea of the Kingdom of God, which is the centre of theology; and I am still of opinion that … this central idea, is, when properly understood, the most suitable to awaken and sustain for our generation the sound and healthy religious life that we need [in other words, that is the influential view of his father-in-law Albrecht Ritschl]. But, [he goes on] I have long been troubled with a conviction that [contemporary German theology’s, i.e.] Ritschl’s idea of the Kingdom of God and ‘the Kingdom of God’ in the Message of Jesus are two very different things.12

Burkitt wrote that Johannes Weiss was the first modern New Testament scholar to bring readers of the Gospels into living contact with Jesus Christ. It was a task that had been attempted in a new way during the nineteenth century in what Burkitt called ‘the real Jesus’ coming to sight stripped of dogma and ecclesiastical tradition. It is that discovery of an apocalyptic, eschatological, counter-cultural prophetic, non-conformist Jesus, all those adjectives apply, latent in the New Testament Gospels, which has been one of the greatest contributions of modern biblical study. The centrality of apocalyptic and eschatology goes back to the beginning of the nineteenth century when ‘apocalyptic’ is seen as the irruption of another world into this, not the gradual evolution of a better world from this one. Whatever one makes of the validity of the view that apocalyptic is a particular form of eschatology, the influence of the early nineteenth century discussion on biblical scholarship and popular usage has been immense. Much of twentieth century New Testament interpretation since Weiss has been concerned either to bridge the gap between ancient text and contemporary thought or to relegate the eschatological and apocalyptic elements to a marginal significance. Albert Schweitzer took the first path. Not only did he 10 A. Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, trans. W. Montgomery (London: A&C Black, 1911), 327. 11 F.C. Burkitt, ‘Johannes Weiss: In Memoriam’, HTR 8 (1915): 291–297. 12 Burkitt, ‘Johannes Weiss: In Memoriam’, 292–293.

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chart the story of modern biblical scholarship’s discovery of the apocalyptic Christ, but in his way he wrestled with the legacy of that discovery. Indeed in life as well as scholarship there is the same heroic quality about his life as about his picture of Jesus, so similar to that portrayed by Weiss. Just before the First World War, Schweitzer left behind a career both as a musician and as a biblical exegete to work as a missionary doctor in West Africa. Like those first disciples beside the lake he responded positively the call to ‘follow me’, which Schweitzer captured in famous words at the end of The Quest of the Historical Jesus. There is much of Schweitzer’s own experience in the final pages of The Quest. Indeed, he wrote to a colleague that the conclusion to The Quest was the key to his philosophy. For Schweitzer, Jesus was the tragic hero, who in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him. Instead of bringing in the eschatological conditions, He has destroyed them. The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign.13

27.6. The Change in Eschatological Perspective Like many others Schweitzer struggled to see how the apocalyptic Jesus could relate to the modern world. In the first edition Schweitzer deemed eschatology to be the key: ‘that which is eternal in the words of Jesus is due to the very fact that they are based on an eschatological worldview’. That changed in the 2nd edition of Schweitzer’s Quest. As James Carleton Paget has pointed out, the ending of the book was almost completely rewritten, possibly in response to those who questioned the existence of Jesus (like Arthur Drews [1865–1935] in The Christ Myth). Instead, Schweitzer bridged the gap between the historical Jesus and the contemporary Christian, by stressing union between the modern individual’s will and Jesus’ will. There is some evidence that this was a fundamentally important issue for the first Christians too. In 2 Peter, for example, we have the clearest indication that the community being addressed had to wrestle with the issue (2 Pet. 3:3– 7). The death of significant actors from the first generation of Christians probably contributed to a sense of bewilderment. For example, Paul thought of himself as an, perhaps the, eschatological agent, like the Twelve, who were told by Jesus that they would sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel (Matt. 19:28). John 21:23 suggests the shock which a community suffered when the death of one who had contact with Jesus took place. Paul, 13

Schweitzer, Quest, 370–371.

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like the Beloved Disciple, places himself as part of the special group who ‘had seen the Lord’ (1 Cor. 15:3, cf. 9:1). What emerged was a structure of ethics, worship and doctrine, to preserve the faith handed down from the apostles, to prepare people for heaven, rather than the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. That required clarity in the delineation of boundaries between true and false religion. Strategies for survival were worked out: emerging institutionalisation and patterns of authority, rituals and authoritative writings are perhaps the most obvious, to ensure that the journey to the eternal abode was not compromised. Alfred Loisy put it succinctly, ‘Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom, and what arrived was the Church’.

27.7. Schweitzer and Paul Briefly, Albert Schweitzer’s book on Paul is a good example of an attempt to illustrate how one influential early Christian writer dealt with the problem of the apocalyptic Jesus and offered consolation for the fact that the Kingdom of God has not come.14 He argued that Paul shared a longing for the Kingdom of God but did not take up the words of Jesus about the Kingdom of God, but expounded them in a form, which was appropriate to life after the death of Christ.15 Paul paved the way to a solution of the problem posed by the nonappearance of the Kingdom of God and facilitated the assimilation of the gospel of Jesus by the Greco-Roman world. He discerned the truth of that which was temporally conditioned, to extract what was of permanent religious value, namely that dying and rising with Christ connected with the values of the Kingdom of God, which Christ preached and which he believed offered a pattern of faith just as true today as it was in Paul’s.16 By dying and rising with Christ the believer experienced in everyday life what it meant to take up their cross and follow Jesus (cf. Luke 9:23). In Paul’s Christmysticism we see developed the concept of the fellowship of believers with the messiah, already present in the preaching of Jesus. In typical words Schweitzer puts it as follows: This Christ-mysticism Paul thought out within the framework of the eschatological worldview with such depth and living power that, so far as its spiritual content is concerned, it remains valid for all aftertimes. As a fugue of Bach’s belongs in form to the eighteenth century, but in its essence is pure musical truth, so does the Christ-mysticism of all times find itself again in the Pauline as its primal form.17 14

A. Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, trans. W. Montgomery (London: A&C Black, 1931), 396. 15 Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul, 390. 16 Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul, 385–386. 17 Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul, 395.

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For Schweitzer, Paul’s solution is indispensable, for it represents the authentic continuation of the gospel of Jesus, as compared with Luther’s emphasis on justification by faith, or the atoning death of Jesus, or the non-eschatological mysticism of Orthodox theology. Thus Schweitzer challenged the dominant understanding of Paul in German New Testament scholarship, which led the world in his day. It is a reminder of what a theological outsider he was, and how slow in coming was recognition of his extraordinary contribution to the understanding of the New Testament, in Germany. For Schweitzer, Paul’s genius was as the pioneer of ways of thinking appropriate to their time and place: Paul is the patron saint of thought in Christianity. He thereby became a paradigm for future Christian theologians. A glance at Christian history demonstrates how time and time again from Augustine via Luther to Karl Barth in the 20th century that view of Paul’s influence has been borne out. … Faith has nothing to fear from thinking,

wrote Schweitzer.18 Paul’s doctrine arose out of ‘profound thought’, and also out of experience, but it is the thought that is primary, because it carries with it an impulse to realisation in experience. He argued that the hammering out of a reasoned faith provided a solution of the problem posed by the nonappearance of the Kingdom of God and facilitated the assimilation of the gospel of Jesus by the Greco-Roman world. James Carleton Paget has pointed out that Schweitzer’s commitment to the idea of Paul as a thinker is there right from the start of his work on the apostle.19 He resisted the views of other scholars, who emphasised the role of experience in Paul’s theology, especially the importance of Paul’s conversion experience. This is where I part company with Schweitzer. The experiential element was passed on by Paul to his converts. They were guided by the divine Spirit and so needed no teacher (1 Thess. 4:8; Gal. 2:19–20; 1 Cor. 2:10–16). But there was also a more ‘rabbinic’ dimension of Paul’s character which asserted itself, eclipsing to some extent the mystical, or at least, subordinating its significance in his churches to apostolic authority. Paul pulled rank as the ambassador of the messiah, who mediated his presence, which put him in a position of authority in the face of what Paul seems to have considered was an awkward community, such as the one in Corinth. Schweitzer was right about the importance of thought, but only to this extent: the mystical experience of the heavenly being, what he described as an apocalypse of Jesus Christ (Gal. 1:12), led him to reflect on the identity of the quasi-angelic being who had appeared to him. Once Paul had made that identification, there were the ramifications for Jewish eschatology of the con-

18 19

Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul, 376. J.N. Carleton Paget, ‘Schweitzer and Paul’, JSNT 33 (2011): 223–256.

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viction that the messiah had come. I think for Paul it was the experience first, followed by rational reflection.

27.8. Conclusion Schweitzer’s portrait of the apocalyptic Christ has been the dominant one during the last hundred years or so. It contrasts with others, the most important being the political Christ and the moral teacher. The other two main types are, firstly, Jesus, the Political Revolutionary, which was the starting point of Albert Schweitzer’s Quest (H.S. Reimarus [1694–1768], Fragments, published posthumously by G.E. Lessing in 1778) and secondly, what I have termed the Moral/Charismatic Teacher/Sage/Healer. The latter involves a rejection or reinterpretation of the apocalyptic/eschatological elements and a prioritising of other elements of Jesus’ words and deeds. Typical of the latter is Harnack’s, for Jesus’ message is about love of God and neighbour; Geza Vermes’ depiction of Jesus as a typical Galilean charismatic healer; and, more recently, the late twentieth century solution of the Jesus Seminar, that Jesus was a wandering sage, a view reconstructed primarily from the Q source, based on traditions in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and the Gospel of Thomas. The discovery of that text, among a collection of gnostic texts in Egypt, has had an enormous impact on modern New Testament study. It has represented a serious challenge to the picture of the apocalyptic Christ, though even its adherents believe that at some stage in the course of transmission that view pervaded and influenced the traditions about Jesus. What is striking about Schweitzer’s depiction of the apocalyptic Christ is that he is a lonely messenger of catastrophe, preaching a message of doom and individual repentance, and the irruption of a new world to take the place of the old. There is little room for any future this-worldly historical perspective. It is a message addressed to the individual; Schweitzer was after all a philosopher in the Kantian-Nietzschean tradition. There is little sign of the Hegelian-Marxist philosophical tradition, in which social history is the context of eschatological fulfilment, and the future hope is not an embarrassment, but a key component. It is thanks to the writings of Ernst Bloch, and more recently the various contributions of Jacob Taubes, appropriated particularly by Jürgen Moltmann, that that tradition has gained any foothold in the discussions of the New Testament. Schweitzer’s apocalyptic Christ was not in any way a political figure. The apocalyptic and eschatological parts of the New Testament are not utopian. There is no blueprint of a new age and the ways it should be implemented. This meant experimenting in different contexts rather than merely implementing some prescriptive blueprint. The New Testament writings bear witness to individuals and groups engaging in the task of embodying and

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exploring what realised messianism might mean in the variety of contexts in which they lived. Paul’s letters are not about the prophetic protest against ‘the evil empire’, as we find in the Book of Revelation, but evince the patient, often painful, struggle to work out what it means in practice to embody that witness to the messianic age here and now.20 In Paul’s letters, we find a mix of experience, personal and otherwise, practical pastoral concern dealing with immediate situations interlaced with reference to Scripture, argument, selfjustification pervaded with Paul’s distinctive rhetorical style, all in the service of varied responses to circumstances. In conclusion the Book of Revelation offers an example of theology, which is at the heart of earliest Christian conviction, rather than being marginal to it.21 The most important result of two hundred years of historical scholarship on early Christian texts is that apocalyptic and eschatological ideas are central to their understanding. The understanding of the development of Christianity is tied up with early Christianity’s wrestling with its eschatological and apocalyptic inheritance. The hope of a new age on earth, was still widely held from the second century onwards.22 This type of belief was the earliest phase of the Christian doctrine of hope, in which an earthly Kingdom of God was earnestly expected, echoing the Matthaean version of the Lord’s Prayer, where there is an earnest longing for God’s Kingdom to ‘come on earth as in heaven’. Later, Augustine’s influential interpretation was paramount, for he reinterpreted the millennium as the whole interval, from the first advent to the last conflict, the ‘reign of the saints’, namely the Church’s. This exemplifies a fundamental division within the Christian world, ancient and modern, and concerns whether Christians believe that the Kingdom of God involves a hope for the transformation of this world and its structures. Future hopes in the Second Temple period were many and various, though with some common features, but the conviction that eschatology was not just a matter of belief or speculation but a determining principle of life, which might disturb received wisdom and push adherents along uncharted paths of religious and social experiment, is a distinguishing feature of New Testament texts (whatever the similarities with contemporary Jewish sources). If there is one secure, and perhaps most important, result of two hundred years of historical scholarship on early Christian texts, it is that eschatological ideas are central to the understanding of them. Recent study of the historical Jesus echoes assessments, which go back at least to the work of Johannes Weiss 20 A. Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2016). 21 Cf. F. Engels, ‘On the History of Early Christianity’, in Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. L. Feuer (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 209–235. 22 B.E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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and Albert Schweitzer.23 The understanding of the development of Christianity was tied up with early Christianity’s wrestling with its eschatological inheritance.24 Eschatological beliefs are the most significant motor of the development of the Christian religion and the formation of the typical contours of Christian theology and ethics in the centuries after the New Testament writings were written. Modern New Testament scholarship, whether historical or theological, offers a series of attempts to comprehend the debt of the New Testament to the eschatological and apocalyptic religion of Second Temple Judaism.

23

Sanders, Jesus and Judaism; Weiss, Jesus’ Proclamation; Schweitzer, Quest. Schweitzer, Quest; M. Werner, The Formation of Christian Dogma: An Historical Study of its Problem, trans. S.G.F. Brandon (London: A&C Black, 1957). 24

28. ‘Diversely and in many ways God spoke by the prophets’: The Perspectives of the New Testament and the Texts and Images of William Blake on the ‘Prophetic Word’ The New Testament Gospels picking up on themes in the Hebrew Bible manifest the differing facets of prophecy and its interpretation. Mark’s account of the baptism of Jesus (Mark 1:10) relates Jesus’ experience at the Jordan using the language of Ezekiel’s call vision (Ezek. 1), with the heavens rent asunder. It is Ezekiel’s call vision along with Isaiah’s (Isa. 6), which is the central component of John’s heavenly vision, and the vision of one like a son of man (Rev. 1:10–16) owes much to different parts of the Book of Daniel. Alongside this, one of Matthew’s distinctive traits is the punctuation of his narrative with explicit references to the moment of definitive Scripture fulfilment. That theme is taken up in Luke’s version of Jesus’ preaching at Nazareth when Isa. 61 is quoted by Jesus and is said to be fulfilled in the presence of those who hear him speak. But this passage concerns not only the words of the prophet but his deeds also. In a similar vein, but in a distinctively Johannine mode, the visions, words and deeds of the prophet are complemented by his person to produce a narrative of the exemplification of the way in which the prophetic word comes through a person’s life as well as his words. In the final section of the article (28.8.) I consider the work of William Blake. My reason is that he is such an important component of the history of prophecy in Christianity and had a conviction of a prophetic vocation, and his words and images offer a kind of recapitulative coda of themes in the lecture, not least with regard to the ethical dimension of the life of the prophet.

28.1. Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible In the heyday of the kingdoms of Judaea and Israel there emerged a movement, to which the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible bear witness. They forged another perspective on the ideology and life of the politics of two small kingdoms, which in due course offered the ingredients for a social critique and a horizon of hope. The critique of the shortcomings of those who were at ease in Zion in the period of the monarchy is one of the most remarkable

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stories in political history. How they came to their conviction of their vocation and the various modes of receiving the divine word is not always clear, but the most dramatic examples include the access to the heavenly court, such as we have in Micaiah ben Imlah’s vision (1 Kgs. 22:19–23), Isaiah’s vision in the Temple in the reign of Uzziah (Isa. 6), and later the dramatic theophany when Ezekiel saw the Lord on the cherubim throne not in the Temple but by the waters in Babylon (Ezek. 1). The nature of ancient Jewish and early Christian expectation in some ways represents a shift from the warnings of the earlier prophets whose words are preserved in the Hebrew Bible. The Book of Joel signals the catastrophe but also the positive consequences of repentance (Joel 1–2; 4:18–19, cf. Ezek. 36:26–29). There are plenty of examples in the Hebrew Bible, where there are warnings of disaster without repentance and a change in social behaviour. There is no hope, no sign of restoration on the other side of catastrophe (e.g., Jer. 4:23–27). That gloomy vision is not so apparent in later texts of the prophetic tradition. The message of doom was systematised and the messianic hope linked with a vision of restoration. The foundation message was one of warning that if there was no repentance then disaster would strike. But the woes and travails are almost always followed by predictions of the messianic age. In the later texts, typified by the eschatology of Revelation, disaster may be inevitable, which would manifest itself in the breakdown of the social as well as the natural order, but it would ultimately be followed by better times for the earth and its inhabitants. In Jewish tradition the prophets are seen as part of the tradition of the interpretation of the definitive words of Moses: ‘Moses received the Torah from Sinai and gave it over to Joshua. Joshua gave it over to the Elders, the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets gave it over to the Men of the Great Assembly’ (m.Aboth 1:1). Moses differed from the later prophets to whom God spoke in visions or dreams, for God spoke with him mouth to mouth, plainly and not in dark speech, and Moses beheld the form of God, of which more in a moment (Num. 12:7–8). The complexities of the prophetic oracles themselves became the subject of exegetical exploration, sometimes explicitly with the aid of divine inspiration (Sir. 39). In the Qumran Scrolls, understanding of the obscurities of the prophetic words came through an inspired Teacher of Righteousness who was inspired to offer authoritative interpretation: … and God told Habakkuk to write down that which would happen to the final generation, but He did not make known to him when time would come to an end. And as for that which he said, that he who reads might read it speedily, interpreted this concerns the Teacher of Righteousness, to whom God made known all the mysteries of the words of his servants the prophets. (Habakkuk Commentary, 1QpHab 7)

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Like the inspired authority granted to the Teacher of Righteousness at Qumran (cf. 1QpHab 7), the apostle Paul saw himself and his companions as stewards with the privilege of administering the divine mysteries (1 Cor. 4:1). Somewhat different from this learned, albeit inspired, exegetical approach to the elucidation of the prophetic words is the way in which the visionary texts, like the call visions of Ezekiel (Ezek. 1) and the related Isa. 6, may have become a stimulus to an exegetical actualisation, which involved seeing again what Ezekiel had seen.1 The reconstruction of the contours of this visionary tradition is not easy and is dependent on hints such as the apocalypse to John, Paul’s enigmatic words about ‘the man in Christ being caught up to the third heaven’ (2 Cor. 12:2–4) as well as passages in pseudepigraphic apocalypses. If we are to believe the testimony of John of Patmos that he ‘was in the spirit’, and saw what he believed he saw in his visions, his apocalypse offers testimony of one engaging with Ezekiel and related prophetic texts, for whom those words inspired his own visions and indeed led him to view his prophecy as possessing an authority even greater than that of his prophetic predecessors.

28.2. Prophetic Word and Human Medium Those later examples remind us that behind the prophetic words now extant in the Bible stand the figures of the prophets themselves, who did not speak only with words, for their often dramatic involvement took an increasingly embodied form of prophetic communication, sometimes very eccentric. In the prophecy of Ezekiel especially, words were complemented by bodily actions, offering dramatic divine signs of the imminent judgement. For example, Ezekiel took a brick and portrayed a city on it and the siege against it and lying on his left side for a number of days indicated that he bore the punishment inflicted on Jerusalem. After that he lay on his right side and bore the punishment of the house of Judah, and then baking bread prepared on human dung (Ezek. 4:12–13), took a sharp sword (Ezek. 5), and an exile’s bag and dug through the wall (Ezek. 12). Most dramatically of all, when tragedy struck Ezekiel, when his wife died, ‘the delight of his eyes’, the prophet was instructed not to mourn for her (Ezek. 24:15–24). In these, ‘Ezekiel shall be a sign to you’ (Ezek. 24:24). The prophet as a sign is echoed by the words of Jesus of Nazareth, who looked back not to Ezekiel but to Jonah who was a sign to the people of Nineveh (Luke 11:30, cf. Matt. 12:40).

1 M.E. Stone, ‘A Reconsideration of Apocalyptic Visions’, HTR 96 (2003): 167–180; G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1941); D.J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988).

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In the prophecy of Jeremiah we find the exposition of the personal and psychological cost of prophetic activity, both in the accounts of the effects of Jeremiah’s controversial activity and in the so-called ‘confessions’ of Jeremiah, in which the prophet laments the difficulties of his calling (e.g. Jer. 15:10–18; 17:5–8; 20:7–12).

28.3. Prophecy in the New Testament The New Testament is about prophecy, its fulfilment and its actualisation from beginning to end, from the way in which Matthew looks back to the authoritative prophecy to authenticate Jesus’ birth (Matt. 1:23), to the experience of John on an Aegean island, who spoke in the language of the prophets of old, and described how he too was called to be a prophet to ‘peoples, languages and nations’ (Rev. 10:11). Of all the texts in the New Testament relating to prophecy, Acts 2:17, as well as any, encapsulates the view that prophecy is in some sense not just ‘fulfilled’ but actually renewed, and indeed, re-started (Joel 2:28–32). The words ‘in the last days’ added to the quotation from Joel sets the tone for the significance of what is happening and marks the phenomenon as a sign that the eschatological moment has arrived. In some rabbinic sources, e.g. t.Sotah 13:3, there is evidence that the prophetic Spirit had departed from Israel with the deaths of the prophets, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, to be replaced by the bat qol, so its return would be a significant eschatological event, a sign of the dawn of ‘the last days’. The New Testament is full of that sense of being part of a ‘propitious moment’ in the divine economy (e.g. Luke 1:23–24, cf. 1 Pet. 1:10–12). Also, the New Testament picture focuses as much on prophets as earlier prophetic words and is more akin to the stories told about the lives of the prophets such as Elijah and Jeremiah. Major actors are as much prophetic agents who actualised the eschatological events as communicators of divine words, though, of course, many words of warning and prediction are to be found (Acts 21:11).

28.4. The Gospels and Acts The Gospels record that Jesus saw a close link between himself and John in his understanding of his ministry. The two different approaches of God’s messengers are both rejected (Luke 7:32). In their different ways they indicate the importance of the baptism of John. In the report of Jesus’ own call (Mark 1:11) there is an echo of Ezek. 1:1. While the methods of scribal interpretation of Scripture set out in Sir. 38 may be found in the Jesus tradition, that sense of one acting with prophetic authority, ‘not as the scribes’ (Mark 1:22) is important (Mark 3:28 and Matt. 12:28). The account of Jesus’

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preaching in the synagogue in Capernaum in its form in Luke (Luke 4:16–18) is based on the fulfilment of Isa. 61. Elijah is explicitly likened with John the Baptist (Matt. 11:14; 17:13) and in the answer to the question Jesus puts about his identity (Matt. 16:14) identification with one of the prophets, is on the lips of Jesus’ interlocutors. Like the biblical prophets, Jesus challenges his generation and places himself in the long line of prophets who have done the same (Luke 11:49–51; 13:33–35), and like Elijah and Jeremiah, he is rejected by his contemporaries (Mark 6:4, cf. Jer. 15:10; 20; Luke 4:24; John 4:44). These sayings echo prophetic themes of rejection such as ‘prophets are not without honour, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house’ (Mark 6:4) and ‘Today, tomorrow and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem’ (Luke 13:33) and Jesus’ denunciation of the activities in the Temple explicitly echoes Jeremiah’s prophetic denunciation (Mark 11:17, cf. Jer. 7:11). As already mentioned, Jesus saw himself as a sign like Jonah to his generation (Luke 11:30). In a more eschatological vein, the enigmatic human figure heralding the fifth monarchy of Daniel’s visions is a frequent allusion in the Jesus tradition (e.g. Mark 14:62, cf. Dan. 7:13). Throughout the Gospel of John, like Isaiah, who ‘saw God’s glory and spoke of him’ (John 12:41, 49; 6:46; 8:38, cf. Sir. 48:22, 25), Jesus is presented as agent and spokesman of God (e.g. John 12:44; 7:16; 12:45). It is a theme, which makes only an isolated appearance in the Synoptic Gospels (Luke 10:16) and as we shall see is important in the Pauline letters. As the one sent by God, Jesus exceeds in authority past prophetic agents, for he is also one who comes to regard himself as a heavenly being, the embodiment of the divine kābōd, the revelation of the hidden God (John 14:8; 1:18). The Gospel of John is what John Ashton has called ‘an apocalypse – in reverse’,2 in that the revelation of heavenly mysteries is not only that Jesus is the one who is sent to speak the prophetic words but also embodies it. The divine plan embracing past, present and future, as exemplified by apocalyptic prophecy was now embodied in a life lived and died.3 Just as Moses differed from other prophets to whom God spoke in visions or dreams (Numbers 12:7–8), so too Jesus in the Gospel of John differs from Moses, for he is the embodiment of divine kābōd, whom Isaiah saw and spoke of (John 12:41). Very briefly, throughout the Acts of the Apostles there is a revelatory thread, from Peter’s ecstatic vision paving the way for preaching to non-Jews (Acts 10:11) and the thrice-told prophetic call of Saul and its consequences 2 J. Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 328–329. 3 J. Ashton, The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), especially 97–156.

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(Acts 9; 22; 26). In addition, the prophetic interventions of Agabus and the daughters of Philip are an important component of the story told (Acts 11:27– 28 and 21:10–12; 21:9).

28.5. The Pauline Letters Paul’s letter to the Galatians evinces the prophetic character of the apostle to the gentiles most clearly. Not only is there the uncompromising assertion of the rejection of human tradition in favour of the commission from the divine at the very outset, but his own experience is the measure of hermeneutical judgement and the necessary context for the subsequent engagement with his ancestral scriptures (Gal. 3–4). In the language used to describe Paul’s conversion in Galatians (Gal. 1:12–16; cf. Acts 9:2; 22:4; 26:10–11), Paul draws on prophetic passages like Isa. 49 and Jer. 1:4. What is more, his sense of himself is an agent of God (šaliaḥ) with a distinctive role in the divine economy. ‘Whom shall I send and who will go for us?’ God had asked of the heavenly court as Isaiah in the Temple described his vocation to be an emissary. Like Isaiah, Paul both saw and was sent to speak to the people. It was the word of God that his hearers received from him, not a human word but God’s word (1 Thess. 2:13). Typifying this is what we find in Colossians (Col. 1:25–27). Paul was convinced that he had been set apart as the apostle to the gentiles, commissioned by the Messiah himself to preach the good news to the nations (Gal. 1:16). Being a prophetic agent and mediator of divine mysteries in deed as well as word, with a key role in the eschatological events, is key to Paul’s self-understanding. Paul can tell the Corinthians that they are those ‘upon whom the end of the age has come’ (1 Cor. 10:11). One sign of this is that believers now taste of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:13, cf. Heb. 6:4). Paul regarded the Spirit as itself a mark of the presence of the New Age, ‘the first fruits’, the seal placed in the hearts of believers as a guarantee (Rom. 8:23, cf. Eph. 1:14; 2 Cor. 1:22). Like the Book of Revelation, which marks the breaking in of the last things with the presence of the prophetic witness (Rev. 19:10; 10– 11), Paul and his churches experience the revival of the gift of prophecy, a sign that the promises of God were being fulfilled (1 Cor. 12–14; Rom. 12:6; 1 Thess. 5:19, cf. Eph. 4:11; Acts 11:28).

28.6. Paul on Words and the Human Person as the Means of Communication of the Divine Paul was a prophet whose legacy has been communicated by letters reflecting the way in which his prophetic words were transmitted to those fledgling communities. Written words were the medium of Paul’s divinely given authority

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to enable communities living in the time of waiting for the culmination of the eschatological hope. But in addition to the letters there is the apostolic presence. Paul did not see himself only as a divine spokesman, for he regarded his personal agency as a crucial part of the eschatological events in enabling the nations to know the everlasting gospel. Indeed, in the Corinthian correspondence, faced with resistance from members of embryonic messianic communities he had established, he appealed to his authority, not only as one called and sent, but also as one who bore the messianic persona. Like Jeremiah, his sufferings are part of his lot as the divine agent (1 Cor. 4), though he relates this closely to identification with the suffering messiah (2 Cor. 4:10, cf. Col. 1:24). Paul contrasted himself with the Corinthians, who are babes in Christ and need to imitate him. Indeed, the appeal to his personal presence whether in body or spirit is a crucial part of his understanding of his pastoral/prophetic oversight. While some in Corinth can, apparently, according to Paul, say ‘His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible’ (2 Cor. 10:10), Paul made a virtue out of his contemptible personal presence. Like the figure in Isa. 53, who became a type of the suffering Christ, Paul saw the contempt shown of him as exemplifying in his person the same characteristics of being despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering, a person ‘of no account’ (Isa. 53:3). But words as well as person are alike crucial. Unlike the contemptible figure about whom the words of Isa. 53 speak, Paul asserts his messianic authority in both his ‘weak’ bodily presence and ‘contemptible’ speech alongside his ‘weighty and strong’ apostolic/ prophetic word, which is how his epistles function in his absence. Paul goes on to say to the Corinthians ‘what we say by letter when absent, we will also do when present’ (2 Cor. 10:11). His prophetic presence as the contemptible messianic figure is complemented by weighty and strong letters, in which the prophetic word is intended to effect the conviction of his authoritative presence with the community: ‘though absent in body, I am present in spirit’ (1 Cor. 5:3–4). In 2 Cor. 3 Paul contrasts his apostolic ministry with that of Moses, the archetypical prophet. Here Paul is not only placing his activity on a superior plane to that of Moses but subordinating the latter’s pivotal role in the divine economy to his role, which effects the temporary nature of Moses’ work, for Paul ministers a new covenant of God with humanity. Paul compares himself with an architect working according to a divine master plan, parallel to Moses himself (Exod. 25:9 and 40, cf. 1 Chron. 28:18 and 2 Cor. 3:16), and that to which he as apostle bore witness was itself an, indeed the, apocalyptic event.4

4

M. Bockmuehl, Revelation and Mystery in Ancient Judaism and Pauline Christianity, WUNT 2.36 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1990).

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28.7. The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ If the character of Paul’s letters as prophetic words is not immediately obvious, the Apocalypse of John is explicitly a book of prophecy whose main message is in large part eschatological. John reports his vision of the present and the future, and indeed, the climax of history in the coming of heaven on earth. The Apocalypse of John presents itself as an authoritative book of prophecy, whose status is described in words echoing Deuteronomy (Rev. 22:18, cf. Deut. 4:2; Rev. 22:10), perhaps even supplanting the ancient prophecy, with whose contents it is replete. By implication, John is a prophet, whose role model is the vision of the two witnesses who prophesy and suffer for their prophetic witness (Rev. 11:2–13). John acts out typical prophetic experiences. Like Isaiah and Ezekiel he is vouchsafed visions of God (cf. Ezek. 1:1) and, echoing the visionary experience of the latter, is commissioned to eat a scroll (Rev. 10:9; Ezek. 2:9; 3:1–3) and perform as a prophet to the nations in the manner of Jeremiah (1:4). This is a direct call to participate actively as a prophet in the midst of the unfolding eschatological drama rather than merely be a passive spectator of it inspired by the prophets Moses and Elijah. In so far as there is any model of community in Revelation, it is a community of prophets, for most of the seven churches themselves are compromised in a situation where, to borrow Blake’s words, ‘The Beast and the Whore rule without controls’ (E6115). The prophetic role means emulating the witness of the paradigmatic prophet, Jesus the faithful witness (Rev 1:5).

28.8. William Blake and Prophecy In the final part I offer a necessary perspective on the theme, which I have just enunciated by considering prophecy in the texts and images of William Blake. The poet, artist and engraver, William Blake was a visionary and thought of himself as standing in a tradition of prophets, especially John. With the quotation from Num. 11:29 slightly emending the Authorised Version’s ‘Would to God that all the Lord’s people were prophets’ William Blake ended his famous ‘Preface to Milton’. Prophecy is not a role, reserved for a privileged elite, for, ‘the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God’. That being said, Blake also had a strong sense of his own peculiar vocation to open the doors of perception and understanding, as we shall see in a moment. Blake’s aim is the recovery of the ‘Poetic or Prophetic character, as a contemporary illuminated text puts it:

5

E plus page number(s) refers to Erdman’s edition of Blake’s works, see below, p. 783.

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If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again. (There is No Natural Religion, E3)

Blake expounded his views on prophets in a marginal note he wrote 1798 in his copy of a book by the Bishop of Llandaff, who had criticised Tom Paine’s critique of religion: Prophets in the modern sense of the word have never existed. Jonah was no prophet, in the modern sense, for his prophecy of Nineveh failed. Every honest man is a prophet; he utters his opinion both of private and public matters. Thus: If you go on So, the result is So. He never says, such a thing shall happen let you do what you will. A Prophet is a Seer, not an Arbitrary Dictator. (‘Annotations to Watson’s Apology’, E617)

Blake’s drawings and illuminated books are saturated with apocalyptic and prophetic images. John’s apocalyptic vision especially is a central component of many aspects of Blake’s visionary world, even when he departs from some of its more violent and vengeful themes. Revelation informs his understanding of his own political situation, as it has done many others before and since, and is such a dominant part of his mental furniture. He saw continuity between the characters in his own mythical world and those characters in John’s vision (The Four Zoas 8.597, E385–386). In Blake’s illustrations to Edward Young’s, ‘Night Thoughts’, Young’s words prompt Blake to consider their social and political implications, and not simply their application to personal morality. As in Rev. 13, where Daniel’s vision is the lens through which John of Patmos views Roman oppression, so in Blake’s image the biblical vision is the lens through which contemporary political realities are considered. Blake depicts the heads of the beast as contemporary sevenfold military, royal, legal and ecclesiastical powers of his day parallel to the way in which seventeenth century Digger Gerrard Winstanley (1609–1676) used the imagery of Daniel to interpret the political and religious oppression of his day (Fire in the Bush, CHL 2:190–1966). There can be few passages more redolent of the revolutionary optimism of biblical prophecy than America 6. It reads like an anthology of allusions to biblical passages, which merge to portray the hopeful mood of the young man with eyes raised, looking for the ‘redemption’ which ‘draweth nigh’, to quote Luke 21:28: The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations; The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up; The bones of death, the cov’ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry’d. Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening! Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst; 6

CHL plus page number(s) refers to Corns’s et al. edition of Winstanley’s works, see below, p. 783.

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Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field: Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air; Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing, Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years; Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open. And let his wife and children return from the opressors scourge; They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream. Singing. The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night; For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease. The juxtaposition of one of Blake’s most famous images ‘The Ancient of Days’ at the beginning of Europe a Prophecy, with the title page showing the prominent serpent twining itself around the words Europe (see Fig. 2, below, p. 559), point to a theme, which is central to Blake’s theology and understanding of humanity. On the left is the depiction of a God who orders and measures, an image, which may have been inspired by Milton’s words from Paradise Lost (vii.224–230): He took the golden Compasses, prepar’d In Gods Eternal store, to circumscribe This Universe, and all created things’: One foot he center’d, and the other turn’d Round through the vast profunditie obscure, And said, thus farr extend, thus farr thy bounds, This be thy just Circumference, O World. Blake probably intended the two images to complement each other, so what stirs the hair of the ordering divinity comes from the direction of the juxtaposed image of the serpent. The wind of change blows from the right, from the east, the direction from which the divine glory comes to the restored Jerusalem in Ezekiel’s prophecy (Ezek. 43:2). The juxtaposition of the measuring, bounding and restricting Ancient of Days and the energetic serpent that brings liberation sets the scene for the prophecy to come.7 Blake was the advocate of living with ‘Contraries’. ‘Without Contraries is no Progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence’ he wrote (Marriage of Heaven and Hell 3, E34). Ordering and energy are both necessary and complement each other. In his Descriptive Catalogue, which was a commentary on what turned out to be a futile attempt to gain public recognition, Blake discussed his artistic method but also extended his purview to everyday existence: 7

D.W. Dörrbecker, ed., William Blake: The Continental Prophecies. With introduction and notes (London: The William Blake Trust/Tate Gallery, 1995), 169.

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The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art. … Leave out this l[i]ne and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist. (Descriptive Catalogue 64, E550)

His artistic work involved great precision as the ‘bounding line’ enabled the channelling of creative energy into images and words. Creative, prophetic, engagement with a diverse literary and artistic inheritance was crucial to his art. He engaged with it, but also resisted it, aware of its shortcomings. The mix of inspiration and resistance enabled him to open up a creative, imaginative space for his own poetic genius, and a different way of looking at things for his own generation. Thus, what Blake’s relationship with Milton offered his generation was a critique of received wisdom. In his early work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell he portrays Milton as representative of an orthodox theological position but suggests that, probably without realising it, Milton was in fact Blake’s theological ally (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 6, E35). He continued his intellectual struggle with his predecessor in Milton a Poem. Here he does not comment on Milton’s writings, but engages directly with the poet himself, or rather his spirit. In so doing Blake may have had Milton’s own words in mind who wrote of books containing ‘the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them’ (Areopagitica 6). Milton’s ‘living intellect’ became a significant part of Blake’s imaginative and interpretative life, so graphically displayed in the image on the screen from Milton a Poem, as Milton’s spirit is depicted entering Blake’s foot (Milton 21[23]:4, E115). In this complex work the spirit of Blake’s distinguished predecessor comes to a belated recognition of his shortcomings, thanks to Blake’s imaginative mediation. Eventually in the poem, Milton confesses his errors, recognises his need to cast off his addiction to ‘Rational Demonstration by Faith’ and ‘the rotten rags of Memory’ and be clothed with Imagination, so ‘To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration’ (Milton 14[15]:3– 32).8 So, in the end Milton comes to accept what he himself had stated, a contrast, which had inspired Blake, that inspiration was not ‘to be obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her Siren Daughters, but by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit’. What is true of Blake’s approach to Milton’s works is also true of how he treated the Bible. Ronald Paulson’s comment that Blake shows himself to be ‘a great illustrator of the repressed text who brings out its latent meaning which has been covered over by pious and tendentious commentators’ and

8

William Blake, Milton a Poem, eds. R.N. Essick and J. Viscomi, William Blake’s Illuminated Books vol. 5 (London: Blake Society/Tate Gallery, 1993), 139.

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‘exposes the errors of the actual verbal and visual text of the Bible while preserving their truths’ is spot on.9 But Blake also revealed his ambivalence about prophecy. Even in versions of America a Prophecy from 1795, which are erased in other versions of this prophecy, there are additional words, which are also clearly present in the much later Copy O of America suggesting ambivalence about prophecy: The stern Bard ceas’d, asham’d of his own song; enrag’d he swung His harp aloft sounding, then dash’d its shining frame against A ruin’d pillar in glittring fragments; silent he turn’d away, And wander’d down the vales of Kent in sick & drear lamentings. (E 52) In Vala, (or as it was entitled later The Four Zoas, reflecting the influence of the prophecy of Ezekiel), the prophetic function is recognised as a distraction, a ‘delusive’ (The Four Zoas 9.850–855, E407). Indeed, in words which seem to echo 1 Cor. 13:8–10, ‘dark Religions are departed’. That which is ‘dark’ is an enigma, echoing Tyndale’s translation of 1 Cor. 13:12, ‘in a darke speakynge’. The contrasting fortunes of the hero of Blake’s mythological system, Los in Blake’s longest and most complex illuminated book, Jerusalem, suggest that, however sincere and energetic Los’s redemptive intentions may be, they do not always achieve their aim, and, indeed at times, seem to be counterproductive. At the climax of Jerusalem Los’s final struggle ‘of strict severity self-subduing’ leads to him no longer being blighted by Selfhood (Jerusalem 91:50; 93 and 94)10 and Los is ‘united with Jesus and casts off Selfhood’ (Jerusalem 96). What matters here is not just the words or the extent of the prophetic endeavour but the character of the prophet who is engaged in the redemptive work. Two dramatic images from Jerusalem make the point. Plate 75 shows Blake invoking Rev. 17. Babylon, depicted as a mermaid is seated upon a sea monster. In the words above, we read about Jesus breaking through death and hell to open eternity in time and space in the face of the aggression of ‘Babylon the Great, the Abomination of Desolation, Religion hid in War’. The very next page of Jerusalem (Plate 76) shows a figure with arms outstretched towards the crucified Jesus, possibly Los (75:23) or Albion, the embodiment of Britain (75:27). The man turns his back on the beast and 9 R. Paulson, Book and Painting: Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible. Literary Texts and the Emergence of English Painting (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), 118; cf. the role of Sachkritik in modern biblical studies, R. Morgan, ‘Sachkritik in Reception History’, JSNT 33 (2010): 175–190; R. Radfor -Ruether, ‘Feminist Interpretation: A Method of Correlation’, in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, ed. L.M. Russell (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985), 117. 10 S.M. Sklar, Blake’s “Jerusalem” as Visionary Theatre: Entering the Divine Body (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 57–58, 240–250.

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‘Babylon the Great’ and looks up at the crucified Christ and seems to embrace Christ’s example. Here is the adoption of a different frame of mind, and behaviour, in which the human ego, which Blake calls ‘Selfhood’, is not allowed to hold sway. It is the kind of thing that Paul seems to enjoin when he talks about being identified with Christ. It is about humility and the diminution of self-importance, recognising the Other rather than putting the self in first place. The nature of this pictorial example is summarised in words elsewhere in Jerusalem ‘if I die I shall arise again & thou with me This is Friendship & Brotherhood without it Man Is Not’ (Jerusalem 96:16, E255).11 For Blake, art, life and prophecy overlapped (E550). His early words about prophecy as a person uttering their ‘opinion both of private & public matters’ (E617) was complemented by the experience of life and by the channelling of imaginative energy into images and words. As already mentioned, the annihilation of selfhood and human brotherhood did not come by resort to violence, ‘Religion hid in War’, or by submission to the rules of an authoritative book, but by promoting brotherhood and the forgiveness of sins. That meant plumbing the complexities of the human personality which leads to the ‘dark delusions’ (The Four Zoas 8.111[107]:18, E382), including the delusions of the prophetic ego and the need to ensure that its potentially counter-productive endeavours were informed by, if not subordinated to, ‘Human Brotherhood’ (Jerusalem 96:16, 21, 28, E255–256). Prophecy is insufficient and is a phenomenon of the present age. It can assist as ‘we see through a glass darkly’ until such time as we see ‘face to face’; meanwhile we ‘know in part’ (1 Cor. 13:12). So there is the need for the ‘Poetic or Prophetic character’, to fashion perspectives ‘that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light’, to quote Theodor Adorno’s words.12 It has to be complemented by an ethical, altruistic, element: ‘Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail’ (1 Cor. 13:8).

28.9. Concluding Comment ‘Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son’ (Heb. 1:1–2). The opening words of the Letter to the Hebrews encapsulate an evolution in which the medium of the prophetic word is a person, whose demeanour and life is the crucial prophetic sign. A similar point is made, of course, in John

11 G.A. Rosso, The Religion of Empire: Political Theology in Blake’s Prophetic Symbolism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016). 12 T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 247.

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1:14. The divine word comes in flesh. It is no accident, therefore, that when the early Christians collected the words of Jesus, it was not only his words, but the story of his life, the witness to a life, which was essential to the way in which they communicated the prophetic word. The Gospel of Thomas and even what we can know of the lost early Christian sayings source, Q, were not enough. What Jesus, the prophet sent by God, heard and saw of God becomes less important than the revelation of God in himself (John 14:9). In the Didache we have one of the most explicit examples in early Christian literature of tests for true and false prophets which includes the statement ‘from his behaviour then the false prophet and the true prophet shall be known’ (Did. 11:8). Blake too grasped that the medium of the prophetic word is more than words and images as he sought to emphasise the importance of the demeanour of the prophet as crucial to the success of his communication, and indeed, the life lived is the prophetic word itself, even if he did not put it in the explicit way we find it in the Gospel of John and the opening of Hebrews. Because the prophetic word is identified with a person in the New Testament, it might appear that the words are redundant. So, it may seem that we should be more interested in who Blake was than what he produced; less interested in the corpus of his words and more in Blake as an embodied person. It is not that the person replaces the words, for the latter are the essential witness to the character of the person, and enable us to judge something of that authenticity of the prophetic words by our knowledge of the life of the prophet.

Section Three

The Reception of Apocalypticism and Its Significance

29. Apocalypse and Violence: The Evidence from the Reception History of the Book of Revelation The first part of this paper will juxtapose three struggles from different periods of history in which the Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse, had a part to play: one from the 1520s, one from 1534–1535, and a third from the late twentieth century (there are other examples from fifteenth century Hussite movements where similar issues are raised).1 These examples will be contrasted with the use made of the Apocalypse by two English writers from the seventeenth century, whose use eschews violence and in which the Apocalypse is used to offer a critique of violence. Despite its reputation as a violent book, which in turn has stimulated violence, the Apocalypse has only rarely been directly linked with the promotion of violence (though there may be examples where biblical passages about the last days, more generally, have had their part to play, for example the Canudos community and the Contestado war in Brazil).2 In some of the cases where there is evidence that it has had a role in promoting violence, this arises from the actualising of the text, when readers either use the Apocalypse to illuminate their own circumstances, or themselves identify with figures in the Apocalypse, and become actively engaged in enabling the fulfilment of its prophecies. While the examples considered in the first part of this essay suggest that ‘acting out’ apocalyptic images by those who believed themselves to be agents of the last days is a recurring feature in those situations where violence occurs, actualisation did not always involve violent activity, as there is also evidence pointing to peaceful forms of ‘actualising’.3

1

N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Secker & Warburg, 1957), 198–280. V. Dobroruka, Antônio Conselheiro, o beato endiabrado de Canudos (Copacabana: Diadorim, 1997); E. da Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944); R.M. Levine, ‘Apocalyptic Movements in Latin America in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, eds. J.J. Collins et al., Vol. 3: Apocalypticism in the Modern Period and the Contemporary Age (New York: Continuum, 1998), 179–203. 3 On ‘actualising’ see J.L. Houlden, ed., The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (London: SCM, 1995), 82–86. 2

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At the risk of simplifying a complex visionary text, the story line of the Apocalypse is the overcoming of the contrast between heaven, where there is acknowledgement of the divine creator by the heavenly host, and earth, where there is rebellion and disorder. The climax of the vision is the merging of heaven and earth when the New Jerusalem comes down from heaven and the divine presence is with people. In this process, the key is the vision of the slaughtered lamb, whose vindication provokes a violent crisis in the cosmos.4 The Apocalypse stresses the importance of resistance and witness to that ‘better world’ in the present. In the midst of the present chaos of a disordered world there is a necessary prophetic witness, which is directed against the allencompassing demands of empire and its social exemplification in Babylon and its culture.

29.1. Examples of ‘Apocalyptic’ Struggles: Thomas Müntzer; Münster in 1535; and Waco in 1993 29.1.1. Thomas Müntzer The ferment in early sixteenth century Europe, caused by Luther’s challenge to the church, helped provoke a rash of uprisings, many of which Luther later vigorously denounced. In the mid 1520s peasants in central Europe agitated for better conditions, which led to a variety of petitions of grievance.5 Involved in this struggle was the mystic and reformer, Thomas Müntzer, whose later writings evince an increasing hostility to the rulers of church, city and state and the injustices perpetrated against the peasants.6 Though Müntzer is regarded as the archetypal apocalyptic revolutionary, yet, perhaps surprisingly, there is very little explicit appeal to the Apocalypse itself in his writings. One example is the way in which Müntzer uses the words of Rev. 14:14 (‘Put in your sickle and reap, for the hour to reap has come’) as a way of describing his own activity of social purging. Other passages (such as the vision of the two witnesses in Rev. 11) are alluded to in passing, to support his prophetic conviction. He saw himself as coming ‘in the spirit and power of Elijah’ and as a new Daniel at the head of the Lord’s army. His sense of vocation and determination to engage in violent activity is rooted in the Hebrew Bible and 4

C. Rowland, ‘The Book of Revelation’, in NIB XII (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), 501–

743. 5 J.M. Stayer, The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991). 6 For the texts see P. Matheson, ed., The Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988); idem, The Imaginative World of the Reformation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000); W. Klassen, Living at the End of the Ages: Apocalyptic Expectation in the Radical Reformation (Lanham: University Press of America, 1992).

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in Rom. 13. He inveighed against what he called ‘book religion’ and so was sympathetic towards dreams and visions as an important means of knowing, experientially, the ways of God. Müntzer believed that true believers could have a clear understanding of the difference between the Elect and the Wicked by the inner prompting of the Holy Spirit and should act on this knowledge, by purging those who were unrepentant. There was, however, a pragmatic side to Müntzer’s actions, and his sensitive liturgical innovations show an ability to articulate a pattern of reform rather than revolution. Likewise his letters to the political authorities often reflect evidence of a more diplomatic tone, which contrasts markedly with some of his uninhibited, militant, invective found elsewhere. This bravado contrasts with the pathetic story of the end of his life. He led the peasants into a battle they could not win and persuaded his motley army outside Frankenhausen to hope for a miracle from God as they struggled with the overwhelming forces ranged against them. The appearance of a rainbow in the cloud seemed to offer a sign that divine deliverance was on its way. It was not to be. Many were slaughtered. Müntzer himself was eventually captured, tortured and hanged. The events of May 1525 manifest a conviction that the God who had delivered the people in the past would be bound to do so again.7 It is a similar kind of conviction which fifteen hundred years previously inspired an unknown prophet and his followers in the last hours of the siege of the city of Jerusalem in AD 66–70, as described in Flavius Josephus’s account of the First Jewish Revolt. While it now seems unlikely that the reasons for the Jewish revolt can be laid at the door of apocalyptic inspiration and messianism,8 in the last days of the siege the hope for a miraculous deliverance fired those who, against all rational expectation, expected that God would intervene to fight alongside the rebels (War 6.281ff. and 6.301ff.). 29.1.2. Münster In the ten years after Müntzer’s death, there emerged a radical Anabaptist movement whose founders had, in the last months of Müntzer’s life, made overtures to him, and some of whose early leaders had been involved with Müntzer at Frankenhausen. It too was characterised by claims to prophetic inspiration as well as challenges to ecclesial practice and polity. The distinguished theologian and commentator on the Apocalypse, Melchior Hoffman, was a supporter of the Anabaptists.9 His interpretation of the Apocalypse 7 C. Rowland, Radical Christianity: A Reading of Recovery (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 89–114; A. Bradstock, Faith in the Revolution: The Political Theologies of Müntzer and Winstanley (London: SPCK, 1997). 8 M. Goodman, The Ruling Class of Judaea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 9 K. Deppermann, Melchior Hoffman, trans. M. Wren (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987).

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suggested that figures and images in the Apocalypse were not just a matter of academic debate but could be linked with contemporary persons and movements. Thus, like many before him, Hoffman identified the two witnesses of Rev. 11 with contemporaries. In parenthesis, it is worth comparing the way in which emerging Lutheranism interpreted the witnesses less specifically as types of true preaching.10 An opportunity to translate Melchior’s exegesis into political reality came with the establishment of the New Jerusalem in Münster. The city of Münster was taken over initially by conventional political means by Anabaptists who were supported by leading burghers who threw in their lot with the Anabaptists.11 It then became a magnet for many Anabaptist sympathisers from the region. There was established a polity, initially egalitarian but which became increasingly monarchical. The practice of the leaders, often with autocratic tendencies, fuelled by convictions based on visions, was at odds with the participative emphasis found elsewhere in early Anabaptism. Some of the behaviour was by any standards bizarre, and occasionally cruel and demeaning of women in particular. It was often linked with the ultimate authority bestowed on visionary experience. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the mystical conviction that drove one of the leaders to act on that inner prompting and become, literally, led like a lamb to the slaughter, as he went out to defeat the surrounding armies single-handedly, only to be slaughtered before the eyes of the horrified Münsterites. The Münster experiment ended in a bloody suppression. It was a model of reformation which friends and foes alike subsequently viewed with horror and which contributed to the suspicion and persecution of Anabaptists for centuries. Eyewitnesses, admittedly unsympathetic to the aims of the Anabaptists, record the complexities of the siege prosecuted by the local bishop, and have tended to dominate judgements of Münster ever since. Recent research, however, suggests a degree of political calculation, which is not always apparent in the eye witness accounts. It is easy to follow the drift of the eye witness testimony and accept the judgement of the failure of the revolutionaries, and find nothing but disaster written over the events in the city. That would be a mistake. There can be no doubt that there were some horrific events, unchecked by any responsible communal initiative, which helped make a complex situation catastrophic. All this was compounded by the horrors of the later stages of the siege, and, as has so often been the case, the fantastic is given more credence, as we saw was the case in the defeat of Müntzer at Frankenhausen. 10

Deppermann, Melchior Hoffman, 257, 336. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 261–270. 11 Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 252–280; G.H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962); J.M. Stayer, Anabaptists and the Sword (Lawrence: Coronado Press, 1972). English translation of eye witness accounts in S. Baring-Gould, Freaks of Fanaticism and other Strange Events (London: Methuen & Co., 1891), 195–372.

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Münster offers an unusual example of the use of the Apocalypse in the practice of politics, which sought to bring heaven on earth. It is the best example of the intertwining of the Apocalypse and violence in Christian history. Like the actions of Thomas Müntzer a decade earlier, Münster was about the active idealism.12 The Münster leaders not only identified with the figures in the implementation of hopes for the future and did not remain at the level of utopian Apocalypse and believed that the Last Things were being fulfilled in their midst, but they also allowed their vocations as prophets of the end time to free them to behave ruthlessly and capriciously. In this at least there seems to be little direct inspiration from the Apocalypse. Only Müntzer, who regarded his violence as licensed by the angelic instruction in Rev. 14 found inspiration for his violent campaigns in the Apocalypse itself. A very different form of Anabaptism emerged in the wake of the events surrounding the defeat at Münster. After 1535 Menno Simons laid the foundations for an Anabaptism more suspicious of the Apocalypse and enabled the refugees of the persecution of the Anabaptists to maintain their identity and persist with an understanding of the radical implications of the left wing of the Reformation.13 29.1.3. Waco The third example of a violent event in which we find influence of the Apocalypse comes from the twentieth century. It is the siege of the Branch Davidian commune at Mount Carmel, Waco, by federal agents in early 1993. This ended in disaster for the nearly hundred people killed in the storming of the complex. Vernon Howell, alias David Koresh, took control of the community after a dynastic power struggle some years before. He engaged in an elaborate exegesis of biblical prophecies similar to that we find in the footnotes of the Scofield Reference Bible. Some of his interpretations have been published posthumously. What follows is dependent on the outline of Ken Newport.14 Koresh found in the Apocalypse a summary of all the biblical prophecies and a key to its interpretation. Koresh seems to have believed that he was called to be an agent of the Last Days, identifying himself with the mighty angel of Rev. 10:1, whose mission it was to reveal the mystery of God when the seventh trumpet sounds. On the whole, Koresh was not an innovator in his exegesis. He appears to interpret the first beast of Rev. 13, which John saw in his vision rising out of the sea, as the sequence of world empires starting with Babylon and ending with America. (I say ‘appears’, as there is some uncertainty about the 12

M. Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 120. Klassen, Living at the End of the Ages. 14 K.G.C. Newport, Apocalypse and the Millennium: Studies in Biblical Eisegesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 197–236. 13

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transcription of some of his biblical studies, which have been recorded.) The second beast mentioned in this chapter he regards as America, in its role in the end times, as the supporter of an apostate religious system. This kind of interpretation is loosely related to his Adventist interpretative tradition. After the disappointment at the failure of their eschatological hope in the midnineteenth century, a key doctrine of some Adventists, which has emerged in various guises, has been that the second beast of Rev. 13 has been identified with the United States of America, its culture and religion.15 This contrasts with the very different sense of being an elect nation, with a peculiar destiny in the divine economy, which was deeply rooted in American public theology from the very early years of the colonisation.16 What emerged in Adventism, however, was a very distinctive interpretation of the second beast of Rev. 13, in which the beast was identified with the United States of America.17 While certainty in this matter is out of the question, America’s eschatological role in Adventist exegesis may have prompted the Branch Davidians at Waco to regard the siege, which was taking place, as being a climactic moment in the divine purposes. The federal agents’ behaviour might have seemed to prove that the prediction, that the followers of the beast would persecute the followers of the lamb, was being fulfilled in the catastrophic and fiery end to the community.18 The career of Thomas Müntzer, the Münster commonwealth in 1535 and the Branch Davidians in Waco in 1993 offer examples of the Apocalypse being directly linked with violence. The use of apocalyptic images in all these cases was part of a complex web of factors, however, social and economic as well as religious, none of which by itself offers an explanation of the events.

29.2. Using the Apocalypse to Read the Signs of the Times: Winstanley and Wentworth In late seventeenth century England, we find many examples from both men and women of the Apocalypse being used to interpret the signs of the times, and to inspire prophetic critique of princes, prelates and oppression of peasants similar to that which we find in the later writings of Thomas

15 R.L. Numbers and J.M. Butler, The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 16 R. Smolinski, ‘Apocalypticism in Colonial North America’, and P. Boyer, ‘The Growth of Fundamentalist Apocalypticism in the United States’, in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, 3:336–371 and 140–178; Newport, Apocalypse and the Millennium, 222. 17 P. Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1992), 225–253. 18 Newport, Apocalypse and the Millennium, 224–225.

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Müntzer.19 Although there are many examples of such prophets contemplating violence in pursuit of their political goals, the two examples, which follow, take a different approach, and contrast with what we have already considered. 29.2.1. Anne Wentworth The Baptist, Anne Wentworth, had been ejected from her home by her husband, for what he considered to be her insubordination. He had subjected her to verbal and physical abuse. In writing of this she describes her oppression and hope for vindication in language derived from the Apocalypse. Indeed, she calls her visions (in which we find her own divinely inspired apology) a revelation of Jesus Christ in imitation of the opening word of the last book of the New Testament. She looked forward to a great day of judgement when her husband and his co-persecutors would be judged. What she looks for is an eschatological judgement on, and indeed redemption of, her persecutors, when ‘the man of earth [presumably a reference to her husband] shall oppress me no more … unless he becomes a new man, a changed man, a man sensible of the wrong he has done me with his fierce looks, sharp tongue and cruel usage’.20 Come all Saints, come sing and rejoice with me at Babylon’s fall, and the glorious days, which ye shall see when the great Battle is fought, the day past, and all done, Then all Honour, Glory and Praise to God must be sung. Rejoice, ye Heavens and Prophets, for God avengeth your cause that Babylon would have deprived you of by her unjust Laws. This is a great Mystery, who now can this read? And know it rightly, and in so narrow a path doth tread? Who is able to bear, to have whole Babylon come down? Who can endure to hear, that they are in Babylon? Who doth think, that in England is the painted Whore? Who did think, they should ever hear of me any more? When they sit as Queen, and say, they shall have no sorrow, I am raised up again, and freed from all their horror. When they thought, to put me in the Grave, and have me slain, I am raised up more strong, and brought to Life again. I am reproached as a proud, wicked, deceived, deluded, lying Woman; a mad, melancholy, crack-brained, self-willed, conceited Fool, and black Sinner, led by whimsies, notions, and knif-knafs of my own head; one that speaks blasphemy, not fit to take the Name of God in her mouth; an Heathen and Publican, a Fortune-teller, an Enthusiast, and the like much more, whereof I appeal to God, to judge: And then let all slanderers challenge their own words and as concerning my Husband’s Behaviour towards me in this Case of the Lords, He the Lord will also judge betwixt Him and Me, and make known, whether I 19 A. Bradstock and C. Rowland, eds., Radical Christian Writings: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 109–156. 20 E. Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–88 (London: Virago, 1988); E. Graham et al., eds., Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by SeventeenthCentury Englishwomen (London: Routledge, 1989), 180–196, and more generally on the background, P. Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). The text of Wentworth’s revelation may be found at the Women Writers Resources Project at Emory University.

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am an impudent Hussy, a disobedient Wife to him, one that run away from her Husband, and the like. Or whether He is the Man, that will not suffer me to live with him, that will not receive me into his Habitation, unless I deny the Lord, and his Message, and avow to be deluded by a lying Spirit. (Anne Wentworth, The Revelation of Jesus Christ [1679])

Elsewhere, Wentworth uses the contrast between Jerusalem and Babylon to interpret her situation (Rev. 17–18 and 21–22). She finds the activities of Babylon fulfilled in what her husband, aided and abetted by his clergy friends, is doing to her by his abusive behaviour and looks forward to her vindication. She uses the language of conflict to speak of the struggle that is needed before she achieves her vindication by God. For Wentworth, Babylon’s culture is found in a society based on patriarchy, in which a woman who rejects the harsh treatment finds herself utterly destitute and an outcast. For her and many other women in seventeenth century England, the Apocalypse is a text which empowers her and provides the imagery for her prophetic critique. 29.2.2. Gerrard Winstanley One of the most interesting examples of a social critique inspired by the Apocalypse and other parts of the Bible emerged in the writings of Gerrard Winstanley (1609–1676).21 Between 1648 and 1652 Winstanley wrote tracts while he was actively involved in creating the ‘Digger’ colony on St. George’s Hill in Surrey (now arguably one of the most affluent areas in the UK and home of many media stars). Winstanley had a vision, not just to improve the lot of the hungry and landless through the cultivation of the commons, but also to create a communist, that is, moneyless and propertyless, society of the kind he believed had existed before the Fall. Winstanley held the Earth to have been originally a ‘common treasury’ for all to share. The Fall, he interpreted as the practice of buying and selling land, which allowed some to become rich and others to starve. From the consequences of this Fall humanity stood in need of redemption. True freedom could not be enjoyed by all until the land was held again in common. The Diggers’ practice of ‘digging’, the common land soon spread to many parts of the south of England, but the violence and hostility of local landowners ensured that no colonies survived for long, though it is arguable that, had the movement not been suppressed, the ‘commonwealth’, then being fashioned under Oliver Cromwell might have been more literally that.

21 C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972); M. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1966); Bradstock, Faith in the Revolution; Bradstock and Rowland, eds., Radical Christian Writings, 120–134.

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Winstanley himself had a strong consciousness of his own prophetic vocation (The New Law of Righteousnes;22 The True Levellers Standard Advanced).23 He believed that the prophetic spirit was again active in the momentous days in which he lived and that the apocalyptic images of the Bible were the currency with which latter day prophets could speak God’s word (The True Levellers Standard Advanced).24 Following in the radical spirit, which was manifest in the annals of early Anabaptism, Winstanley uses the imagery of Daniel and the Apocalypse to interpret the oppressive behaviour of the wielders of political and economic power of his day. Winstanley regarded the prevalence of private property as typifying the rule of the Beast of the Apocalypse and the Book of Daniel. For Winstanley, the first of the four beasts in Daniel was royal power, which by force makes a way for the economically powerful to rule over others, making the conquered a slave, giving the earth to some, denying the earth to others; the second Beast he sees as the power of laws, which maintain power and privilege in the hands of the few by the threat of imprisonment and punishment; the third Beast is what Winstanley calls ‘the thieving art of buying and selling the earth with the fruits one to another’; the fourth Beast is the power of the clergy which is used to give a religious or (in something like Marx’s sense) an ideological gloss to the privileges of the few. According to Winstanley, the Creation will never be at peace, until these four beasts are overthrown and only then will there be the coming of Christ’s kingdom. These foure powers are the foure Beasts, which Daniel saw rise up out of the Sea … And this Sea is the bulk and body of mankinde … for out of Mankind arises all that darknesse and Tyranny that oppresses it selfe. … The first Beast which Daniell saw rise up out of the deceived heart of Mankinde, was like a Lion; and had Eagles wings: And this is Kingly power, which takes the Sword, and makes way to rule over others thereby, dividing the Creation, one part from another; setting up the Conqueror to rule, making the conquered a slave; giving the Earth to some, denying the Earth to others. … The second Beast was like a Beare; And this is the power of the selfish Lawes, which is full of covetousnesse … the power of Prisons … the power of whiping, banishment, and confiscation of goods … the power of hanging, pressing, burning, martering …; take these three ribs out of the mouth of the Law, or Innes of Court trade, and that Beast hath no power but dies. The third Beast was like a Leopard … this is the thieving Art of buying and selling, the Earth with her fruits one to another … this Beast had foure wings; Policy; Hypocrisie; Self-Love, and Hardness of Heart; for this Beast is a true self-Lover, to get the Earth to himselfe, to lock it up in Chests and barnes, though others starve for want. The fourth Beast is the Imaginary ClergyPower, which indeed is Judas; and this is more terrible and dreadful then the rest … When Christ the Anointing spirit rises up, and inlightens mankind, then in his light, they shall see the deceit and falshood of this Beast, that hath deceived all the world; and 22 G.H. Sabine, ed., The Works of Gerrard Winstanley (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1941), 190. 23 Sabine, ed., Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 261. 24 Sabine, ed., Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 260.

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shall fall off from him, and leave him naked and bare; and if he will teach and rule, let him shew his power over the Beasts; for the people will all looke up to God, to be taught and governed by him. (Gerrard Winstanley, Fire in the Bush [March 1650], CHL 2:190–196)

Winstanley does not suggest that the overthrow of the Beast should come about through force of arms. Indeed, he offers a view of political change, which is dependent on change in attitudes: the ‘rising of Christ in Sons and daughters’ is what is required to bring about change. Throughout his works there is a rejection of violence, even in the face of extreme provocation from local landowners to the Digger communes (though there is nothing to suggest that he disapproved of the execution of Charles I). He wrote ‘though you should kill my body or starve me in prison, yet know that the more you strive, the more troubles your heart shall be filled with’. Winstanley’s aim was not to conquer by force of arms but to enlighten. This practice, he recognised, was different from what he saw around him: ‘I see, Father, that England yet does choose to fight with the sword of iron and covetousness than by the sword of thy spirit (which is love).’ We find in Winstanley’s work an anticipation of the spirit of protest against violence, which characterised the Quakers. Indeed, it was as a member of one of its assemblies Winstanley probably ended his days. It was among such groups that the flame of radical protest was kept alive at the end of the seventeenth century when the opportunities for radical social change, which seemed to be on offer in the 1640s in England, seemed to have disappeared.25

29.3. William Blake Winstanley’s interpretative approach remained alive among the radical fringes of English religion down to the end of the eighteenth century. The prophet, poet, artist and interpreter of the Apocalypse, William Blake stood in this tradition. He often condemned what he describes as ‘religion hid in war’, the alliance of religious ideology and militarism, which he saw all around him in the activities of the mainstream churches of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century England. In the ‘Preface to Milton’,26 we read that the New Jerusalem is not something remote or far off but a present possibility, something which may be built in England’s green and pleasant land:

25 J. Sproxton, Violence and Religion: Attitudes towards Militancy in the French Civil Wars and the English Revolution (London: Routledge, 1995), and Bradstock, Faith in the Revolution, 103–105, 130–134. 26 Copy B (ca 1805) in Milton a Poem, eds. R.N. Essick and J. Viscomi, William Blake’s Illuminated Books vol. 5 (London: Tate Gallery Publications/William Blake Trust, 1993), 94.

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And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green: and was the holy Lamb of God in England’s pleasant pastures seen! And did the Countenance Divine shine forth upon our clouded hills? and was Jerusalem builded here, among these dark Satanic Mills? Bring me my Bow of burning gold: bring me my Arrows of desire: bring me my Spear: O Clouds unfold: bring me my Chariot of fire! I will not cease from Mental Fight. nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: till we have built Jerusalem, in England’s green and pleasant Land. Would to God that all the Lord’s people were Prophets. Numbers xi.29. As with his radical predecessors, there is no disjunction between human activity and divine activity in bringing this about. For Blake, God is involved through the imaginative and creative work of the prophet. Prophecy is not a thing of the past, for it is the vocation of all people (note the quotation from Num. 11 at the end of the familiar stanzas printed above). Elijah is not just part of past history or future expectation but an inspiration for each new Elijah in every generation, who is willing to condemn the Baalism of a contemporary culture and politics. It was this religion of Baal, which, according to Blake, characterised the capitulation of Christianity to a religion of rules and the acceptance of war and violence. The vision of the New Jerusalem is one that is open to all and the task of building belongs to all. This poem is based on a contrast between what is actually the case and what might be, which is typical of the story line of the biblical Apocalypse. The contrast between the implied question of the opening lines becomes explicit at the beginning of the second stanza, where the question marks are to be found. What is needed for that hope to be fulfilled is ‘Mental Fight’. The use of military imagery here reflects the Apocalypse and Eph. 6:10. ‘Mental Fight’ is the process of challenging the way in which dominant patterns of thinking and behaving make it difficult for all God’s people to be prophets. The ‘Satanic Mills’ is the grinding logic of the reason of the philosophers, which has to be overcome to allow imagination to flourish in the spirit of biblical

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religion. By the time Blake wrote the ‘Preface to Milton’ he challenges Christianity’s overreliance on classical study and philosophy, as the immediate context of these verses make plain. Blake’s drawings and illuminated books are saturated with apocalyptic images, many of which reflect the violent world in which he lived and about which he protested. Two must suffice. In the Songs of Experience version of ‘Holy Thursday’ the marginal designs, such a necessary complement to the interpretative process in Blake’s Illuminated Books, show a woman contemplating a dead child and the comfort offered by a woman for fearful children. There is a close connection with the image of a child cuddling up to the woman reminiscent of the scene of desolation in the frontispiece of America, where a gigantic demon overshadows a woman and a child, naked and overawed, in a desert, dominated by a single cannon, echoing the persecution of the woman and the child Jesus by the Dragon in Rev. 12. The protest against an oppressive state is nowhere better seen than in Blake’s illustrations for Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’.27 The author, a conservative and a monarchist, found in Blake an artist whose political views were diametrically opposed to his own and who took the opportunity of the political repression of the 1790s in England to offer a radical interpretation of apocalyptic images. His depiction of the heads of the beast on which Babylon is seated follows in the radical tradition of Winstanley in Fire in the Bush for the heads include identification with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope, the king, a military figure and a judge. The representation of Babylon as a gaudy woman is, for Blake, curiously literal. Blake was usually extraordinarily sensitive to issues of economic oppression and race, but not to gender. Perhaps in the context of illustrating another’s book he dared not risk too much of a departure from the Bible. The impact of the drawing is, however, striking, particularly for the time and the context. The approach to the Apocalypse of Wentworth, Winstanley and Blake anticipates aspects of late twentieth century reading of the Apocalypse: reading the signs of the times; challenging oppressive behaviour, which afflicts the poor and vulnerable. This may be seen, for example, in the reading of the Bible in the grassroots biblical interpretation inspired by Latin American liberation theology and in the socialist biblical politics of those like William Stringfellow and his followers in the US.28 In popular religion in Latin America, the use of the Apocalypse is an important part of the political critique of those influenced by liberation theology, but also, in parts of the 27

M. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, vol. 2 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), Plate 344. 28 W. Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (Waco: Word Books, 1973); C. Rowland, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; rev. edn. 2007).

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burgeoning pentecostalist movement in Latin America, we find the reading of prophetic texts familiar to us from the Scofield Reference Bible.29 With regard to the former, while one needs to take care not to generalise about a complex phenomenon like liberation theology, there is little evidence of the use of the Apocalypse to support violent, revolutionary, activity. (There is no evidence that the Apocalypse is used in the context of the Movimento dos Sem Terra in the struggle for land in contemporary Brazil, though appeal is made to other egalitarian strands in the Bible.) The writing of a Christian revolutionary like Camilo Torres, for example, who died fighting a guerrilla struggle in Colombia, does not appeal to the Apocalypse. There is much to suggest that the hermeneutical approach of Wentworth, Blake and Winstanley have their twentieth century counterparts in this form of political theology.30

29.4. Hermeneutical Reflections Despite its reputation, the Apocalypse has only rarely been directly linked with the prosecution of violence. In the cases where there is evidence that it has had a catalytic effect, it would appear that there is often a particular hermeneutical move, in which actualising the text takes place, which may be supported by appeal to visions, dreams and direct divine communication. In these cases, the authority given to visionary experience seems to have neglected any attempt to ‘test the spirits’. In fact, it seems to me that we have an inversion of the imbalance between imagination and reason, which prompted the prophetic critique of William Blake of the rationalism, which he found dominant in the religion of his day. At Münster, imagination is given full rein with little credence given to reason or to any critique of the claims to inspiration, which were taken as signs of bad faith and indeed apostasy. Unsurprisingly, down the centuries there has been suspicion of a mix of visionary enthusiasm and political activism. Instead there is a long-standing tendency to play down actualising of the text, and to favour a more detached, analytic reading of the text, which excludes subjective identification with its images or interpretation of contemporary situations in the light of the Apocalypse. One major reaction to actualisation has been to reject present identification in favour of linkages of the text with the distant past or the eschatological future. While the examples considered in the first part of this lecture suggest that ‘acting out’ images from the Apocalypse, by those who considered themselves agents of the last days, is a recurring feature in these examples, actualisation did not always lead to violence. One common factor in the first three 29 30

D. Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). Rowland, Radical Christianity.

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examples is that all believed that the biblical prophecy was being fulfilled and that theirs, therefore, was the meaning of the text without remainder. Tentatively, it may be suggested that, in the other cases, there may have been a greater degree of openness, allowing both a present reference and future applications when apocalypse could go on to make its challenge. Winstanley, like Müntzer and Koresh, believed himself called to be a prophet of the end time, but it is not impossible that when the decisive opportunity passed he did not press for fulfilment by force. His last extant words in his last work ‘The Law of Freedom’ suggest a deep sense of disappointment that the leaders like Cromwell had let the opportunity for change pass. ‘Falsehood ruling power’ is ‘a cause of grief each hour’ for Winstanley and his radical companions.31 But the radical challenge of Apocalypse might offer a resource when the opportunity next came. I hazard the guess that other biblical passages may have provoked more violence in the last 2000 years, e.g. Luke 3:14 which implies acceptance of military involvement unquestioningly, the two swords seemingly commended by Jesus at his arrest in Luke 22:38, references to the centurions in the New Testament and especially Rom. 13. It is true that the distinguished commentator on the politics of apocalypticism, Norman Cohn, thinks that there is a direct line from the Apocalypse via those who were in pursuit of the millennium in the late medieval period to the Third Reich. Against this must be set the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who challenged the church of his day to be ‘a community which hears the Apocalypse’.32 This suggests to me that he thought that the church’s problem in the 1930s was that there was too little Apocalypse and not too much, for this text might have offered more appreciation of the titanic struggle going on in their midst. Apocalyptic images have also contributed indirectly to violence in helping to promote a culture of assured complacency in some modern Christian circles.33 If one is assured of election and final redemption out of a corrupt world destined for destruction, there is no urgency to work for its change. Implicit, and occasionally explicit, approval, may be given to that which may contribute to the world’s end. A fatalistic acceptance of the inevitability of a ‘doomsday’ scenario for the world can mean withdrawal from protests against social injustice and violence, or the tacit approval of the way in which weapons of mass destruction might contribute to the end time events.34 Apocalypse here functions less as a means of social protest than as a small 31

Rowland, Radical Christianity, 102. D. Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures and Notes 1928–1936, trans. E.H. Robertson and J. Bowden (London: Collins, 1965), 324–325. 33 Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More. 34 A.G. Mojtabai, Blessed Assurance: Living with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986). 32

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piece of an eschatological jig-saw in which those who have assurance of salvation are assured of their destiny. The Apocalypse can contribute to conviction of the rectitude of one’s cause and lead to the unswerving commitment to acts and attitudes, which may seem irrational to the majority and detrimental to what is normally perceived as contributing to human flourishing. It does give encouragement to those who resist and protest to maintain their stance even at personal cost to themselves, though in this it differs little from every other piece of early Christian literature and a long literary tradition since, even if it offers the most unequivocal support for those who resist compromise. The Apocalypse is described as prophecy. In it we hear the voice of a lone prophet. The book has, unsurprisingly, appealed to others in similar situations: dissidents and non-conformists, and those who do not feel called to promote a sense of community. Indeed, the messages to angelic representatives of the communities in the book, evince no strong sense of community, but disdain for backsliding, compromise and complacency. One can see why it cannot be the staple diet of any concerned to build up community. The stark contrasts in the book can lead to attitudes of cultural disdain, sectarianism and aversion to compromise, as well as certainty about the rightness of one’s cause and ultimate salvation. Assurance, however, is hardly what is offered to readers of the book. Tyconius, the Donatist Christian from fourth century North Africa, whose interpretation of the Apocalypse greatly influenced Augustine, suggested that the text has little interest in supporting the self-righteousness of an elect community over against the world.35 Most of those addressed in the opening chapters of the book are seen as compromised and in need of change. Indeed, there is a pervasive sense of uncertainty about the identity of those who will be ultimately inhabitants of the New Jerusalem. The conflictual patterns in the Apocalypse passed into mainstream Christianity via Augustine’s City of God, which stresses the ongoing struggle between the two cities, the heavenly and the earthly, Jerusalem and Babylon, both individually and socially and has contributed profoundly to Christian identity. In the light of events like Münster, the Apocalypse was almost completely excluded from the regular pattern of readings in the Church of England.36 When it was included again at the end of the nineteenth century, politically sensitive material like Rev. 13 and 17 was omitted. Today, in mainstream churches, the Common Lectionary only exacerbates this situation, and the book is largely ignored, despised and suspected. The task confronting interpreters is to enable readings, which both own its imaginative potential 35 R.K. Emmerson and B. McGinn, eds., The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 37. 36 F.E. Brightman, The English Rite, 2 vols. (London: Rivingtons, 1915), 1:51.

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and allow that potential to function within the parameters of community building not destruction. Indeed, it was this, which Menno Simons achieved in the wake of the events surrounding the aftermath of Münster.37 Menno’s actions focused less on individual prophetic charisma than community building. In his day he managed to preserve some of the social radicalism of the Apocalypse, which characterised early Anabaptism, while rejecting the variegated forms of violence, which had become endemic in Münster, by offering a more realistic, if no less personally vulnerable, alternative form of communal social protest. The examples in this essay, mainly from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, illustrate the way in which the Apocalypse has helped to provoke violence on the one hand and protests against violence on the other. Nothing has been included on the way in which apocalyptic images of violence, and conflictual views of the world, pervade modern culture.38 For all the distaste for the Apocalypse in the mainstream churches, especially since the Enlightenment, its influence has been felt, more or less directly, in such diverse cultural form as art and the ‘end of the world’ literary genre. So, the Apocalypse may not directly inspire acts of violence but it may have contributed to perceptions of the world which are less quantifiable, but no less pervasive.

37

Klassen, Living at the End of the Ages; G.H. Williams, The Radical Reformation,

387. 38

On this see F. Carey, ed., The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come (London: British Museum Press, 1999).

30. English Radicals and the Exegesis of the Apocalypse From the Venerable Bede until R.H. Charles in the early decades of the twentieth century there has been a succession of interpreters of the Apocalypse in England. Among these only the high point of medieval interpretation of the Apocalypse in the fourteenth century, in the wake of Joachim of Fiore’s ground breaking interpretation,1 can rank with the seventeenth century as a ‘golden age’ of the interpretation of the Apocalypse. This was a particularly turbulent period of history when England had its one period of republican rule. The learned and ingenious explanations of Joseph Mede and Isaac Newton,2 both of whom saw biblical prophecy as a sign of divine providence, mark the boundaries of our period. Their approach stands in marked contrast with the swathe of little known readers of the Apocalypse, many reading the Apocalypse in a time of political upheaval, whose work will be the focus of this essay. These interpretations indicate the way this text was a source of fascination and inspiration among elites and ordinary people alike. The first part of this essay is a descriptive survey of four seventeenth century expositors of the Apocalypse, all of whom are part of the surge of radicalism in the second part of the century, in their resistance to current political and economic arrangements and their aspirations for something different. They have been chosen for their contrasting use of this visionary text. There follows a consideration of the apocalyptic work of William Blake, which complements and continues the seventeenth century exegetes. The essay concludes with a brief hermeneutical reflection, in which I discuss the contrasting approaches. I want to explore the way in which the interpreting subjects insert themselves into the text as active participants in that which the text describes, so that understanding of the text comes about through an imaginative process of identification with the subject matter of the text. 1

D. Burr, Olivi’s Peaceable Kingdom: A Reading of the Apocalypse Commentary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); idem, The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century After Saint Francis (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); J.L. Kovacs and C. Rowland, Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 2 C. Burdon, The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unravelling, 1700–1834 (London: Macmillan, 1997).

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30.1. Mary Cary (fl. 1649), ‘The Little Horne’ and ‘The New Mappe of the New Jerusalem’: Militant ‘Decoder’ The seventeenth century saw a flowering of women’s religious activity in England which coincided with a crisis in religious and political life.3 At the height of the English Revolution in 1649 Mary Cary propounded a doctrine which was to become extremely influential among revolutionary groups: namely, that the succession of world empires predicted in Dan. 2 and 7 had come to its end and that the reign of King Jesus was about to be established.4 In the process of the establishment of this ‘fifth monarchy’, Cary gave the saints an active role. As Christ had ascended to heaven, she wrote, the saints would be his instruments in the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth (Rev. 17:14, 16; 18:6; 19:11). Despite the reference to peace and love of enemies in the gospel, Cary interprets the rider on a white horse of Rev. 19:11 as one who leads the armies of the Saints. Like Thomas Müntzer before her,5 Cary goes to Hebrew Bible passages to justify the just war of the saints in their role as instruments of God in purging the world from evil and setting up the New Jerusalem. Unlike Müntzer, however, she grounds this more firmly in the Apocalypse, whereas Müntzer bases his justification for the war of the saints on an ingenious interpretation of Rom. 13:4 (‘Sermon before the Princes’). According to Cary the reign of God which will be set up on earth will be a happy condition for the Saints. It is only then that they will have no need of using swords and spears any more. They will be filled with knowledge and live in humility and love, exhibiting what she calls ‘a holy filial fear’. They will be enabled to speak a pure, heavenly, language by which their minds and affections will be elevated and their wills will be swallowed up into the will of God. Theirs will be an instinctive knowledge of the divine will and of what 3

M. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966); B.S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (London: Faber & Faber, 1972); P. Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); E. Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–88 (London: Virago, 1988); H. Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); see also Profiles of Anabaptist Women: Sixteenth Century Reforming Pioneers, eds. C.A. Snyder and L.A.H. Hecht (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1996). 4 Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men, 172–194; C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972); idem, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution (London: Penguin, 1993). 5 P. Matheson, ed., The Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988); N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Secker & Warburg, 1957).

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constitutes divine worship (Jer. 31:33, where reference is made to instinctive knowledge of the divine will). There will be no temple nor any ordinance for worship, and, in the light of 1 Cor. 11:26 there will be no Eucharist once the Lord has come to reign with his saints. They will not sin in using the goods of creation, for they will be enabled to make a holy use of all the creatures: ‘their corn, and wine, and oil, and stocks, and herds, and fruits of the trees, and of the field, which they shall enjoy, shall in no sort be abused by them: for the Spirit shall guide them to use all the creatures in a holy manner, enabling them to receive them with prayer and thanksgiving’. What we find in Cary’s approach to passages in Daniel and the Apocalypse is an interpretation of the details of the text and their application to contemporary events. Unlike others of the period (but like both Mede and Newton) she maintained that her understanding of Scripture was not the product of visionary insight but the fruit of a twelve-year study. Hers was an exegesis which she said arose out of conviction and learning rather than an angelic or other form of revelation.6

30.2. Anna Trapnel (fl. 1654), ‘Cry of a Stone’ and ‘A Voice for the King of Saints’ Very different in temper and style is Anna Trapnel. She also was a Fifth Monarchist.7 Where she differed from Cary was in the prophetic rather than explanatory character of her approach to the biblical text. Anna had a visionary trance in 1654 in the centre of London, during which she prophesied about the political failures of Cromwell’s regime. Details of her prophecy were written down at the time and are recorded in The Cry of a Stone.8 In this there is evidence of the disillusionment which was felt among a significant segment of the population, that the hoped for New Age ushered in by the overthrow of the monarchy had seemingly been thwarted. There is a plea to Cromwell to recognise the dominion of Christ and to establish a polity which reflected the democratic aims of the people’s army, to enable the common people to have their proper stake in the divine commonwealth. There is in her prophecy a clear sense that an opportunity, a Kairos, is in danger of being missed when the Spirit of God could effect a change in human polity. Instead the prophet saw all the marks of the old order (private property, a stratified social order and a familiar, albeit non-episcopal, church structure) still present. 6

Mack, Visionary Women. Hobby, Virtue of Necessity; Mack, Visionary Women; http://www.wwp.brown.edu/ texts/wwoentry.html (writings of Mary Cary); http://chaucer.library.emory.edu/wwrp/index. html (writings of Anna Trapnel and Anne Wentworth). 8 Anna Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone, ed. and introd. by H. Hinds (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000). 7

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To those who looked to the reign of King Jesus such reactionary behaviour was tantamount to apostasy. Anna Trapnel’s prophecy offers an example of the kind of prophetic challenge which was made by many at the time. Anna sees the present state as the last empire of Daniel’s prophecy rather than as the dawn of the reign of King Jesus. Hers was a prophetic positioning in a time of penultimacy, much as the followers of Joachim of Fiore, like Peter John Olivi,9 placed themselves on the cusp of the sixth age predicted by the Apocalypse, in the time of Antichrist and a Babylon-like church, when the Saints’ role was primarily to bear prophetic witness against an alien rule. While the indirect influence of the Apocalypse is evident in her major prophecy, The Cry of a Stone, not least in the way it is a springboard for her own visions, it is also explicitly referred to in the midst of the vision by way of offering an explanation of the Apocalypse much as we find the seer in 2 Esdras 11–12 explaining the meaning of Daniel in his vision. It becomes more explicit in the later, A Voice for the King of Saints. Here there is an explicit link between her visions and that of John of Patmos. In a distinctive appropriation of the Apocalypse, Anna Trapnel praises her ‘sisters’ who had supported her in her struggles with the political authorities of the time by identifying them with the ‘elders’ surrounding the throne in Rev. 4, thereby including them in the heavenly promises (A Voice for the King of Saints 37, 54):10 John thou wilt not offended be That handmaids here should sing That they should meddle to declare The matters of the King. John will not be displeased that They should sit about the throne, And go unto original And nothing else will own … And the handmaids were promised, Much of that spirit choice, And it is, and it shall go forth In a rare singing voice.

9

Burr, Olivi’s Peaceable Kingdom. Hobby, Virtue of Necessity, 33.

10

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30.3. Gerrard Winstanley (1609–1676): Activist and Political Typologist One of the most intriguing examples of a social critique inspired by the Apocalypse and related parts of the Bible emerges in the writings of Gerrard Winstanley.11 Between 1649 and 1651 Winstanley wrote tracts while he was actively involved in creating the ‘Digger’ colony on St. George’s Hill in Surrey. Winstanley had a strong consciousness of his own prophetic vocation.12 He believed that the prophetic spirit was again active in the momentous days in which he lived.13 Winstanley had a vision, not just to improve the lot of the hungry and landless through the cultivation of the commons, but also to create a moneyless, and propertyless, society of the kind he believed had existed before the Fall. Winstanley held the earth to have been originally a ‘common treasury’ for all to share. The Fall he interpreted as the practice of buying and selling land, which allowed some to become rich and others to starve. From the consequences of this Fall humanity stood in need of redemption by a process of education concerning the extent of the departure from the divine will and the way in which one should return to it. The Diggers’ practice of ‘digging’ the common land soon spread to many parts of the south of England, but the violence and hostility of local landowners ensured that no colonies survived for long, though it is arguable that, had the movement not been suppressed, the so-called ‘commonwealth’ then being fashioned in England under Oliver Cromwell might have been more literally that. This interpretation of the Fall and its consequences has a long pedigree which in one form or another goes back to Augustine in The City of God 15.5 and beyond him to Josephus.14 Following in the spirit, which was manifest in the annals of early Anabaptism, Winstanley uses the imagery of Daniel and the Apocalypse to interpret the oppressive behaviour of the wielders of political and economic power of his day. In particular, Winstanley regarded the prevalence of private property as typifying the rule of the Beast of the Apocalypse and the Book of Daniel. Like John, his interpretation of Daniel’s vision of the beasts arising out of the sea becomes a vehicle of a powerful political critique of the contem11 Hill, World Turned Upside Down; A. Bradstock, Faith in the Revolution: The Political Theologies of Müntzer and Winstanley (London: SPCK, 1997); idem and C. Rowland, eds., Radical Christian Writings: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). 12 The New Law of Righteousnes, in The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. G.H. Sabine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1941), 190; True Levellers Standard Advanced (Sabine, ed., Works, 261). 13 The True Levellers Standard Advanced (Sabine, ed., Works, 260). 14 Antiquities 1.60. According to Josephus Cain increased his wealth by violence and put an end to the simplicity in which people lived, as he was the first to fix boundaries of the land and to build a city, and later Augustine argues that the earthly city is one in which there is a desire for power and glory at the expense of others. Its founder was Cain.

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porary polity. As in Rev. 13 the Danielic vision is interpreted synchronically rather than diachronically. It is not a succession of empires, therefore, but a fourfold imperial oppression. According to Winstanley the first of the four beasts in Daniel was royal power, which by force makes a way for the economically powerful to rule over others, ‘making the conquered a slave; giving the earth to some, denying the Earth to others’; the second Beast he saw as the power of laws, which maintain power and privilege in the hands of the few by the threat of imprisonment and punishment; the third Beast is what Winstanley calls ‘the thieving art of buying and selling the earth with the fruits one to another’; the fourth Beast is the power of the clergy which is used to give a religious or (in something like Marx’s sense) an ideological gloss to the privileges of the few. According to Winstanley, the Creation will never be at peace, until these four beasts are overthrown and only then will there be the coming of Christ’s kingdom: These foure powers are the foure Beasts, which Daniel saw rise up out of the Sea … And this Sea is the bulk and body of mankinde … for out of Mankind arises all that darknesse and Tyranny that oppresses it selfe. … The first Beast which Daniell saw rise up out of the deceived heart of Mankinde, was like a Lion; and had Eagles wings: And this is Kingly power, which takes the Sword, and makes way to rule over others thereby, dividing the Creation, one part from another; setting up the Conqueror to rule, making the conquered a slave; giving the Earth to some, denying the Earth to others. … The second Beast was like a Beare; And this is the power of the selfish Lawes, which is full of covetousnesse … the power of Prisons … the power of whiping, banishment, and confiscation of goods … the power of hanging, pressing, burning, martering …; take these three ribs out of the mouth of the Law, or Innes of Court trade, and that Beast hath no power but dies. The third Beast was like a Leopard … this is the thieving Art of buying and selling, the Earth with her fruits one to another … this Beast had foure wings; Policy; Hypocrisie; Self-Love, and Hardness of Heart; for this Beast is a true self-Lover, to get the Earth to himselfe, to lock it up in Chests and barnes, though others starve for want. The fourth Beast is the Imaginary ClergyPower, which indeed is Judas; and this is more terrible and dreadful then the rest … When Christ the Anointing spirit rises up, and inlightens mankind, then in his light, they shall see the deceit and falshood of this Beast, that hath deceived all the world; and shall fall off from him, and leave him naked and bare; and if he will teach and rule, let him shew his power over the Beasts; for the people will all looke up to God, to be taught and governed by him. (CHL 2:190–196)15

Unlike Mary Cary, Winstanley does not suggest that the overthrow of the Beast should come about through force of arms. Indeed, he offers a view of political change which is dependent on transformation in attitudes: what he describes as the ‘rising of Christ in sons and daughters’. Winstanley’s aim was not to conquer by force of arms but to enlighten, therefore.16 There are 15

Gerrard Winstanley, Fire in the Bush (March 1650) (CHL 2:190–196). Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 144; C. Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians in the French Revolution in France and England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 16

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passages deploring victory ‘gotten by the sword’,17 though there is nothing to suggest that he disapproved of the execution of Charles I. Winstanley’s approach to apocalyptic images is distinctive. This is not because the hermeneutic is different from many others working in the tradition which stems from Tyconius,18 but because the actions through which the communities laid claim to their birthright from God is regarded as the framework and inspiration through which understanding of Scripture and the divine will takes place. The great historian of the English Revolution, Christopher Hill, has rightly noted the affinities between this approach to Scripture and the reading of the Bible in the Basic Ecclesial Communities of Latin America with connection to the theology of liberation.19 In both there is a robust conviction that illumination of the meaning of Scripture and contemporary affairs comes when the Bible is allowed to function as a lens through which the world can be perceived afresh in the context of a prophetic witness carried out in the midst of history. It is a form of what is typical of biblical interpretation in the contemporary Brazilian comunidades eclesiais de base: ‘life interpreted by means of the Bible’.

30.4. Anne Wentworth (fl. 1679), ‘Revelation of Jesus Christ’: Personal Typology If Trapnel represents the initial phase of disillusionment with the pace of political change, the experience of defeat and reaction after the restoration of the monarchy in 1661 intensified and affected later writers, not least in the ways in which they used the Apocalypse. Concern moved to the personal and the spiritual life rather than the impact of apocalypse on wider society. In different ways Milton and Bunyan represent this trend of internalising the apocalyptic struggle.20 There is something similar in the writing of the Baptist, Anne Wentworth. She had been ejected from her home by her husband for what he considered to be her insubordination. According to Wentworth he had subjected her to verbal and physical abuse. In writing of this she describes her oppression and hope for vindication in language derived from the Apocalypse. Indeed, she calls her own divinely inspired apology a Revelation of Jesus Christ in imitation of the opening words of the last book of the New 17 Bradstock, Faith in the Revolution, 130; J. Sproxton, Violence and Religion (London: Routledge, 1995). 18 Tyconius, The Book of Rules, trans. W.S. Babcock, SBLTT 39 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989); P. Fredriksen, ‘Tyconius and Augustine on the Apocalypse’, in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, eds. R.K. Emmerson and B. McGinn (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 20–37. 19 Hill, English Bible; C. Rowland and M. Corner, Liberating Exegesis: The Challenge of Liberation Theology to Biblical Studies (London: SPCK, 1990). 20 C. Hill, The Experience of Defeat (London: Faber, 1975).

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Testament. She looked forward to a great day of judgement when her husband would be judged, when ‘the man of earth’ (presumably a reference to her husband) ‘shall oppress me no more … unless he becomes a new man, a changed man, a man sensible of the wrong he has done me with his fierce looks, sharp tongue and cruel usage’:21 Come all Saints, come sing and rejoice with me At Babylon’s fall, and the glorious days, which ye shall see When the great Battle is fought, the day past, and all done, Then all Honour, Glory and Praise to God must be sung. Rejoice, ye Heavens and Prophets, for God avengeth your Cause That Babylon would have deprived you of by her unjust Laws. This is a great Mystery, who now can this read? And know it rightly, and in so narrow a path doth tread? Who is able to bear, to have whole Babylon come down? Who can endure to hear, that they are in Babylon? Who doth think, that in England is the painted Whore? Who did think, they should ever hear of me any more? When they sit as Queen, and say, they shall have no sorrow, I am raised up again, and freed from all their horror. When they thought, to put me in the Grave, & have me slain, I am raised up more strong, and brought to Life again. … I am reproached as a proud, wicked, deceived, deluded, lying Woman; a mad, melancholy, crack-brained, self willed, conceited Fool, and black Sinner, led by whimsies, notions, and knif-knafs of my own head; one that speaks blasphemy, not fit to take the Name of God in her mouth; an Heathen and Publican, a Fortune-teller, an Enthusiast, and the like much more, whereof I appeal to God, to judge: And then let all slanderers challenge their own words … And as concerning my Husbands Behaviour towards me in this Case of the Lords, He the Lord will also judge betwixt Him and Me, and make known, whether I am an impudent Hussy, a disobedient Wife to him, one that run away from her Husband, and the like. Or whether He is the Man, that will not suffer me to live with him, that will not receive me into his Habitation, unless I deny the Lord, and his Message, and avow to be deluded by a lying Spirit.22

Wentworth uses the contrast between Jerusalem and Babylon to interpret her domestic situation (Rev. 17–18 and 21–22). She finds the activities of Babylon worked out in what her husband, aided and abetted by his clergy friends, is doing to her by his abusive behaviour and she looks forward to her vindication. She uses the dualistic language of the Apocalypse to speak of the struggle that is needed before she achieves her vindication by God. For Wentworth Babylon’s culture is exemplified in a situation in which a woman who rejects harsh treatment finds herself utterly destitute and an outcast. For her, and many other women in seventeenth century England, the Apocalypse is a text which both empowers and provides the imagery for her critique. As a prophetic text it not only confirmed her right to speak (given the opportunity afforded by 1 Cor. 11:5), but also offered a language to interpret the world, whether an oppressive state, a malfunctioning domestic environment, or, as is evident in the writings of late seventeenth century mystics like Jane Lead, the snares which beset the seeker of the things of the spirit.23 21

Hobby, Virtue of Necessity, 50. Anne Wentworth, The Revelation of Jesus Christ (1679). 23 Mack, Visionary Women. 22

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30.5. William Blake (1757–1827): Visionary, Artist and Poetic Exegete24 A century later William Blake continues the tradition of seventeenth century apocalypticism. Blake thought of himself as standing in a tradition of prophets like John of Patmos, and he himself wrote two prophecies about the nations in the form of illuminated books, in which, by word and picture, a process of conversion, spiritual and political, is sought in the reader through the effects of the texts. Blake offered insight into the meaning of contemporary events, much in the same way as the biblical prophecies against the nations or the visions of the beast and Babylon in the Apocalypse. He recognised the prophets of the Bible as kindred spirits with whom he could commune (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 13). He can write in their style and use their images. The abrupt and rapid transitions between heaven and earth, and difficulties of interpretation of Blake’s texts exemplify the description of, what Robert Lowth describes as, the ‘prophetic impulse’, as that ‘which bears away the mind with irresistible violence, … in rapid transitions from near to remote objects, from human to divine’.25 According to Blake prophecies lay bare the inner dynamic of history and the potential for positive change that is required if disaster is to be averted: Prophets in the modern sense of the word have never existed. Jonah was no prophet, in the modern sense, for his prophecy of Nineveh failed. Every honest man is a prophet; he utters his opinion both of private and public matters. Thus: If you go on So, the result is So. He never says, such a thing shall happen let you do what you will. A Prophet is a Seer, not an Arbitrary Dictator. (‘Annotations to Watson’s Apology’, K392)

Recent research into the technology of Blake’s engraving have shown that he evolved a technique which allowed him to give full rein to visionary inspiration in his writing.26 Like John on Patmos, who responded to the heavenly command to ‘Write’, Blake developed a version of writing which enabled him to give full rein to inspiration. The text emerged in the actual process of writing. Evidence suggests that Blake did not always plan what he was to engrave but wrote as he felt himself led. Like John the seer who was commanded to write, in Blake’s case too we may be able to glimpse how a mind

24

Blake’s works are cited according to G. Keynes, ed., The Complete Writings of William Blake: With Variant Readings (London: Oxford University Press, 1972) = K plus page number(s); D. Bindman, ed., William Blake’s Illuminated Books, 6 vols. (London: Tate Gallery Publications/William Blake Trust, 1991–1995). 25 R. Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (London: J. Johnson, 1753). 26 J. Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 42–43.

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saturated in the scriptures could be impelled in new directions by the very process of writing, inspired by, and using, the scriptural imagery. John’s apocalyptic vision is a central component of many aspects of Blake’s visionary world and also informs his understanding of his own political situation. As he put it in 1798, ‘To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life. The Beast and the Whore rule without controls.’ Blake traces a continuity between his own idiosyncratic mythical world (which I would regard as a necessary preparation for reading the Bible with new eyes) and the vision seen by John, as he makes clear at the conclusion of the Eighth Night of The Four Zoas: Rahab triumphs over all; she took Jerusalem Captive, a Willing Captive, by delusive arts impell’d To worship Urizen’s Dragon form, to offer her own Children Upon the bloody Altar. John saw these things Reveal’d in Heaven On Patmos Isle, & heard the souls cry out to be deliver’d. He saw the Harlot of the Kings of Earth, & saw her Cup Of fornication, food of Orc & Satan, press’d from the fruit of Mystery. (The Four Zoas 8.597–603, K356) What is evident in Blake’s use of the Apocalypse is the way it represents a visionary continuity with the text rather than a commentary or analysis of it. His relationship to the biblical prophecies resembles that of John to his own prophetic predecessors like Ezekiel and Daniel, in which the elements of the older prophetic visions inspire new symbols in the context of the issues of the later prophet’s own day. It was not just the biblical apocalypses that inspired Blake. The Apocalypse of Enoch, brought back from Ethiopia, where it had been preserved by the Ethiopian Church, was first published at the beginning of the nineteenth century. An English translation was published towards the end of Blake’s life. Blake left illustrations for it incomplete at his death in 1827. Among the unfinished sketches there is one of 1 En. 14:8ff.,27 a chapter which has exercised the minds of students of Second Temple Judaism, because it offers an extended description of the vision of God, the Great Glory, enthroned in the inmost recesses of the heavenly temple. It is part of a number of pictures in which Blake depicted enthroned deities, including Ezek. 1 and Rev. 4–5. What is striking about Blake’s depiction of Ezek. 1 is the prominence of the human figure among the four creatures (man, lion, ox and eagle) which surround the divine throne-chariot. In Jewish midrashim28 the figure of a man 27 J. Beer, ‘Blake’s Changing View of History: The Impact of the Book of Enoch’, in Historicizing Blake, eds. S. Clark and D. Worrall (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 159– 178. 28 Ber.R. 47:6; 69:3; 82:6; Targumim on Gen. 28:12; The Prayer of Joseph.

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was linked with ancestors like Jacob or Abraham, and in early Christian use of this passage the human figure was linked with Christ (John 12:41; Justin, Dial. 126). The enthroned figure represented for Blake a theology that emphasises God as powerful, transcendent monarch. He protested against this kind of theology, not least because he disliked the way in which this kind of theology was used as the blueprint for monarchy in the human realm.29 Instead, he favoured a divine immanentism and a more egalitarian polity. Blake used apocalyptic images to deconstruct views about divine and human monarchy. This is most explicit in his exegesis of the Book of Job.30 Part of Blake’s interpretation of Job in the engravings is his view that the book is about Job’s conversion from being a person who views God as remote in heaven to one whose life is turned upside down by the immediacy of the divine vision: ‘I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes’ (Job 42:5). Job starts as an adherent of a religion of the letter and a worshipper of a God removed far above the heavens. He is overwhelmed by an apocalyptic experience (like Paul on the Damascus Road) and converted to a religion of the spirit and divine immediacy. It is a sequence which reflects Blake’s major theological concerns but also indicates Blake’s exegetical insight, not least in his appreciation of the centrality of the apocalyptic dimension of the book and the importance of a christological interpretation of it in the context of the Christian Bible. It is easy to dismiss Blake’s reading of Job and other biblical books as mere eisegesis.31 This is unfair as he often notices things about the text and has a grasp of its overall thrust which manifests an acute exegetical insight. Blake’s focus on the apocalyptic framework of the Book of Job in Job 1–2 and 38–40 is used to portray Job’s conversion. The dualistic framework which characterises the opening depictions of Blake’s ‘Job’ sequence is left behind at the end, where God in Christ appears to Job and his wife, without the apocalyptic, cosmological framework evident in the opening chapters. Elsewhere Blake’s critical caricature of divine monarchy is more hardhitting. In this I believe that he reflects hints in the Apocalypse itself. Thus, in Rev. 5 into the conventional scene of the divine throne and its environs, familiar to us from contemporary Jewish texts, there irrupts into John’s vision a Lamb which then shares the divine throne and becomes the agent of the opening of eschatological mysteries. The narrative of the transformation of a remote divine monarchy in Rev. 5 in some ways anticipates Blake’s subver29 D. Nicholls, Deity and Domination: Images of God and the State in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Routledge, 1989). 30 M. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981). 31 D. Brown, Discipleship and Imagination: Christian Tradition and Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 220–221.

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sion of the monarchical lawgiver and the need for an understanding of God which is less abstract and remote. A remote self-possessed divinity is in Blake’s view typical of the religion of Europe, quenching the life of the spirit and the imagination and more concerned with law than mutual forgiveness. It is this religion which he ruthlessly caricatures in his depiction of what he regarded as the false God of the religion of the scientists and philosophers in Plate 11 from Europe. Blake’s drawings and illuminated books are saturated with apocalyptic images many of which reflect the violent world in which he lived and about which he protested. The protest against an oppressive state is nowhere better seen than in Blake’s illustrations for Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’.32 The author, politically conservative and a monarchist, hired Blake to do the illustrations. Blake took the opportunity of the commission to insert his protest against the political repression of the 1790s. His depiction of the heads of the beast on which Babylon is seated in Rev. 17 resembles that found in Winstanley’s work, Fire in the Bush. The heads include identification with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope, the king, a military figure and a judge. The representation of Babylon as a gaudy woman is, for Blake, curiously literal, however. Blake was usually extraordinarily sensitive to issues of economic oppression and race but not always to gender. Perhaps in the context of illustrating another’s book he dared not risk too much of a departure from the Bible. The impact of the drawing is, however, striking enough, particularly for the time and the context.

30.6. Concluding Hermeneutical Reflections We have looked at examples of seventeenth and eighteenth century interpretations of the Apocalypse and apocalyptic themes. They derive from a long tradition of relating the text to context as a way of interpreting political and social events. At first sight, they may seem marginal to the mainstream of Christian theology and the interpretation of the Apocalypse, yet I believe that they are representative of the wider variety of interpretative approaches to the Apocalypse, and, what is more, come from an age rich in source material which gives the reader some purchase on the way in which text and context interrelate. Throughout the history of the interpretation of, and engagement with, the Apocalypse, it is possible to point two major streams of interpretation, what I would like to term ‘decoding’ and ‘visionary’. The textual prompts for both the ‘decoding’ (e.g. Rev. 4:5 and 17:9) and the ‘visionary’ approaches can be found in the Apocalypse itself. Luther in his 1530 (1546) Preface recognised 32

Butlin, Paintings.

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the peculiar character of the apocalyptic images in the Apocalypse. He pointed out that, unlike Daniel, the Apocalypse is a prophecy without explanation and with no sure interpretation. Hence the possibility of contrasting streams of interpretation rooted in the text itself. One qualification needs to be inserted, however. A verse like Rev. 22:18 could indicate that there was something definitive and unrepeatable about this visionary book. What the visionary tradition of interpretation suggests, from the Montanist prophets onwards, is that the Paraclete who announces that which is to come (John 16:13) continues to inspire men and women in ways similar to those in which John and the prophets of his circle were inspired to see and to write. In the first of these types, which I have labelled ‘decoding’, we find the presentation of apocalyptic images in another, less allusive, form, i.e. showing by way of detailed explanation what the text really means. There is an attempt to seek precise equivalence between every image in the book with particular persons, figures and events in history, past, present or future. Thus the Apocalypse can be rendered in another, more prosaic, form and its inner meaning laid bare. Thus, we have that long tradition, exemplified by the detailed explanations of the English commentators Joseph Mede and Isaac Newton, in which the Apocalypse is seen as a detailed map of history from creation to eschaton. Of the interpreters I have looked at, Mary Cary’s detailed exposition of Daniel and the Apocalypse comes closest to this type. The vagueness and interpretative breadth of an allusive text is thereby elucidated as the details of images and actions are fixed on some historical personage or event. Not represented in this essay are the interpretations in which individuals ‘act out’ details of the text of the Apocalypse. This is a peculiar form of ‘decoding’ in which individuals ‘act out’ details of the text, in effect decoding the text once and for all in that person. These would include women prophets like Anne Lee of the Shakers33 and Joanna Southcott being identified, or identifying themselves, with the Woman Clothed with the Sun of Rev. 12,34 or Muggleton and Reeve in the middle of the seventeenth century who could have proclaimed themselves as the two witnesses of Rev. 11.35 The other approach maintains an interpretative dialectic between text and context without allowing the apocalyptic image to be translated by one particular historical personage or circumstance. Thus, in theory at least, the 33 C. Garrett, Origins of the Shakers: From the Old World to the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 34 Garrett, Respectable Folly; J.K. Hopkins, A Woman to Deliver Her People: Joanna Southcott and English Millenarianism in an Era of Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). 35 T.L. Underwood, ed., The Acts of the Witnesses: The Autobiography of Lodowick Muggleton and Other Early Muggletonian Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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text can be actualised in different ways over and over again. This approach takes several forms. In one form the imagery of the Apocalypse is juxtaposed with the interpreter’s own circumstances, whether personal or social, so as to allow the images to inform understanding and to serve as a guide for action. Such interpretation has deep roots in the Christian tradition, going back at least to the time of Tyconius and Augustine.36 This is especially the case in the writing of Wentworth and Winstanley. Then, there is the appropriation by visionaries,37 where the words of the Apocalypse either offer the opportunity to ‘see again’ things similar to what had appeared to John or prompt new visions related to it. Trapnel, I think, is a good example of this, and, in a more complex way, so is Blake. For Blake the prophetic texts serve as a springboard for new apocalypses, in which the detail of the original can be left behind. At the risk of digressing into another, complex, issue I would want to suggest that this phenomenon parallels in some ways what happens in John’s vision, saturated as it was with biblical prophecies. For John and his apocalyptic contemporaries in the first century CE, a prophetic text like Ezek. 1 was probably not just the subject of learned debate but a catalyst for visionary experience as is found in the remarkable tradition of interpretation of Ezek. 1: maʿaseh merkabah. In some circles this led to renewed visionary experience as expounders saw again what had appeared to the prophet, but in their own way and appropriate for their own time.38 The publication of the texts from Qumran Cave 4, known as the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, has given support to the view that the origin of this visionary tradition lies early in the Second Temple period. In circles influenced by rabbinic Judaism reading Ezek. 1 was severely restricted because of its use by visionaries and the dangers to faith and life which visionary activity posed.39 Early Christians like John the visionary of the Apocalypse (and probably also Paul) were influenced by such visionary currents. This extraordinary tradition was maintained over centuries, particularly in Judaism but also in some parts of Christianity. In this kind of exposition of prophetic texts, understanding of the text is discerned in the course of visionary experience. This provided the means of understanding its detail rather than it being the result of the deliberate application of exegetical methods to illuminate the ambiguities of the text. It is this which is captured by Blake 36

Fredriksen, ‘Tyconius’; Babcock, Tyconius. P. Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua († 203) to Marguerite Porete († 1310) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 146. 38 D.J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988); C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982); G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1955). 39 m.Meg. 4:10; t.Meg. 4(3):31ff.; b.Meg. 24a–b. 37

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and Trapnel, for example, standing in a visionary tradition which goes back to Hildegard of Bingen and beyond.40 One aspect of Ezekiel’s vision is often described in later interpretations of the vision: discussion of the meaning of the Hebrew word ḥašmal (only found in the Bible in Ezek. 1 and 8). In the Babylonian Talmud sight of the ḥašmal was regarded as a potentially threatening experiential moment. So, legends circulated about children, who dared to dabble in the mysteries of Ezekiel and found that the experience was damaging: For behold there was once a child who expounded (the mysteries of) ḥašmal, and a fire went forth and consumed him. … The rabbis taught: There was once a child who was reading at his teacher’s house the Book of Ezekiel and he apprehended what ḥašmal was, whereupon a fire went forth from ḥašmal and consumed him. (b.Hag. 13a, cf. y.Hag. 77a)

Thus, in some forms of the interpretation of Ezek. 1 the meaning of the text may have come about as the result of ‘seeing again’ what Ezekiel saw. The visionary’s own experience of what had appeared to Ezekiel becomes itself context for a creative interpretation of the text. This is a dimension of the interpretation of visionary texts which can often be ignored. An analytical approach to prophetic, visionary, texts annoyed S.T. Coleridge. In his Marginalia, Coleridge reproaches J.G. Eichhorn for thinking that Ezekiel’s vision is mere poetic decoration which needs to be explained and deciphered, and he reproaches Eichhorn for his lack of sympathy for poetic imagination, whereas he himself stresses the irreducibility of the prophetic poetry: It perplexes me to understand how a Man of Eichhorn’s sense, learning and acquaintance with psychology could form or attach belief to so cold blooded an hypothesis. That in Ezekiel’s vision ideas or spiritual entities are presented in visual symbols, I never doubted; but as little can I doubt, that such symbols did present themselves to Ezekiel in visions – and by a law so closely connected with, if not contained, in that by which sensations are organised into images and mental sounds in our ordinary sleep.41

What we find in these approaches to Ezekiel at the genesis of modern biblical criticism reflects the contrasting ways in which a prophetic text like Ezekiel, or the Apocalypse, has been used. On the one hand there has been the analytical approach, with minute attention to, and exhaustive explanation of, the detail of the text. On the other hand there has been an imaginative appropriation in which Ezekiel’s vision has in its turn inspired subsequent visionaries and artists and poets like Blake. It seems to me that such an exercise of im-

40

M. Lieb, The Visionary Mode: Biblical Prophecy, Hermeneutics, and Cultural Change (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991). 41 Burdon, Apocalypse in England, 146; E.S. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770– 1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 89.

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agination involves the visualisation in the mind of objects, inspired by what is read in texts or what is in the external world. It has a close relationship with the visionary, the dreamlike and the trance, therefore, though in the latter the process is usually less deliberate than would be the case with an exercise of imagination. The precise role of human initiative in both processes is not always clear, however, thus leaving the exact relationship between vision and imagination tantalisingly vague. What I have found in my work on the history of the interpretation of the Apocalypse is that visionaries, poets and artists represent an altogether more oblique, though exegetically illuminating, relationship with the text. To write it all off and compare it unfavourably with the exegesis which is based on a deliberately formulated exegetical procedure in order to explain texts, ancient or modern, ignores the insight into the meaning of apocalyptic texts which such an approach offers. Approaching visionary texts like the Apocalypse in a way that stimulates a later reader to ‘see again’ what the biblical prophet had seen in his vision might in fact capture something which can be missed by such analysis, as Coleridge seems to suggest. This form of appropriation of visionary texts corresponds to my second category under the ‘visionary’ type. Here the words of the Apocalypse either offer the opportunity to ‘see again’ things similar to what had appeared to John or prompt new visions related to it. Of course, not all will emulate the merkabah mystics, or Blake’s visionary imagination. In another, more widespread, form of the ‘visionary’ type of engagement with the Apocalypse (such as we find in Winstanley’s work, for example) the imagery of the Apocalypse is juxtaposed with the interpreter’s own circumstances, whether personal or social, so as to allow the images to inform understanding and to serve as a guide for action. Such a juxtaposition of apocalyptic image and social context, in an imaginative and ethically stimulating interplay, we find at work in the reading of the Apocalypse from Winstanley to modern liberationist hermeneutics. In both, there is the possibility of insight into the meaning of biblical passages when those who engage with the text align themselves, in different ways, with the passage, as they seek hope in adversity or to be challenged in their complacency. This is a matter of putting oneself in a position which conforms to the character of the address of the biblical text. Such an engagement with the text, I think, is what Anthony Thiselton is driving at when he characterises authentic reading as ‘self-involving and performative’.42 42

A.C. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics (London: Harper Collins, 1992), 616; C. Rowland, ‘Christology, Controversy and Apocalypse: New Testament Exegesis in the Light of the Work of William Blake’, in Christology, Controversy and Community: New Testament Essays in Honour of David R. Catchpole, eds. D.G. Horrell and C.M. Tuckett, NovTSup 99 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 355–378.

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In this essay I have tried to explore interpretations of the Apocalypse which represent a significant part of the hermeneutical map of the reception history of this influential biblical book. They are indicative of the importance of the study of the effects of allusive texts like those in the Bible, for they suggest an ability to ‘rouze the faculties to act’, to quote Blake’s words, written in the course of a fascinating letter to a learned critic who wanted him to explain the symbolism of his paintings: You say that I want somebody to Elucidate my Ideas. But you ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients consider’d what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction, because it rouzes the faculties to act. I name Moses, Solomon, Esop, Homer, Plato … Why is the Bible more Entertaining & Instructive than any other book? Is it not because they [sic] are addressed to the Imagination, which is Spiritual Sensation, & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason? (‘Letter to Trusler’, K793–794)

Blake’s focus on the effect of texts, whether the Bible or his own allusive illuminated texts, reflects a similar belief to that which Coleridge described when he writes of being ‘found by the Bible’.43 It is a receptive openness to the impact of the Bible in which the texts are less an object to be explained than a stimulus to the exploration of the imaginative space which biblical texts may offer.44 It is the exploration of that ‘space’ that we can see in the ways in which seventeenth century readers of the Apocalypse have explored its particularly rich allusiveness, not least in attempts to respond to its theological imperative in discerning what they thought the Spirit might have been saying to the churches of their day.

43 S.T. Coleridge, Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit (1840), in Coleridge’s Responses: Selected Writings on Literary Criticism, the Bible and Nature, ed. A.J. Harding, Vol. 2: Coleridge on the Bible (London: Continuum, 2008), 168–169. 44 Lieb, The Visionary Mode.

31. Imagining the Apocalypse Working on the reception history of the Apocalypse over the last five years has underlined for me that there are few biblical books that have been illustrated more than the Apocalypse, and drawn attention to the reasons why it has an important place in art history.1 The text, full as it is of indicators of colour and movement, as well as images themselves, has understandably prompted translation into visual representations. The visions of the Apocalypse are, to quote Mary Carruthers’s translation of an illuminator of a Beatus Apocalypse commentary, ‘picture-making words’ (verba mirifica storiarum).2 The different portrayals exhibit particular ‘readings’ of the texts. Painters read the text, and their translation of the text involves visualising objectively the problem posed by their reading of the text. The image in a painting is, in a sense, a solution to the interpretative problem posed by their reading of the text. For those of us who see the artists’ pictures, we encounter the result of their reading and pictorial exegesis. How the image affects us is the result of what the painter enables the beholder to discern about the meaning of the text.3 Consideration of pictures of biblical subjects suggests some of the contrasting exegetical approaches familiar to biblical exegetes. This essay is, therefore, an essay on the character of biblical exegesis through the medium 1 G. Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst, Part 5, [Vol. 1:] Textteil (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1990); R.K. Emmerson and B. McGinn, eds., The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992); J.F. Hamburger, St John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); idem, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone, 1998); F. van der Meer, Apocalypse: Visions from the Book of Revelation in Western Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978); F. Carey, ed., The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come (London: British Museum Press, 1999); K. Lewis, ‘John on Patmos and the Painters’, ARTS: The Arts in Religious and Theological Studies 5.3 (1993): 18–23; J. Kovacs and C. Rowland, Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 2 M.J. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 152–153. 3 P. Berdini, ‘Jacopo Bassano: A Case for Painting as Visual Exegesis’, in Interpreting Christian Art, eds. H.J. Hornik and M.C. Parsons (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2003), 169–186.

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of pictures.4 The pictures are discussed in chronological order; they are taken entirely from Western Christianity (there is nothing reflecting the iconography of the Southern hemisphere or the East); and the latest is dated 1809. Only one of the artists, William Blake, might be considered a representative of the popular culture of his day.5 In only two cases have I paused over the social and political context, not because I think such questions are unimportant, but because it would be impossible in the space available to have attended to such issues in the case of all 14 pictures. I shall consider first the various ways in which artists have sought to enter into, and re-express, the content and character of the visions of John (the seer). I shall then consider four different interpretative approaches to ‘imagining the Apocalypse’: synchronic interpretations; varying depictions of the four horsemen and the influence of the work of Albrecht Dürer; the dialectic between heaven and earth in ecclesial and eschatological readings; and Joachim of Fiore’s figurae and related political interpretations of the Apocalypse. The essay finishes with some brief suggestions that offer historical examples by way of analogy. The philosophical and hermeneutical questions are also important, and I am grateful for the issues that have been raised by experts in aesthetics and art history, as well as for the suggestive comments by Eva Maria Räpple in her recent book on art and the Apocalypse.6 By means of my historical analogies I wish to compare the exercise of imagination in art with other examples of visualising biblical texts.

31.1. John, the Seer Jean Duvet was court goldsmith to the French kings. His illustrations of the whole of the Apocalypse were completed at the end of his life. They are, to varying degrees, inspired by Dürer’s sequence. In some ways, in their relationship to Dürer’s sequence, they parallel the representation in visionary art of the way prophetic texts, such as Ezekiel and Daniel, are reproduced in the Apocalypse. Yet unlike Dürer’s engravings, Duvet’s are a jumble of figures and the confusion of things earthly and heavenly. In the opening engraving of his Apocalypse sequence, ‘Duvet as John on Patmos’ (British Museum, 1555), Duvet imagines himself in the role of the ancient visionary, as he 4 The pictures referred to in this article are of images which are not all freely available on the web. Location references are given, but users of Google’s image search will know how easy it is to find most of the images discussed. 5 E.P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); J. Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). 6 E.M. Räpple, The Metaphor of the City in the Apocalypse of John (New York: Peter Lang, 2004).

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attempts to give objective expression in his engravings to the way in which he ‘sees’ John’s visions. Duvet represents himself as John on Patmos, with a particular affinity with the aged John:7 ‘Jean Duvet aged seventy has completed these histories in 1555 … The fates are pressing; already the hands tremble and the sight fails, yet the mind remains victorious and the great work is completed.’ While this is most obviously a reference to his age, one cannot exclude the possibility that, like many others in the sixteenth century, he thought that the eschatological events were likely to happen in his own day. On an open book near Duvet is the Apocalypse of St John, and in the bottom left corner is written: ‘the sacred mysteries contained in this and the other following tablets are derived from the divine Revelation of John and are closely adapted to the true letter of the text with the judgement of more learned men brought to bear’. Note the reference to the ‘true letter of the text’, which Duvet hoped to expound in his Apocalypse engravings, perhaps a reflection of the fact that he spent time in Calvin’s Geneva and was well acquainted with protestant exegesis. His illustrations, then, involve a ‘reseeing’ of John’s vision, as one old man enters into the visions of another, and into that sense of crisis and impending doom.8 The depiction of John’s call experience by Hieronymus Bosch (‘St John on Patmos’, Berlin Gemäldegalerie, ca 1460/1510) contrasts with the Duvet engraving.9 A young-looking John, with a background of fifteenth-century Netherlands, looks up at the Woman Clothed with the Sun. The vision of the Woman (Rev. 12:1) appears in a circular form in the top left corner of the picture, as with several other contemporary depictions.10 John gazes in rapt attention while around him, just visible over his shoulder, are scenes of destruction, inspired by the various destruction sequences in the Apocalypse (Rev. 6:8–9, 16). The scenes are restrained compared with other Bosch pictures, and indeed contrast with the reverse of this picture, where what appear to be sea monsters surround a depiction of the crucifixion. Within the structure of the painting itself, the tree establishes the vertical relationship between heaven and earth. Contrasts are evident in the picture, for example between light and darkness, between the celestial vision (top left) and the demonic (bottom right), and between the pale angel and the dark tree. John is accompanied by creatures, a bird (a raven, perhaps a link with the 7

Cf. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.23.1–4. Similarly, among twentieth-century painters, mention should be made of the apocalyptic character of the painting of Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944). Kandinsky felt himself led by a prophetic vocation in his artistic work: R. Heller, ‘Kandinsky and Traditions Apocalyptic’, Art Journal 43 (1983): 19–26; Carey, ed., The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come, 276–279. 9 http://www.apocalyptic-theories.com/gallery/patmos/boschjohn.jpg. 10 J. Drury, Painting the Word: Christian Pictures and their Meanings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 174–175. 8

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Elijah story) and a little wasp-like figure. The bird and the figure appear to be in a kind of stand-off, eyeing each other. The former is seemingly keeping guard over the means whereby the revelation will be communicated in pen and ink. The sublime moment appears to be, therefore, also one of threat. The insect-like figure wears spectacles, evincing the air of a gently sceptical observer who might have a question about the authenticity or validity of the vision. The potentially diabolical threat, arising from such openness to prophetic inspiration, is something very much to the fore in several of Bosch’s depictions of the lives of saints. In ‘The Temptation of St Anthony’ (Museu Nacional de Arte, Lisbon), for example, the saint’s spiritual torments are even more graphically displayed. Diego Velázquez’s work (‘St John the Evangelist on the Island of Patmos’, National Gallery, London, 1618) is one of a pair of pictures.11 In this picture, the focus of attention is on John the visionary. John’s vision of the Woman Clothed with the Sun, only barely visible in the top left, is given full pictorial presentation by Velázquez in a companion picture, the Immaculate Conception. This he painted for the Convent of the Carmelites in Seville, at around the same time that he painted ‘John on Patmos’.12 It is a young, virile John who confronts us in the portrait. The characteristic depictions of the eschatological events are replaced by allusions to the ecstatic nature of John’s experience. The picture illustrates two different aspects of the vision: John as the medium of the visionary experience, and John as the great authority of the writing of the heavenly revelations from Jesus Christ. Velázquez depicts John ‘in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day’, with eyes suggesting a visionary trance.13 Gone is the general, social backdrop of northern Europe evident in the Bosch painting. All we have is the ecstatic prophet with a bare background, with the tree which appears in so many of the pictures of John on Patmos. The attendant eagle is on John’s right, with the prophet illuminated by the light of vision. John fills the whole picture, indicating a focus on John’s psyche as the context for the vision.14 Velázquez’s picture seems to reflect the command to write in the ecstatic state. It may indeed suggest a form of automatic writing, as the words are written on the empty page. These words are, of course, the divine words, as the near-final words of the Apocalypse indicate (Rev. 22:18). What are the books we see at John’s feet? Are they part of the revelation that he saw, or other books, perhaps the other Johannine texts, or even biblical books, now made obsolete by the new revelation of Jesus Christ (Rev. 1:1–2, cf. 22:18)? 11

http://www.biblical-art.com/artist_artwork.asp?id_artist=772&alt=2&pagenum=1. Drury, Painting the Word. 13 Cf. Asc. Isa. 6:10. 14 H.O. Maier, Apocalypse Recalled: The Book of Revelation after Christendom (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), 44–50. 12

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This may indeed be suggested by the dead tree standing behind John, from which some new growth is just evident, symbolic of the new prophetic revelation that has come to this new prophet.

31.2. Synchronic Interpretations I turn now to two depictions which illustrate the way in which artistic interpretations exemplify a familiar exegetical approach to the Apocalypse. Synchronic reading, in which the sevenfold sequences of Rev. 6–9 and 16 are considered to overlap in some way, has been advocated by many interpreters down the centuries. It was championed by the influential English interpreter of the Apocalypse, Joseph Mede, in his Clavis Apocalyptica at the beginning of the seventeenth century.15 Pictorial representations can capture this way of reading by allowing the eye to comprehend the visionary scenes together. This is particularly well illustrated by Hans Memling’s altar piece (‘St John on Patmos’, Altar Piece of St John, Bruges, 1479). This also includes the beheading of John the Baptist on the left panel, and, in the centre, features the Virgin and child attended by John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, as well as St Barbara and St Catherine.16 In the right panel we have several scenes from the early part of the vision of John on Patmos. These embrace Rev. 1– 12 only. The four horsemen of ch. 6 are evident in the foreground, while the vision of heavenly worship in ch. 4 dominates the picture. The apocalyptic panorama leaves the visionary confronted by the welter of images, recording what he sees in the best order that he can, moving from the origin of divine purposes in heaven, via the four horsemen, and back up to the Woman pursued by the dragon in heaven in the top right part of the picture. In the first of two of his pictures of the Whore of Babylon (British Museum, 1809), the English artist, engraver and poet, William Blake, underscores the close links between the iniquity of Babylon and the death and destruction described in the previous chapters, especially the trumpet (Rev. 8–11) and bowl (ch. 16) sequences.17 In Rev. 17:4 we read: ‘The woman was holding in her hand a golden cup full of her abominations and the impurities of her fornication.’ The cup, which Babylon holds in her hand, is full of the violence and destruction described in the bowls sequence, which immediately precedes Rev. 17. The sequence of disasters that has been described by John earlier in the vision, is linked with the political violence caused by the culture of Babylon, and outlined in chs. 17–19. The picture suggests – and Babylon points in this direction – the retrospective character of the reading of the 15

J. Mede, Clavis Apocalyptica (Cambridge: Buck, 1632). http://www.brugge.be/Musea/en/mmemec.htm. 17 http://www.ldolphin.org/whore.jpg. 16

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Apocalypse, in which the violence of the bowl and trumpet sequences is read in the light of the imperial pretensions and oppressive activity of Babylon and the Beast. The Apocalypse offered Blake, a self-styled prophet, the inspiration to challenge the political apathy of his own day, and what he considered the blasphemous link between religion and violence (what he called ‘religion hid in war’).

31.3. The Four Horsemen and the Influence of A. Dürer Alternative exegetical possibilities connected with the opening of Rev. 6 may be discerned in both Albrecht Dürer’s ‘The Four Horsemen’ (1497–98) and, from a much earlier period, the Trier Apocalypse.18 Dürer’s sequence separates image and text, so that the former becomes a self-contained version of John’s Apocalypse, a new imagining of its contents, rather than just a guide or illustration of the written text. In the Dürer engraving, the four horsemen ride together. His undifferentiated depiction of them as harbingers of doom has been influential on the interpretation of the four horsemen ever since (although Dürer was probably dependent on the Koberger Bible, 1483). For example, Luther’s interpretation, in his 1530 Preface, parallels Dürer in interpreting the four horsemen as different aspects of the future tribulations.19 In the Trier Apocalypse, however, things appear to be different. The ninthcentury Trier Apocalypse is one of the earliest illuminated Apocalypse manuscripts. Its roots may take us back to sixth-century Italy, meaning that the manuscript may reflect accurately the iconography of three centuries before.20 The rider on the white horse stands alone, receiving a crown of honour (Rev. 6:2), similar in shape to those cast down before God by the elders around the throne in the depiction of Rev. 4. This differentiation distinguishes the work from other depictions. It reflects ancient Christian commentary on this figure, dating back at least to Victorinus’s commentary. Here the opening of the first seal prompts the going forth of the first of the horsemen, which is said to refer to the coming of the Christian gospel into the world.21 18

http://www.apocalipsis.org/artwork/durer4horse.html. M. Karrer, ‘Ein optisches Instrument in der Hand der Leser: Wirkungsgeschichte und Auslegung der Johannesoffenbarung’, in Studien zur Johannesoffenbarung und ihrer Auslegung (FS O. Böcher), eds. F.W. Horn and M. Wolter (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2005), 402−432. 20 P.K. Klein, ‘Introduction: The Apocalypse in Medieval Art’, in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, eds. Emmerson and McGinn, 176. 21 ‘Christ’s coming is the revelation of the meaning of the Old Testament in the person of Jesus Christ … after our Lord ascended into heaven, he opened all things and sent the Holy Spirit, whose words, like seals, reached the human heart through preachers and overcame unbelief … [T]he white horse is the word of preaching sent to the world with the 19

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There are links with Rev. 19:11–16, with which Rev. 6:2 has so much in common.22

31.4. The Dialectic of Heaven and Earth in the Ecclesial and Eschatological Reading of Revelation Apocalyptic dualism offered early Christian writers the opportunity to portray existence under God as a two-level drama, in which things in heaven are in dialectical relationship with things on earth.23 This heaven/earth dialectic is nowhere better seen than in Rev. 12:10–12. Trier’s depiction of the heavenly vision of the Woman Clothed with the Sun indicates this ‘two-level’ drama in the way the picture is divided by a line into two parts. What happens in heaven reflects, and indeed may affect, those on earth: note that the tail of the dragon swishing towards John results in the persecution of the seer by the soldiers, who move towards him. A similar interplay between heaven and earth is suggested by the lead figure in El Greco’s ‘The Opening of the Fifth Seal’ (Museum of Fine Art, New York, 1604–1608).24 The need for clothing of the martyred souls under the altar (Rev. 6:9) reflects the concern about nakedness, about which Paul expresses so much horror in 2 Cor. 5:2. The synergism between the martyr and heaven is an important martyrological theme and one that permeates the Apocalypse.25 Whether or not El Greco intended this, we may discern that his main figure stretches between earth and a forbidding-looking heaven, a heaven permeated with an increasing sense of foreboding, engendered by the opening of the previous four seals. Another example of the creative interaction between earth and heaven is found in van Eyck’s altar piece ‘The Adoration of the Lamb’ (Cathedral of St Bavo, Ghent).26 This is part of a backdrop to the eucharistic celebration, a complex of pictures, which includes God enthroned in glory attended by the

Holy Spirit …’ (A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, eds., Ante-Nicene Fathers, 10 vols. [Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994], 7:350). This is largely Jerome’s revision of Victorinus’s commentary. See further, Kovacs and Rowland, Revelation, 79. 22 The Douce Apocalypse has a Christ-like rider on the fourth horse, harrowing hell (S. Lewis, Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], 85). 23 J. Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 381–405. 24 http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/default.htm. 25 A.Y. Collins, ‘The Political Perspective of the Revelation to John’, in eadem, Cosmology and Eschatology in Jewish and Christian Apocalypticism, JSJSup 50 (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 187–217. 26 http://members.lycos.nl/manchicourt/images/Van_Eyck_Gent_Polyptych_Adoration_ Lamb_opened.JPG.

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Virgin and John the Baptist, and Adam and Eve. Below this scene, and including side panels, crowds converge on the Lamb on the altar, who pours forth his blood for the faithful. In the foreground is the fountain of life, explicitly identified by words around its edge in Latin, inspired by Rev. 22:1 and 7:17: ‘hic est fons aquae vitae de sede dei et agni’. Inscribed on the altar are the words of John the Baptist in John 1:29. This interpretation roots the relevance of the Apocalypse for the church in the present time and represents a version of the ecclesial reading of the Apocalypse prevalent from the time of Origen, and particularly well exemplified in Tyconius’s apocalyptic hermeneutic.27 Sandro Botticelli’s ‘Mystic Nativity’ (National Gallery, London, 1500) is unlike all the other paintings, with the possible exception of the Joachite figurae, to which we shall turn in a moment.28 It is an allegorical reading of the text rather than an attempt at literal depiction. The picture is a nativity scene – not, apparently, anything to do with the Apocalypse. But appearances can be deceptive. A closer look reveals something without parallel in Botticelli’s other works: an explanation. The heading, in Greek capitals, explicitly links the picture with Rev. 11–12, in addition to the political upheavals in Italy and specifically Florence, which came about as a result of the apocalyptic preaching of Girolamo Savonarola: ΤΑΥΤΗΝ ΓΡΑΦΗΝ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΤΕΛΕΙ ΤΟΥ Χ ΣΣΣΣΣ ΕΤΟΥΣ ΕΝ ΤΑΙΣ ΤΑΡ[ΑΧΑΙΣ] ΤΗΣ ΙΤΑΛΙΑΣ ΑΛΕΞΑΝ∆ΡΟΣ ΕΓΩ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΜΕΤΑ XΡΟΝΟΝ ΗΜΙXΡΟΝΩ ΕΓΡΑΦΟΝ ΠΑΡΑ ΤΟ ΕΝ∆ΕΚΑΤΟΝ ΤΟΥ ΑΓΙΟΥ ΙΩΑΝΝΟΥ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΑΠΟΚΑΛΥΨΕΩΣ Β: ΟΥΑΙ ΕΝ ΤΗ ΛΥΣΕΙ ΤΩΝ Γ ΚΑΙ ΗΜΙΣΥ ΕΤΩΝ ΤΟΥ ∆ΙΑΒΟΛΟΥ ΕΠΕΙΤΑ ∆ΕΣΜΟΘΗΣΕΤΑΙ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΙΒ ΚΑΙ ΒΛΕΨΟΜΕΝ [ΤΑΦΗΣΟΜΕ-/ΠΑΤΟΥΜΕ-]ΝΟΝ ΟΜΟΙΟΝ ΤΗ ΓΡΑΦΗ ΤΑΥΤΗ I, Alexandros, was painting this picture at the end of the year 1500 in the tr[oubles] of Italy in the half time after the time according to the eleventh chapter of St John in the second woe of the Apocalypse in the loosing of the devil for three and a half years. Then he will be chained in the twelfth chapter, and we shall see him [about to be buried/trodden down] as in this picture.29 27

Such eucharistic piety is paralleled in the central role Dürer gives to the Lamb, whose blood is shed into a chalice held by a cardinal (Plate 12, illustrating Rev. 14; van der Meer, Apocalypse, 301). Cf. the Bamberg Bible, 339, where the lamb is juxtaposed with a chalice. On Tyconius, see Tyconius, The Book of Rules, trans. W.S. Babcock, SBLTT 39 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). 28 http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/WebMedia/Images/10/NG1034/mNG1034.jpg. 29 Martin Davies rejects the suggestion of the reading ΠΑΤΟΥΜΕNON as he believes that the first letter is an Σ and the third likely to be Φ; National Gallery Catalogues, 104– 105. Close examination of the picture suggests that the opening letters are either ΠA, TA or TAY, with the possibility of the third letter being Φ, which may later have been expunged. Nigel G. Wilson, therefore, prefers the reading ΤΑΦΗΣΟΜΕNON (‘Greek Inscriptions on Renaissance Paintings’, Italia medioevale e umanistica 35 [1992]: 215– 252), and it is this reading that has been used in most recent translations. Another

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‘The Mystic Nativity’, like the damaged ‘Mystical Crucifixion’ (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard), reflects the critical challenge that Botticelli believed faced Florence in 1500. The time in which Botticelli found himself, 1500 years after the birth of Christ, was, he believed, one which stood on the brink of the New Age. The inscription implies that, within a period of perhaps two years, a reign of peace would occur. Three years before Botticelli painted the picture, Savonarola had been executed and burnt at the stake in the streets of Florence for prophesying ‘new doctrines’. Though the section dealing with the witnesses is not explicitly mentioned in the inscription, this might have been taken as the martyrdom of the faithful witnesses predicted in Rev. 11. Admittedly, there is no contemporary evidence that links Savonarola with the two witnesses of Rev. 11, despite him often being identified with several biblical prophets.30 The effects of Savonarola’s preaching nonetheless lived on. Botticelli’s brother was an enthusiastic supporter, and Sandro may have been influenced, at least in general terms, by the Dominican’s eschatological preaching. There is little in the picture linking it explicitly to Savonarola’s doctrines. Indeed, Savonarola preached the need for penitence as a condition for the coming of eschatological bliss. The general tenor of the inscription does, though, relate in general terms with Savonarolan Florence. What is more, there is some evidence that the painting may have been done for a family that was sympathetic to Savonarola.31 Botticelli reads Rev. 11–12 as a prophecy of the eschatological realities of his day, in which the period of the Antichrist prefigures the return of the Messiah and the overcoming of the powers of darkness.32 In the inscription, he links the ascent of the beast from the bottomless pit in 11:7 with the loosing of the devil after the millennium (20:3, 7). In this, he may also be drawing on the Augustinian interpretation of Rev. 20:2–10 in The City of God, where the binding of Satan (20:1–3) has already taken place, with the first coming of Christ. Botticelli writes of the second woe of 11:14, after which, in Rev. 11, the loud voices in heaven proclaim that the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of the Lord and of the Messiah. It is the coming of this kingdom that is signified in the vision of the woman in

possibility is that there may have been a correction of an original TAΦ- to ΠA-. On this see also D. Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 334; R.M. Steinberg, Fra Girolamo Savonarola, Florentine Art, and Renaissance Historiography (Athens, Oh.: Ohio State University Press, 1977), 79. 30 M. Davies, National Gallery Catalogues, 105. 31 M. Davies, National Gallery Catalogues, 103–106; Steinberg, Fra Girolamo Savonarola, 77–81. 32 M. Davies misses the obvious sense of eschatological fulfilment evident in Rev. 12: M. Davies, National Gallery Catalogues, 105.

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Rev. 12 who gives birth to the Messiah.33 The bruising of the serpent’s head of Gen. 3:15 may be depicted in the form of the little beaten devils, which crawl away into their holes, reflecting Rev. 6:15.34 Compared to the depictions in his other paintings, one can see something very stylised in Botticelli’s depiction of the nativity scene. Here, the antique style may be a way of suggesting the picture’s allegorical character. The picture relates Christ’s first coming to his imminent, eschatological coming. In it, we the viewers are led up the path to the central scene, framed by the dawn sky. The appearance of the morning star, a familiar messianic symbol (Rev. 22:16; Luke 1:78), is now focused on the birth of the Woman Clothed with the Sun in the centre of the picture. The embrace of angels and humans sees Florentines rejoicing with the heavenly world at the millennial glory that is to be revealed, and the inscriptions on the scrolls, where legible, link with Luke 2:14 particularly, as well as lauding the Blessed Virgin Mary. The demons scurry to find their holes in the ground in which to hide (Rev. 6:16); past and present are brought together as Florence becomes the epicentre of the apocalyptic deliverance that is about to come upon the world. Like Milton after him, Botticelli interprets the first coming of Christ as itself an eschatological event, in which the powers of darkness are overcome and a new age begins.35

31.5. Joachim of Fiore and Political Readings of the Apocalypse Joachim of Fiore is one of the most remarkable exegetes of the Apocalypse, and his influence after his death, at the end of the twelfth century, has been immense.36 Joachim restored to the theological agenda a reading of the Apoca33 The millennial significance of Rev. 12 as a fulfilment of Gen. 3 and a reversal of the Fall can be found acted out much later in the way the English prophetess, Joanna Southcott, believed in 1814 that, as the Woman Clothed with the Sun, she was about to give birth to the Messiah and act out that peculiar role reserved for a woman in bruising the serpent’s head. See J.K. Hopkins, A Woman to Deliver Her People: Joanna Southcott and English Millenarianism in an Era of Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). 34 This connection would have added weight if we reconstruct the missing words in the damaged last line of the inscription in the way I have conjectured reading ΠATOYMENON. 35 Milton writes of ‘dissolv[ing] / Satan with his perverted world, then raise / From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined / New heav’ns, new earth, ages of endless date / Founded in righteousness and peace and love, / To bring forth fruits, joy and eternal bliss’ (Paradise Lost xii.546–551). Cf. ‘Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, xviii.168: ‘Th’ old Dragon under ground, in straiter limits bound’. 36 An introduction to Joachim’s thought may be found in M. Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 3– 132. On the later appropriation of the Apocalypse in circles influenced by Joachim, see

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lypse, discredited since the abandonment of the this-worldly eschatology of early Christianity, that saw its images as relating to the scheme of human history. In so doing, Joachim challenged the hegemony of the Augustinian reading of the Apocalypse, which had more or less held sway from the fifth century. This saw much of the Apocalypse as referring to events beyond history, or to the life of the Church. Apart from his commentary on the Apocalypse, in his later years Joachim complemented his written expositions of the Apocalypse with pictures and diagrams (figurae), which encapsulate his beliefs about history and salvation.37 Most of Joachim’s remarkable representations concern the nature of history, and apply particularly to his distinctive typological interpretation. Rev. 12:3 provided the inspiration for one of Joachim’s most graphic figurae, ‘The Red Seven-headed Dragon’ (Corpus Christi College, Oxford, late twelfth century).38 This is an example of the reading of John’s visions sequentially, in which the order of the text of Rev. 12 relates directly to historical events leading up to the eschatological age. In this approach, Joachim anticipates the consistently sequential interpretation of the Apocalypse, pioneered by Alexander the Minorite in the thirteenth century, evident iconographically in a fifteenth-century German altar-piece by Master Bertram, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.39 Joachim’s dragon has seven heads, the sixth of which is Saladin.40 Saladin is singled out as contemporary, since only this head is crowned, with one yet to come. The tail of the dragon is Gog. Between the long necks of the dragon’s heads appear captions detailing the seven persecutions of the Church, and suggesting a millennial period of peace after Christ’s defeat of the last head, before the final mysterious appearance of Gog, the tail.41 The millennium is placed between the two last and the final, worst manifestation of Antichrist, symbolised by the tail of the dragon. This roughly corresponds to the pattern in Rev. 20. Joachim relates the pressing crisis of his own time to eschatological times, when the Church’s tribulation would reach its height. In his interpretation there is a recognition that the threat from Antichrist is both D. Burr, Olivi’s Peaceable Kingdom: A Reading of the Apocalypse Commentary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). 37 M. Reeves and B. Hirsch-Reich, The Figurae of Joachim of Fiore (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972). 38 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/explanation/joachim.html. 39 C.M. Kauffmann, An Altar Piece of the Apocalypse from Master Bertram’s Workshop in Hamburg (London: HMSO, 1968). 40 The first four are Herod, Nero, Constantius and Cosdore, king of Persia; the fifth is a king of Babylon, a Muslim king. 41 Reeves and Hirsch-Reich, The Figurae of Joachim of Fiore, plates 21 and pp. 146– 152; cf. J.J. Collins et al., eds., The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, 3 vols. (New York: Continuum, 1998), 2:302.

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eschatological and historical. What will be the case at the end time has always been a constant part of human history. The second of Joachim’s figurae offers an example of the way in which the eschatological future of Rev. 21–22 is construed. In it we have a monastic-inspired ‘heaven on earth’, evident in the New Jerusalem (Corpus Christi College, Oxford, late twelfth century). It is a plan for the new society of the third age.42 In the centre is the four-square pattern of John’s city (Rev. 21:16). The arms of a cross contain four quarters for the monastic residents of the celestial city; each is associated with one of the four living creatures of Rev. 4:6–7, which also appear in Joachim’s diagrammatic depiction of Ezekiel’s merkabah vision, which Joachim had read allegorically. This figura and its commentary, with its inclusion of practical details of food and clothing and religious practices, as well as its spatial measurements, is very much ‘this-worldly’ and reminds us of the historicising of eschatology that is at the heart of the Joachite apocalyptic legacy. It evokes the kind of ideal society outlined, for example, in the Temple Scroll (11QTemple). In Joachim’s New Jerusalem people live in their own homes, but according to a lay religious rule, fasting, working with their hands, giving to the poor and obeying their spiritual mentors. In its recognition of the importance of the laity, this vision was prophetic of future developments: in the age of the friars there were many lay fraternities of various kinds. This picture of a future society might be called utopian were it not for the fact that Joachim clearly believed that such a state of bliss on earth was a clear future reality. Such interpretative moves initiated the extraordinary outburst of self-aware eschatological enthusiasm of the centuries following Joachim’s death, in which various persons and events became signs of hope. This was especially true of the emerging mendicant orders. This kind of reading parallels the reading of the present as a Kairos, portending a time of renewal that we saw also in the Botticelli painting. Returning to Blake, we have already looked at an overt, political reading of the Apocalypse in Blake’s depiction of Babylon seated on the seven-headed beast.43 A second picture is found in a design which illustrates Edward Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’ (British Museum, 1797).44 The picture of Babylon 42

Reeves and Hirsch-Reich, The Figurae of Joachim of Fiore, plate 31. http://library.uncg.edu/depts/speccoll/exhibits/Blake/Nighttp.jpg. 44 M. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 1:344; D.V. Erdman, William Blake’s Designs for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980). Young himself died in 1765. Richard Edwards (b. 1768), a conservative Bond Street bookseller and publisher, commissioned the illustrations from Blake. G.E. Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 162. On the wider apocalyptic context in English literature, see M.D. Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999). 43

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glosses ‘Virtue’s Apology, in which are considered, the Love of this Life, the ambition and Pleasure, with the Wisdom of the World’. These words prompt Blake to understand this socially and politically, not just in terms of personal morals. At the time that he painted this picture, Blake was acutely aware of the culture of repression in war-torn England. It was a situation in which, to quote his words, ‘The Beast and the Whore rule without controls’.45 Indeed, Blake was to be accused of treason as a result of an unfortunate encounter, near his Suffolk home, with an English infantryman.46 This second picture of Babylon picks up on a long tradition of political interpretation of apocalyptic images, rooted in Daniel and the Apocalypse, going back to the radicalism of mid-seventeenth-century England. In it the heads of the beasts function as a way of understanding political oppression, and do not refer just to eschatological prediction. This very much resembles how his English predecessor, Gerrard Winstanley, at the time of the English Civil War in 1649, used the beast to describe the fourfold oppressive aspects of contemporary political and economic power. Like John’s visionary interpretation of Daniel, these interpretations are, therefore, not a succession of empires, but a fourfold imperial oppression, taking place all at once and with differing dimensions.47 This is similar to Rev. 13, where the Danielic vision is recast synchronically rather than diachronically. It is not a succession of empires, but a sevenfold, contemporary, imperial and cultural oppression. Blake very pointedly depicts the heads of the beast as contemporary military, royal, legal and ecclesiastical powers. He took the opportunity of this commission to register his protest against the political repression in the England of the 1790s. The representation of Babylon is, for Blake, curiously literal. Blake was usually extraordinarily sensitive to issues of economic oppression and race, but not often to gender. Perhaps, in the context of illustrating another’s book, he dared not risk too much of a departure from the Bible. Nowhere is this more true than in the attitude to women in the Apocalypse. Clearly, the Apocalypse poses a real problem for modern readers because of its negative attitude to women.48 The book portrays women as either whores or brides. Women are viewed in terms of a patriarchal culture and its attendant economy, and are either idealised or demonised. Whatever its radical political attitude towards empire, in terms of gender it presents ideological problems for a 45 William Blake, Annotations to Richard Watson, an apology for the Bible in a series of letters addressed to Thomas Paine (London, 1797). 46 Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise, 254–257. 47 See further, A. Bradstock and C. Rowland, eds., Radical Christian Writings (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). 48 T. Pippin, Death and Desire: The Rhetoric of Gender in the Apocalypse of John (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992); E. Schüssler Fiorenza, Revelation: Vision of a Just World, rev. edn. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993).

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modern reader – yet another reminder of the complex nature of a text’s ideological position. Nevertheless, the history of interpretation reminds us that, as a prophetic book, down the centuries the Apocalypse has offered space for women as well as men to enable their spirituality to flourish in the midst of a society permeated with patriarchy.49 They have found in this allusive text a licence to resist received religion and practice, precisely because a canonical text opened a door for an experience of God that enabled them to transcend the boundaries imposed by what was conventionally possible.

31.6. Reflections 31.6.1. The Pictorial Representations The pictorial representations of the Apocalypse have shown different facets of the understanding of the text. Joachim’s figurae exemplify what is perhaps most typical in interpretations of the book: an insight into the understanding of history and the utopian horizon for a better world. Botticelli’s work is a theologically complex attempt to depict hope for his generation in the light of the time-frame of the Apocalypse, utilising the past to evoke the second coming of Christ, which he believed was near. Botticelli’s work reflects an important strand in the interpretation of the Apocalypse down the centuries: he and his contemporaries were the fortunate ones on whom the end of the ages had come (cf. 1 Cor. 10:11) and might even be agents in its coming. Diarmaid MacCulloch has rightly commented of the men and women of the Reformation period, that ‘The Reformation would not have happened if ordinary people had not convinced themselves that they were actors in a cosmic drama plotted by God’ and ‘the momentous events through which they were living signified that the visible world was about to end’.50 I have suggested that Duvet’s work may also be seen in this light. In addition, Duvet had an understanding of his artistic task, the vocation to ‘see again’ what had appeared to John. Here an ageing artist identifies with the aged seer in his portrayal of what appeared to John on the island of Patmos. In all these pictures the artists bring to visual expression the suggestive words and images of the Apocalypse, that most pictorial of writings. 49 This is especially evident in the visionary prophecy of Anna Trapnel. See Anna Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone, ed. and introd. H. Hinds (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000). Also, P. Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); H. Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); E. Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing, 1649–88 (London: Virago, 1988). 50 D. MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 550.

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As I indicated at the outset, much of the comment I have made on these pictures has been determined by my interests as a biblical exegete. Conversations with my artistic colleagues have been a reminder that the effects of a picture on the beholder are of key importance, transcending the effectiveness of words to communicate what pictures do to those who see them.51 There is a peculiar grammar of iconography to which I have alluded briefly from time to time. It is different from the interpretative concerns of the biblical exegete, even if it complements that task. William Blake, perhaps more than any other artist and poet since the Middle Ages, explored the overlapping effects of words and pictures, with the latter not functioning as illustrations but as independent components of the aesthetic moment.52 Words and pictures offer different modes of expression which complement each other in the interpretative task. There is an opportunity in a picture to have several conflicting ideas, as it were, in suspension without resolution. Different aspects can engage the reader, without necessarily offering any sense of resolution in the aesthetic experience. 31.6.2. Receiving and Meditating on the Text In the last part of this essay I want to explore the way in which visualisation, whether of biblical image or as a means of memorisation, has played a part in the interpretation of the Bible, and in particular of visionary texts. My three brief examples are diverse culturally and chronologically, but offer contrasting ways of imagining apocalypse. An exercise of imagination, perhaps involving the visualisation in the mind of objects, has historically been an important part of the reading of Scripture.53 Mary Carruthers has pointed out, in two books about memory in the medieval period and in antiquity, that the differentiation between memory, which is concerned with the recollection of the real, and the imagination, which is not, is a modern construct and does not apply to medieval pedagogy, nor to much earlier notions of memory. Carruthers has shown how, in the process of memorisation and the recall of memory, there is a creative process of interaction of images. The medieval scholar remembers things by making a 51

This brings to mind the comment of the distinguished American philosopher Donald Davidson, who wrote: ‘Words are the wrong currency to exchange for a picture’. D. Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, in idem, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 245–264, at 263. 52 On Blake’s biblical interpretation, see C. Rowland, ‘Christology, Controversy and Apocalypse: New Testament Exegesis in the Light of the Work of William Blake’, in Christology, Controversy and Community: Festschrift for David Catchpole, eds. D. Horrell and C.M. Tuckett (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 355–378. 53 A.R. White, The Language of Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Räpple, The Metaphor of the City.

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mental vision, a ‘seeing’ of things that are invisible from the matters in the memory, thereby embracing the present and the future through their likeness to that which is past.54 Ancient readers and hearers of texts could thus seek to ‘visualise’ what they read (or heard), and that seeing or listening would frequently involve the creation of mental images. Such meditative practice was the result of a sophisticated process of memorisation of scriptural texts, in which, in imitation of Ezekiel’s and John’s digestion of the scroll passages (often mentioned in medieval treatises on the reading and interpretation of Scripture), the one meditating was able to recall and envision. According to Hugh of St Victor in the Didascalion, meditation opened up the gateway to a network of allusions and personal context to effect a memory of Scripture that yielded an elaborate and existentially addressed meditative lectio.55 Recalled biblical texts yielded new meaning by process of spontaneous interconnections, through meditative recall.56 As part of this, illuminated manuscripts stimulated an affective experience in which an encounter with the divine came about through meditation. The pictures often shaped the reader’s understanding of the book. They aided understanding and facilitated meditation. With the rise of private reading, such illuminated books offered what Susan Lewis describes as ‘fuller access to a subjective, interiorised conception of “seeing God”’.57 31.6.3. Roots in the Merkabah Mary Carruthers points out in passing links between the medieval material imaginative exegesis and Jewish exegesis, based on Ezekiel’s merkabah vision, where a similar kind of imaginative exegesis may have included visualising the biblical images afresh, perhaps as early as the Second Temple period.58 This merkabah tradition was maintained over centuries, particularly in Judaism, but also in some parts of Christianity.59 John’s Apocalypse is itself part of the story of the visionary appropriation of Ezekiel’s merkabah 54

Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 68–69, 304. Hugh of St Victor writes: ‘Meditation is a regular period of deliberate thought. [It] takes its start from reading but is not at all bound by rules or precepts of lecture (lectio), for it delights to run freely through open space … on these, now those connections among subjects … Whence it is that in meditation is to be found the greatest pleasure and amusement’ (Didascalion 3.10). 56 This kind of imaginative activity has affinities with the kind of exegetical ingenuity that is presupposed by rabbinic legends in which fire is said to play around a tannaitic teacher, such as Simeon ben Azzai, renowned for his skill in relating one biblical text to another (Shir ha-Shirim R. 1:10.2). 57 S. Lewis, Reading Images, 336. 58 I. Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, AGJU 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1980). 59 M. Lieb, The Visionary Mode: Biblical Prophecy, Hermeneutics, and Cultural Change (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991). 55

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vision. We cannot be sure how visions took place among ancient Jews and Christians, but an educated guess might point to a form of engagement with Scripture when Ezekiel’s merkabah vision offered the springboard, either for visionary experience, or for an imaginative process of connecting scriptural images from related texts. It may have involved the visualisation in the mind of some of the various objects described in Ezekiel’s vision. Most obscure, however, was ḥašmal, an enigmatic word which occurs three times in the early chapters of Ezekiel (Ezek. 1:26 and 8:2). In b.Hag. 13b, warnings are given by means of stories about the effects on the inexperienced of imaginative engagement with aspects of Ezekiel’s text.60 Sight of the ḥašmal was regarded as a potentially threatening experiential moment. Legends circulated about children who dared to dabble in the mysteries of Ezekiel and found that the experience was damaging (b.Hag. 13a, cf. y.Hag. 77a). So, in some examples of the interpretation of Ezek. 1 the meaning of the text may have come about as a result of the interpreter’s own creative and experiential appropriation of the text, a ‘seeing again’ of what Ezekiel had seen. David Halperin captures this aspect of merkabah exegesis well when he writes: ‘When the apocalyptic visionary “sees” something that looks like Ezekiel’s merkabah, we may assume that he is seeing the merkabah vision as he has persuaded himself it really was, as Ezekiel would have seen it, had he been inspired wholly and not in part.’61 31.6.4. Imagination Finally, to a rather different analogy. Discussions with colleagues, while exploring the nature of apocalypticism together in seminars on reception history over the last three years, have shown me that, aside from Blake, among the English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century the exercise of the imagination was a central creative activity, though now no longer confined to meditation on religious texts.62 In perceiving imagination as a creative act, divinely inspired,63 William Wordsworth could describe its effects as an ‘apocalyptic’ experience every bit as overwhelming, and in some sense even more vivid and real, as experience of the real world. In Book VI of The Prelude he describes the way he has been steadily making his way across 60 D.J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988), 130–136. 61 Halperin, Faces of the Chariot, 71. See further on visionary experience, M.E. Stone, ‘A Reconsideration of Apocalyptic Visions’, HTR 96 (2003): 167–180. 62 M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971). Abrams stresses the eschatological character of apocalypse rather than its revelatory quality. 63 S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. N. Leask (London: Everyman, 1997), Chapter 13.

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Europe towards Italy, full of anticipation of the moment when he and his companions will cross the Alps. Yet he discovers that he has actually missed this eagerly anticipated event, and, in place of the actuality of the experience, Wordsworth’s imagination takes over and creates the vision in his mind’s eye. This exercise of creative imagination enables him to have an experience of the physical sight he had missed – one that was every bit as overwhelming as the actual experience itself, and indeed of proportions akin to that experienced by John in his apocalyptic vision: The unfettered clouds, and region of the Heavens, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light – Were all like workings of one mind, the features Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree; Characters of the great Apocalypse, The types and symbols of Eternity, Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.64 In this act of imagination, the last book of the Bible offers the poet a framework for his visualisation, and is the most appropriate way in which he can grasp and explain the enormous significance of what has happened to him. Nature itself expanded the horizons of the interpreter as the poet sought to express the meaning of ‘the great Apocalypse’.65

31.7. Conclusions The ‘picture-making words’ of the Apocalypse have stimulated the imaginations of many and led to its translation into visual images and representations in paintings. We have seen the ways in which painters have read the text and offered their understanding of the problems posed by the text in visualising objectively. In pictures we encounter the result of the reading in pictorial exegesis. As a result, pictures offer another stimulus to the imagination, parallel to the ways in which the Apocalypse, and indeed other biblical texts, functioned to stimulate the imagination, particularly through visualisation as a path to interpretation and application of Scripture. In this essay I have tried to explore interpretations of the Apocalypse in art. It has afforded a glimpse into a rich variety of pictorial interpretations, which, nevertheless, offer a sample of what is a significant part of the recaption history of this most influential biblical book. They are examples of the 64

Similarly, Byron, travelling near Interlaken, compared a great torrent he had seen with the tail of a white horse streaming in the wind – such as that of the ‘pale horse’ on which Death is mounted in the Apocalypse might be conceived: Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium, 193. 65 Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 105–107.

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importance of imagining the Apocalypse. Botticelli describes his ‘Mystic Nativity’ as a graphē, and one might construe the ambiguity in that word to see his picture as a writing in pictorial form, itself a creative exegesis of Rev. 11–12. Pictures are indicative of the way in which the biblical text has been a stimulus to the exploration of the imaginative space that Scripture may offer.66 Of course, there is a complex relationship between textual image, visualisation and the objectification of that in the pictures; in some cases the pictures can close down meaning and focus the attention of the reader.67 The pictures are, however, more often a gateway for the imagination, focusing the mind, yet opening up the text to new interpretative possibilities. The text may be the starting place but the pictures manage to offer interpretations, which open up different perspectives because of the difference of medium. By enabling us to imagine visually the Apocalypse they offer a parallel way of exegeting this, the most pictorial of biblical texts.

66

Lieb, The Visionary Mode. This may well have been what was happening in the medieval illuminated manuscripts and perhaps also in Luther’s Bible, where Lucas Cranach’s pictures directed early sixteenth-century new readers of the Bible in the way they should approach this most allusive of texts. R.W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). 67

32. Tyconius and Bede on Violent Texts in the Apocalypse* 32.1. Bede on the Apocalypse Although generally remembered as church historian for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Venerable Bede (673–735) was most accomplished amongst his contemporaries as an interpreter of Scripture and writer of biblical commentaries. His Explanatio Apocalypsis, generally dated to the first decade of the eighth century,1 is probably the earliest of Bede’s biblical commentaries. It is prefaced by an accompanying letter, addressed to his fellow monk and later abbot Hwaetbert (or Eusebius, a name given to him by his monks due to his piety), which sets out his distinctive seven-part division of the Apocalypse and his particular interpretative strategies. As in other exegetical works, Bede draws heavily on the work of predecessors. His Apocalypse commentary is clearly indebted to the sixth century commentator Primasius (from whom he sometimes borrowed verbatim),2 with some limited use also made of Victorinus in Jerome’s edited version, and ideas of Gregory the Great.3 But Bede’s letter to Eusebius explicitly acknowledges his dependence on the fourth century Donatist Tyconius (fl. 370–390), whom he praises as ‘a man of the most learning among those of his sect’.4 He draws upon both his Apocalypse commentary and his Liber *

With Ian Boxall. Gerald Bonner dates it to between 703 and 709: G. Bonner, Saint Bede in the Tradition of Western Apocalyptic Commentary, Jarrow Lecture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bealls, 1966), 8. Similarly Roger Gryson: ‘il est donc vraisemblablement antérieur à 710’ (R. Gryson, ‘Les commentaires patristiques latins de l’Apocalypse’, RTL 28 [1997]: 484–502, at 484). Edward Marshall dates it slightly later, to ca 710–716: E. Marshall, trans., The Explanation of the Apocalypse by the Venerable Beda (Oxford and London: James Parker & Co., 1878), iv. 2 Bonner, Saint Bede, 8. 3 He quotes from Gregory’s Homilies on Ezekiel and his Moralia in Job. See also T.W. Mackay, ‘Sources and Style in Bede’s Commentary on the Apocalypse’, in Biblica et Apocrypha, Ascetica, Liturgica, ed. E.A. Livingstone, StPatr 30 (Leuven: Peeters, 1997), 54–60. 4 Marshall, Explanation, 3. English translations of Bede’s commentary are from Marshall; the Latin text, where cited, is from R. Gryson, ed., Bedae Presbyteri Expositio Apocalypseos, CCSL 121A (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001). 1

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regularum or Book of Rules (the latter Bede apparently knew second-hand, through Augustine’s De doctrina christiana). In Bede’s own words, Tyconius both understood [the Apocalypse] with a lively apprehension, and expounded with truthfulness, and in a sufficiently Catholic sense, excepting only those places in which he endeavoured to defend the schism of his party, that is, the Donatists.5

It is Tyconius’s distinctive pattern of exegesis, and its influence on Bede’s Apocalypse commentary which will be the main concern of this essay. When considering Bede’s interpretation of the Apocalypse, however, two further influences should be considered beyond his literary dependence on earlier commentators. The first is visual. Bede himself tells us in his Vitae abbatum of the Apocalypse paintings brought back from Rome by Abbot Benedict Biscop ca 685, which were displayed on the north wall of the monastic church of St Peter in Wearmouth.6 Although not explicit about their content, he does reveal that they functioned as a reminder of the ‘perils of the last judgment’ (extremi discrimen examinis).7 The Apocalypse, in other words, would have been visually present each time Bede entered the monastic church in Wearmouth, and the memory would surely have lingered after his departure for Jarrow. The second influence could be described as monastic-liturgical. Whether at Wearmouth or at Jarrow, he would have heard the Apocalypse, or selected verses from it, during the liturgy. His primary reception of Revelation would therefore have been in the context of prayer and worship, and this would have informed his more systematic study of the text and of existing patristic commentaries on it.8 Bede puts it thus:

5

Marshall, Explanation, 7. F. van der Meer, Apocalypse: Visions from the Book of Revelation in Western Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978), 40; H.R. Willoughby, The Elizabeth Day McCormick Apocalypse, Vol. 1: A Greek Corpus of Revelation: Iconography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 133–134. Some art historians believe this Northumbrian prototype to be preserved in two ninth-century illuminated manuscripts in Valenciennes and Paris (Valenciennes, Bibliothèque Municipale MS 99; Paris BNF nouv. Acq. Lat. 1132): see J.J.G. Alexander, Insular Manuscripts: The 6th to the 9th Century (London: Harvey Miller, 1978). 7 Bede, Vitae quinque ss. abbatum, liber 1. Latin text in PL 94, 717–718. English translation from J.A. Giles, trans., ‘The Lives of the Holy Abbots of Weremouth and Jarrow’, in Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, Everyman’s Library 479 (London and New York: J.M. Dent/E.P. Dutton, 1910), 349–366. 8 On this see B. Ward, The Venerable Bede, Outstanding Christian Thinkers (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1998), 44. 6

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I have spent all my life in this monastery, applying myself entirely to the study of the Scriptures; and amid the observance of the discipline of the Rule and the daily task of singing in the church, it has always been my delight to learn or to teach or to write.9

He goes on to describe his strategy for biblical interpretation, whether for his own benefit or that of his brother-monks (and through his written works, a wider audience of monks and clergy): ‘to make brief extracts from the works of the venerable Fathers on Holy Scripture, or to add notes of my own to clarify their sense and interpretation’. We find both elements in Bede’s Apocalypse commentary: although heavily dependent upon the work of his predecessors (notably Primasius and Tyconius), there are points at which his originality shines through.

32.2. The Rules of Tyconius The Apocalypse of St. John, in which God was pleased to reveal by words and figures the wars and intestine tumults of the Church, seems to me, brother Eusebius, to be divided into several sections. Apocalypsis sancti Iohannis, in qua bella et incendia intestina ecclesiae suae deus uerbis figurisque reuelare dignatus est, septem mihi, frater Eusebi, uidetur esse diuisa periochis.10

So begins Bede’s commentary on the Apocalypse, and, writing these words, Bede indicates the profound influence of Tyconius. The reference to the revelation of the wars and tumults of the church circumscribes and focuses the nature of the imagery and relates it closely to the life of the church. This is, as we shall see, central to the ways in which Tyconius interprets the Apocalypse and which is implicit in the exegetical rules of his Liber regularum, which Bede goes on to epitomise after offering his summary of the contents of the Apocalypse. Tyconius’s commentary is no longer extant, and its contents can only be tentatively reconstructed from the commentaries of his successors, Bede among them, and the Turin fragments.11 For the purposes of this essay, the strategy adopted by the Revelation volume of the Ancient Christian Commentary series will be employed, namely, using Steinhauser’s ‘Tyconian

9 Bede, Historia Eccclesiastica 5.24. B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, eds., Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 566–567. 10 Marshall, Explanation, 1; Gryson, Expositio Apocalypseos, 221. 11 Others influenced by Tyconius are Victorinus-Jerome, Caesarius, Primasius, Cassiodor’s Complexiones, Pseudo-Jerome’s Commemoratorium, Ambrose Autpert, Beatus. See K.B. Steinhauser, The Apocalypse Commentary of Tyconius: A History of Its Reception and Influence, Europäische Hochschulschriften, Reihe 23: Theologie, 301 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1987). On the fragments, see F. Lo Bue, ed., The Turin Fragments of Tyconius’ Commentary on Revelation, TS 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963).

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Synopsis’ as a guide.12 This will allow us to see wider Tyconian influence on passages where Bede does not explicitly mention Tyconius by name (as he does when commenting on Rev. 5:6; 8:7; 12:4; 14:5; 16:17; 20:14).13 The second Tyconian influence on Bede, Tyconius’s Book of Rules, has survived in its entirety. This text was probably published in Carthage shortly before Augustine’s return to North Africa in 388.14 Having read it at that stage, Augustine returned to it some years later, in 426 when completing De doctrina christiana, thus ensuring the pervasive influence of this Donatist’s thinking in Catholic Christianity. The Book of Rules sets out the following seven regulae (an appropriate apocalyptic number), which will provide readers of Scripture with a guide as they travel through the ‘immense forest of prophecy’ (prophetiae inmensam siluam), opening up that which would otherwise be closed, and illuminating what is dark:15 1. Concerning the Lord and his body (De Domino et corpore eius); 2. Concerning the twofold body of the Lord (De Domini corpore bipertito); 3. Concerning the promises and the law (De promissis et lege); 4. Concerning species and genus (De specie et genere); 5. Concerning times (De temporibus); 6. Concerning recapitulation (De recapitulatione); 7. Concerning the devil and his body (De diabolo et eius corpore). Tyconius’s seven rules offer a hermeneutical method for reading the whole Bible, which may be distinguished by its ‘self-involving’ character. Detecting these rules at work in the processes of the Holy Spirit, who inspired the Scriptures, he developed a particular understanding of the Apocalypse which heavily influenced many of his successors, Bede included. Building on foundations laid by Victorinus, Tyconius saw the potential for Revelation to be interpreted ecclesially rather than primarily eschatologically, even whilst retaining an urgent expectation of Christ’s coming.

12

Steinhauser, Apocalypse Commentary, 265–316; W.C. Weinrich, ed., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament XII: Revelation (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2005), xxix–xxx. 13 In the appendix to his 1966 Jarrow Lecture, Gerald Bonner has identified a significant number of ‘Tyconian’ passages he believes Bede transcribed verbatim: Bonner, Saint Bede, 21–29. 14 C. Kannengiesser, ‘The Interrupted De doctrina christiana’, in De doctrina christiana: A Classic of Western Culture, eds. D.W.H. Arnold and P. Bright (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 3–13. 15 For the Latin text, see F.C. Burkitt, ed., The Book of Rules of Tyconius, TS 3.1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1894), 1; English translation from P. Bright, The Book of Rules of Tyconius: Its Purpose and Inner Logic, Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity 2 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 37.

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32.2.1. First Rule Thus his first rule (De Domino et corpore eius), whereby the close link between Head and Body means that what is said of one may be applied to the other, enabled him to see allusions to the church even in passages generally interpreted christologically. It invites the reader to discern what aspects of the passage apply to Christ the Head and which to his ecclesial Body. In a manner typical of modern ‘transparency’ interpretation of the Gospels, in which what in the literal sense concerns the life of Jesus on another level speaks of the community’s own life, this rule opens out the possibility of seeing the literal sense having another application to the Body of Christ, the church. 32.2.2. Second Rule Tyconius’s second rule, concerning ‘the twofold body of the Lord’, is perhaps the most distinctive of all. Pamela Bright describes its concept of the bipartite church as ‘the linchpin’ of Tyconius’s theological system.16 It gave a particular subtlety to Tyconius’s ecclesiology, which belied his Donatist allegiance, and made his thought more acceptable to Catholics, avoiding a clear distinction in this present world between true and false churches.17 This concept was to pass into catholic ecclesiology in the understanding of the Christian community as a corpus mixtum. This rule of the bipartite church is at work in Tyconius’s comment, preserved by Primasius, on the first trumpet, which causes a third of the earth and of the trees to be burnt up: One third consists of the false brothers who are mixed in among the good within the church, and another third that is separated by the errors of the Gentiles or by heretical depravity or by open schism. And so the church (namely, the one third) must struggle against a double evil, as though it were simplicity resisting duplicity.18

Likewise, the fall of a great star at the blowing of the third trumpet (Rev. 9:10) could refer, not simply to the devil, but also to ecclesiastical people, who living the spiritual life in the church, have become forgetful of themselves and like animals bend down to the things of the earth and fall from their positions of authority.19

This rule of the ecclesia mixta is crucial to the interpretation of the Apocalypse. It means that certainty about one’s ultimate destiny is impossible until 16

Bright, Book of Rules, 182. Bonner, Saint Bede, 4. 18 Weinrich, Revelation, 123. For the Latin text of Primasius, see A.W. Adams, ed., Primasius Episcopus Hadrumetinus, Commentarius in Apocalypsin, CCSL 92 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1985), 138. 19 Weinrich, Revelation, 127; Lo Bue, Turin Fragments, 94–95, § 165. 17

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the eschatological separation. So, assurance that one is on the side of Jerusalem rather than Babylon, of the Lamb rather than the Beast, is impossible. The Tyconian method characterises the present as a time of struggle and agnosticism about one’s ultimate destiny. In this respect it captures the subject matter of the Book of Revelation itself where readers are exhorted to repent and ensure that they endure to enjoy the life of the New Jerusalem. The kind of violence which has been endemic in the life of the Christian church, post-Christendom, and indeed which at times characterised Augustine’s theological politics, is according to the logic of Tyconian hermeneutic, to which Augustine was so greatly indebted, ruled out. In the interim all there can be is watching, waiting and suffering. 32.2.3. Third Rule The third rule concerns the promises and the law, spirit and letter, grace and commandment. It is a rule whose application echoes the dualism which pervades the Tyconian rules but now is a way of relating the two parts of the Christian Bible, much as the typological method did. 32.2.4. Fourth Rule The fourth rule in many ways parallels the first, in the way in which the dialectic between whole and part, both in subject matter and, indeed, in the relationship between the meaning of the discrete element and the wider context in which the text is to be found is a reminder to readers to look beyond the immediate particular to grasp the general. There is, according to this rule, a surplus of meaning, in which a particular person or event in the Bible only gains its true significance. The first ‘son of David’, Solomon only gains his true significance when he is viewed in relationship to the one who asserted that ‘one greater than Solomon is here’ (Matt. 12:42). 32.2.5. Fifth Rule The fifth rule ‘concerning the times’ (De temporibus) deals with two kinds of ‘times’: those where an apparent contradiction can be resolved by taking a part for a whole (as in the ‘three days’ of Christ’s burial), and those where certain numbers (such as seven, or a thousand) have a fixed, spiritual meaning.20 The second type is particularly important when interpreting the Apocalypse and indicates something which is fundamental to Tyconius’s approach namely the move away from the literal application to an exploration of the significance of the reference to time and numbers to the situation of the church. It is taken up from Tyconius by Bede, who writes that ‘the seventy 20

On this see Bright, Book of Rules, 76–77.

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years of Jerusalem may be taken spiritually for all the time during which the Church is among aliens’.21 Ecclesial readings could similarly emerge from passages where this rule De temporibus came into play. This is exemplified by the following Tyconian comment on the seven trumpet angels of Rev. 8:2: In the seven angels we shall recognise again the church according to that rule that indicates that universality is often to be acknowledged in the number seven. [The church] is said to have received a most powerful trumpet of proclamation by which she is strong and by which, we believe, every age comes to faith.22

However, in contrast to Victorinus, Tyconius’s reading was amillennial. The ecclesial potential of his fifth rule led him, for example, to doubt the literal interpretation of ‘a thousand’ at Rev. 20:2 as referring to a thousand year reign of Christ. Instead, Tyconius advocates a kind of ‘realised eschatology’: the ‘rule of the righteous’ is already spiritually present in the church.23 32.2.6. Sixth Rule The sixth rule perhaps more than any other offers an implicit challenge to what is perhaps the major tradition of interpretation in the Christian tradition the reading of the Apocalypse as a chronological account of the end of the world, best epitomised by the literalist allegorical reading of Alexander the Minorite who read the whole Apocalypse as a chronological account of the history of humanity from Christ to Last Judgement. Concentration on a simple chronological narrative may mean that one misses the fact that in successive passages the same point has been made albeit in different ways. Nowhere is this rule more important than in interpreting the Apocalypse. Here is a text where a fourfold sequence of seven letters, seals, trumpets and bowls seems to suggest some kind of narrative sequence. Yet Tyconius’s rule suggests that recapitulation may be intended and that the nature of the apocalyptic genre may call for an interpretation which treats what might otherwise be read as a succession of events as a recapitulation of the same theological theme. As Burkitt puts it: According to the terminology of Tyconius a ‘recapitulation’ is made when a Biblical writer is speaking both of the type and the antitype, the promise and the fulfilment. For just as the Church and her Head are not two but one, according to the ‘subtle eloquence of the Spirit,’ and may therefore appropriately be the subject of the same prophecy, so also the type and the antitype are in a measure one in the prophet’s mind.24

21

Marshall, Explanation, 7. Reconstructed from Adams, Primasius Episcopus, 135. English quotation from Weinrich, Revelation, 119. 23 Bright, Book of Rules, 79. 24 Burkitt, Book of Rules, xvi. 22

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This is exemplified by Matt. 24:15 (‘When you see that which was spoken by Daniel the prophet …’). The event spoken by Daniel had ‘come to pass long ago’; but ‘the Evangelist “recapitulates” this and joins the events together by saying “then”; that is, when a similar state of things is seen again in the world’.25 This rule asserts that the divine truth is evident, albeit in another guise, at different moments in the divine economy. This linking of events, while superficially similar to typology, in fact merges two parts of Scripture, and, more importantly from our point of view, closely relates Scripture and the recapitulation of Scripture in the experience of the church. This way of reading the Apocalypse has been taken up by a long tradition of Apocalypse commentators down to the present day, most significant of whom one might include the seventeenth century English theologian Joseph Mede (1586–1639), whose recapitulative theory and apocalyptic interpretation had enormous influence. 32.2.7. Seventh Rule The final rule picks up a theme which was already enunciated in the second rule. Here Tyconius offers a way of exploring the relationship between the diabolical and human persons, about which there can be no clarity until that moment when ‘nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known’ (Matt. 10:26). The ecclesial focus of Tyconius’s interpretation, which is particularly apparent in his Apocalypse comments, does not remove the problem of the violence in John’s vision. Nevertheless by its concentration on judgement beginning with the house of God (cf. 1 Pet. 4:17) it circumscribes and humanises, so that the awesome language is less a literal description of terrestrial and cosmic happenings than a reference to social upheavals and challenges. As such, the method of interpretation by implication requires the interested reader to check first the beam in their own eye before being concerned with the moat in their brother’s (cf. Matt. 6:3–4). The reform and maintenance of the Body of Christ is informed by the apocalyptic ‘words and figures’ so that disorder and chaos are understood in terms of the interpreting subject and the community of which they are a part, rather than the latter being spectators of a horrific drama affecting others but from which somehow they are exempt. Indeed, quite the reverse is true, because the ‘words and figures’ are about ‘the tumults of the Church’.

25

Burkitt, Book of Rules, xvi.

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32.3. Tyconius and Bede: Two Texts Two passages have been chosen from the Apocalypse for specific attention. The first (Rev. 4:1), although not in itself a violent text, is important for understanding Tyconius’s overall reading strategy, taken up also by Bede. It has implications for their respective treatment of violent texts. The second is a section of Revelation (the seven trumpets of Rev. 8:2–11:18) which illustrates that ever-increasing spiral of violence typified by the septets of seals, trumpets and bowls. Here attention will focus on Bede’s Tyconian interpretation of a potentially problematic text. 32.3.1. Tyconius on Revelation 4 As noted above, teasing out Tyconius’s views from the various extant extracts of his work is not an easy task. In exploring what Tyconius may have written on Rev. 4:1, a comparison of the treatment of Rev. 4:1 in the commentaries of Primasius and Bede is called for. This indicates that the latter makes a brief allusion to what is in the former (printed here in italics), though Primasius includes other related points, which, as Weinrich (following Steinhauser) indicates, probably represent sentiments which are Tyconian in character.26 Bede’s commentary on Rev. 4:1 reads as follows: After describing the works of the Church and its future condition, he recapitulates from the birth of Christ, with an intention to repeat the same things in a different manner, for in this book he repeats under various figures the whole period of the Church’s history. Descriptis ecclesiae operibus, quae esset et qualis futura esset, recapitulat a Christi natiuitate eadem aliter dicturus. Totum enim tempus ecclesiae uariis in hoc libro figuris repetit.27

This is the relevant passage in Primasius: ‘Afterwards’, John said, ‘I saw.’ After seeing the vision, he remembered that he had seen another. The interval in time belongs not to the events but to the visions. If one were to describe a single event in different ways, it would be the descriptions that differ in time, not what took place at one time. In this way, he retraces the whole span of the church using various figures to describe it. Postea, inquit, uidi. Post ipsam utique uisionem se alteram memorat uidisse. Non gestorum est diuersum tempus sed uisionum, ac si quis unam rem diuersis modis enarret, narrationes habebunt diuersum tempus, non illud quod uno tempore gestum est. Sic totum tempus ecclesiae diuersis figuris repetit enarrandum.28

Although Bede only includes the final comment about the whole story of the church being offered in different figures, the substance of Primasius’s longer account coheres with this. The point throughout, derived ultimately from 26

Weinrich, Revelation, 57–58; Steinhauser, Apocalypse Commentary, 275. Marshall, Explanation, 29; Gryson, Expositio Apocalypseos, 227. 28 Weinrich, Revelation, 57; Adams, Primasius Episcopus, 46. 27

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Tyconius, is that what we have in symbolic form are different ways of describing the story of the church. As such, it is not a thinly veiled account of church history. The point is that visionary material is not to be read chronologically. Any reference to chronology in John’s visionary account relates not to historical events but to the relative order of the visions. Hermeneutically, this is important, as it justifies a reading which does not regard the apocalyptic imagery as some kind of elaborate depiction of the eschatological punishments meted out on a wicked humanity. It is more a challenging message to the church to recognise its complex and multi-faceted character. By its figurative and existential application of the violent language the self-reference gives the interpretation a moral seriousness, which the use of the imagery as an objective description of the terrible fate of those outside the bounds of the church might not suggest. By emphasising the didactic importance for life in the present, Tyconius did what many Apocalypse commentators have done. The significance of what will happen when the Son of Man comes in glory and the Antichrist is revealed is reduced in terms of its curiosity value as its existential challenge increases. Thus, what the reader of Tyconius’s interpretation needs to understand is less about what will happen and more about the reality of what is already happening as the ‘mystery of lawlessness’ is already at work in the life of a flawed community. Christ and Antichrist already fight an unseen battle and their equally secret followers exist side by side in the Christian community. Tyconius’s exegesis is allegorical in character. The apocalyptic images become ciphers of characteristics of individuals or trends within the church. Nevertheless, it is typological in this sense: there is a dialectical relationship between the eschatological message of the Bible and the eschatologically challenging situation in which the people of God find themselves. It is not that Tyconius reduces the significance of eschatology. What he does do is to ‘eschatologise’ the present. But, as we see in the case of Tyconius’s discussion of Babylon, the divine pronouncement about Babylon’s fall is not only a future prediction but relates to a reality which is the case. This Bede explains utilising Tyconius’s ideas that Scripture is wont to represent as past that which it knows is inevitably to be fulfilled. So prophecy is not just about prediction but also about what is already the case. This is evident in Tyconius’s interpretation of Babylon as ‘confusion’. It is the ‘city and people of the devil’.29 This is entirely in line with Tyconius’s self-involving method: the relationship between future eschatological denouement and present struggle with evil, in the life of the church, is included in the discussion of Babylon. This kind of interpretation makes questionable Paula Fredriksen’s critique of Burkitt. She suggests that ‘modern scholars 29

Weinrich, Revelation, 225; Adams, Primasius Episcopus, 15–16.

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have incoherently maintained both that Tyconius was the source of the later Catholic antimillenarian commentaries on the Apocalypse and that he expected the End in his own lifetime’.30 But such apparent incoherence is entirely comprehensible in the light of Tyconius’s hermeneutic, which prioritises the present application of eschatological prophecy. It need not have been the case that Tyconius abandoned hope of imminent eschatological fulfilment, but, as far as he was concerned, the necessity was to ensure that his communities perceived the struggle between good and evil as a present reality. Study of eschatological movements in other periods of Christian history show how a de facto preoccupation with what Fredriksen calls ‘the historical realisation of prophecy’ means that speculating about the exact time of the end becomes a distraction for those who must seek to be members of the New Jerusalem. 32.3.2. Bede on Revelation 8:2–11:18 Among the most violent of passages within the Apocalypse are the sequences of trumpets (Rev. 8:2–11:18) and bowls (Rev. 15:5–16:21). The trumpet sequence describes a nightmarish scenario, echoing in part the plagues of Egypt, whereby havoc (albeit partial) is wreaked on earth, sea and the very sources of light themselves, culminating in the torturing of human beings by demonic locusts from the abyss, and ultimately the slaughter of a third of humanity by monstrous cavalry. Such a passage raises a host of interpretative questions for the commentator: what is symbolised by the various trumpet plagues, and how do these relate to the historical process, or to eschatological events? Who are the key actors in this trumpet sequence? If God is the instigator of the trumpet plagues, how may such actions be reconciled with his role as Creator and Redeemer? Writing at the beginning of the eighth century, Bede is able to draw upon a rich Latin exegetical tradition to deal with such a violent and theologicallyproblematic scenario. Victorinus, the earliest extant Latin commentator had already understood the bowls sequence to be a recapitulation of the trumpets, rather than the two providing a neat chronological sequence of end-time events. Jerome’s recension of Victorinus took this further, probably under Tyconius’s influence, by proposing that the trumpets, following the silence of Rev. 8:1, also describe the same realities as the seals: ‘after the silence has been interrupted, [the revelation] repeats these same events in order’ (interrupto silentio eadem per ordinem repetit).31 Moreover, Tyconius (in a passage already 30 P. Fredriksen, ‘Tyconius and Augustine on the Apocalypse’, in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, eds. R.K. Emmerson and B. McGinn (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 20–37, at 26, n. 17. 31 D.W. Lumsden, And Then the End will Come: Early Latin Christian Interpretations of the Opening of the Seven Seals, Medieval History and Culture (New York and London: Garland, 2001).

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cited above, reconstructed from Primasius’s commentary on Rev. 8:2) offered a particular way forward with his ecclesial reading, dependent in part on his fifth rule (De temporibus). Thus the seven trumpet angels represent the universal church, seven being a number associated symbolically with universality. The trumpets themselves are the church’s proclamation of the gospel: [The church] is said to have received a most powerful trumpet of proclamation by which she is strong and by which, we believe, every age comes to faith. Haec firmissimam praedicationis tubam dicitur accepisse, qua praeualente saeculum omne fidimus credere.32

Bede picks up on this connection between the trumpets and the ecclesial task of preaching, and further comments made by Tyconius and other predecessors, to develop a distinctive interpretation of the whole trumpets section. His commentary on v. 2 provides an overview and summary of his approach, which is then developed further in his commentary on each of the trumpets in turn: The Church, which is often presented under the number seven, is commended to the office of preaching. And here the first trumpet denotes the common destruction of the ungodly in the fire and hail; the second, the expulsion of the devil from the Church for the fiercer burning of the sea of the world; the third, the falling away of heretics from the Church, and their corruption of the streams of Holy Scripture; the fourth, the defection of false brethren in the darkening of the stars; the fifth, the greater hostility of heretics, the precursors of the time of Antichrist; the sixth, the open war of Antichrist and his own against the Church, and the destruction of the same enemy interposed by a recapitulation from the advent of the Lord; the seventh, the day of judgment, in which the Lord is to render to His own their reward, and to exterminate those who have corrupted the earth.33

Bede’s Latin original reads as follows: Ecclesia septenario saepe numero commendata praedicationis officio mancipatur, cuius prima tuba communem impiorum in igne et grandine designat interitum, secunda propulsum de ecclesia diabolum mare saeculi ardentius incendentem, tertia hereticos ecclesia decidentes sanctae scripturae flumina corrumpentes, quarta falsorum fratrum in siderum obscuratione defectum, quinta maiorem hereticorum infestationem tempus antichristi praecurrentium, sexta apertum antichristi et suorum contra ecclesiam bellum et, recapitulatione ab aduentu domini interserta, eiusdem aduersarii destructionem, septima diem iudicii, quo mercedem dominus suis redditurus et exterminaturus est eos qui corruperunt terram.34

The preaching motif is picked up in the sounding of the seven trumpets prepared for in v. 6: The Church, enflamed by the sevenfold Spirit, prepared herself to preach with confidence, so as to throw down the glory of the world like the walls of Jericho with heavenly trumpets.35 32

Weinrich, Revelation, 119; Adams, Primasius Episcopus, 135. Marshall, Explanation, 56. 34 Gryson, Expositio Apocalypseos, 333. 35 Marshall, Explanation, 58. 33

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A number of points are worthy of note in this interpretation of Revelation’s septet of trumpets. First, the violence of John’s imagery is partly absorbed into the church’s ministry of preaching. Proclaiming the word in every generation is understood as a violent act, with potentially devastating consequences for those who resist. Hence, Bede understands the flying eagle with its threefold ‘Woe’ (Rev. 8:13) to be the voice which daily flies through the mouths of eminent doctors in the Church, when they announce that the cruelty of Antichrist and the day of judgment will come with all severity to those who are lovers of the earth.36

This sentiment chimes in with a recurring motif in the Apocalypse and indeed throughout the New Testament. The gospel, good news for the poor and oppressed, manifests itself as terrifying judgement to the world’s oppressors. God’s wrath is the other face of God’s redeeming love. God’s word of truth is encountered as a sharp, double-edged sword, which can cut to the quick, unmasking the lie for what it is and ultimately destroying the beast Babylon has created. It is exemplified par excellence in Revelation’s rider on the white horse (Rev. 19:11–16), the personified Word of God who slays with the sword from his mouth, and perpetuated in the preaching of the propheticchurch, symbolised in Christ’s two witnesses of Rev. 11. Second, in Bede’s ecclesially-oriented reading, the plagues announced by the church’s preachers are not so much eschatological events as symbolic descriptions of what may befall God’s people at any stage of the church’s life. True, there is some progression in Bede’s interpretation of the seven trumpets, with the ‘open war’ (apertum bellum) of Antichrist symbolised by the sixth trumpet, and the resolution of the final judgement by the seventh. He has not lost that sense of eschatological urgency found in important predecessors such as Gregory the Great, even if, as Lumsden argues, he has concentrated instead on ‘the process by which the true church would become a purified body of the elect’.37 Nevertheless, Bede’s understanding of what is symbolised by the first five trumpets results in an interpretation, which speaks to the church of every generation. The hail and fire mixed with blood (Rev. 8:7) signify the punishment of hell, announced by the voice of the church’s preachers to the wicked in the present time. The mountain cast into the sea at the second trumpet (Rev. 8:8) is the devil, cast out of the church into the sea of the world. Following a prompt in the Letter of Jude (sidera errantia, Jude 13), the great falling star of the third trumpet is interpreted as heretics, a constant threat for God’s people, corrupting the fountains of the Scriptures and, by making such sweetness bitter, deserving of the name Wormwood. The darkening of a third 36 37

Marshall, Explanation, 61. Lumsden, And Then the End will Come, 52.

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of sun, moon and stars at the fourth trumpet (Rev. 8:12) signifies the obscuring of the church’s glory by false brethren in its midst. These seem to be distinguished from the heretics in that their crime is ethical rather than doctrinal. The heretics re-emerge at the fifth trumpet; which again speaks of a star falling from heaven. Heresy within the church is a precursor of the time of Antichrist, although that time is not yet here, and therefore the identification of both heretics and false brethren is rather more precarious. Bede seems to share Tyconius’s conviction, expressed in his second rule De Domini corpore bipertito, that any true identification of the elect within the church must await the final judgement, i.e., the sounding of the seventh trumpet. Underlying Bede’s repeated focus on threats to the church’s life and purity is a theological reading of the text, which understands the violent imagery to be not so much a description of divine punishment as of the consequences of human rebellion and demonic seduction. When the devil is thrown out, he begins to ‘rage with greater madness against his own’,38 resulting in spiritual death. Heretics inflict damage on the well-being of God’s people, while the false brethren tarnish the brightness of the church’s glory. The reign of Antichrist is a reign of general cruelty, and particular persecution for members of the church. The four angels bound at the Euphrates (Rev. 9:15) symbolise malignant spirits, who hunger for the deaths of human beings. Ultimately in Bede’s reading, it is not the Creator, but demonic forces and humans held in their grip, who inflict violence on the earth and whose actions bear the seeds of their own destruction. That is why the climactic seventh trumpet announces the time not only for judging the dead and rewarding God’s servants, but for destroying the destroyers of the earth (Rev. 11:18), or in Bede’s words, the day on which the Lord is to ‘exterminate those who have corrupted the earth’ (exterminaturus est eos qui corruperunt terram). One final element of Bede’s exegesis of the trumpet sequence calls for comment: his assertion that the Apocalypse’s sixth trumpet contains a recapitulatio ab aduentu domini inserted between its visionary description of the open war of Antichrist and his own against the church, and of the destruction of the enemy. This recapitulation ‘from the advent of the Lord’ must refer to the vision of the mighty angel with the little scroll of Rev. 10 and the destruction of the enemy to the great earthquake which destroys a tenth of the great city following the ascension of the two witnesses (Rev. 11:1–14). What is puzzling is Bede’s description of the angel vision as adventus domini. Certainly the biblical text leaves open an interpretation of the mighty angel as Christ’s angel, or even Christ himself, given the similarities between this figure and ‘one like a son of man’ at Rev. 1:12–20.39 Thus Bede can identify him as the Lord, the angel of the great counsel. Rather, the puzzle 38 39

Marshall, Explanation, 59 (commenting on Rev. 8:8). E.g. I. Boxall, The Revelation of St John, BNTC 18 (London: Continuum, 2006), 152.

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revolves around the nature of the ‘advent’. This is a ‘recapitulation’, which might suggest that the intercalation of Rev. 10 begins with a visionary flashback to Christ’s first coming in the incarnation. This interpretation is strengthened by Bede’s comment that the Lord descends from heaven ‘clothed with a cloud of flesh’. There is a plausible alternative, however, suggested on the one hand by the ecclesial dimension of Bede’s exegesis, and on the other by his own monastic context. This adventus may refer to the ongoing coming of Christ to the church, which for Bede would have been particularly in the liturgy. We have already noted the presence of scenes from the Apocalypse on the north wall of St Peter’s Church, Wearmouth, and the hearing of Revelation would also have occurred in a liturgical setting, where the community encountered the risen Christ and his angelic mediators. Indeed, Sarah Foot has drawn attention to Bede’s lively awareness of the presence of angels during liturgical services.40 The trumpet sequence would thus be interrupted by a reminder of Christ’s abiding presence in his body, and his repeated ‘coming’ in judgement and salvation. But there is a further dimension to this ecclesial ‘coming’. The vision of Rev. 10 is framed by the gift of the ‘little scroll’ containing God’s prophetic word, and the angelic charge to John to ‘prophesy again’, having devoured that scroll (Rev. 10:8–11). In this context, Bede explicitly mentions the church’s ministry of preaching,41 and understands the location of the angel’s right and left feet to symbolise the preaching of the Christian faith by land and sea. Following the Tyconian ecclesial pattern, Bede’s recapitulation ‘from the advent of the Lord’ seems to include the preaching ministry of faithful Christians. In every age of the church’s life, Christ comes to his people in the word that is preached.

32.4. Conclusion In the introduction to the Blackwell Bible Commentary on Revelation a distinction was made between two different kinds of interpretation of the Apocalypse: the decoding and the analogical.42 Decoding involves presenting the meaning of the text in another, less allusive, form, showing what the text really means, whereas analogical reading involves reading the Apocalypse in relation to new circumstances. Analogical interpretations take two forms. In one form the imagery of the Apocalypse is juxtaposed with the interpreter’s 40

S. Foot, Monastic Life in Anglo-Saxon England c. 600–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 193. 41 See especially Bede’s comment on Rev. 10:3. 42 J. Kovacs and C. Rowland, Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 7–11.

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own circumstances, whether personal or social, so as to allow the images to inform an understanding of contemporary persons and events and to serve as a guide for action. In contrast with ‘decoding’, it preserves the integrity of the textual pole. The crucial thing is that it does not allow the image or passage from the Apocalypse to be identified solely with one particular historical personage or circumstance. The text may relate in different circumstances over and over again. Thereby, the book is seen as applicable to every age. It offers that alternative horizon, functioning as a lens through which one can see one’s own situation afresh. Such is the interpretation inspired by Tyconius, and developed by Bede. One cannot deny the possibility that Tyconius believed that the Last Days impended upon the life of his church, and so it is appropriate that the apocalyptic images should speak to them. His rules expand the relevance of the Book of Revelation to all situations, whether or not readers believed that they were the ones ‘upon whom the ends of the ages had come’ (1 Cor. 10:11). One recalls the Gospel of Matthew, where eschatological parables are subordinate to a present ethical message, thus anticipating the hermeneutic evident in Tyconius’s interpretation. For both Matthew and Tyconius, and also for Bede, it is the eschatological significance in its existential awesomeness that is so striking. There is no refuge in some kind of eschatological fantasy, no assurance that the identity of the elect can be known, only the struggle to seek first the Kingdom of God. The reality, or propriety, of violence is not questioned in either Tyconius or the Gospel of Matthew, but the ambiguity of its effects and the fact that in this age both just and unjust may be on the receiving end of it, the former as a way of testing, means that the neat Deuteronomic solution that God regards the righteous and punishes the impious is inapplicable. The possibility of complicity in the exercise of violence is an ever present reality. All one can do is live with the agnosticism and so eschew doing, or being complicit with, violence because there can never be an assurance that one is in the right. Two modern examples of the persistence of Tyconian hermeneutics must suffice. The English apocalyptic writer, William Blake (1757–1827), uses the Jerusalem/Babylon contrast to expose the ways in which in both the human person, and in wider society, two sets of values can exist side by side in conflict in an anticipation of the ultimate struggle. Thus, his last prophetic work, Jerusalem, is the story of the struggle between Jerusalem and Babylon as a society seeks to fulfil its destiny under God as a place of human brotherhood and the forgiveness of sins.43 At the end of the twentieth century, during the political crisis of the US torn apart by the Vietnam War, the apocalyptic contrasts of the Book of 43

C. Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 150–152.

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Revelation offer William Stringfellow, theologian and political activist, an interpretative key to understand the cosmos under God and the situation of his nation. Babylon and Jerusalem are types of two different kinds of community. Babylon is a description of every city, an allegory of the condition of death, which is the focus of judgement. Jerusalem is about the emancipation of human life in society from the rule of death. Jerusalem is a parable, he says, of the church of prophecy, an anticipation of the end of time.44 So, Babylon and Jerusalem are a way of understanding of every situation, speaking on the one hand of the condition of death and on the other hand emancipation of human life: … while Babylon represents the principality in bondage to death in time and time is actually a form of that bondage Jerusalem means the emancipation of human life in society from the rule of death and breaks through time, transcends time, anticipates within time the abolition of time.45

There is no reason to think that Tyconius or Bede shared modern unease with the language of violence in the Apocalypse. Indeed, the horror of the Last Judgement unleashed the ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’, which characterises evocations of the world to come. That said, such a pre-occupation with the identity of the elect is significantly qualified by the hermeneutical approach they adopted. Agnosticism about the identity of the elect and the ongoing struggle to ensure that one may share the throne of the Son of Man (Rev. 3:21) was an ongoing spur to moral endeavour. In the interim there was nothing that could be done to separate the sheep and the goats, however much that might be the theory on the one hand of Tyconius’s Donatist co-religionists, and the practice on the other hand of Augustine. The application of apocalyptic images to the tribulations, sufferings and shortcomings of the church turned attention away from the quest to identify those images with historical events. Interpreters of the Apocalypse are less spectators of eschatological history than eschatologically significant subjects, whose moral identity becomes the subject matter of exegetical engagement. Reading violent texts is part of moral endeavour rather than either the satisfaction of eschatological curiosity or vengeful delight that one’s enemies might be consigned to the Lake of Fire. The task of the exegete of the Apocalypse is to recognise that they have in their hands the medicine of immortality, which applies to them and to their community. As a recent commentator on Tyconius has pointed out, Tyconius linked the Bible with his contemporary world, in contrast to the distancing of the Bible from current events, which is typical of writers like Augustine. Tyconius

44 W. Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (Waco: Word Books, 1973), 21. 45 Stringfellow, Ethic, 60.

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believed that biblical models were intimately linked with the events of the present and that the words of the Bible directly addressed Christians in the present.46 He was a Donatist, a member of a church condemned by Augustine. Yet Tyconius’s theology and biblical interpretative principles were adopted by Augustine, and through him exegetes like Bede. In The City of God Augustine’s view of the church as a site of evil rather than a place of light, and the world as a place of darkness, owed much to Tyconius. More explicitly, in De doctrina christiana, Augustine acknowledges his debt to Tyconius’s methods of biblical interpretation. These are complex points, but what is important for our present concern is the way in which Tyconius emphasises the importance of Scripture in all its variety having a present application to the life of the church. He would have agreed very much with Paul’s words in 1 Cor. 10:6: ‘these things occurred as examples for us’, a sentence repeated again a few verses later (1 Cor 10:11). This kind of dialectic is a central feature of Tyconius’s rules. Not only is there an interplay between Christ and his Body, the church, but also between text and present experience. Thus, the apocalyptic images of the Bible cease to be primarily about some external eschatological events in which the church is not involved, but about the present experience of tribulation and persecution, which was the lot of Tyconius’s Donatist community, or about the daily struggles towards fidelity of Bede’s monastic community. The ‘actualising’ of biblical texts means going beyond the preoccupation with ‘what it meant then’, to the essential text as it comes to life in the midst of the community reading and seeking that continuity of experience, and action with the communities whose stories are reflected in the Scriptures. Tyconius describes this as a kind of typology in which the biblical story, attentively read, can offer a framework for contemporary life. His church, with its tradition of persecution and harassment, looked to martyr stories, especially the martyr stories in the Bible, such as the death of Jesus. These are not just things that happened ‘back then’, but are models, catalysts for life. They are not prescriptions, but intellectual and ethical stimuli, and means of encouragement.

46

See M.A. Tilley, The Bible in Christian North Africa: The Donatist World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 116.

33. ‘By an immediate revelation … by the voice of his own spirit to my soul’: A Perspective from Reception History on the New Testament and Antinomianism 33.1. Antinomianism in the New Testament? There was a debate over fifty years ago, which is now largely forgotten, and I think probably merits more than a footnote in the history of modern New Testament scholarship. In writings which had much popularity at the time I was first studying theology, the North American-based New Testament scholar, John Knox, juxtaposed the ethic of Jesus and that of Paul, and found the latter wanting because of the lack of the dynamic of repentance and forgiveness, and what he considered was the inadequate theoretical structure of the theology underpinning Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith, which failed to offer a convincing theological response to antinomianism. Knox’s discussion of the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, based on his interpretation of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, repays careful consideration, not because Knox got the diagnosis right, but because he did see that there was a problem in the Pauline corpus.1 Knox’s challenge received a response in the Festschrift, which was presented to him, including essays by Paul Schubert and Charlie Moule. The latter2 analysed Paul’s understanding of identification with Christ and showed convincingly that, even if Paul did not use the language of repentance and forgiveness, the Pauline language of submission to another lordship, say, in Rom. 6, had an implicit notion of the dynamic of repentance and forgiveness, which paralleled that which Knox had identified in the Jesus tradition, which was the major concern of the Knox essay. What Moule failed to answer adequately, however, was the subsidiary point that in the Pauline letters there are contradictory themes, which sit uneasily together. 1

J. Knox, The Ethic of Jesus and the Teaching of the Church: Its Authority and Relevance (New York: Abingdon, 1961). 2 C.F.D. Moule, ‘Obligation in the Ethic of Paul’, in Christian History and Interpretation: Studies Presented to John Knox, eds. W.R. Farmer et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 389–406.

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This contribution is about lawlessness (one of the subjects of the 2015 symposium on ‘Law and Lawlessness in Early Judaism and Early Christianity’ which took place in Oxford), in the sense there is less of law and more of ‘immediate revelation’ as a mode of understanding and engaging with the divine, which subordinates the position of law. It may occasionally involve disregard of, or disobedience to, law but need not, and indeed arguably, even in the most extreme cases, includes some of the main ethical themes of the law. As such, while its primary concern is with strands of theology from the early modern and modern period, it concerns an issue which goes all the way back to the New Testament and indeed is a feature one may find much more widely in the study of religion. It is an attempt to move beyond the usual brief rejection of antinomianism by probing aspects of reception history of the Bible. I agree with the view that ‘none of the [New Testament] authors would have considered himself as defending an antinomian position’.3 I do not think that the New Testament is ‘antinomian’ in the sense of being against appropriate forms of conduct with basic outlines echoing key themes from the Mosaic law, even if there are at times statements which suggest an end of the Mosaic dispensation. I would say the same with regard to those who were reputedly antinomian, for there is often a profoundly ethical stance, as with Abiezer Coppe (1619–1672) and Laurence Clarkson (1615–1667), however unconventional their behaviour and subversive of contemporary values they were. I shall question the adequacy of ‘antinomianism’ as being primarily ‘anti-law’ or indeed about the promotion of ‘immoral’ behaviour. Not prioritising rules and regulations, sitting loose to law and custom, even appearing to be sexually immoral, blasphemous or offending against convention are often symptomatic of prioritising another source of authority, which is experiential and indeed apocalyptic. It could be termed prioritising autonomy over heteronomy, but autonomy fails adequately to capture the widespread and deep-seated conviction that it is not principally about the right of the individual to determine how they should live, for most pre-modern and early modern people (possibly Blake apart of those considered in this essay), it is an individual’s claim to knowledge based on divine inspiration. The conviction that God has spoken by dream or revelation, and indeed revealed God independently of established patterns of discerning the divine will, is evident in different parts of the New Testament itself, as in the passages from the later Christian tradition, which I will consider. As a result, inspiration then is given priority over obedience to convention. As we shall see, that should not lead us to suppose that Blake naïvely supposed that appeal to ‘Memory’ wasn’t crucial to him. No one used his 3 M. Mayordomo et al., ‘Antinomianism’, EBR 2:233–245 (New Testament: M. Mayordomo; Judaism: J. Davis; Christianity: P. Gemeinhardt, B. McGinn, F.C. Ilgner, K. Bowler), 234.

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intellectual ancestors’ work to better effect, in reaction and as an inspiration than Blake.4 Indeed, he mentions as much, e.g. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 5, E35; 21–22, E42.5 Milton, Swedenborg not to mention the Bible, all influenced Blake, stimulated his imagination and concentrated his mind to articulate his resistance to them. Key to my thesis is, that one aspect of the broad phenomenon of antinomianism is the primacy of what was believed to be immediate access to understanding the divine, through dreams, visions, insight – what Anne Hutchinson calls an immediate revelation … ‘by the voice of God’s own spirit to my soul’ and what a young William Blake wrote about Jesus that he ‘acted from impulse not from rules’ (E43). It is ‘anti-nomian’ only in the sense of relegating the authority of Scripture and received wisdom to a secondary position, another medium and source of authority. Or put another way, it is lawlessness, in the sense there is less of law and more of another mode of understanding and engaging with the divine, which subordinates the position of law. It may occasionally involve disregard of, or disobedience to, law but need not, and indeed arguably, even in the most extreme cases, includes some of the main ethical themes of the law. This may be considered a weak sense of antinomian, but I believe it is part and parcel of the intellectual history of Christianity, which should be considered as relevant to the subject of this symposium. Even Blake, the most coherent advocate of the subordinate place of law in religion, indicated a place for the boundaries and constraints as a necessary complement to the imaginative flights of fancy of the prophetic spirit and a necessary means of communicating them. After a brief survey of the article on antinomianism in the De Gruyter Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, I shall consider some examples of antinomianism in the sense I am considering it from the early modern period with particular reference to the trial of Anne Hutchinson and the writings of William Blake. I shall then outline a typology, which I worked out for my book on Blake and the Bible, based on the book on seventeenthcentury antinomianism by David Como. I shall suggest that subjection to an external law has mutated so that the external code is internalised, ‘written on the heart’ or ‘the spirit within’, influenced by passages from Ezek. 36:25–27 and Jer. 31:33–34, so that the individual has no need any longer of resort to law as an external authority. Finally I shall return to the New Testament itself, ending with some hermeneutical reflections.

4 H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 5 E plus page number(s) refers to Erdman’s edition of Blake’s works, see below, p. 783.

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33.2. Antinomianism in the De Gruyter Encyclopaedia of the Reception of the Bible Debates about antinomianism have a long history but became an explicit part of theological vocabulary with the dispute between Luther and Johannes Agricola in the 1530s.6 It became part and parcel of the way in which nonconformist groups were branded in the early modern period. John Milton dismissively lumps together the ‘sort of men who follow Anabaptism, Familism, Antinomianism, and other fanatic dreams’ without acknowledging the moral seriousness evident in the lives of Familists and Anabaptists alike, though he does go on to make the perceptive point that this kind of approach to ethics ‘proceed not partly, if not chiefly, from the restraint of some lawful liberty which ought to be given Men, and is deny’d them’ (On Divorce 14). Milton’s Samson Agonistes, published in 1671 at the same time as Paradise Regain’d, has a more nuanced view. Samson’s words offer an apologia for neglect of the law of God in furtherance of some higher aim on the basis that God cannot be tied ‘to his own prescript, Who made our Laws to bind us, not himself, And who hath full right to exempt Whom so it pleases him’ (309–310). The multi-authored article on ‘Antinomianism’ in the De Gruyter Encyclopaedia of the Reception of the Bible is divided into three major sections: New Testament; Judaism; and Christianity. In the New Testament section (by Moisés Mayordomo) there is recognition that antinomianism is used loosely to refer to ideas which consider ‘obligation to fixed religious or social laws somehow irrelevant for salvation or moral behaviour’. The place of the term in discussions about gospel and Law, and the emergence of a new perspective on Paul in the last thirty years, in which ‘covenantal nomism’ looms large, is taken as an indication that care is needed to not read back the controversies of later times into the New Testament. There is then coverage of those passages in the New Testament (especially the Pauline corpus), which might be taken in an antinomian way, but the conclusion is that ‘on any account it is difficult to consider Paul an antinomian’. The Gospel of Matthew and Revelation are then considered, but the same general conclusion emerges. Section II on Judaism (by Joseph Davis) has an interesting discussion of redemption through sin with particular attention to the Sabbatian movement of the seventeenth century, and Maimonides’s view of the conventional, rather than normative, nature of Torah law. Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn and Buber are mentioned in an article which explores the effects of deep-seated antinomian traditions in Judaism. What is missing is a mention of the rather elusive figure found in the rabbinic tradition, Elishah ben Abuyah, alias ‫אחר‬. 6 Mayordomo et al., ‘Antinomianism’, EBR 2:241; T.J. Wengert, Law and Gospel: Philip Melanchthon’s Debate with John Agricola of Eisleben over Poenitentia (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1997).

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Stories about his antinomian behaviour are found in b.Hag. 15a–b. All of these stories seem to be a commentary on the enigmatic words used of Elisha in the story of the Four who entered pardes, that he ‘mutilated the shoots’. The traditions preserved about him suggest a rather similar mix that we find in the Pauline corpus, of profound knowledge of the law and its traditional understanding, along with stories about his corrupting young scholars. But there are also accounts of his ‘immediate revelation’, including in one version, an apocalyptic heavenly ascent, which convinced him that there was no possibility of repentance for him (b.Hag. 15a; 3 En. 16). Part III examines the rest of Christian intellectual history. This is divided into four sections each by different authors. The first on the Greek and Latin Patristics (by Peter Gemeinhardt) covers gnostic texts, especially the patristic references to the Carpocratians. The section on Medieval Times (by Bernard McGinn) focuses on ‘The Heresy of the Free Spirit’ among Beguines and Beghards, with some attention given to Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of the Simple Annihilated Soul, which McGinn points out does not deserve the description ‘antinomian’. The third part is on the Reformation Era (F.C. Ilgner). The major concern here is with the first and second antinomian conflicts, the first involving Johann Agricola, the second Georg Major. The fourth section on Modern Europe and America (by Kate Bowler) starts with Wesley’s antinomian tendencies, and mentions Anabaptists and Quakers in passing. Then there is reference to the Civil War period in seventeenth century England. Laurence Clarkson’s views are briefly quoted. The New England antinomian controversy in 1636–1637 gets a longer treatment, especially a crucial point in Anne Hutchinson’s trial when she made a claim to ‘immediate revelation’, which led to her conviction (on which see below). There is a final reference to the Oneida community and John Humphrey Oneida’s advocacy of freedom from the constraints of the law, which is typical of many such millenarian movements in both Europe and North America. The point of the Anne Hutchinson condemnation is that she claimed ‘immediate revelation’ as the basis of a superior theological appeal and the subordination of the Bible to it. This is something which is implicit in the writings of some of the radical Reformation writers like Hans Denck and Sebastian Franck. Abiezer Coppe gets a passing reference.7 He epitomises the problem of the discussion of antinomianism. His reputation as immoral and a libertine needs to be matched by a strong theme throughout, that the result of his being indwelt by the divine is a demonstration of the motor of his ethical outlook. Then there is lack of any mention of the consummate example of antinomianism, the writings of the English poet, artist and visionary, William

7

On the links between Coppe and Blake see S. Makdisi, Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

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Blake (1757–1827), which exemplify the way in which the biblical material informed this current of thought. Throughout Christian history recourse is made to a theological insight, for example, through the Spirit or vision, which is given priority over Scripture and tradition. This needs to be taken into account in any consideration of the New Testament also, where appeals to ‘higher wisdom through revelation’ may be found, e.g. 1 Cor. 2:10–168 and often in the Gospel of John.

33.3. The Trial of Anne Hutchinson There is a dramatic moment in the trial of Anne Hutchinson in New England in 1637 when she explains to her interrogator the priority she gives to ‘speaking what in my conscience I know to be truth’: Mr. Nowell. How do you know that that was the spirit? Mrs. H. How did Abraham know that it was God that bid him offer his son, being a breach of the sixth commandment? Dep. Gov. By an immediate voice. Mrs. H. So to me by an immediate revelation. Dep. Gov. How! an immediate revelation. Mrs. H. By the voice of his own spirit to my soul. Here she appeals to Gen. 22 and the priority of ‘an immediate voice’, which was the basis of Abraham sacrificing Isaac. The example of Abraham offered a precedent for appealing to ‘an immediate revelation’, ‘… the voice of [God’s] own spirit to my soul’, which settled a matter as far as she was concerned. In the opinion of those judging her this clear enunciation of her convictions, at the climax of what had hitherto been a very measured response, was the basis for her condemnation. So, John Winthrop in his summing up thanked divine providence for making Hutchinson ‘lay open her self and the ground of all these disturbances to be by revelation’.9 There was a crucial turning point in Anne Hutchinson’s trial when she intervened and was allowed to do so by the governor of Massachusetts. The original charge levelled against Anne Hutchinson was as a woman promoting 8 A.C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2000). 9 D.D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), 337, 341; Mayordomo et al., ‘Antinomianism’, EBR 2:245; M.G. Ditmore, ‘A Prophetess in Her Own Country: An Exegesis of Anne Hutchinson’s “Immediate Revelation”’, The William and Mary Quarterly 57 (2000): 349–392; and on the general background in English Calvinism, D. Wallace, Shapers of English Calvinism, 1660–1714: Variety, Persistence, and Transformation (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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the ‘covenant by grace’ preaching of John Cotton and John Wheelwright, the latter of whom was related to Hutchinson by marriage and was also banished for his views. As suggested, Hutchinson’s reported admission at her trial put the matter on another level of theological significance, however closely related to it it might have been. It was not just about a ‘covenant of grace’ as compared to a ‘covenant of works’, but the relative weight given to ‘immediate revelation’ as compared with Scripture of any kind. To use Blake’s terminology, it has become about the priority given, to ‘Inspiration’ over ‘Memory’.10 The decisive moment came when she, seemingly spontaneously, shared with the court her fondness for what governor Winthrop, writing to friends in England, termed ‘bottomlesse, revelations, as came without any word [of Scripture] or without the sense of the word’.11 What is more, though she justified such revelations, she used the word ‘immediate’ of the revelations, which suggested the subordination of the words of Scripture to revelation and conjured up what her opponents considered antinomian, Familist and smacked of all the worst excesses of Anabaptism. According to Winship, Hutchinson became the cause of the colony’s troubles and her supporters became, at worst, followers of this dangerous ringleader. Though Hutchinson’s testimony is laced with scriptural support, the basic conviction is there, that it is immediate revelation which not only inspires her use of the Bible but also the typological identification with biblical figures.12

33.4. Gerrard Winstanley and His Contemporaries: Another Example of ‘Immediate Revelation’ in England in the Mid-seventeenth Century The 1630s Antinomian Controversy in New England is the tip of the iceberg of a network of beliefs, which reverberated around Old England in the following decades, in which the primary place was given to the apocalyptic, viewed in its epistemological, rather than eschatological, sense. For example, the importance of ‘immediate revelations’ is confirmed and justified by Anne Hutchinson’s English contemporary Gerrard Winstanley who wrote ‘if you say that visions and revelations are ceased … then you erre mightily’ … (‘Truth Lifting his Head’, CHL 1:41013). He himself repeatedly set great store by his trance experience with the command to dig the common land: 10

Milton a Poem, Preface (E95). M.P. Winship, The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson: Puritans Divided (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005), 111–112. 12 Ditmore, ‘A Prophetess’, 386–388. 13 CHL plus page number(s) refers to Corns’s et al. edition of Winstanley’s works, see below, p. 783. 11

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Not a full year since, being quiet at my work, my heart was filled with sweet thoughts, and many things were revealed to me which I never read in books, nor heard from the mouth of any flesh, and when I began to speak of them, some people could not bear my words, and amongst those revelations this was one, That the earth shall be made a common Treasury of livelihood to whole mankind, without respect of persons; and I had a voice within me bad me declare it all abroad, which I did obey … yet my mind was not at rest, because nothing was acted, and thoughts run in me, that words and writings were all nothing, and must die, for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing. Within a little time I was made obedient to the word in that particular likewise; for I took my spade and went and broke the ground upon George-hill in Surrey. (A Watch-Word to the City of London and the armie, CHL 2:80, noted by Ditmore, ‘A Prophetess’, 352, n. 5 from the earlier The New Law of Righteousnes, CHL 1:513)

Winstanley begins his treatise The Saints Paradice with a quotation from Jer. 31:34 (‘And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord’). It is not the verse which mentions the law written on the heart (the previous verse). The quotation is put to use as part of Winstanley’s challenge to acceptance of ‘the tradition from the mouths and pen of others’. Indeed, the whole treatise is a challenge to those ‘professors’ who may know the Bible well and its history, but ‘who worshipped a God, but neither knew who he was, nor where he was’. What is required is ‘a teacher within yourselves (which is Spirit)’ who ‘will teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance [echoes here of John 14:26, 1 Cor. 2:14–15, in addition to Jeremiah], so that you shall not need to run after men for instruction’. Winstanley denies the authenticity of even ‘the most glorious Preacher, or professor of literal gospel’ who may end up as ‘the subtilest hypocrites, if they do not know the power of God’. It is not the words of the letter of the Bible, for example adherence to what is ‘called the ten Commandments’, for ‘it is the manifestations of God in all, or any one of his attributes, shining forth upon, and in his creature’. Milton believed that ‘On the introduction of the gospel, or new covenant through faith in Christ, the whole of the preceding covenant, in other words the entire Mosaic law, was abolished. Jer. xxxi.31–33’ (De Doctrina Christiana, in Complete Prose Works 6:525–532), and that ‘we ought to believe what in our conscience we apprehend the Scripture to say, though the visible church with all her doctors gainsay’.14 Among Winstanley’s more radical contemporaries were Laurence Clarkson and Abiezer Coppe. Coppe was one of the most colourful and controversial figures of his day, and his A Fiery Flying Roll, which provoked parliament’s censure and later the Blasphemy Act of 1650, suggests that he was more interested in challenging the conventional hierarchy of values as a result of his overwhelming experience of being 14

Treatise of Civil Power, see C. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber, 1977), 314.

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indwelt by God. Coppe in A Fiery Flying Roll 2:18 writes ‘Why should I turn away mine eyes from mine own flesh? Why should I not break bread to the hungry, whoever they be?’15 Particularly evident in mid-seventeenth century radical English nonconformist theology is the assumption that God is present in all, so there is no need to attend to another source of authority. David Lincicum has suggested to me that the neologism ‘panentheonomy’ might be an apt description of this. For example, Richard Coppin, a writer who may have influenced Abiezer Coppe, wrote: ‘God is all in one; and so in everyone; the same all which is in me, is in thee; the same God which dwels in me dwels in another; and in the same fullness as he is in me, he is in everyone.’16 This is echoed in a reminiscence of Blake by Henry Crabb Robinson. When asked about the divinity of Christ, Blake responded ‘he is the only God’ – but then he added – ‘And so am I and so are you’.17 It parallels ‘The worship of God is. Honouring his gifts in other men each according to his genius’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 22, E43 repeated in Jerusalem 91:7, E250). Such reflect the conviction of the innate character of the individual human person as being indwelt by God.

33.5. ‘Jesus Was all Virtue, Acted From Impulse, Not From Rules’: William Blake – Quintessential Antinomian? Which brings us to the views of William Blake (1757–1827). These have prompted several commentators over the years to regard him as the quintessential antinomian.18 In his amusing, satirical, work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, we find a challenge to dualism, intriguing echoes of the views of Carpocrates according to Irenaeus (Adv. haer. 1.25.4: ‘they maintain that things are evil or good, simply in virtue of human opinion’, cf. ‘From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. 15 Cf. Coppe’s words quoted in Mayordomo et al., ‘Antinomianism’, EBR 2:246: ‘we as lief be dead drunk every day of the weeke, and lye with whores i’ the market place, account these as good actions as taking the poore abused, enslaved ploughmans money from him’. 16 Divine Teachings, quoted in A.L. Morton, The Everlasting Gospel: A Study in the Sources of William Blake (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1958), 58. 17 G.E. Bentley, Blake Records: Documents (1714–1841) Concerning the Life of William Blake (1757–1827) and his Family, Incorporating Blake Records (1969), Blake Records Supplement (1988), and Extensive Discoveries since 1988, 2nd edn. (New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2004), 696. 18 E.g. Morton, The Everlasting Gospel; E.P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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Evil is Hell’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 3, E34). In it Blake offers his most explicit and succinct statement about what he considers to be Jesus’ antinomianism: Jesus is the pioneer of radical religion who acted ‘from impulse not from rules’: The Devil answer’d: … did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbath’s God? murder those who were murder’d because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labour of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defence before Pilate? covet when he pray’d for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust off their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, acted from impulse, not from rules. (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 24, E43)

It is the critical moment in a debate which persuades the angel to come over to the side of the devils given that the Jesus whom the angel thought was on his side, as a supporter of the religion of commandments, was in fact an exponent of all that he had been opposing. It is easy to be put off by William Blake’s hyperbole here and as a result fail to see that he has put his finger on something very important in the Jesus tradition, even if one cannot go along with the details of his exegesis. William Blake’s view of Jesus as one who ‘acted from impulse not from rules’ exhibits the same kind of prioritisation of the subjective experience as compared with the subservience to authoritative texts or tradition. Though Blake does not use the word ‘impulse’ very frequently, he probably meant ‘divine impulse’. The priority of ‘intimate impulses’ from God is an issue wrestled with by Milton in Samson Agonistes: ‘That what I motion’d was of God; I knew From intimate impulse’.19 It was part of the language of the activity of the Spirit by the prominent seventeenth century puritan divine, John Owen who in fact brings together the words used by both Hutchinson and Blake in his phrase ‘an immediate revelation or divine impulse and impression’.20 Elsewhere in the Blake corpus, the incomplete verses of The Everlasting Gospel (ca 1820) show Blake contrasting ‘Inspiration’ with ‘Memory’, a regular feature of his writing (e.g. in the Preface found in some versions of Milton a Poem, E95). Jesus lived by the inspiration of the Spirit and exhibited the kind of religious enthusiasm which was despised by the wise of the world: 19 Samson Agonistes 222–223, cf. ‘didst plead / Divine impulsion prompting how [he] might’st / Find some occasion to infest [Israel’s] foes’, 421–423, cf. 300–320; R. Grey, The Complicity of Imagination: The American Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 217; D.V. Urban, ‘“Rousing Motions” and the Silence of God: Scripture and Immediate Revelation in Samson Agonistes and Clarel’, Leviathan 4 (2002): 91–111. 20 John Owen, Pneumatologia (1674), 184, cf. ‘If by some revelation or impulse of the Spirit’, Sermon 14, ‘The testimony of the church is not the only nor the chief reason of our believing the scripture to be the word of God’.

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Like dr. Priestly & [Sir Isaac del.] Bacon & Newton – Poor Spiritual Knowledge is not worth a button! … For thus the Gospel Sir Isaac confutes: ‘God can only be known by his Attributes; And as for the Indwelling of the Holy Ghost Or of Christ & his Father, it’s all a boast And Pride & Vanity of the imagination, That disdains to follow this World’s Fashion …’ (The Everlasting Gospel, E519)21 Elsewhere in The Everlasting Gospel the story of the Woman taken in Adultery (John 8:2–11) evokes an explicit antinomian challenge from Blake.22 The woman in the story is identified with Mary Magdalene and the setting of the biblical passage in the Temple (John 8:2) makes the climactic focus of the story even clearer – the presence of God is not in the Temple, the Holy Place, but in the act of forgiveness and reconciliation taking place in the environs of Jesus (cf. Matt. 18:20):

5

10

15

20

Was Jesus chaste or did he Give any Lessons of Chastity The morning blushd fiery red Mary was found in Adulterous bed Earth groan’d beneath & Heaven above Trembled at discovery of Love Jesus was sitting in Moses Chair (Matt. 23:2) They brought the trembling Woman There Moses commands she be stoned to Death What was the sound of Jesus breath He laid his hand on Moses Law The Ancient Heavens in Silent Awe (Deut. 29:20) Writ with Curses from Pole to Pole All away began to roll The Earth trembling & Naked lay (Ps. 18:7; 68:8) In secret bed of Mortal Clay On Sinai felt the hand Divine Putting back the bloody shrine (Exod. 20:24) And she heard the breath of God As she heard by Edens flood Go[o]d & Evil are no more Sinais trumpets cease to roar

21 C. Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 192. 22 Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 181–194.

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Cease finger of God to Write (Exod. 31:18; John 8:6) The Heavens are not clean in thy Sight 25 Thou art Good & thou Alone Nor may the sinner cast one stone To be Good only is to be A Devil or else a Pharisee. (The Everlasting Gospel, E521)23 This event Blake interprets as an ‘earth shattering’ event (lines 5 and 12, 15), in which Jesus’ actions not only challenge, but also revolutionise, the hegemony of the religion of law. What Blake sees in this passage means a shaking of the theological foundations of a culture and religion dominated by the law. In this poem, Blake has the Pharisees forcing Jesus to occupy Moses’ seat (Matt. 23:2 in line 7), thereby being asked to make a judgement on the case. The consequence is cataclysmic: lines 10–14, ‘What was the sound of Jesus’ breath? He laid his hand on Moses’ Law The Ancient Heavens, in Silent Awe, Writ with Curses from Pole to Pole, All away began to roll.’ In the words ‘Cease finger of God to Write’ (line 23), Jesus pronounces the end of the era of law (cf. Rom. 10:4), written on Sinai with the finger of God (Exod. 31:18) and condemns the law and its policing by the clerics of every generation. The apocalyptic character of the event (in the strict sense of the word), however, is not reserved solely for the Law, for Mary’s experience of release prompts a revelation to her of the nature of her shortcomings. Mary comes to see the way she has conformed to culture, habit and circumstances. The sin is not the fact that she committed adultery, for Mary’s sin was the pretence to chastity in conformity with a moral law, whose origins and originator Jesus exposed and condemned. Where Blake takes this is crucial for understanding his theology. It is emphatically not the case that he is against mutually enabling, respectful and merciful, even just, ways of behaving between people but that this is not in subservience to an external moral law. The charge often made against antinomians is that ‘they placed exclusive emphasis on the infusion of grace as an emotional experience, so that once they possessed that emotional conviction, no other principle of ethics could be consulted to question it, as they discarded the notions of reason and of ecclesiastic tradition’.24 This is probably an appropriate assessment of the position taken by Anne Hutchinson. On the other hand, Blake argued that there was a balance between reason and Spirit. Thus Blake writes of the inspiration of the ‘comforter or Desire that Reason may have Ideas to build on’ (The Marriage of

23

Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 182–190. Gertrude Huehns, quoted in J. Moskal, Blake, Ethics, and Forgiveness (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 14. 24

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Heaven and Hell 6, E35). In writing of the Bible he advocates an immediate appeal to the imagination but secondarily reason has its part to play: ‘Why is the Bible more Entertaining & Instructive than any other book. Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination which is Spiritual Sensation & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason’ (‘Letter to Trusler’ [1799], E703). Notwithstanding the rhetoric of the simple contrast between ‘Inspiration’ and ‘Memory’ we should not neglect the complexity of Blake’s work. It should not surprise us, given that for him ‘Contraries’ are the very stuff of existence (‘Without Contraries is no progression’, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 3, E34). As already mentioned, engagement with his intellectual ancestors’ work by way of critical response and as a stimulus to his own creativity, is central to Blake’s genius. That is how the dialectic of ‘Contraries’ works for him.25 The dialectic between constraint and freedom, Memory as well as Inspiration is crucial.

Fig. 2. William Blake: ‘The Ancient of Days’, Europe a Prophecy, Plate 1: Frontispiece (left) and Plate 2: Title Page (right), 1794

One of Blake’s most famous images is the picture known as ‘The Ancient of Days’ (Fig. 2). Blake painted various versions. This one is found at the beginning of Europe a Prophecy, a work which is, in effect, a complex political commentary, written in the wake of events in France particularly in 1793– 25

Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. See above, p. 549 with n. 4.

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1794. The two images show us Blake engaging in an issue, which he writes of elsewhere in terms of religion and art and which we will consider further in a few moments. On the left is the depiction of a God who orders and measures, an image which may have been inspired by Milton’s words from Paradise Lost vii.224–231. On the right is the title page with the prominent serpent twining itself around the words Europe a Prophecy and towering above the mountains reaching up towards heaven. The divinity’s hair is blown sideways. Blake probably intended the two images to face each other, so what stirs the hair of the ordering divinity comes from the direction of the juxtaposed image of the serpent. The wind of change blows from the right, from the east, the direction from which the divine glory comes to the restored Jerusalem in Ezekiel’s prophecy (Ezek. 43:2). The juxtaposition of the measuring, bounding and restricting Ancient of Days and the energetic serpent that brings liberation sets the scene for the prophecy to come.26 These two images point to a theme, which is central to Blake’s theology and understanding of humanity. While he has the reputation of being the prophet of energy and desire, the champion of the ‘poetic genius’ and the enemy of restraint, he is also the advocate of living with ‘Contraries’. ‘Without Contraries is no Progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence’ he wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (3, E34). Bounds, and resistance to them, are important for Blake in art and life, and resemble the measuring and ordering of chaos juxtaposed with the energy of the towering serpent which we see at the start of Europe a Prophecy. In two passages from Blake’s earliest illuminated books we read that ‘the bounded is loathed by its possessor’ (from There is No Natural Religion, E2, ca 1788), whereas later breaking ‘with the same dull round’ is necessary and comes from ‘the Poetic or Prophetic Character’ (There is No Natural Religion, b, Conclusion, E3). There is a constant need to ‘transcend the closed circle’.27 According to Blake what he saw in his visions had clear outlines and shape (cf. E531). In his Descriptive Catalogue, which was a commentary on what turned out to be a futile attempt to gain public recognition (E550), Blake discussed his artistic method but also extended his purview to everyday existence: The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art. … Leave out this l[i]ne and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist. (Descriptive Catalogue 64, E550)

26 27

162.

Dörrbecker, ed., Continental Prophecies, 169. J. Bowker, Why Religions Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015),

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Blake’s artistic work involved great precision as the ‘bounding line’ enabled the channelling of creative energy into images and words. The mix of inspiration and resistance enabled him to open up a creative, imaginative space for his own poetic genius, and a different way of looking at things anew drawing on the Bible as his ‘inspiration’ to bringing the grace and truth of Christ to his generation (to paraphrase the words of the ‘Declaration of Assent’ of the Church of England).

33.6. Antinomianism: Towards a Typology In his widely praised book David Como explored the origins of antinomianism in the seventeenth century on both sides of the English-speaking Atlantic.28 He showed the variegated character of early Puritanism and how that was the seedbed of the surge in antinomian sentiment in mid-century. As the title of the book implies, Como comes to the unsurprising conclusion (to the biblical scholar at least) that the more his sources trusted the power of the Spirit the more likely they were to allow the Spirit to convey them from accepted standards of orthodox belief and practice. The heart of his thesis is that antinomian ‘believers would obey the will of God not out of the external compulsion of the Law but freely and voluntarily by virtue of the internal guidance of the Spirit’.29 He characterises early-seventeenth-century antinomianism as a spectrum of beliefs and shows how the early modern debates were inspired by New Testament passages.30 He suggests that, while Paul inherited an unstructured anti-legal spirit from those who were Christians before him, his own sweeping comments on the Law were improvisations of his own making. Como finds pervasive anti-legal elements in the Pauline corpus and alleges that, despite his strenuous efforts to clarify the subject, Paul left an ambiguous textual legacy. On the one hand, at some points, Paul suggests that followers of Christ were utterly free from the Law. On the other hand, he made statements that, even if believers were free from the Law, they were not free from moral duty to God. There are passages in the Pauline corpus (e.g. Rom. 8, the Letter to the Galatians and 1 Cor. 1–4), which suggest that the period of the Law was over, and recourse to it, was to slip back into the obsolete religion of a bygone age (this is something like the sentiments we find in Gal. 4:5, 9 and the Letter to the Hebrews). Those who have turned to Christ are no longer subject to an external code, but, echoing Jer. 31:31 (alluded to in 2 Cor. 3:3 but only 28

D.R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre–Civil-War England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); cf. E.P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast. 29 Como, Blown by the Spirit, 260. 30 Como, Blown by the Spirit, 38–40.

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quoted explicitly in Heb. 8:8–12), God’s demands were written on the heart, and believers no longer had need for an external code. In the table which follows I have produced an expanded typology of antinomianism based on the discussion by David Como:31

33.7. Types of ‘Immediate Revelation’ and Antinomianism TYPE 1: Antinomianism is lawlessness, anarchism and immorality (the reputed behaviour of Elisha ben Abuyah, Coppe and the seventeenth century Ranters would be examples of this). TYPE 2: The law is regarded as the creation of lesser divine being (the view of Marcion and texts like the Testimony of Truth). TYPE 3: There is absolute confidence in the individual’s ultimate salvation so that no works can alter that destiny (the tradition from which Anne Hutchinson came). TYPE 4: eschatological/dispensational in which the law is a feature of earlier era/old age and is now obsolete with the coming of the New Age. TYPE 5: law written on the heart (cf. Jer. 31:33 and Ezek. 26:26–27, cf. Heb. 8:8–13; 2 Cor. 3:3 and just possibly Rom. 8:4). TYPE 6: stressing inspiration by the divine (akin to 1 Cor. 2:10–16). TYPE 7: the conviction of divine indwelling/possession which enables and completely justifies the action taken (so e.g. Coppe). Strictly speaking, only types 1 and 2 are antinomian. The rest to a greater or lesser extent place the written code in a subordinate position to ‘the voice of God’ or the ‘indwelling spirit’ or the ‘law written on the heart’.

33.8. Turning Again to the New Testament As I have indicated, at first sight ἀνοµία seems to be frowned upon in the New Testament.32 Yet there are strongly antipathetic passages especially in the Pauline corpus (e.g. Gal. 3–4; Rom. 7:1–7; 10:4). The Gospel of Matthew suggests strong support for Law observance. While it is difficult to consider a writer like Paul to be an antinomian, when his writings are taken as a whole, strong moral concerns are evident. There is evidence of tolerance, for example with regard to the food laws (1 Cor. 8, cf. Acts 15:20, 29 and 21:25). But, as I have suggested, to confine discussion of antinomianism solely on those passages which concern licentiousness is to miss a key ingredient 31

Cf. the earlier attempt in Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 201–207. E.g. Matt. 24:12; 2 Cor. 6:14; Rom. 6:19; Mayordomo et al., ‘Antinomianism’, EBR 2:234–235. 32

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evident in the early modern examples which we have considered: the inward conviction of divine light or inspiration by the divine spirit being given priority over a heteronomous code. This is an important dimension of early Christian experience. Paul’s favourite self-designation is as the agent, or apostle of Jesus Christ. As the peculiarly called agent of the Christ he subordinates all human tradition to that. But he is not only an agent, for he is the one who imitated Christ (1 Cor. 11:1). Rarely he uses language about Christ indwelling the believer (e.g. Gal. 2:20), and can occasionally include fellow Christians also (Rom. 8:3–9, 20, and Col. 1:27). Gal. 1 is also important. It is a chapter which is not mentioned in Ditmore’s otherwise comprehensive treatment of biblical references in Anne Hutchinson’s similar confession. Hutchinson’s words ‘after he was pleased to reveal himself to me’ echo Gal. 1:15, cf. Isa. 49:1.33 Elsewhere, Ditmore risks polarising what he terms ‘ecstatic mysticism’ and engagement with the Bible when he writes ‘In her closing citations Hutchinson’s personal voice becomes entirely swallowed up not in ecstatic or oracular utterance but in what might be called ecstatic but exact scriptural quotation’.34 One of the most striking passages of all, and the one which relates most closely to the theme of this lecture, is 1 Cor. 2, not surprisingly a favourite of later writers often labelled as ‘antinomian’. It is one of the most remarkable passages in the Pauline corpus. It is a chapter chock full of apocalyptic terminology. Thus, the language in v. 2 about ‘mystery’ echoes apocalyptic elements such as we find in Dan. 2:28 (and elsewhere in the New Testament, e.g. Mark 4:11; Rom. 16:25; Eph. 1:9; 3:3; Col. 1:26; 1 Tim. 3:16). In v. 7 we have the sharing of secrets, reminiscent of the kind of apocalyptic brokerage claimed by the Teacher of Righteousness in 1QpHab 7 (‘to whom God made known all the mysteries of the words of his servants the prophets’, cf. Matt. 11:25–27; 13:35; 1 Cor. 14:2; 15:51; Col. 1:26, cf. Rom. 8:30; 16:25; Eph. 1:4; 3:1–13; 1 Pet. 1:20; Rev. 13:8). Paul too is a broker of divine mysteries (cf. 1 Cor. 4:1). It is not clear whether the exploration of the ‘deep things of God’ (1 Cor. 2:10, cf. Dan. 2:22 ‘deep mysteries’ and Rev. 2:24 ‘depths of Satan’) is just the preserve of the apostolic elite who speaks wisdom among the perfect (2:6) or includes the Corinthians. They may well be excluded from this privilege in 2:6, but in 2:10 the first person plural may include the Corinthians, which is even more likely in 2:12. Receipt of the Spirit probably applies to them too, whatever reservations Paul may have about them and however much he may contrast his own ability to know the mind of Christ (2:16) as compared with his addressees. What follows about life in the Spirit in vv. 10–16 is an extraordinary testimony to the centrality of ‘immediate revelation’. Paul expected that those who resorted to ‘immediate revelation’ 33 34

Ditmore, ‘A Prophetess’. Ditmore, ‘A Prophetess’, 383.

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complemented this with a way of life appropriate for those who are the ‘temple of the Holy Spirit’ (cf. 1 Cor. 3:16; 6:19). This is not made clear in 1 Cor. 2, from the surrounding context it is clear that Paul required that the holiness of the Temple space be maintained (Lev. 18:8, 25, cf. Lev. 10:10; 20:26; 21:23). In 1 Corinthians Paul responds in a rather similar vein to what we find in the rabbinic tradition, in both the Mishnah and the later more extended discussions and warnings of mystical/apocalyptic involvement being reserved for the ‘wise’ only (e.g. m.Hag. 2:1). In the management of maʿaseh bereshit and maʿaseh merkabah in the Mishnah and Talmuds it is the maturity of age and the knowledge of the tradition which is crucial. Indeed, the later talmudic glosses on the Mishnah stories illustrate what happens when the immature, including children, dabbled in discerning the mystery of the meaning of ‫חשמל‬ in Ezek. 1, only to be consumed with fire: For behold there was once a child who expounded ‫חשמל‬, and a fire went forth and consumed him … The Rabbis taught: There was once a child who was reading in his teacher’s house, and he apprehended what ḥašmal was (‫ )מבין בחשמל‬whereupon a fire went forth from ‫ חשמל‬and consumed him. (b.Hag. 13a)

Paul, like the rabbinic tradition, warned that ‘immediate revelation’ was not something to be taken lightly and certainly not to be dabbled in by those who were not ethically equipped or still in captivity to the wisdom of this age. He characterised the recipients of his letters as babes in Christ rather than spiritual people (1 Cor. 3:1) whereas he, as one who has the mind of Christ, is best equipped to know the deep things of God (1 Cor. 2:10). To digress briefly: a glance at an example from the early reception history of 1 Cor. 2 reveals its importance. It was drawn to my attention by Margaret Mitchell. It refers to the extra-scriptural, extra-textual knowledge of divine things, transcending Scripture. Here Origen appeals to 1 Cor. 2 to make his point.35 Origen did not allow himself to be confined to what the words of the Bible said to understand the ways of God’s Spirit and points to a divine wisdom, which lies outside Scripture and argues for a devaluation of the written text as containing only the introduction to divine knowledge. Margaret Mitchell comments on this remarkable passage that ‘Origen offers none other than Paul himself – in both 1 and 2 Corinthians – to exemplify a spiritual hermeneutics which offer a promise of deeper insight’ to get at ‘that which is beyond what stands written’.36 It is the Gospel of John which prioritises ‘immediate revelation’. The Johannine Jesus is one who seems willing to flout the Law impelled by some

35 Origen, Commentary on John 13.5–6; M.M. Mitchell, Paul, the Corinthians and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 35–37. 36 Cf. 1 Cor. 4:6; M.M. Mitchell, Paul, the Corinthians, 37, 36.

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higher call. This appeal to a higher authority becomes the criterion for his action, not the Law of Moses. Yes, there is a justification of Sabbath contravention by Scripture in John 7:23 and by reference to God’s ongoing action, Sabbath included, in John 5:17. Thus, Jesus claims to offer revelation of God in his person and also revelation about God in his words from what he has seen and heard in heaven. Like Isaiah who ‘saw his glory and spoke of him’ (John 12:41, probably a reference to Isa. 6:1, 5, among other passages), what Jesus has seen and heard of, and from, the Father, is the basis of his authority.37 Indeed, in Isa. 6, Isaiah both saw and was sent, two themes which are central to the Gospel of John. So, Jesus is a visionary prophet who sees God and reports what he has seen and heard, and is sent by the Father, who also comes to regard himself as a heavenly being, the embodiment of the divine kābōd. Indeed, it is a situation rather similar to the way Enoch the righteous visionary who ascends to heaven shares the divine throne, according to the Hebrew Enoch (3 Enoch). As Catrin Williams reminded me in a recent paper she gave in Cambridge, Isaiah was remembered as faithful in his vision, who showed hidden things before they happened (Sir. 48:22, 25). The early chapters of Ascension of Isaiah suggest Isaiah’s reputation was as a visionary prophet who saw the Lord. Isaiah retreats from Jerusalem to the desert along with the faithful prophets who believed in the ascension to heaven and lived on wild herbs (Mart. Isa. 2:7–11). Isaiah was pursued by Belkira, who made the following accusation against him: Isaiah and the prophets who are with him prophesy against Jerusalem and against the cities of Judah that they will be laid waste … but they prophesy lies against Israel and Judah. And Isaiah himself has said, ‘I see more than Moses the prophet’. Moses said, ‘There is no man who can see the LORD and live.’ But Isaiah has said, ‘I have seen the Lord, and behold I am alive’. Know therefore, O king, that they are false prophets. And he brought many accusations against Isaiah and the prophets before Manasseh. (Mart. Isa. 3:6–10)

When the moment of his martyrdom comes, like Stephen in Acts 7:56, and his own experience in the Temple, Isaiah is said to be ‘in a vision of the Lord’ (Mart. Isa. 5:7). The Gospel narrative portrays Jesus as one who breaks the Sabbath law to heal, most especially in John 9, where the issue gets focused on the comparative claims of who is the true interpreter of the divine will (John 9:28–29), with Jesus as the one who asserts his mission from God to act and speak as he does. The editorial addition in John 5:18 indicates that the problem was not only Sabbath breaking but also that Jesus made himself equal with God (John 5:18, cf. 10:33). Although the blasphemy charge is not part of the Jewish hearing in the Gospel of John, transgression against the Law does come up in 37

Similarly Ashton: ‘these claims are, in the strong sense, apocalyptic’ (J. Ashton, The Gospel of John and Christian Origins [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014], 116).

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the hearing before Pilate (John 19:7). Jesus claimed to be the son of God and before that Jesus was accused of being a criminal (John 18:30). Jesus claims not to have spoken on his own authority, for ‘the father who sent me has himself given me a commandment about what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I speak, therefore I speak just as the father has told me’ (John 12:49–50, cf. 8:38: ‘I speak of what I have seen with my Father’, and 3:11). The Johannine Jesus is impelled by ‘divine impulse’, a higher authority than the Torah, which is the basis of his actions. Jesus claims to offer revelation of God (in his person) and also revelation about God in his words from what he has seen and heard in heaven.38 Like Jeremiah, Jesus found himself on the brink of death for speaking what he believed to be given to him by God, a message which contrasted starkly with what the prophets and priests of his day asserted (Jer. 28 and 29, cf. John 7). The Gospel of John is a text which has a lot to say about commandments, but its focus is just one, the new commandment, that you ‘love one another as I have loved you’ (John 13:34). So, whatever theological conclusion we draw from the presentation of Jesus in the Gospel of John in relation to the Sabbath, whether Jesus fulfils the Sabbath or transcends the Sabbath of this age by enabling people to enter the eschatological Sabbath of the New Age (cf. Heb. 4), the basic issue arises from his claim to a higher authority than the Law of Moses. The Gospel of John is as much a narrative about the conflict over different sources of authority as it is about christology, or, put another way, the christology is communicated in a narrative of the power struggle over ‘immediate revelation’ as the basis for Jesus’ claim to be God’s agent in contrast with those who saw themselves as disciples of Moses (cf. John 9:28). More widely, in connection with the theme of antinomianism, elsewhere in the New Testament and in early Christian literature, the early Christians told a story of Jesus as an offender against the Law, though the picture is a complicated one.39 Thus, though according to Mark, Jesus declared ‘all foods clean’ (Mark 7:19) and died as a transgressor against the Law, being found guilty of blasphemy (Mark 14:64), Mark doesn’t ever quite portray Jesus as transgressing the Law. Elsewhere in the Synoptic Gospels, that the end of the era of the Law and the advent of a new dispensation have begun is suggested by Luke 16:16/Matt. 11:13. This is part of an interesting complex, especially in its Lucan context. The sayings in Luke 16:16–18 come in different points in Matthew (Matt. 11:12–13, 5:32 and 5:17). The saying in Luke 16:17 quali38

John 12:49–50, further E. Käsemann, On Being a Disciple of the Crucified Nazarene: Unpublished Lectures and Sermons, ed. R. Landau in cooperation with W. Kraus, trans. R.A. Harrisville (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2010), 138–139. 39 J.G. Crossley, ‘Halakah and Mark 7.3: “with the hand in the shape of a fist”’, NTS 58 (2012): 57–68.

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fies what precedes it. A new era may be here but the Law is still in some sense in force. It is possible that development history of the Q source offers evidence of an attempt to tone down what appears to be a strong subordination of the place of the Law.40 There is possibly evidence of a similar subordination of the Law of Moses in the Gospel of Matthew. A case can be made for suggesting that the Gospel of Matthew suggests a change in the status of the Law of Moses (Matt 5:18), which comes with the completion of Jesus’ mission at the crucifixion, at which point it is Jesus’ words not those of the Law which will not pass away.41 In Acts, whatever the role of Stephen’s speech, preparing a way for the departure from Jerusalem, a transition to Paul, or whatever, it is not too difficult to sympathise with Luke’s report of Stephen’s opponents that he ‘never stops saying things against this holy place and the Law’.42 He points to Solomon as the one who built a house for God rather than establish a ‘habitation’ for the house of Jacob, which is part of the promise to David, who found favour with God and asked God to find a dwelling for the house of Jacob. Possibly in the description of Solomon’s act of building a house for the God of Jacob (Acts 7:47, cf. 2 Sam. 7:10–13; 1 Kgs. 8:19) there may be suggested that Solomon had misunderstood the promise of the dwelling for Jacob in the land. He challenges divine approbation of the Temple, finally suggesting that the Temple was little better than the idolatrous places of the nations, ‘a house made with hands’.43 The extent of the apparent apostasy appears not to have been lost on Stephen’s ‘hearers’ (7:54), though, given that the Temple is not prescribed in the Law of Moses, this does not deem to be an example of speaking against the Law. Elsewhere in Stephen’s speech, there is little by way of explicit criticism of the Law, though Stephen is presented as endorsing the view that angelic mediation was involved in the giving of the Law.44 I don’t want to make much of this, as it is not clear whether the doctrine is being used with a tinge 40 C.M. Tuckett, Q and the History of Early Christianity: Studies on Q (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 407. 41 Matt. 24:35; M. Kusio, ‘The Apocalypse on the Mount – the Relationship between Matthew 5:18 and 27:45, 51b’, The Biblical Annals 11.1 (2021): 79–97. 42 Acts 6:13; 7:46; C. Rowland, ‘The Temple in the New Testament’, in Temple and Worship in Biblical Israel, ed. J. Day (London: Continuum, 2005), 469–483. 43 Acts 7:48, cf. Lev. 26:1, 30; Isa. 2:18; C.K. Barrett, ‘Attitudes to the Temple in the Acts of the Apostles’, in Templum Amicitiae: Essays on the Second Temple presented to Ernst Bammel, ed. W. Horbury, JSNTSup 48 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), 345–367; idem, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, 2 vols., ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 1:373. 44 Acts 7:53, cf. Gal. 3:19 and Heb. 2:2; Jub. 1:27; 3:7; H.L. Strack and P. Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch, 4 vols. (München: Beck, 1922–1928), 3:554–556.

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of polemic in Stephen’s speech (as in Gal. 3:19). After all what Moses received are said to be λόγια ζῶντα (Acts 7:38). In the understated way, which is typical of the speech as a whole, Stephen states that the tent of testimony was the result of the instruction from the one who spoke with Moses. Despite the suggestion of the NRSV’s translation, (RSV is to be preferred) which indicates that the ordinance for the tent of testimony in the wilderness was the result of a direct divine command, (‘Our ancestors had the tent of testimony in the wilderness, as God directed when he spoke to Moses’, Acts 7:44) the Greek is ambiguous. The last time reference is made to converse with the divine world, is where the angel speaks with Moses on Mount Sinai (Acts 7:38). The themes of Stephen’s speech have their parallels in other early Christian texts. The obsolete character of the Temple is taken up in the Epistle of Barnabas (16:7). Sacrifices are abolished and replaced by the law of Christ (Barn. 2:6). Inspired by 1 En. 89:55, 66–67, Barnabas implies that God the eschatological temple is found in lives in which God dwells (Barn. 16:8), not a building of stone (cf. 1 Cor. 3:16; 6:19). The true covenant came with Christ, and the Mosaic Law is to be read allegorically.45

33.9. Hermeneutical Reflections In sum, antinomian traces were a part of the particular form of the interpretation of the Jewish traditions, which came to be known as Christianity. What we find in the New Testament displays a balance between novelty and continuity. As I have indicated, I agree with the view that antinomianism is a very blunt analytical instrument for understanding a very complex phenomenon in Christian intellectual history. What we have are different types of ethical responses, characterised by a common initial move, stimulus from the internal rather than the external and consequent subordination of the position and role of law. For some, including some of those written off as antinomians, if one is convinced of one’s relationship with God, or has a sense of the divine dwelling within, the impetus for appropriate behaviour is what Blake simply called ‘impulse not from rules’. Of course, that won’t bypass engagement with influence of, past texts and beliefs, including law.46 Blake is a good example of this. What we find in the early Christian sources is evidence of the internalisation of the law in accordance with, e.g. Jer. 31/Ezek. 36, anticipating the kind of debate which Como points to in the late sixteenth and early seven45

Barn. 8–9; J.N. Carleton Paget, The Epistle of Barnabas: Outlook and Background, WUNT 2.64 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1994); cf. Philo, On the Migration of Abraham 89–93; Ptolemy’s Letter to Flora, in Epiphanius, Panarion 33.3.1–7, 10. 46 C.H. Dodd, Gospel and Law: The Relation of Faith and Ethics in Early Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 77.

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teenth centuries. I am not sure that this is what Blake had in mind, but then I think that he had more sympathy with 1 Cor. 2:10–16 than Jer. 31:31–33 and Ezek. 36:26–27 (it was noted that it is Jer. 31:34 only which is quoted by Winstanley extensively in The Saints Paradice, CHL 1:313 and identified as the anointing mentioned in 1 John 2:27). We have seen various examples of attempts to negotiate a course between two extremes, one giving greater explicit weight to external authorities and the other to the divinely inspired self, as a source of wisdom as applied to a particular time and place. Blake differed from much Christian mainstream hermeneutics in his conviction that the Spirit is not some privileged property of Christians but that which all humans possess by virtue of their humanity. What one finds in his interpretation is a realistically positive view of humanity. The pouring out of the Spirit on all flesh is the normative experience of humanity; the problem is raising awareness about the perspective, which the Spirit gives, which Blake saw it as his vocation to fulfil. One might summarise the heart of his position in the light of 1 Corinthians as one form of the exploration of the discernment of the mind of Christ, which is not already known in advance by resort to any external authority, the law written on the heart included. Already in 1 Corinthians we find Paul asserting the need to follow his example since he had the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2:16; 11:1). There may well have been a development in Paul’s understanding of this from the simple being ‘taught by God’, 1 Thess. 4:9 and 1 Cor. 2:10–16 on the one hand, to the more considered and law-friendly Rom. 8, where pre-existing rules, albeit written on the heart, are acknowledged, not to mention the appeal to wider practice and custom (1 Cor. 14:33).

34. The Reception of the Book of Revelation: An Overview It is no exaggeration that the Book of Revelation both explains the nature of Christianity and epitomises its problems. In his essay on the origins of Christianity, Friedrich Engels suggested that the Book of Revelation was the most important text in the New Testament. Its importance lies in the extent of its influence down the centuries and the challenge it has posed for interpreters. In its subject matter and form, it encapsulates the intellectual dynamic and character of the movement that was to become Christianity. The fact that it has been viewed with suspicion by some of the most important theological figures in Christian history – Luther being an obvious example – and has been frequently pushed to the margins of religious and intellectual life epitomises the challenge it has posed and the opportunities it has offered. For centuries its place in the liturgy of the Church of England was marginal, with politically sensitive passages omitted from the lectionary and its more evocative passages chosen for reading. What it contains are two major themes that are key to understanding Christian origins. As its opening word implies, it is an apocalypse, a revelation or unveiling of divine secrets, not least about the consummation of all things, when the New Jerusalem is established on earth and God is all in all. That future hope is the heart of the content of the Apocalypse, what is unveiled, but it is not all. As well, and as important, is the emphasis on the outworking of the divine economy when the Lamb who was slain shares the throne of God and becomes the key to the meaning of history (Rev. 4–5). The mystery of political power is also revealed, and the political oppressions, which characterise the beast in the culture of Babylon, supported by the second beast, are unmasked (Rev. 13 and 17). Not surprisingly, an apocalyptically minded writer and artist like William Blake (1757–1827) could allude to Revelation in words that succinctly describe the oppressive politics of his own day: ‘The Beast and the Whore rule without controls.’1 This is one of countless examples of a writer finding in the words and images of the Apocalypse a way of construing the social reality that confronted him. Blake’s words were written 1

William Blake, ‘Annotations to Richard Watson’s Apology’ (E611). E plus page number(s) refers to Erdman’s edition of Blake’s works, see below, p. 783.

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at a time of crisis in British society. If an early date for Revelation is preferred, rather than the reign of Domitian (see Rev. 17:10), it is possible that it may have originated at a moment of crisis in the Roman Empire, on the death of Nero in AD 68.2 That said, the history of its reception suggests that it appealed to visionaries in situations that were socially less fraught. The mystical dimension of ‘apocalyptic’, as well as the concern with the last days, is just as important for understanding Christian origins. A work like the Apocalypse may well represent the form that prophetic experience and discourse took at the end of the Second Temple period (AD 70), but its genre includes not only eschatology but also visions and revelations of another world, which has as much in common with the mystical tradition in Judaism and Christianity3 as it does with the hope for the future. The link between Revelation and the prophetic books of the Bible is seen in the indebtedness to Daniel and Ezekiel, in particular. But the striking imagery of John’s vision sets it apart from much of the prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible where the visionary imagery is exceptional (e.g. Amos 7:7; 8:1; Jer. 1:11, 13). That changed in the post-Exilic prophecy of Zechariah (e.g. 1:8, 18; 2:1; 3:1; 4:2; 5:1), whose imagery, along with the visions of Ezekiel (Ezek. 1, cf. 8:2; 10; 37; 40–48) and Daniel’s visions (especially Dan. 7:1–14 and 8:3–12), provide the antecedents for the visual images of Revelation.

34.1. The Apocalypse in the Context of Christian Origins Revelation stands at the conjunction of a long tradition of apocalyptic interpretation, which stretches into Christian tradition and in a related, but rather different trajectory, into the mystical tradition of kabbalistic Judaism. One example of that position may be illustrated with regard to the merkabah, the vision of God based on Ezekiel, which forms such a central part of John’s own vision in Rev. 4–5, and which illustrates the visionary appropriation already mentioned. The discoveries in Cave 4 from the Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrate the importance of this, as may be seen in fragment 4Q405, dependent as it is on Ezekiel and Isaiah, and probably influenced by the same visionary tradition inspired by Ezekiel, of which John himself was a part. Given the widespread existence of the visionary and mystical in the Christian material of the first century or so, not to mention its profound importance for the growth of the movement, it would be an excessively 2

C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982), 403–413. 3 G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 3rd rev. edn. (New York: Schocken, 1954); B. McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, The Presence of God, Vol. 1 (London: SCM, 1991).

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suspicious person who would deny that authentic visions lie behind some or all of these brief literary records. It is possible that the visions that follow may have been prompted by imaginative exegesis in which the images were visualised by the seer. We cannot know precisely what led to John’s dramatic meeting with the heavenly Son of Man on the isle of Patmos, even if conjectures may be made about the significance of the time (the Lord’s Day) and the place (possibly, though not certainly, in exile as was the prophet Ezekiel). Mary Carruthers has shown how in antiquity and medieval readings of the Bible there was a creative process of imaginative engagement. Meditation, she argues, was an imaginative craft of thinking. Such meditative practice opened up the gateway to a network of biblical allusions and personal context to effect an engagement with Scripture that yielded new meaning by process of spontaneous interconnections, through meditative recall.4 Visionary images engage the imagination, create fear and bewilderment, and, especially in the Book of Revelation, challenge the readers to see the distinction between the beast and the Lamb, Babylon and Jerusalem. But how the readers are to negotiate the path of righteousness is not clearly delineated and is left to reflection on the imaginative experience, which prompted that rational reflection. This imaginative exegesis may also explain the more extraordinary phenomena, such as what comes in the dream or vision. A neat separation between exegesis and experience is not one that does justice to what was going on in antiquity, where the reading of the Bible may, as in the case of the interpretation of some prophetic passages like the opening chapter of Ezekiel, have involved an empathetic identification and replication of the experience of the prophet. For John of the Book of Revelation, and his visionary predecessors and contemporaries, the exegesis of a prophetic text like Ezekiel was probably not just the subject of learned debate but also a catalyst for visionary experience through imaginative engagement.5 This is what we find in the tradition of visionary interpretation of Ezekiel, loosely referred to as merkabah mysticism. So Revelation is part of a visionary tradition. Ezekiel and Daniel have influenced the form and content of the Book of Revelation. From the Christophany at its opening via the visions of heaven, the dirge over Babylon, the war against Gog and Magog, and, finally, the vision of New Jerusalem, 4 M.J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); eadem, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and eadem, The Medieval Craft of Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 5 Scholem, Major Trends; Rowland, The Open Heaven; D.J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988).

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Revelation bears the marks of the written forms and ancient prophecies influencing the more recent prophetic imagination of John of Patmos. Daniel’s beasts from the sea, for example, become in John’s vision a terrible epitome of all that is most oppressive and eerily akin to the way of perfection symbolised by the Lamb that was slain. This unique example in the early Christian literature of the apocalyptic genre is profoundly indebted to Jewish apocalyptic and mystical ideas. In Revelation, the first chapter of Ezekiel, the merkabah chapter, has contributed to the visionary vocabulary of John in two crucial parts of his vision (namely Rev. 1:13 and Rev. 4) and in the references to the throne, divine and demonic, which run like a leitmotif throughout the book. What we have in Revelation is a glimpse of a distinctive use of the prophecy, parallel to, but in significant respects an independent variant of, other apocalyptic texts. In addition to Ezekiel, Revelation stands near the start of a long tradition of interpretation of Dan. 7 in which both the apocalyptic beasts and the Human Figure are taken up in an emerging political apocalypticism. In the appropriation in Rev. 13, there is a concentration on the beasts from the sea with the Human Figure separate, appearing either in John’s call vision in 1:13ff. or in the judgement scene in 19:11ff. That separation is already evident in the synoptic tradition where the use of Dan. 7:13 is detached from the wider context of the sequence of beasts in Dan. 7. Although the passage picks up on the tradition of representing nations by beasts found in Dan. 7, only one beast is described as incorporating characteristics of the other beasts. As in Dan. 7, one beast arises from the sea, but two creatures are described in Rev. 13 (13:1, 11). The second emerges from the land reflecting the local, indigenous promoter of the imperial cult, while the first is the official representative from Rome. The beast is the incarnation of the powers of the Devil (13:2) and attracts universal admiration for its acts (13:3). The plausibility of the beast is seen in that it is like the Lamb and appears to deserve worship. Imperial power is rooted in its military might (13:4). The beast is given some of the characteristics of the Lamb (13:3, 14). In addition to Dan. 7, the political vision is informed by the oracles against Tyre and Babylon in Ezek. 27 and Jer. 51. There are several parallels also with 4 Ezra, particularly 4 Ezra 11 which, like Rev. 13, focuses on only one of Daniel’s beasts, which is an epitome of the awfulness and oppression of tyranny. Thus 4 Ezra, too, agrees in separating the political critique (the opening verses of Dan. 7 dealing with the beasts emerging from the sea) from the ‘messianic solution’ focused on Dan. 7:13. So Rev. 13 focuses on the critique of empire, whereas chs. 14 and 19 (though the latter is not formally dependent on Dan. 7:13–14) present us with a contrasting scene in which the dominion of the Lamb under God is outlined. In 4 Ezra 11–12, the eagle vision offers a critique of, and prediction concerning, the destruction of the last empire.

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34.2. The Apocalypse in History 34.2.1. The Place of the Book of Revelation in Christian Theology and Life In many strands of the New Testament, reference is made to the importance of visions and revelations.6 Take the accounts of Jesus’ baptism and the conversion of Paul, for example.7 In the former, we have, particularly in its Marcan form, the personal vision reminiscent of the apocalypses and the callvisions of the prophets, and, in the reference to the open heaven, a typical feature of visionary accounts. Similarly, the account of the transfiguration is shot through with typical features of angelic apocalypses. Elsewhere, at the start of Paul’s ministry as an apostle of Jesus Christ, there stands the Damascus experience. In Gal. 1:12 and 1:16, Paul seems to have felt impelled to describe his call in language derived from the prophetic commissions of Jer. 1:5 and Isa. 49:1. The centrality of the indebtedness to apocalypticism is evident. Paul’s letters testify to the conviction that the Scriptures, the fountainhead and embodiment of tradition and the basis for a community’s identity, are now read in the light of the new experience, that of the Spirit (Gal. 3:2–4). The Scriptures’ meaning can only be fully understood with that intuition that flows from acceptance of the Messiah. What is required is apocalyptic insight, which will enable the enlightened reader to pierce beyond the letter of the text to get at its inner meaning. Similarly at Qumran, the Teacher of Righteousness opened up the enigmatic prophetic oracles with his mystical insight: ‘to whom God made known all the mysteries of his servants the prophets’ (1QpHab 7:1). A mystery of ultimate importance had been revealed in Christ, and it is subsequently amplified by other divine mysteries. In short, the spirit of mystery and revelation is a recurring theme of New Testament theology. In a myriad of ways, apocalyptic traditions are taken up elsewhere in the New Testament. In Hebrews (and in the Letter to the Ephesians also) apocalyptic categories are utilised in the expression of convictions about Christ’s exaltation and its consequences. The cosmology of apocalyptic and the notion of revelation, which we find in the apocalypses and the mystical literature, was a convenient starting place for reflection on the understanding 6 W. Bousset, Die Offenbarung Johannis, KEK 16 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1906); R.H. Charles, Studies in the Book of Revelation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1910); G. Maier, Die Johannesoffenbarung und die Kirche, WUNT 25 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1981); A.W. Wainwright, Mysterious Apocalypse: Interpreting the Book of Revelation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993); J. Kovacs and C. Rowland, Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 7 Rowland, The Open Heaven, 358.

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of revelations that Christian writers believed had been inaugurated by the exaltation of Christ. The glory of the world above, which was to be manifested in the future, had now become a present possession for those who acknowledged that the Messiah had come and had already made available the heavenly gifts of the messianic age. The Gospel of John is frequently regarded as an example of the type of Christianity that firmly rejected apocalyptic, yet the main thrust of its message appears to have a remarkable affinity with apocalyptic. John Ashton rightly calls the Gospel ‘an apocalypse – in reverse’.8 The heavenly mysteries are not to be sought in heaven but in Jesus, ‘the one who has seen the Father’ (5:37) and makes the Father known. Admittedly, the mode of revelation stressed in the Gospel differs from that outlined in the apocalypses. Nonetheless, the goal of apocalyptic is the attainment of knowledge of the divine mysteries, and in particular the mysteries of God. Much of what the Fourth Gospel says relates to this theme. In the Gospel of John, the quest for the highest wisdom of all, the knowledge of God, comes not through the information disclosed in visions and revelations but through the Word become flesh, Jesus of Nazareth. Thus even if there is a rejection of any claim to revelation except through Christ, there is presupposed a claim to revelation with so many affinities with apocalypticism.9 34.2.2. Early Church Early patristic appropriation of the Apocalypse took several forms. In the struggle with Gnosticism, insistence of the materiality of the doctrine of the resurrection and this-worldly eschatology played their part in the writings of both Justin (Dial. 80) and Irenaeus (Adv. haer. 5.26.1–5.36.3).10 It is the future hope, along with the cataclysmic element in the vision, for which Revelation is best known. This does not feature to any large extent in ongoing representations of the book. Nevertheless, in the book itself the juxtaposed messianic kingdom, the millennium, and the New Jerusalem come down to earth from heaven present contrasting evocations of the future. The millennium, at once puzzling and embarrassing to many generations of Christians, was central to the hope of the first Christians and continued to be part of the pattern of hope for this world, as is evident from traditional material in the writings of Papias of Hierapolis (who lived in the early part of 8

J. Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 329. 9 C. Rowland and C.R.A. Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament, CRINT 12 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 10 B.E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); C.R. Helms, The Apocalypse in the Early Church: Christ, Eschaton and Millennium (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1991).

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the second century). Included in his now lost work is a saying, attributed to Jesus, in which the fruitfulness of the earth would be dramatically increased in the New Age (preserved in Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 5.33.3–4). The popularity of such apocalyptic ideas among movements like the Montanists led to a growing suspicion of the book. This point deserves to be stressed. Suspicions about the Apocalypse only emerged at the beginning of the third century CE. It is true that the nature of apocalypticism meant that it was always a thorn in the flesh of the wielders of power in the emerging church, not helped by the eschatological enthusiasm it engendered, but it was a central component of earliest Christian experience and self-definition from the very beginning. Questions about the apostolic origins of the book, echoed by Luther in his preface centuries later, were part of that growing suspicion of its theology. According to Eusebius, Gaius of Rome regarded the expectation of a reign of God on earth as evidence of authorship by the heretic Cerinthus rather than the apostle John (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.28.3).11 Although in several key respects he had been anticipated by Origen, Tyconius’s reading of the Book of Revelation (ca 400)12 had a profound influence on the mature Augustine and thence on later Christendom, stressing the contemporary rather than eschatological import of the visions.13 Tyconius read Revelation as having a contemporary application to the life of Christians living in the midst of ambiguity, and just as important as part of a community that contained both those on their way to salvation and those on their way to perdition. As such, Revelation was a key hortatory resource informing contemporary practice, rather than an eschatological map to the climax of all things. The mature Augustine continued in that tradition. Indeed, Revelation offered him an interpretative key, which helped him to expound the complex struggle between the heavenly and earthly cities in the present age in which Christians had to live. 34.2.3. Joachite Interpretation The main outlines of the Augustinian interpretation held sway for centuries.14 The later Middle Ages saw the emergence of the influential reading by Joachim of Fiore, which was to use Revelation as a hermeneutical key to 11

I. Backus, Reformation Readings of the Apocalypse: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 12 K.B. Steinhauser, The Apocalypse Commentary of Tyconius: A History of Its Reception and Influence, Europäische Hochschulschriften, Reihe 23: Theologie, 301 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1987). 13 P. Fredriksen, ‘Tyconius and Augustine on the Apocalypse’, in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, eds. R.K. Emmerson and B. McGinn (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 20–37. 14 Emmerson and McGinn, eds., The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages; J.J. Collins et al., eds., The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, 3 vols. (New York: Continuum, 1998).

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understand both Scripture and the whole of history. Joachim broke decisively from the Augustinian tradition in being willing to find significance in history. Joachim used a trinitarian reading of history in which a coming third age, that of the Spirit, would be characterised by an outburst of spiritual activity in the form of monastic renewal. That time was imminent. In Joachim’s interpretation of the Apocalypse, the sixth and seventh penultimate ages assume great importance as a time of anticipation and struggle. The period represents a space for conflict with the forces of Antichrist, which evokes an outburst of spiritual activity in the form of spiritual renewal. In this penultimate period, persecution and renewal, exile and prophetic witness, jostle one with another. The sense of anticipation prompted various patterns of moral renewal, and this should remind us that Joachite exegesis was not about learned prognostications but was intimately linked with the renewal of the church and the witness to the coming kingdom. Joachim’s figura of the dragon with seven heads indicates that, alongside his historically sequential explanation, he also recognised that this threat was both eschatological and historical: What will be the case at the end time is a constant part of human history.15 As such it needs to be part of that ongoing engagement with the Apocalypse of every generation, an engagement that enables people to see its part in that struggle between good and evil at the heart of human history. Joachim of Fiore’s figurae sought to encapsulate imagery from the Apocalypse in diagrammatic form. The inspiration for the figura of the dragon with seven heads was provided by Rev. 12:3. The seven heads are identified as different persecutors of the Christian church through history (Herod, Nero, Constantius, Mohammed, Mesemoth, Saladin, and one yet to come). The final Antichrist, indicated by the tail of the dragon, is Gog. Between the long necks of the dragon’s heads appear captions detailing the seven persecutions of the church; Saladin, the contemporary tyrant, is represented as a larger head. Joachim interprets history, relating the pressing crisis of his own time as a sign of the eschatological times. It is this decisive move that initiates that extraordinary outburst of self-aware eschatological enthusiasm, in which persons and events became the signs of hope, or agents of Antichrist. The illumination of history by mystical insight and revelation, and the presenting of the critical significance of the present, are characteristic, particularly of the Book of Revelation.

15 The best representation of the dragon is to be found in Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 255A, fol. 7r; cf. http://image.ox.ac.uk/show?collection=corpus&manuscript =ms255a; L. Tondelli, M. Reeves and B. Hirsch-Reich, Il libro delle figure dell’abate Gioachino da Fiore, 2 vols. (Torino: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1953), 2:tav. xiv.

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34.2.4. The Reformation Even if Revelation did not dominate the interpretative horizons of the principal magisterial reformers, the sense of the propitious moment, of the time being ‘apocalyptic’, pervaded the sixteenth century and the climactic events that it witnessed.16 Luther initially outlined his reasons for relegating the book to a subordinate place within the canon of the New Testament, in words that echo much earlier (and later) assessments in the Christian tradition. He believed that it was neither ‘apostolic [n]or prophetic’ because ‘Christ is not taught or known in it’ and ‘to teach Christ is the thing which an apostle above all else is bound to do’ (‘Preface to the New Testament’, September 1522). He modified his view of Revelation in the later editions of his New Testament, from 1530 onward. In this second, more constructive preface, Luther suggests that one ‘ought to read this book and learn to look upon Christendom with other eyes than those of reason’. From his summary of its meaning, he regards its images as indicative of the heretical threats to the church down through the centuries; and in Rev. 13 and 17, the comprehension of unmasking of papal power in the beast and Babylon, seated on the beast, is an important resource in his intellectual battle with the Roman Catholic Church. Luther offered a careful and insightful typology of biblical visions, which explains why Revelation is such a problematic text for an interpreter, given the almost complete absence of interpretative guidelines in the text itself. Revelation is prophecy without words or interpretations, exclusively in ‘images and figures’. It resembles ‘the dreams, visions and images that many holy people have had from the Holy Spirit’. As long as this kind of prophecy remains without explanation and of uncertain interpretation, its value is limited. Luther considers that a way of unlocking its images is ‘to take from history the events and disasters that have come upon Christendom till now, and hold them up alongside of these images’, and, if the two coincide, that forms a foundation for a more secure interpretation. The place of Revelation in radical religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries needs little explanation. Perhaps more surprising is the rich tradition of interpretation in which the careful exposition of the book was carried out in a more measured and less heated atmosphere. For example, Joseph Mede (1586–1638) viewed the book as a series of ‘synchronisms’ or recapitulations. Isaac Newton’s commentary on Revelation, written a century and a half later, was explicitly indebted to Mede’s work. It manifests a concern to 16 K.R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain 1530–1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); J. Pelikan, ‘Some Uses of Apocalypse in the Magisterial Reformers’, in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance thought and literature: Patterns, antecedents and repercussions, eds. C.A. Patrides and J. Wittreich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 74–92; C. Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution (London: Penguin, 1993); Backus, Reformation Readings.

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discern evidence of divine providence in history.17 From another academic setting, we find Revelation inspiring the utopian politics of Mede’s contemporary, Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1654), the German exegete whose Christianopolis (1619) evinces a speculative architecture that is indebted to Rev. 21–22 and that was part of a series of actualised utopian projects in the early modern period.18 In the midst of the conflicts of the Reformation period, the emergence of a rise of historical awareness led to a perspective on the book that focused more on past meaning rather than present application, an interpretative approach that was used by Roman Catholic critics as they struggled to reject the links between the Babylon of Rev. 17 and the Roman Church. Similarly, an early modern interpreter like Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) argued that the book’s meaning was almost entirely related to the circumstances of John’s own day (the ‘preterist’ method of interpretation of Revelation). Attention is paid entirely to the book in its ancient context. A witness to the interpretation of Revelation in the early Calvinist tradition is provided by the Geneva Bible, which offers a typical example of the historicising interpretation of the day.19 It enables us to see how Revelation was used as part of the ecclesiastical struggle of the time. Its Reformed Protestant leanings are everywhere apparent. As may be expected, there is an identification between Rome and Antichrist (the papacy is the inheritor of the power of the Roman Empire, in the interpretation of the two beasts of Rev. 13). There are some distinctive interpretations. The locusts of Rev. 9:3, for example, are ‘worldlie suttil Prelates, with Monkes, freres, cardinals, Patriarkes, Archbishops, Doctors, Bachelors and masters which forsake Christ to maintain false doctrine’. The interpretation of Revelation’s imagery includes recognition of the historical background of the original. The Geneva Bible is testimony to a use of Revelation as a crucial tool for ‘the true kings and priests in Christ’ whereby may be disclosed ‘the wicked deceit’ in their midst (on 16:12) and acting in a way appropriate to their election and continued perseverance. Given that this historicising and hortatory reading of Revelation rejects both Anabaptist and chiliastic enthusiasm, it is strange that it should have a lessfavoured position in the lectionary of the Book of Common Prayer than the Apocrypha (read in October and November).20

17

C. Burdon, The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unravelling, 1700–1834 (London: Macmillan, 1997). 18 C. Bernet, ‘Gebaute Apokalypse’: Die Utopie des Himmlischen Jerusalem in der Frühen Neuzeit (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2007). 19 Firth, Apocalyptic Tradition, 122; Hill, English Bible, 56; R. Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse (Appleford and Oxford: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1978), 45. 20 F.E. Brightman, The English Rite, 2 vols. (London: Rivingtons, 1915), 1:51.

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The evidence of an extensive use of Revelation is apparent, however, in the writings of Melchior Hoffman (d. ca 1534), who was a significant influence on radical Anabaptism at Münster.21 He saw Revelation as the key to the understanding of history, the meaning of the secrets of which had been revealed to himself. The Melchiorite interpretation of Revelation, relatively unusually in the practice of a millenarian politics (and like the revolutionary actions of Thomas Müntzer a decade earlier), did not remain at the level of utopian idealism but resulted in violent attempts to establish an eschatological theocracy. Despite the sense of an expectation of imminent fulfilment, what one finds in the post-Münster Anabaptism is the sense of being in the penultimate period rather than in the eschatological commonwealth on earth. 34.2.5. During the English Civil War Four different interpreters from the period of the English Civil War illustrate the contrasting interpretations of the Apocalypse. Two are women Fifth Monarchists, the third a woman accused of insubordination by her husband, and the fourth a political activist. Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the statue and the four world empires to which it referred was, along with the related vision of the beasts from the sea in Dan. 7, of fundamental importance for early modern eschatology: the belief in the advent of the establishment of the ‘Fifth Monarchy’, when the series of world empires predicted in Dan. 2 and 7 had come to its end and that the reign of King Jesus was about to be established.22 Among the Fifth Monarchist exegetes was Mary Cary.23 In 1649 Mary Cary argued that, as Christ had ascended to heaven, the saints would be his instruments in the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth (Rev. 17:14, 16; 18:6; 19:11). Cary interpreted the rider on a white horse of Rev. 19:11 as one who leads the armies of the saints, who will be divine instruments to purge the world from evil until the reign of God is finally set up on earth, when there will be no need of swords and spears. Cary’s approach to passages in both Daniel and the Apocalypse is to interpret the details of the text in such a way as to apply them to contem-

21 N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Secker & Warburg, 1957); K. Deppermann, Melchior Hoffman, trans. M. Wren (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987). 22 B.S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 172–194; C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972); Hill, English Bible. 23 Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men; E. Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–88 (London: Virago, 1988); P. Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); H. Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).

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porary events. She maintained that her understanding of Scripture was not the product of visionary insight but the fruit of a twelve-year study.24 Very different in temper and style was the witness of Anna Trapnel, also a Fifth Monarchist.25 Anna had a visionary trance in 1654 in the centre of London, during which she prophesied about the political failures of Cromwell’s regime. Details of her prophecy were written down at the time and are recorded in The Cry of a Stone.26 In her prophecy there is a clear sense that an opportunity is in danger of being missed when the Spirit of God could effect a change in human polity. Instead the prophet saw all the marks of the old order (private property, a stratified social order and a familiar, albeit nonepiscopal, church structure) still present. To those who looked to the reign of King Jesus, such reactionary behaviour was tantamount to apostasy. What we find here is that the present state is still the last empire of Daniel’s prophecy rather than the dawn of the reign of King Jesus. Hers was a prophetic positioning in a time of the penultimate, therefore, in the time of Antichrist and a Babylon-like church, when the saints’ role was primarily to bear prophetic witness against an alien rule. The echoes of the Book of Revelation are particularly evident in the following little cameo. Although the indirect influence of the Apocalypse is evident in The Cry of a Stone, in A Voice for the King of Saints, Trapnel praises her ‘sisters’ who had supported her in her struggles with the political authorities of the time by identifying them with the ‘elders’ surrounding the throne in Rev. 4: John thou wilt not offended be That handmaids here should sing That they should meddle to declare The matters of the King. John will not be displeased that They should sit about the throne, And go unto original And nothing else will own … And the handmaids were promised, Much of that spirit choice, And it is, and it shall go forth In a rare singing voice (A Voice for the King of Saints 37, 54)27

24

Mack, Visionary Women. Hobby, Virtue of Necessity; Mack, Visionary Women. 26 Anna Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone, ed. and introd. H. Hinds (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000). 27 Hobby, Virtue of Necessity, 33. 25

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If Trapnel represents the initial phase of disillusionment with the pace of political change, the experience of defeat and reaction after the restoration of the monarchy in 1661 intensified and affected later writers, not least in the ways in which they used the Apocalypse. Concern moved to the personal and the spiritual life rather than the impact of an apocalypse on wider society. In different ways, Milton and Bunyan represent this trend of internalising the apocalyptic struggle. Anne Wentworth, a Baptist, had been ejected from her home by her husband for what he considered to be her insubordination. She describes her oppression and hope for vindication in language derived from the Apocalypse and calls her own divinely inspired apology ‘a Revelation of Jesus Christ’. Wentworth used the contrast between Jerusalem and Babylon to interpret her domestic situation (Rev. 17–18 and 21–22). Babylon’s culture is exemplified in a situation in which a woman rejects harsh treatment and finds herself utterly destitute and an outcast. She looked forward to a great day of judgement when her husband would be judged and oppress her no more.28 For all these women in seventeenth-century England, the Apocalypse was a text that both empowered them and provided the imagery for their critique. As a prophetic text, it not only confirmed their right to speak (given the opportunity afforded by 1 Cor. 11:5) but also offered a language to interpret the world, whether an oppressive state, a malfunctioning domestic environment or, as is evident in the writings of late seventeenth-century mystics like Jane Lead, the snares that beset the seeker of the things of the spirit.29 One of the most powerful examples of a social critique, inspired by the Apocalypse and related parts of the Bible, emerges in the writings of Gerrard Winstanley.30 Between 1649 and 1651, Winstanley wrote tracts while he was actively involved in creating the ‘Digger’ colony on St. George’s Hill in Surrey. Winstanley had a strong consciousness of his own prophetic vocation (The New Law of Righteousnes; The True Levellers Standard Advanced).31 He believed that the prophetic spirit was again active in the momentous days in which he lived (‘The True Levellers Standard Advanced’).32 Winstanley had a vision, not just to improve the lot of the hungry and landless through the cultivation of the commons but also to create a moneyless and propertyless 28

Hobby, Virtue of Necessity, 50. Mack, Visionary Women. 30 Hill, World Turned Upside Down; A. Bradstock and C. Rowland, eds., Radical Christian Writings: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); A. Bradstock, Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England: A Concise History from the English Civil War to the End of the Commonwealth (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011); C. Rowland, ‘Gerrard Winstanley, Radical Interpreter of the Bible’, in Theology and Human Flourishing, eds. M. Higton et al. (Eugene: Cascade, 2011), 93–107. 31 G.H. Sabine, ed., The Works of Gerrard Winstanley (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1941), 190, 261. 32 Sabine, ed., Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 260. 29

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society of the kind he believed had existed before the Fall. Winstanley held the earth to have been originally a ‘common treasury’ for all to share. The Fall he interpreted as the practice of buying and selling land, which allowed some to become rich and others to starve. From the consequences of this Fall, humanity stood in need of redemption by a process of education concerning the extent of the departure from the divine will and the way in which one should return to it. Following in the spirit that was manifest in the annals of early Anabaptism, Winstanley used the imagery of Daniel and the Apocalypse to interpret the oppressive behaviour of the wielders of political and economic power of his day. In particular, Winstanley regarded the prevalence of private property as typifying the rule of the beast of the Apocalypse and the Book of Daniel. Like John, his interpretation of Daniel’s vision of the beasts arising out of the sea becomes a vehicle of a powerful political critique of the contemporary polity. As in Rev. 13, the Danielic vision is interpreted synchronically rather than diachronically. It is not a succession of empires, therefore, but a fourfold imperial oppression. According to Winstanley, the first of the four beasts in Daniel was royal power, which by force makes a way for the economically powerful to rule over others, ‘making the conquered a slave; giving the Earth to some, denying the Earth to others’; the second beast he saw as the power of laws, which maintain power and privilege in the hands of the few by the threat of imprisonment and punishment; the third beast is what Winstanley called ‘the thieving art of buying and selling the earth with the fruits one to another’; the fourth beast is the power of the clergy, which is used to give a religious or (in something like Marx’s sense) an ideological gloss to the privileges of the few. According to Winstanley, the Creation will never be at peace until these four beasts are overthrown and only then will there be the coming of Christ’s kingdom (Fire in the Bush, March 1650). Unlike Mary Cary, Winstanley did not suggest that the overthrow of the beast should come about through force of arms. Indeed, he offered a view of political change that was dependent on transformation in attitudes: what he described as the ‘rising of Christ in sons and daughters’. Winstanley’s aim, therefore, was not to conquer by force of arms but to enlighten. There are passages deploring victory ‘gotten by the sword’.33 Winstanley’s approach to apocalyptic images is distinctive. This is not because the hermeneutic is different from many others working in the tradition that stems from Tyconius,34 but because the actions through which the communities laid claim to their 33

Bradstock, Radical Religion, 130; J. Sproxton, Violence and Religion: Attitudes towards Militancy in the French Civil Wars and the English Revolution (London: Routledge, 1995). 34 Tyconius, The Book of Rules, trans. W.S. Babcock, SBLTT 39 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989); Fredriksen, ‘Tyconius and Augustine’.

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birthright from God are regarded as the framework and inspiration through which understanding of Scripture and the divine will takes place.

34.3. The Apocalypse and Art Unsurprisingly, the Apocalypse, as the most suggestively visual text in the Bible, has appealed to many artists.35 Artistic interpretation includes the iconography of ecclesiastical architecture, illuminations and woodcuts that accompany the text, and painted panels and drawings of individual themes. In early Christian art, motifs such as Christ enthroned, along with the New Jerusalem of Rev. 21–22, are featured in the triumphal arches and apses of churches, especially in fifth- to ninth-century Roman churches such as S. Paolo fuori le mura, SS. Cosma e Damiano and S. Prassede, and in San Vitale in Ravenna.36 Illustrated Apocalypse manuscripts from the ninth to fourteenth centuries indicate connected cycles of illustrations.37 One of the earliest such surviving manuscripts, the Trier Apocalypse, produced near Tours, France, around the year 800, has a cycle of 74 full-page illustrations (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Ms. 31).38 Although many Apocalypse manuscripts were commissioned by monasteries, the genre also appealed to royal patrons, who followed early Christian emperors in seeing their own rule as a reflection of the world-rule of Christ.39 One example is the splendid Bamberg Apocalypse (Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Ms. Bibl. 140), which was probably commissioned by the German emperor Otto III around the year 1000.40 A special place in the manuscript tradition is occupied by Spanish manuscripts of the 35 M.R. James, The Apocalypse in Art (London: British Academy/Oxford University Press, 1931); F. van der Meer, Apocalypse: Visions from the Book of Revelation in Western Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978); Emmerson and McGinn, eds., The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages; R.M. Wright, Art and Antichrist in Medieval Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). 36 G. Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst, Part 5: Die Apokalypse des Johannes, [Vol. 1:] Textteil (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1990), 116–118; for the Trier Apocalypse, see 142–144; van der Meer, Visions from the Book of Revelation, 32, 54, 57–58, 62. 37 Schiller, Apokalypse: Textteil, 117; D. Kinney, ‘The Apocalypse in Early Christian Monumental Decoration’, in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, eds. R.K. Emmerson and B. McGinn, 201; see also in the same volume J. Williams, ‘The Purpose and Imagery in the Apocalypse Commentary of Beatus of Liébana’ (217–233)‚ P.K. Klein, ‘Introduction: The Apocalypse in Medieval Art’ (159–199) and S. Lewis, ‘Exegesis and Illustration in Thirteenth-Century English Apocalypses’ (259–275). 38 Schiller, Apokalypse: Textteil, 142–144; van der Meer, Visions from the Book of Revelation, 92–100. 39 Schiller, Apokalypse: Textteil, 147. 40 Schiller, Apokalypse: Textteil, 147–149; H. Mayr-Harting, Ottonian Book Illumination: An Historical Study (London: Harvey-Miller, 1991).

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tenth through the thirteenth centuries that illustrate the commentary on the Apocalypse composed in 776 by the monk Beatus of Liébana.41 The interpretation emphasises ecclesiology and Christology. Another tradition of manuscript illustration, the Anglo-French, began around the year 1250 in England and continued through the fifteenth century, spreading to other countries, especially France.42 An outstanding early example is the Trinity Apocalypse (Trinity College, Cambridge) dated to 1250–1260,43 which is known for its rich colours, use of gold leaf and lively, graceful drawing. Here we see the founders of new monastic orders, Saints Francis and Dominic (f. 28).44 The Apocalypse is framed on either end by numerous scenes derived from apocryphal accounts of the life of the apostle John, which has the effect of locating the exile of John, when he receives his visions, within the context of the rest of his life. The seer also appears in the margins of the framed scenes from the Apocalypse, a device that underlines their visionary character and links the book’s spiritual vision to the experience of exile.45 A different kind of artistic representation is found in the Liber Figurarum of Joachim of Fiore, which contains sixteen diagrams apparently drawn under Joachim’s direction and collected after his death in 1202.46 These detailed drawings, which incorporate explanatory words of Joachim, do not illustrate specific scenes of the Apocalypse but instead express in symbolic pictures the essence of the Calabrian abbot’s views on history and eschatology. The influence of the Apocalypse on ecclesiological architecture, evident as early as the fifth century, continues in the cathedrals, churches and monasteries of the Romanesque and Gothic periods, where images from the book appear in portals, carved capitals, vault bosses, stained glass windows, wall paintings, altarpieces and other decorations.47 An outstanding example is the large east window in York Minster, England (1405–1408).48 Manuscript 41 J. Williams, ed., The Illustrated Beatus: A Corpus of the Illustrations of the Commentary on the Apocalypse (London: Harvey Miller, 1994–); idem, ‘Purpose and Imagery’; Schiller, Apokalypse: Textteil, 119–135; van der Meer, Visions from the Book of Revelation, 109–127. 42 Schiller, Apokalypse: Textteil, 242–243; Klein, ‘The Apocalypse in Medieval Art’, 188–192. 43 Schiller, Apokalypse: Textteil, 261–262; van der Meer, Visions from the Book of Revelation, 152–170. 44 van der Meer, Visions from the Book of Revelation, 152. 45 S. Lewis, Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the ThirteenthCentury Illuminated Apocalypse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 31–33. 46 Tondelli et al., Il libro delle figure; cf. Plates in M. Reeves and B. Hirsch-Reich, The Figurae of Joachim of Fiore (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972); B. McGinn, Apocalyptic Spirituality (London: SPCK, 1979), 103–111; Schiller, Apokalypse: Textteil, 168–171. 47 Emmerson and McGinn, eds., The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, 234–258. 48 T. French, York Minster: The Great East Window (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

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illuminations gave way to woodcuts illustrating the text. Best known are the fifteen woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer (1497–1498),49 which began a new era in the book’s illustration. Both medieval manuscript illuminations and later woodcuts give contextual readings in which visions from the Apocalypse are used as an interpretative lens for viewing contemporary history. A wellknown example is the depiction of the whore of Babylon as papal Rome in Lucas Cranach’s woodcuts for Luther’s Septembertestament of 1522.50 These reflect the widespread iconic propaganda of the German Reformation in which images inspired by the Apocalypse are pervasive.51 The prominent place of Apocalypse illustrations in Luther’s Bible of 1534 indicates the continuing role of artistic imagination in the exegesis of a controversial text. Over the centuries, the Apocalypse has also inspired countless painted panels. These include altarpieces such as that painted by Jan van Eyck for a chapel of Saint John in the Cathedral of St. Bavo in Ghent.52 Its central panel, known as the ‘Mystical Lamb’, exemplifies an interpretation that goes back to Tyconius and Augustine, which emphasises relevance for the church in the present time. Here the division between heaven and earth is transcended in the Eucharistic feast, as the Lamb in the midst of the throne (Rev. 5) is found on an altar on earth. Another fifteenth-century altarpiece, a triptych made by Hans Memling for St. John’s Hospital in Bruges (1475–1487), features numerous scenes from the life of John as well as the seer experiencing the vision on Patmos. Scenes that appear frequently in painted panels include John’s vision in Rev. 1 (e.g. Hieronymus Bosch, Staatliche Museen Berlin, ca 1500). On the eve of the Reformation, the preaching of Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498) electrified Florence. This led to his trial and execution in 1498. His preaching was based on a visionary conviction, expounded in his Compendium of Revelations. Begun in 1495, it was an apology for his prophetic career. His attacks included criticism of Rome and the papacy. Like Joachim, he used the sequence of sevens from the Book of Revelation and located himself at the end of the fourth age immediately preceding the fifth age and the coming of Antichrist. The time in which Botticelli found himself, 1500 years after the birth of Christ, was one that, he believed, stood on the brink of the New Age.

49 F. Carey, ed., The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come (London: British Museum Press, 1999); R.H. Smith, Apocalypse: A Commentary of Revelation in Words and Pictures (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2000); van der Meer, Visions from the Book of Revelation, 283–314. 50 van der Meer, Visions from the Book of Revelation, 308. 51 R.W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 148–149. 52 Schiller, Apokalypse: Textteil, 307–311; van der Meer, Visions from the Book of Revelation, 236–257.

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In 1500, Sandro Botticelli painted ‘The Mystic Nativity’ (National Gallery, London), which is an allegorical reading of the Nativity. A closer look at the picture will reveal a caption in Greek capitals that explicitly links the picture with Rev. 11–12 and also with the political upheavals in Italy and especially Florence, which came about as the result of the apocalyptic preaching of Savonarola: I, Alexandros, was painting this picture at the end of the year 1500 in the tr[oubles] of Italy in the half time after the time according to the eleventh chapter of St. John in the second woe of the Apocalypse in the loosing of the devil for three and a half years. Then he will be chained, and we shall see him [trodden down], as in this picture.

The inscription implies that within a period perhaps of two years a reign of peace was to occur. In the inscription, Botticelli links the ascent of the beast from the bottomless pit in Rev. 11:7 with the loosing of the Devil after the millennium (20:3, 7). Botticelli writes of the second woe of 11:14, after which, in Rev. 11, the loud voices in heaven proclaim that the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of the Lord and of the Messiah. Here Botticelli reads Rev. 11–12 as a prophecy of the eschatological realities of his day, in which the period of Antichrist prefigures the return of the Messiah and the overcoming of the powers of darkness. It is the coming of this kingdom that is signified in the vision of the woman in Rev. 12 who gives birth to the Messiah. The bruising of the serpent’s head of Gen. 3:15 may be depicted in the form of the little beaten devils that crawl away into their holes, reflecting Rev. 6:15. The picture relates Christ’s first coming with his imminent, eschatological coming. In the picture, we, the viewers, are led up the path to the central scene of the picture framed by the dawn sky. The embrace of angels and humans sees Florentines rejoicing with the heavenly world at the millennial glory that is to be revealed. The demons scurry to find their hiding holes in the ground (Rev. 6:16). Past and present are brought together as Florence becomes the epicentre of the apocalyptic deliverance that is about to come upon the world. Diego Velázquez’s work (‘St. John the Evangelist on the Island of Patmos’, National Gallery London, 1618) illustrates two different aspects of the visionary moment: the great authority of the writing of the heavenly revelations from Jesus Christ and the focus on John as the medium of the visionary experience. John’s vision is given full pictorial presentation by Velázquez in a companion picture, the depiction of the Immaculate Conception, which he painted for the Convent of the Carmelites in Seville at about the time he painted ‘John on Patmos’.53

53

J. Drury, Painting the Word: Christian Pictures and their Meanings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 174–175.

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It is a young, virile John who meets us in this portrait, in which the characteristic depictions of the eschatological events are replaced by allusions to the ecstatic nature of John’s experience. Velázquez depicts John ‘in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day’. The ecstatic prophet fills the whole picture. As Harry Maier notes, this indicates a focus on John’s psyche as the context for the vision.54 The picture seems to reflect the command to write in the ecstatic state and indeed may suggest a form of automatic writing, as the words that are written on the empty page turn out to be words that are indeed the divine words as the near final words of the Apocalypse indicate (‘I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if any one adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book’, Rev. 22:18). The books may be part of the revelation that John saw, other books, perhaps biblical books, now made obsolete by the revelation of Jesus Christ that the prophet had seen (Rev. 1:1–2, cf. 22:18), or the other book attributed to John, the Gospel. There is only a glimpse of the vision of Rev. 12 in the top corner of the image. This image represents a shift from the wider landscape of Patmos, found in late medieval and early modern depictions, to focus on John’s interior, visionary life. It represents the ‘re-imagining of the visionary moment’.55

34.4. Differing Patterns of Interpretation The shifting fortunes of the Apocalypse can be traced in the history of interpretation. That ambivalence – manifest in the work of the earliest commentators, where an ecclesiological, political and eschatological hermeneutic are woven together without comment – has characterised the two poles of interpretation. Despite their theological and political differences, Augustine, Winstanley and Melchior Hoffman all seem to be agreed that key images relate to contemporary realities. Those who interpret the book wholly eschatologically effectively diminish its contemporary significance, as do those who see the book as applying totally to the past. But the differences between those who utilise this ‘actualising’ approach suggest that the impact of the images has as much to do with the complex preferences and interests of the readers as it does with what the text demands. The realised eschatology, which dominates the theocratic applications of the Apocalypse, such as those of Melchior Hoffman, ignores the fact that, although what is described may be coming soon, there is still an unfulfilled dimension to its apocalyptic evocation.

54 H.O. Maier, Apocalypse Recalled: The Book of Revelation after Christendom (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), 44–50. 55 I. Boxall, Patmos in the Reception History of the Apocalypse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 207; H.O. Maier, Apocalypse Recalled, 45.

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The demand for understanding has gone hand in hand with attempts to find precise equivalence between history and every image in the book, and has resulted in a long tradition of interpretation that is dedicated to the ‘decoding’ hermeneutical principle. An image has a particular meaning and, if the code is understood in its entirety, the whole Apocalypse can be rendered in another form when the code is cracked and the inner meaning laid bare. It is only the occasional reader who refuses to leave open the possibility of polyvalence. Instead, we find meaning confined, as the details of images and actions are fixed on some historical personage or event. That applies also to encapsulations of Revelation’s theology, for the problem posed by this book is the difficulty imagination places on that desire for the ordered systematic presentation, which lies at the heart of theology. A book, which requires interpretation and seems to demand order in the face of the apparent chaos of its imagery, in the end confounds such attempts, not least those that are furthest from its own prophetic impulse. In situations where its imagery is allowed to work, however, it can disturb the convention maintained by the commonsensical. Like metaphors, whose function is to lay bare the realities of experience by the abrupt and jarring impact of their linguistic juxtapositions, Apocalypse seeks to stop readers and hearers in their tracks and get them to view things differently. For many, however, metaphors are ‘dead’, themselves having become part of mere convention or habit without the effect they once had, salt that has lost its savour. Revelation, too, requires the recovery of that ability to hear or read and to be stirred or shocked and scandalised into repentance and action rather than indifference or rejection. Blake understood what was required very well, exhibiting an apocalyptic perspective on the world that was not carried away with eschatological theorising but found in the text a resource to stimulate the imagination and equip the reader/viewer in the struggle with the principalities and powers that prevented men and women from fulfilling their vocation ‘in the divine image’. Revelation was the catalyst in succeeding centuries for a variety of eschatologically or apocalyptically inclined movements and readings of history.56 It is representative of that spirit of early Christianity, which allied expectation of historical change with visionary intuition, endowing its message with authenticity. Revelation offered its first readers the perception of things that are beyond human understanding as an indispensable guide to their eternal destiny, particularly as they struggle to live under the shadow of empire. The main contours of apocalyptic interpretation were already set within the earliest period of Christianity. The Book of Revelation points the way in three major respects, some of which are paralleled elsewhere in the New Testament. There is that visionary appropriation of Scripture in which the words 56

Emmerson and McGinn, eds., The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages.

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offer the opportunity to ‘see again’ what had appeared to prophets and seers in the past, or become a means of prompting new visions whereby there can be a discernment of higher spiritual realities. This is well exemplified in the engraving by Jean Duvet (1555), in which the artist clearly represents himself as John the visionary.57 Secondly, Revelation, although it only occasionally prompts that quest for the meaning of the mysteries (e.g. 17:9, cf. 1:20 and 4:3), has prompted scores of ingenious attempts to unlock its mysteries, most comprehensively in the interpretative tradition of Joseph Mede and Isaac Newton.58 Thirdly, there has been the ‘actualising’ of Revelation in which particular visions are believed to be identified with, or embodied in, contemporary events. These range from the more mystical (and indirect) appropriations by visionaries such as Hildegard of Bingen to the militant ‘acting out’ of the Münsterites.59 In addition, the visions of Revelation have been related to their ancient, first-century context. In this interpretative approach, questions are concerned with the meaning for the original author and readers, and with the need to decipher the complex symbolism and its relationship to the particular circumstances in which Christians in late first-century CE Asia Minor found themselves. The images have been regarded as an allegory of the struggles facing the individual soul in its quest for God, and the wider political ramifications of the text are subordinated to an individual religious piety. Finally, and related to that tradition of ‘actualisation’, there has been an application of the text to an interpreter’s own circumstances, but rather than the text of Revelation being ‘decoded’ so that the apocalyptic imagery is translated into a less-exotic narrative of persons and events, the imagery of Revelation is used as an interpretative lens through which to view history. In this way of using the text of the Book of Revelation, the interpretative perspective has ceased to be solely about the eschaton and becomes instead a means of interpreting every age of human existence. To quote the words of the twentiethcentury Christian activist William Stringfellow, ‘Babylon is an allegory of the condition of death, the focus of apocalyptic judgment, whereas Jerusalem is about the emancipation of human life in society from the rule of death, an anticipation of the end of time’.60 The differing interpretations of the Apocalypse may be expressed in diagrammatic form. On the one hand, there is a chronological component (the vertical axis): Does the interpretation relate to the past, present or future? On the other hand, there is a hermeneutical component: The allegorical method 57

Carey, ed., The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come, 169. Carey, ed., The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come, 232. 59 Deppermann, Melchior Hoffman. 60 W. Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (Waco: Word Books, 1973), 114. 58

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‘decodes’ the text and renders it in another, more prosaic form as compared with the colourful language of the apocalyptic imagery; and the analogical method juxtaposes the imagery of the Apocalypse with the situation of the readers, thereby enabling them to look at their situation in a new way. Whereas the allegorical tells one what the text really means and reduces its applicability to one time and place, the analogical method can be used over again at different times and places. The latter is closest to the method of Tyconius, the former is similar to the kind of interpretation that we find in Joachim’s interpretation of the dragon, whose heads are identified with specific rulers. Past Allegorical

Analogical Future Plotting differing interpretations

By the end of the seventeenth century, the basic hermeneutical approaches to Revelation were in place. What we have witnessed since are variations on what was then well established. Thus, the historical-critical method, in which the imagery is understood in the light of its first-century setting, was being worked out at the time of the Reformation controversies and was given a firm foundation by the historical approach of Hugo Grotius. Modern scholarship may have been greatly informed by wider knowledge of archaeology and ancient historical sources, but the essential method is the same as that with which Grotius and his contemporaries were familiar. The ways in which biblical prophecy, including Revelation, was woven into a complex eschatological map was set in train by the Joachite tradition of interpretation, picked up in different ways in the early modern period by Joseph Mede. It has its modern analogues in the popular works of modern American prognosticators like Hal Lindsey and the authors of the popular Left Behind series.61 The same is also true of William Blake’s more daring imaginative engagement with Revelation (and, for that matter, earlier prophetic texts like Ezekiel), which reflects the kind of actualising exegesis of Tyconius and the way in which the images relate to the activity of Blake the prophet and provide him with a visionary language. Contemporary events become a part of Blake’s creative engagement with Revelation. The Apocalypse informs Blake’s understanding 61

P. Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1992).

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of his own political situation. For example, in 1798, in the margin of his copy of the Bishop of Llandaff’s Apology for the Bible, he wrote: ‘To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life. The Beast and the Whore rule without controls’ (E611). Blake explicitly traced a continuity between his own idiosyncratic myth and John’s vision: ‘John Saw these things Reveald in Heaven / On Patmos Isle & heard the Souls cry out to be deliverd / He saw the Harlot of the Kings of Earth & saw her Cup / Of fornication food of Orc & Satan pressd from the fruit of Mystery’ (The Four Zoas 8.601–604, E385– 386). John, too, had seen what Blake had seen. Such an ongoing priority given to the ‘Poetic Genius, the Spirit of Prophecy’ (All Religions Are One, ‘Principle 5’, E1) is central to Blake’s sense of his vocation and his art.

35. British Interpretation of the Apocalypse: A Historical Perspective The Book of Revelation in a British context suggests a sequence of scholars from R.H. Charles1 via H.H. Rowley2 and thence to D.S. Russell3 who all made a significant contribution to the study of apocalyptic literature more generally, including the Book of Revelation. Charles followed in the footsteps of Richard Laurence (1760–1838),4 whose pioneering translation of the Ethiopic Apocalypse was published in 1820. Charles himself translated and edited that important text, as well as other apocalyptic texts and wrote a typically learned commentary on Revelation for the International Critical Commentary series.5 Among his other works, he contributed studies on the history of interpretation, and it is the history of the reception of Revelation in Britain, which is the focus of this contribution to a volume on British Research on the Apocalypse.6 This essay is more about the way in which British readings of the Apocalypse, inside and outside the scholarly world, have offered new perspectives on the Apocalypse. Recent writing on the Apocalypse in Britain has explored its reception history, with special attention to representation in literature, art and music. The importance of British interpretation in relation to the reception history of Revelation has been considerable, with some interpreters better known than others, and capturing the story goes much further back than the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and should include the medieval period. It is 1 R.H. Charles, The Ethiopic Version of the Book of Enoch: Edited from 23 MSS. together with the Fragmentary Greek and Latin Versions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906); idem, ed., The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English: With Introductions and Critical and Explanatory Notes to the Several Books (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913). 2 H.H. Rowley, The Relevance of Apocalyptic: A Study of Jewish and Christian Apocalypses from Daniel to the Revelation, 2nd edn. (London: Lutterworth, 1947). 3 D.S. Russell, The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic, 200 BC–AD 100 (London: SCM, 1964). 4 R. Laurence, The Book of Enoch the Prophet, tr. from an Ethiopic MS. in the Bodleian Library, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1838). 5 R.H. Charles, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Revelation of St. John, 2 vols., ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1920). 6 R.H. Charles, Studies in the Apocalypse: Being Lectures Delivered Before the University of London (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1913).

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with this period that we begin. Classic illuminated Apocalypses were produced in these islands (e.g. the Douce and Trinity Apocalypses)7 as well as The Great East Window in York Minster, much of which is an interpretation of Revelation.8 By the beginning of the seventeenth century the Book of Revelation was deeply ingrained in English-speaking theology, a phrase carefully chosen, as the interest in apocalypticism and Fifth Monarchy ideas and the like, were carried to the American colonies with the settlers such as John Eliot.9 Whether it initially occurred under the influence of the work of Foxe, Bale or Brightman, or after them the learned Joseph Mede, Revelation became part of the theological framework, which undergirded a Protestantism in these islands.10 Mede it was whose memory lived longest. His academic reputation was based on a claim to objectivity, rather than on the ingenuity of his exposition. What counted for Mede was the ability to discern the structure of the text, and note its ‘synchronisms’. Mede had by no means been the first to discern these, but the way he seemed to put the structure of the vision on a firm foundation commended itself to generations of interpreters and indeed undergirded the explosion of interest, which the mid-seventeenth century civil wars ignited. With his explanation of the structure he then applied his solution to the historical referents, and that kind of ‘decoding’11 continued a form of interpretation, which had been rife from Joachim onwards.12

7 See M.R. James, The Apocalypse in Art (London: British Academy/Oxford University Press, 1931); N.J. Morgan, The Douce Apocalypse: Picturing the End of the World in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2007). 8 See T. French, York Minster: The Great East Window (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 9 B.S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 51; R.W. Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War (London: Harvard University Press, 1999). 10 K.R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain 1530–1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); C. Burdon, The Apocalypse in England: The Apocalypse Unravelling, 1700–1834 (London: Macmillan, 1997); M. Murrin, ‘Revelation and Two Seventeenth Century Commentators’, in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance thought and literature: Patterns, antecedents and repercussions, eds. C.A. Patrides and J. Wittreich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 125–147. 11 J. Kovacs and C. Rowland, Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 7–10. 12 B. McGinn, Apocalyptic Spirituality: Treatises and Letters of Lactantius, Adso of Montier-en-Der, Joachim of Fiore, the Franciscan Spirituals, Savonarola (London: SPCK, 1979), 136–141.

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35.1. Gerrard Winstanley (ca 1609, d. 1676) Another influential British interpreter was Gerrard Winstanley, who turned to the Book of Revelation often in his biblical interpretation, particularly in contrasting Christ or Michael with the Dragon and relating this to the sociopolitical circumstances of his own day. The most sustained engagement with Revelation is found in what is probably his earliest extant work, The Breaking of the Day of God, now more widely available with the publication of Winstanley’s early work in The Complete Works.13 This often exegetically convoluted work reveals a mind saturated in the Bible and a distinctive sense of how the parts may relate one to the other, with a keen sense of intertextual connections and the allegorical possibilities of apocalyptic images. Several of the themes which emerge in Winstanley’s later work are to be found here, for example, the emphasis on the importance of experimental knowledge of God as the sine qua non for understanding theology and scriptures, and the consequent disparagement of such ‘Scholars’ who lack such experience. It is a disquisition on prophecy and the fate of the prophets. Prophecy is seen as ‘foretelling, either in plain or dark language’, or ‘making such things plain and easier to the understanding of others’, and most importantly to do so by giving ‘testimony or proofe … by experimentall Discoveries’ (CHL 1:15–16). The focus of this often-complex interpretation is the two witnesses of Rev. 11. This offers Winstanley a focus for a discursive and highly allusive essay in biblical theology, which embraces a wide number of biblical texts and the contemporary context (it is likely that it was written in 1648, a year before the execution of Charles I). The focus is the emphasis on the two witnesses as a twofold demonstration in human persons of the divine in human, beginning with Jesus Christ (the first witness) and continuing with his faithful saints (the second witness) who testify to the ways of God and the ways in which the dominion of the Beast has trampled them under foot. It differs from a contemporary application such as that of Lodowick Muggleton and John Reeve, who saw themselves as the two witnesses of Rev. 11, the ‘true prophets’ in an age of many prophetic claims.14 For Winstanley, Muggleton and Reeve, their days were a time of the eschatological climax, but the difference between them is the more inclusive diachronic reading offered by Winstanley, as compared with the individually focused interpretation of Muggleton and Reeve. In the process of this long exposition, other key texts such as Gen. 3:15 (‘the seed of woman shall bruise the serpent’s head’) 13

T.N. Corns, A. Hughes and D. Loewenstein, eds., The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Hereafter, CHL. 14 T.L. Underwood, ed., The Acts of the Witnesses: The Autobiography of Lodowick Muggleton and Other Early Muggletonian Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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highlight the soteriological role of the ongoing act of prophetic witness against the Beast of self-centredness and obliviousness to divine justice. The link with this passage is understandable for two reasons: first, in the light of the woman who gives birth to the messiah and whose seed is persecuted by the dragon (cf. Rev. 12:17), and, second, the fact that Rev. 11 and 12 are closely related, as a result of Mede’s synchronisms, by the chronological references in Rev. 11:3 and 12:6.15 But God’s provision of a ‘wilderness condition’ offers a ‘safe hiding place’ (CHL 1:140). According to Winstanley, Jesus Christ breaks the Serpent’s head through the agency of the Saints, when he makes them able to speak out of experience, rather than ‘the writings and words of others’ (CHL 1:116, cf. 148). ‘The Wildernesse-condition’ is one wherein a man is dead to all his owne wisdom, memory, strength, learning, actings, and looks upon all as priviledges of no gain, but of weaknesse and of drosse; without the Anointing, he cannot meditate, nor understand; till God come into him. (The Breaking of the Day of God, CHL 1:140)

There are many echoes of Pauline language here, especially Gal. 2:20 and Phil. 3:8. The cost of witness to ‘the experimental’ in the domain of the Beast is teased out. Intertextual links are picked up by Winstanley, not least the links with Zech. 4:3 in Rev. 11:3. What Winstanley makes out of this, linked as it is with the diachronic perspective offered by Rev. 11:2–3, is that the witness begun by Jesus Christ is continued by the saints and martyrs down the ages, the ‘whole Christ, Head and Members, a perfect man, consisting of diverse members’ (CHL 1:131). This witness has reached its climax, according to Winstanley, in his own day, corresponding to the ‘half day’ of Rev. 11:9 (cf. 12:14). What emerges in The Breaking of the Day of God is a version of salvation history, which is a story of the persecution by the Beast in its many guises of the faithful few whose vindication is about to take place – at least according to Winstanley’s earnest conviction – in his own day. He sees himself and his contemporaries, in a manner akin to what we find in Joachite writings, to be situated at a particular place in the historical pattern offered by Revelation, in the moment of the blast of the sixth angel’s trumpet (Rev. 9:13). Indeed the sense of the penultimate pervades this particular writing of Winstanley.16 The consummation is imminent (11:13), and the work as a whole finishes with a quotation of Rev. 11:19 when ‘at the sound of the seventh Angels Trumpet, when the mystery of God is finished, and the Temple of God is opened in heaven … Christ in Spirit is made known to

15

Firth, Apocalyptic Tradition, 217. C. Rowland, ‘Joachim of Fiore and the Theology of the New Testament’, in Joachim of Fiore and the Influence of Inspiration: Essays in Memory of Marjorie E. Reeves (1905– 2003), ed. J.E. Wannenmacher (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 35–52 = above, pp. 364–380. 16

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Saints’ (CHL 1:112). The work as a whole is interspersed with the conviction of the imminence of consummation: the Winter is near past, the Summer is come, the flowers appear in the earth; that is, the glorious workings of the Anointing in the spirit of Saints: The time of the singing of the birds is come, that is all the Saints begin to sing, Hallelujah, for the Lord God reigneth omnipotent within, and begins to reign in the world, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land, that is, the voice of the Lord Christ our righteousness, is heard and seen to rule in our flesh: And now the beast or wisdom and power of our corrupt flesh, or Serpent within us, is wounded to death, and she shall reign no more. (CHL 1:147, cf. Cant. 2:10–12)

Winstanley’s interpretation of the apocalyptic imagery from Dan. 7 resembles Blake’s dramatic image of Babylon seated on the Beast in Rev. 17 (of which more later). The Breaking of the Day of God offers an earlier version of this actualising type of interpretation but this time, rather than Dan. 7, it is Rev. 13 and 17 which informs Winstanley’s theological exposition. It starts with the bodies of the witnesses being left for three days and a half (Rev. 11:8; 13), which Winstanley interprets as the period of the reign of the beast, which is coming to an end in his day. He interprets this period as ‘Magistracy out of joint’, namely, the perversion of the divine ordering of society into the ways of injustice. The focus of this situation of being ‘out of joint’ is the consequence of contrasting ecclesial hegemonies, ‘grosse Popery’, and after the ‘Church reformation’ by the hypocritical abomination of ‘the time and age of the Beast with two horns like a Lamb, but spake like a Dragon’, the era of reformed Episcopacy. But the two are two aspects of the reign of the Beast in which the agents of God in the flesh are vilified, persecuted and accused of error. And these two dead bodies were to lie dead, three days and an half; that is, the whole reign of the Beast, in his three ages and an half. As first, the time and age of the Dragon, which was Majestracy [sic] out of joynt, that persecuted Christ and his Saints, by open violence, before the universal Bishop was lifted up by the Dragon [cf. Rev. 12:17], and this is the first shape or time or age, in which the Serpent appeared to kill the Witnesses. Secondly, The Time and age of the Leopard [Rev. 13:1–2, cf. 17:17], which is what we call grosse Popery, when the universall Bishop bare rule by the authority of the dragon, before there was any Church reformation. And this was not so downright violence, but kils the Witnesses by a pretended law, under the names of error, for indeed the appearance of God in the flesh, is far different from the appearance of the Serpent in the flesh. And the Serpent having a time, to act himself, and to maintain his being, labours to destroy the being of God, and calls the appearance of God an error or deceiver [John 7:12]. Thirdly, The time and age of the Beast with two horns like a Lamb, but spake like a Dragon [Rev. 13:11]; And this is what we call reformed Episcopacy, which was of the same nature, and had the same authoritative power from the deceived Kings of the earth, to make war with Christ & his Saints, as the former had, though a little more hypocritical; for it came in sheeps cloathing, but it spake like a Dragon; for it devoured the sheep by his common Lawes, Eclesiasticall power, and high Commission Courts. And these two shapes of Popery and Episcopacy are called times, because they are two ages or dayes of the Beast, maintaining one and the same nature and compulsive and coercive power, the one

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being more grosly abominable, the other more hypocritically abominable; so that here in time, the Dragon; and times, Popery, and Episcopacy, faln in the world; or three dayes, which are visibly past and gone already, in this one tenth part of the Cities, England, &c … … And this halfe day, of this dividing of time, is the age of the Beast, under which England, Scotland, and Ireland doe now groan; and it may be a very hot time for the length of it; but it will be but short. (CHL 1:170–171)

What we find here is a more ecclesial interpretation than what was to emerge in his application of the vision of the four beasts of Dan. 7 in Fire in the Bush, which will be discussed briefly in the context of Blake’s image of Rev. 17 later in this essay. In this early work we find the Book of Revelation offering comfort to a writer who saw himself as part of a persecuted minority in his own day, and who understood that this was part of a long-established pattern. In a manner similar to Stephen, in his speech according to Acts 7, which is a catalogue of disobedience, Revelation functions as an interpretative key, which unlocks the self-consciousness of an alternative perspective on religion and politics whose vindication is near. Winstanley was a remarkable biblical interpreter who burst like a comet on the literary horizon coming from nowhere and returning to comparative obscurity and apparent conventionality. Nevertheless in his extant works there is evidence of one who showed ‘the transformative potentials inherent in vernacular scripture and protestant social thought’.17

35.2. Jane Lead (1624–1704) and Joanna Southcott (1750–1814) English religion in the seventeenth century was pervaded with the interpretation of the Apocalypse, whether the cooler approach of Joseph Mede or of Fifth Monarchists. For one such, Mary Cary, this included a militant part in the final eschatological struggle for the saints.18 Jane Lead’s interpretation of the Apocalypse, in contrast, could not be more different. It is born from the impact of European apocalyptic interpreters, such as Hendrik Niklaes and Jacob Boehme, as the result of its availability in English. Boehme’s writings were concerned with a spirituality in which sharing of the eschatological life in this age was the goal of divine service. Jane Lead (1624–1704)19 aimed to 17 See J.C. Davis and J.D. Alsop, ‘Winstanley, Gerrard (bap. 1609 d. 1676), author and Digger’, in Dictionary of National Biography, eds. H.C.G. Matthew and B.H. Harrison, vol. 59 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/29755. 18 See C. Rowland, ‘English Radicals and the Exegesis of the Apocalypse’, in Die prägende Kraft der Texte: Hermeneutik und Wirkungsgeschichte des Neuen Testaments, ed. M. Mayordomo (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 2005), 160–177, esp. 160–161 = above, pp. 493–509, esp. 494–495. 19 See S. Bowerbank, ‘Lead, Jane (1624–1704)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds. H.C.G. Matthew and B.H. Harrison, vol. 32 (Oxford: Oxford University

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declare how ‘in this present Life there should be found any to ascend to the New-Jerusalem, to fear and worship GOD There’. The world of the Apocalypse is one which can be lived out in the human heart and in the life of the elect community. Lead was a founding member of the Behmenist group in London at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, whose influence stretched much further in the years after her death. As we see from the following extracts, what we have is the exposition of realised eschatology in which access to the celestial spheres is vouchsafed to the spiritual successors of Enoch who also may travel thither and enjoy the heavenly delights. In her Revelation of Revelations (1683) she offered a reading of the apocalyptic images, which related almost entirely to the spiritual progress of the individual. Jane Lead relates her own visionary experience to John’s, asserting that the ‘continued run of the Spirit throughout all ages … preaching the same Doctrine by his Spirit in the Apostles after his Ascension’. In anticipation of Blake, Lead emphasised reclaiming the imagination as the one faculty capable of overcoming a narrow perspective of reason and sense experience. That which most inhibits spiritual growth is reason, and in a daring interpretative move, Lead’s application of the apocalyptic images to the inner life sees her understand a key characteristic of the participants in the millennial reign as the subduing of the hegemony of reason. But, as my former student Jonathan Downing writes in his Oxford dissertation, Jane Lead’s exposition of Revelation indicates the need for a ‘spiritual’ engagement with the text of Revelation to interpret it aright. In the process she claims to have ‘been oft taken up to see the wonderful Plat-form of the New-Jerusalem’ (Revelation of Revelations 1). Lead describes ‘a sensible rising and spreading over all my Heart, Head and Body, as if all were covered with a Cloud of Sun-heat, giving out light, by which I could see what was inwardly done, as well as feel it. Then it was further spoke in me, that I should take notice that this was also the bright Garment of the Sun’ (Revelation of Revelations 10). The importance of divinely endowed insight to ‘measure out the meaning’ is stressed: For what in John’s Revelation is mentioned concerning these things, is very obscure and mystical, and there is no fathoming of it to the utmost, until the Lord himself come with the Plummet-Line of the Holy Spirit to measure out the meaning. Though there are some who have been favoured with this Light of Revelation … I shall set down in order, according as it was acted in my own particular, through my Soul’s waiting with the Lamb’s-rising Power, in a particular experience of my own in the divine Mystery. (Revelation of Revelations 12)

Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/16231, and S. Apetrei, Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. 187–204.

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Lead’s interpretation of the text depends on ‘my Soul’s waiting with the Lamb’s-rising Power, in a particular experience of my own in the divine Mystery’ as a basis for her authoritative exposition of the text. Her interpretation of apocalyptic images has a long history in Christian theology.20 What we find here is the kind of individualising and internalising of apocalyptic images, in the Tyconian interpretative tradition, which is familiar to us from the Familist theology21 inspired by Hendrik Niclaes and Lead’s older English contemporary Peter Sterry (1613–1672)22 who wrote: Christ teacheth us to seek a City, not of this Creation, whose Builder, Building, and chief Inhabitant is God. He teacheth us to find this new Hierusalem, which is above us, within us, and there to dwell. He discovers this City with its Citizens in our Spirits, and draws us into it.23

Beyond Lead, Joanna Southcott was one of several women prophets who identified with Rev. 12, including Sarah Flaxmer in 1795,24 and the Scottish Elspeth Buchan in 1784.25 Previously, Ann Lee, the leader of the Shaker community, depicted Albany as the wilderness to which the woman flees (Rev. 12:6).26 In 1792 Southcott claimed to have heard the Spirit of God, warning her that the coming of Christ was imminent. From the start of her prophetic ministry until her death she claimed to be the ‘Woman Clothed with the Sun’ of Rev. 12:1 and the Bride of Christ (Rev. 19:7). Such claims were by no means unique. Indeed, Southcott believed she was called to be the one whose seed was ‘to bruise the serpent’ (Gen. 3:15). Southcott’s theology was based on her interpretation of the Fall. God’s purposes in redemption were to be fulfilled in the advent of a second Eve who would fulfil the salvation begun by Christ. Southcott saw herself as the authentic interpreter of the 20

See Kovacs and Rowland, Revelation, 56. C. Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 22 For more on Sterry see V. de Sola Pinto, Peter Sterry, Platonist and Puritan, 1613– 1672: A Biographical and Critical Study with Passages Selected from his Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934) and Apetrei, Women, 228–230. 23 P. Sterry, The Teachings of Christ in The Soule (1648), 42. On Sterry, see Pinto, Peter Sterry, and D. Wallace, Shapers of English Calvinism, 1660–1714: Variety, Persistence, and Transformation (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 51–85. 24 J.F.C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780–1850 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 32–38. 25 See J. Train, The Buchanites: From First to Last (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1846); J. Cameron, The History of the Buchanite Delusion: 1783–1846 (Dumfries: Mann, 1904). 26 See C. Garrett, Origins of the Shakers: From the Old World to the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); R. Francis, Ann the Word: The Story of Ann Lee, Female Messiah, Mother of the Shakers, the Woman Clothed with the Sun (London: Fourth Estate, 2000); A. Clark, ‘The Sexual Crisis and Popular Religion in London, 1770– 1820’, International Labor and Working-Class History 34 (1988): 56–69. 21

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Scriptures. While she affirmed that all truth was contained in Scripture, she believed that its meaning had not been made clear, and that its right interpretation awaited the right moment in salvation history when its import could be revealed. In this she based herself on biblical precedents like Dan. 12:9: ‘for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end’. While she always considered the Bible to have a unique authority, the relationship between her inspired insights and the Bible itself was often ambiguous. It is nowhere better illuminated than in a remarkable communication received by Southcott in April 1806. It followed a dream, in which she dreamt of binding her personal Bible tight with cord before boiling it, only for it to rise up out of the water. As she came to open the boiled Bible it began to disintegrate, such that she required a second Bible in order to read the passages in the Psalms where the first had been opened. The meaning of the dream, revealed by the Spirit, was that the binding of the first Bible referred to the way in which its meaning was hidden (‘perfect so is the mystery of my Bible [that] it is a Book bound up from the wisdom of all men’). The opening of the boiled Bible at the second Psalm referred to the contemporary visitation of the Spirit to Southcott. The second Bible was none other than ‘thy Prophecies, which all men will find is the Word of God, like the Bible that is bound up and sealed up’. Not only was this new activity of the Spirit necessary ‘to throw open all mysteries and make every truth clear, before the Bible can be discerned to what its perfect meaning is’ but also Southcott’s prophecies achieved a status on a par with authoritative Scripture.27 Initially, Southcott’s activity initiated a John the Baptist-like, preparatory movement summoning people to be sealed in imitation of Rev. 6–7 in preparation for the imminent judgement of God.28 In the last year of her life, however, she believed that she was called to actualise her vocation as the Woman Clothed with the Sun of Rev. 12 and literally to give birth to the messiah, Shiloh. She believed that she was pregnant with the male child whom she identified with the enigmatic Shiloh mentioned in Gen. 49:10. That conviction had a remarkable effect on her followers. Artefacts donated in anticipation of the messiah’s birth, the cot, for example, are now on display in the Panacea Museum, Bedford.29 She died supposedly giving birth to her messianic child. Her followers rapidly believed that, as the text of Revelation says, the messianic child was caught up to heaven. After her death there emerged a series 27 All quotations in the paragraph come from Panacea Society (now known as the Panacea Charitable Trust, Bedford, UK), MSS 114, 212–220, ‘Communication given to Joanna Southcott, April 3rd 1806, On Boiling the Bible’. 28 J.K. Hopkins, A Woman to Deliver Her People: Joanna Southcott and English Millenarianism in an Era of Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 20, 33; S. Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 246–258. 29 See http://panaceatrust.org/the-panacea-museum/ (accessed 14 May 2015).

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of prophetic movements, which spanned three continents and which still persist in different forms to the present day. That set in train a series of interpretations of the child’s future coming. The Southcottian movement, of which the Panacea Society considers itself a part, not only looked back to Joanna Southcott but also to Jane Lead, as the first in the prophetic line, known by members of The Panacea Society as ‘The Visitation’.30

35.3. William Blake (1757–1827) Another influential popular British interpreter of Revelation is the poet and artist William Blake. Blake never used the ‘Apocalypse’ or ‘apocalyptic’ and yet his whole work is infused with it. Seeing things differently, which means unmasking, seeing beyond what is expected and the consensus to what is deeper, or how it gets transformed through the eye of vision, as he put it in a letter to his friend Thomas Butts, ‘visionary studies’ are crucial to him.31 In one place he seems explicitly to link his own visions with those of John on Patmos.32 His language is frequently indebted to Revelation. His opening annotations to Richard Watson’s Apology indicate a man whose view of the world was formed by the language of the Apocalypse. He observed the reaction to the French Revolution in England in the mid-1790s and commented: ‘To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life. The Beast & the Whore rule without controls’ (E611). His illustrations of Revelation play a significant role in the series of watercolours he painted for Thomas Butts. As we shall see, understanding of redemption is infused with an apocalyptic perception in which the prophetic endeavour is explored and its shortcomings unmasked thereby contributing to the understanding of the divine in human. The Book of Revelation, or the Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, is full of allusions to biblical books especially Daniel, Ezekiel and Isaiah, though there is never an explicit quotation. Blake’s work is similar. As Revelation was conditioned by the socio-political realities of its day and the apocalyptic images woven into a new visionary pronouncement, so in Blake’s work biblical allusion merges with contemporary persons and places. Blake believed that there was a continuity of the ‘prophetic genius’, so the same spirit that is at work in John is present in Blake’s work too. The Book of Revelation may best enable us to understand the most difficult of Blake’s works, Jerusalem, as Benjamin Heath Malkin (1806) wrote: ‘The book of Revelation, which 30 J. Shaw, Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and her Followers (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011). 31 See D.V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, newly rev. edn. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 728. This resource is hereafter designated E, followed by page number. 32 The Four Zoas 8.115 (E385).

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may well be supposed to engross much of Mr. Blake’s study, seems to have directed him.’33 In one important respect, however, Blake’s use of apocalyptic images differs significantly and decisively from that of Revelation. The fires of judgement turn out to be the cathartic water of life, and eternal judgement of the great white throne (Rev. 20) is forgiveness. Blake’s apocalypse, unlike John’s apocalypse, ends in the restoration of all things and universal forgiveness from which no one is excluded. In contrast, the Book of Revelation presupposes that there will be an eternal separation between that which is opposed to God and the world of the divine. Those outside the eternal city, or condemned to the Lake of Fire, are offered no respite. Blake does resist Revelation and implicitly challenges its separation between sacred and profane, and between saved and damned. Blake’s reading of the Apocalypse, in relation to new circumstances, means that the text and its imagery speak to a variety of different contexts. The book is not viewed as a map to the end of the world, but a resource which can inspire and be a language which will assist in the process whereby ‘the doors of perception’ are ‘cleansed’ and every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.34 Such interpretation has deep roots in the Christian tradition, going back at least to the time of Tyconius in the late fourth and early fifth centuries CE.35 The Apocalypse, like Ezekiel, pervades Blake’s theological imagination. Not only does it give him a language to communicate in both text and image but also inspires the idiosyncratic myth of disintegration and apokatastasis which emerges in his illuminated books. The book is illustrated in several of the watercolours of the Bible, which Blake painted for Thomas Butts, though there is no obvious theme which can be discerned in these. They include scenes (in addition to the two considered below) such as Death on a Pale Horse (Rev. 6), the Angel who stood on sea and land – a colossal figure towering over John, two images of The Woman Clothed with the Sun (Rev. 12), and the Beast and Babylon (Rev. 13 and 17).36

33

G.E. Bentley, Blake Records: Documents (1714–1841) Concerning the Life of William Blake (1757–1827) and his Family, Incorporating Blake Records (1969), Blake Records Supplement (1988), and Extensive Discoveries since 1988, 2nd edn. (New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2004), 567. 34 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 14 (E3). 35 M.A. Tilley, The Bible in Christian North Africa: The Donatist World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), esp. 112–128; Kovacs and Rowland, Revelation, 9, 11, 15–17, 34, 37, 206–207, 225; C. Rowland and I. Boxall, ‘Tyconius and Bede on Violent Texts in the Apocalypse’, in Ancient Christian Interpretations of “Violent Texts” in the Apocalypse, eds. J. Verheyden et al. NTOA 92 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 161–179 = above, pp. 529–546. 36 See, further, C. Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 224–228.

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The image of the Beast linked with Babylon, which makes appearances in the Blakean myth, particularly in the identification with the sea monster Rahab, ‘is reveald’ as ‘Mystery Babylon the Great: the Abomination of Desolation Religion hid in War: a Dragon red, & hidden Harlot’.37 Rahab and Babylon are mentioned together in Ps. 87:4 (‘I will make mention of Rahab and Babylon to them that know me’). Rahab epitomises the religion of holiness, sacrifice, the culture of war and the ideology of empire, moral virtue and self-sacrifice, as Blake terms it ‘religion hid in war’.38 The juxtaposition of the many-headed Beast merging with Babylon and the crucified Christ acknowledged by a man standing at the foot of the cross in Jerusalem 75–76 expresses not only the human dilemma but the fact that the one who was himself the victim of the violence of the Beast and Babylon offers the clue to redemption from the restrictive ethic of Babylon. Earlier, Blake had depicted Babylon seated on the seven-headed beast in a design which illustrates Edward Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’ (British Museum, 1797).39 The picture of Babylon glosses ‘Virtue’s Apology, in which are considered, the Love of this Life, the ambition and Pleasure, with the Wit and Wisdom of the World’. These words prompt Blake to understand this image of Babylon socially and politically and not just primarily in terms of personal morals. At the time he painted this picture Blake was acutely aware of the culture of repression in war-torn England. This picture of Babylon picks up on a long tradition of political interpretation of apocalyptic images, rooted in Daniel and Revelation, going back to the radicalism of the mid-seventeenth century England. In it, the heads of the beasts function as a way of understanding political oppression, and do not refer just to eschatological prediction. This very much resembles how his English predecessor, Gerrard Winstanley, at the time of the English Civil War in 1649, used the beast to describe the fourfold oppressive aspects of contemporary political and economic power. Like John’s visionary interpretation of Daniel, these interpretations are not a succession of empires, therefore, but a fourfold imperial oppression, taking place all at once and with differing dimensions. This is similar to Rev. 13 where the Danielic vision is recast synchronically rather than diachronically. It is not a succession of empires, therefore, but a sevenfold contemporary, imperial and cultural, oppression. Blake very pointedly depicts the heads of the beast as

37

Jerusalem 75:18–20 (E231). Milton 37:43 (E138); Jerusalem 75:20 (E231). See G.A. Rosso, ‘The Religion of Empire: Blake’s Rahab in its Biblical Contexts’, in Prophetic Character: Essays on William Blake in Honor of John E. Grant, ed. A.S. Gourlay (West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press, 2002), 287–326. 39 See M. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 2:277; Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 226–227. 38

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contemporary military, royal, legal and ecclesiastical powers. He took the opportunity of this commission to insert his protest against the political repression in the England of the 1790s. It was the expression of the voice of prophecy in the face of the oppressive culture of kings and their ideologues reflecting the paradigmatic non-conformist Jesus who in Blake’s words, ‘acted from impulse not from rules’.40 Blake’s painting ‘The Four and Twenty Elders’ (Tate Gallery, London)41 is a dramatic picture dominated by the bearded Almighty with a scroll, with seven seals in his right hand radiating glory. His head is surrounded with a beautiful sea blue topped by a rainbow and above and around his head are creatures with heads of an eagle, a lion, an ox and a man merging one into another, the whole scene full of eyes reminiscent in colour and appearance of a peacock in full plume. At the forefront of the picture are figures doing obeisance laying their crowns before the Almighty and right at the front of the picture are seven heads with tongues of fire. The whole brilliantly captures the ‘jasper and carnelian’, the emerald rainbow and the twenty-four elders, clad in white garments, and the seven torches of Pentecostal fire burning before the throne, all of which are mentioned in John’s first heavenly vision (Rev. 4–5). There is no mention of the scroll in the hand of the Almighty in Rev. 4, which comes in the following chapter. After seeing the glory of God, John sees the Almighty with a scroll and hears one of the twenty-four elders asking ‘who will open the scroll’. At this point John weeps because no one is found worthy to open the scroll. He is told not to weep, because ‘the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals’. Then John notices something, which had hitherto slipped his attention: And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders, I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain … he went and took the scroll from the right hand of him who was seated on the throne and … the twenty-four elders … sang a new song, saying, ‘Worthy art thou to take the scroll and to open its seals’. (Rev. 5:6–9)

Just like John, who saw first a throne and the glory of the Almighty, a viewer of Blake’s picture too would be forgiven for not noticing what appears to be the points of a crown and under it, almost invisible in the glorious surroundings, what at first sight seems to be a comatose animal. This insignificant creature is easily missed as our attention is caught by the kaleidoscopic effect of images and colours elsewhere in the picture. Such a response underlines a key element of the vision in Rev. 5 captured by Blake in this remarkable image in a way that both complements and transcends words.

40 41

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 23–24 (E43); see also Rosso, ‘Religion of Empire’. See Butlin, Paintings, 2:515; Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 224–225.

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Blake’s depiction of the ‘The River of Life’ (Tate Gallery, London, ca 1805) has inscribed upon it ‘Rev: c xxii v 1 & 2’,42 but it seems to mix the imagery of Revelation with Ezekiel. Notwithstanding the inscription, the figures wade through deep water as they move towards the light inhabited by angels. This is reminiscent of Ezekiel’s vision (Ezek. 47:4), where the waters issued out from under the threshold of the house eastward and got ever more deep, eventually ending in a river which could not be passed over (Ezek 47:5). Blake seems to capture the moment when the river of life ‘flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb’ (Rev. 22:1) has risen ‘to the loins’ (Ezek. 47:4). Beside the river are trees ‘whose leaf shall not die’ and in particular there is the tree of life (Rev. 22:2, cf. Ezek. 47:12). The sun, surrounded by the angelic host shines. ‘There will be no more night … for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever’ (Rev. 22:5). What is striking about Blake’s reading of the Apocalypse is his repudiation of the dualism which pervades the book to the very end, despite heaven and earth being united. John the seer cannot let go of basic dualistic ways of thinking, because, for whatever reason, probably determined by Ezekiel, there is a sense that while the walls separate, there remains an inside and an outside, where there remains a space for those who are still ‘not of us’ to exist, an essentially dualistic position, Blake parts company from the Apocalypse (cf. Rev. 21:27 and 22:15). Commentators on Blake have often pointed to the way in which Blake fiercely protests against the dualism of the Bible while at the same time seemingly being caught in the trap of using it.43 But throughout his work, especially in the way he interprets Revelation, there is a resistance on Blake’s part, exemplified by his universalism and especially the way in which he makes images like fire and water, which seem so threatening in an image like the Lake of Fire, purgative rather than punitive. Thus, we find the noun ‘holiness’ referring to all that is restrictive and destructive, while the adjective ‘holy’ is liberated from its restrictiveness, as is demonstrated by a Blakean slogan such as ‘for every thing that lives is Holy’,44 an utterance indicating a theological understanding which includes rather than excludes. Blake’s dualistic mythology is inspired by the Bible, but takes its leave of it fundamentally by regarding it as inadequate and needing to be transcended by a unity. It partakes of the basic dualism which is inspired by the Torah (the separation of sacred and profane, clean and unclean, God and idols, even elect and non-elect) and his eschatology (now and not yet, this world and the world to come) is inspired by the contrasts which are central to the Apocalypse. Dualistic language is crucial for Blake’s apocalyptic theology, whether 42

Butlin, Paintings, 2:525; Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 227. E.g. L. Damrosch, Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 166. 44 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 27 (E45). 43

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about holiness or eschatology, but the difference is that in both cases, the ultimate goal is not ultimate separation but integration, for God is all in all. Blake as artist and writer was always emphasising both Energy and Reason, the Prolific and the Devourer,45 so it becomes impossible to ignore the fact that for all his protestations of monism he cannot escape from using dualistic language in order to make sense of existence, as Damrosch rightly stresses. The reason he cannot escape is that Blake never frees himself from a biblical way of construing things. The nature of his work as an artist means that Energy and Desire is a dynamic and definite image. The medium is the message. Creative energy is confined in order to be able to communicate and not overwhelm or confuse. Words and images confine to communicate. Blake’s work epitomises the dialectic between imagination and definition, as he reduced the products of his visionary imagination into a form which offered an opportunity to reflect on self and world.

35.4. Visualisation One of the issues which lurks below the surface of the writing of both Blake and Winstanley is the centrality of the interpreting subject and their role in the engagement with Scripture. Blake puts it in terms of a contrast between memory and inspiration, Winstanley between the scholars and those ‘professors’ who place their emphasis on the voice of the divine Spirit within. For both, the epistemological question is central. Research on the Apocalypse involves the ways in which the words of the Apocalypse, or for that matter any other biblical book, bear witness to the living Christ within. The hegemonic authority of the Bible detached from that inward ‘inspiration’ is viewed by both as arid and an inversion of the proper relationship between the interpreting subject and the text. They advocate a research into the texts’ meaning in the context of experience or through the imaginative engagement. That kind of engagement has a long history and deserves a brief consideration. Visualisation has been an important part of the reading of Scripture. Mary Carruthers, who was Speakers Lecturer in the University of Oxford in 2012, in a series of lectures and publications, has shown how memorisation and the recall of memory involved visualisation.46

45

As he does in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 16 (E40). See R. Williams, ‘“The human form divine”: Radicalism and Orthodoxy in William Blake’, in Radical Christian Voices and Practice: Essays in Honour of Christopher Rowland, eds. Z. Bennett and D.B. Gowler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 151–164. 46 M.J. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), e.g. 118–122.

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The monastic practice of meditation notably involved making mental images or cognitive “pictures” for thinking and composing. The use of such pictures … derives both from Jewish spirituality and from the compositional practices of Roman rhetoric. The emphasis upon the need for human beings to “see” their thoughts in their minds as organised schemata of images, or “pictures,” and then to use these for further thinking, is a striking and continuous feature of medieval monastic rhetoric … Medieval memoria was a universal thinking machine – machina memorialis – both the mill that ground the grain of one’s experiences (including all that one read) into a mental flour with which one could make wholesome new bread, and also the hoist or windlass that every wise master-mason learned to make and to use in constructing new matters.47

So, ancient readers ‘visualised’ what they heard and read, and that involved the creation of mental images, or ‘painting in the heart’ (to use words of Jerome’s commentary on Ezekiel)48 the images of the scriptural texts. Illuminated manuscripts stimulated an affective experience in meditation. So, through the pictures the Apocalypse could shape the reader’s understanding of the book. Such illuminated books offered a greater access to a selfinvolved understanding of what seeing God might mean. It is possible that another part of Ezekiel’s vision, in addition to the vision of Jerusalem in Ezek. 40–48, was also susceptible to such an imaginative kind of exegesis, namely Ezekiel’s merkabah vision.49 Engagement with this chapter, probably involving visualisation of what Ezekiel had seen, was a tradition maintained over centuries, particularly in Judaism, but also some parts of Christianity.50 John’s apocalypse is itself part of the story of the visionary appropriation of Ezekiel’s merkabah vision, and with the brief description in the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (4Q405), is one of the earliest testimonies to this kind of appropriation, and Rev. 4 is explicitly stated to be part of a vision (Rev. 4:2, cf. 1:10). I have often wondered if exegesis of Ezek. 1 may have been assisted by such imaginative visualisation enabling the understanding of obscure words like ‫חשמל‬, a word which occurs three times in the early chapters of Ezekiel (Ezek. 1:4, 27; 8:2). In the collection of material about the meaning of ‫ חשמל‬in b.Hag. 13b (cf. y.Hag. 77a) warnings are given by means of stories about the effects on the inexperienced, of imaginative engagement with aspects of Ezekiel’s text, such as ‫חשמל‬: For behold there was once a child who expounded (the mysteries of) ‫חשמל‬, and a fire went forth and consumed him. … The rabbis taught: There was once a child who was reading at his teacher’s house the Book of Ezekiel and he apprehended what ‫ חשמל‬was, whereupon a fire went forth from ‫ חשמל‬and consumed him. (b.Hag. 13a, cf. y.Hag. 77a)

47

Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 3–4. Quoted in Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 133–134. 49 I. Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, AGJU 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1980). 50 M. Lieb, The Visionary Mode: Biblical Prophecy, Hermeneutics, and Cultural Change (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991). 48

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The meaning of the text may have been elucidated as the result of the interpreter’s own visualisation of the text – a ‘seeing again’ of what Ezekiel had seen. The ‘picture-making words’ of the Apocalypse, full as it is of indicators of colour and movement, have stimulated the imagination and its translation into visual images and representations in paintings. They are ‘picture-making words’ (verba mirifica storiarum).51 Botticelli describes his picture ‘Mystic Nativity’ as a graphē, and one might construe the ambiguity in his use of that word to consider his picture, headed at is with an inscription in Greek, as a writing in pictorial form, itself an exegetical essay on Rev. 11– 12 in which the image captures synchronically what text can only depict diachronically.52

35.5. Concluding Reflections I touched briefly on the interpretation of Joseph Mede, who represents a way of interpreting the Apocalypse that regards the text as some kind of eschatological map. As we have seen, such eschatological issues are not absent in Winstanley’s work, which we have considered, but that is not their only, nor even their primary focus. The identity of actors in the eschatological drama takes a subordinate place to the attempt to understand the role of a prophetic remnant through history. Similarly, Blake’s use of the images from Revelation in his apocalyptic drama weaves Beast, Babylon, lakes of fire and lamb into a new myth, recognisably connected with the original and obviously inspired by it, but one which better captures the essential point of its subjectmatter than replicates its detail. By way of contrast, for Mede the detail of the language, its structure and the primacy of its significance is what counts, rather than the general tenor of its message and its power to inspire the ‘Poetic Genius’ of a later age. Winstanley and Blake evince a different relationship to the text of the Bible as compared with the interpretation of Clavis Apocalyptica. The niceties of the detail of the text matter – crucially so. It is the ‘key’ by which interpretation is possible and the unfolding of history can more accurately take place. By contrast, Winstanley and Blake take a more rhapsodic and creative view of the text, albeit in different ways. Winstanley, more explicitly, Blake less obviously, weave together different kinds of representations of Revelation, Winstanley calling on a variety of different biblical texts, most of which are familiar to exegetes of Revelation. In so doing, however, he is not merely engaging in an exercise in exegetical gymnastics. His task is to understand his overall theme. Whether he is successful in doing that, or his 51

Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 152–153. See C. Rowland, ‘Imagining the Apocalypse’, NTS 51 (2005): 303–327 = above, pp. 510–528. 52

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meandering digressions detract rather than complement his main message, is a moot point. Be that as it may, the identification of the witnesses, and the nature of their witness and its vindication, is the theme to which he returns. Likewise, Blake, while being less explicitly devoted to expounding the Apocalypse, draws on the various images and their meaning and significance in their original context in the narration of the redemptive drama, the reasons for its necessity, its tortured route to its final climax, the barriers to its fulfilment, not least in the case of one of the main redemptive figures, and its surprising all-inclusive culmination. The examples I have looked at exemplify different facets of the interpretation of the Apocalypse down the centuries. The quest to be true to the text and its structure is the hallmark of Mede’s work. By its historical references it continues in a rich tradition going back to the Middle Ages. The political appropriation of apocalyptic images, of which Revelation is itself a part, dependent as it is on the inspiration of the Book of Daniel, is well represented particularly at moments of historical crisis in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The way in which this allusive biblical book opened up the door for other ways of construing political upheaval is no better exemplified than in the application of the text to the inner journey of the religious life. That too has a long history, but the influence of Jacob Boehme set in train a pattern of mystical interpretation, which echoed the contemporary application to the religious life going back to the writings of Methodius. But a contribution of this study to the history of the interpretation of the Apocalypse has been a brief consideration of the long meditation on the Apocalypse by Gerrard Winstanley, in which the meaning of the witnesses of Rev. 11 takes centre stage. I have written about Winstanley’s biblical interpretation, including the importance of apocalyptic images. This work, which is more discursive than the later writings anticipates themes which would appear in those which are more widely known. What comes across is a grasp of die Sache of the apocalyptic images, which relates to an ongoing prophetic witness, with all its consequences, with which Winstanley identifies himself. We shall never know about the genesis of the Apocalypse and any suggestions are tentative, but the important work done by Mary Carruthers on ‘visualisation’ offers a possible way of construing a visually suggestive text, whose intertextual links are so strong. Indeed, as the doyen of apocalyptic interpreters, Joachim of Fiore, tells us it was the mixture of imagination and exegesis which led to what he considered his own interpretative breakthrough in understanding the text during his meditation, when he had what he called ‘a revelation of the fullness of the Apocalypse and of the complete agreement of the Old and New Testaments perceived with clear understanding by the mind’s eye’.53 53

M. Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 22.

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Engagement with Blake’s depictions of the Apocalypse, which are an important part of the series of watercolours he painted for Thomas Butts, takes us to the issue of the reception of the Apocalypse, and in particular the appropriateness of visual images as ways of interpreting the text. These have a long history going back at least as far as the earliest illuminations of the Apocalypse, such as we find in the Trier Apocalypse. Recent work in England on the visual aspect of the interpretation of the Apocalypse by Natasha O’Hear and Ian Boxall have highlighted the importance of this and shown how reception history complements in many different ways conventional exegesis.54 While O’Hear’s concern is with late medieval illuminations across the whole of the text, Boxall focuses on one verse, the location of John’s vision, still, of course, a site of pilgrimage and commemoration. Their work highlights the singular appropriateness of reception history, indicating that this is not just another fad in hermeneutics but integral to understanding the text. It is after all the most visual of texts. Indeed, there are parts of it (and the differing levels of imaginative trigger gives pause for thought) which seem to beckon the reader to do more than just read, but visualise for themselves using the graphic images of locusts (Rev. 9:7), or of swords appearing from the mouth (1:16), and the like. They are ways not of expressing the literal but conjuring up a very visual scene.

54 See N. O’Hear, Contrasting Images of the Book of Revelation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Art: A Case Study in Visual Exegesis, Oxford Theological Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Boxall, Patmos.

36. ‘Pride & Vanity of the imagination, That disdains to follow this World’s Fashion’: Apocalypticism in the Age of Reason Apocalyptic ideas formed a significant, but too often, neglected, part of early modern theology. In the seventeenth century the interpretation of the Book of Revelation had some distinguished advocates, particularly Joseph Mede, whose Clavis Apocalyptica was so important for the prophetic studies of Isaac Newton.1 In addition to the more conventional wisdom of Mede, however, there was also an undercurrent of esotericism typified by John Dee (1527–1608), for whom Enoch was a paragon of the kind of communion with the angels that he actualised.2 Enoch, briefly mentioned in Gen. 5:22–24, was a channel of revelations and offered a model of access to heavenly wisdom. A century later, Jane Lead (1624–1704), part of a group responsible for introducing the ideas of the apocalyptic seer, Jacob Boehme, into English theology, was attracted to the figure of Enoch as her work The Enochian Walks with God Found out by a Spiritual traveller whose Face towards Mount-Sion Above indicates.3 The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the emergence of a pattern of interpretation of the Book of Revelation in which the visionary variety of its apocalyptic images was transformed either by relating the visions exclusively to the situation in which John of Patmos was writing, thereby reducing its contemporary significance (e.g. Hugo Grotius), or mathematical precision to turn the visions into a systematic outline of salvation history. With regard to 1 C. Burdon, The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unravelling, 1700–1834 (London: Macmillan, 1997); J. Kovacs and C. Rowland, Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 7–10. 2 G. Parry, The Arch-conjuror of England: John Dee (London: Yale University Press, 2011); G. Szönyi, John Dee’s Occultism: Magical Exaltation Through Powerful Signs (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004). 3 C. Rowland, ‘Blake, Enoch, and Emerging Biblical Criticism’, in Sibyls, Scriptures, and Scrolls: John Collins at Seventy, eds. J. Baden et al., JSJSup 175 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), 1145–1165 = below, pp. 720–738; A. Hessayon, Jane Lead and her Transnational Legacy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and idem and S. Apetrei, eds., An Introduction to Jacob Boehme: Four Centuries of Thought and Reception (New York: Routledge, 2014).

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the latter, the English commentator Joseph Mede’s Clavis Apocalyptica, in particular, was influential, taken up with alacrity by other learned commentators, not least by Isaac Newton, who pays due regard to the influence of his distinguished Cambridge predecessor. The effect of the commentaries of Mede and Newton was to reduce the Book of Revelation by decoding its images and rendering them in the form of a theology of history with its repetitions and overlaps duly explained. The detail of this is less important than the effect it had in curbing enthusiasm of those who found in the Apocalypse a licence for their own visions and the challenge which they offered to respectable religion. Throughout the history of the interpretation of biblical apocalyptic texts there have been very differing kinds of interpretation. On the one hand there has been the relating of the images to specific persons and events as the picturesque apocalyptic images are ‘decoded’ and usually the true meaning of the text is elucidated. Whether that is in respect of the Beast or the Whore being linked to a particular person or institution, or a moment in the Apocalypse such as the opening of a seal, the blast of the trumpet or the pouring forth of a bowl is related to a particular historical moment. Thereby once the apocalyptic code is cracked, then the apocalyptic sequence can be rendered as a narrative of the Last Things. On the other hand there are interpretations which apply the text to the interpreter’s own circumstances, to inform understanding and action. Part of this pattern of interpretation includes the ways in which later visionaries are prompted by the apocalyptic images to have their own visions or see again things similar to what had appeared to John in his visions. A feature of this period is that there was much ‘enthusiasm’, more of ‘immediate revelation’ as a mode of understanding and engaging with the divine, which subordinates the position of institutions, Scripture and convention. It may occasionally involve disregard of, or disobedience to, law but need not and indeed arguably even in the most extreme cases includes some of the main ethical themes of the law. As such, while its primary concern is with strands of theology from the early modern and modern period, it concerns an issue which goes all the way back to the New Testament and indeed is a feature one may find much more widely in the study of religion. Not prioritising rules and regulations, sitting loose to law and custom, even appearing to be sexually immoral, blasphemous or offending against convention are often symptomatic of prioritising another source of authority, which is experiential and indeed apocalyptic. It is an individual’s claim to knowledge based on divine inspiration. The conviction that God has spoken by dream or revelation, and indeed is revealed independently of established patterns of discerning the divine will, is evident in different parts of the New Testament itself, as in the passages from the later Christian tradition, which I will consider. As a result, inspiration then is given priority over obedience to

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convention. As we shall see when we consider Blake’s writing, that should not lead us to think that he naïvely supposed that appeal to ‘Memory’ wasn’t crucial to him. No one used his intellectual ancestors’ work to better effect, in reaction and as an inspiration than Blake.4 Milton, Swedenborg, not to mention the Bible, all influenced Blake, stimulated his imagination and concentrated his mind to articulate his resistance to them. This essay starts by outlining a dominant understanding of the inadequacy of the visions unless they are attended by careful rational explanation in line with Christian tradition. The contrast is then offered, with reference to the trial of Anne Hutchinson and the writings of her contemporary Gerrard Winstanley, followed by a particular consideration of the apocalypticism of William Blake. It concludes with a consideration of the indebtedness of these apocalyptic themes to the New Testament followed by some hermeneutical reflections.

36.1. ‘The soul of the vision is the doctrine itself, from whence faith is born’ No words better encapsulate the triumph of reason over apocalypse than some words of John Calvin in his commentary on Exod. 33:19: ‘the soul of the vision is the doctrine itself, from whence faith is born’.5 No more clear-cut statement of this can be found than in Calvin’s sermon on Exodus and his writings on Ezekiel’s visions. In the following extract from his commentary on Exod. 33:19 Calvin lucidly explains why visions are so much less satisfactory and indeed less important for Christianity than words, God’s manifestation to Moses ‘in a vision of brief duration’. Let it be observed that although a vision was exhibited to his eyes, the main point was in the voice because true knowledge of God is received more by the ears than by the eyes. A promise indeed is given that he shall behold God, but the latter blessing is more excellent: that is that God will proclaim his name so that Moses may know him more by his voice than by his face. For speechless visions would be cold and altogether evanescent if they do not borrow efficacy from speech (ex sermone). Therefore just as the logicians compare a syllogism to the body and the reasoning which it includes, to the soul, so – properly speaking – the soul of a vision is the doctrine (doctrina) itself, from whence faith is born. (Calvini Opera 25, 109) 4 Indeed, he mentions as much (e.g. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 5, E35; 21–22, E42 [E plus page number(s) refers to Erdman’s edition of Blake’s works, see below, p. 783]). See H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 5 Calvin’s commentary on Exod. 33:19, quoted in E.A. de Boer, John Calvin on the Visions of Ezekiel: Historical and Hermeneutical Studies in John Calvin’s ‘sermons inédits’ (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 107–108; see also A. Mein, ‘Seeing Ezekiel’s Visions in Early Modern England’ (paper presented at the annual meeting of the European Association of Biblical Studies, Amsterdam, 23 July 2012).

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Calvin wrote no commentary on the Book of Revelation, though his contemporary, Martin Luther’s, view of the Book of Revelation in his earlier preface to his translation of the New Testament in 1522 called the book neither ‘apostolic nor prophetic’ because ‘Christ is not taught or known in it’. This probably typifies them both. Luther’s major criticism of Revelation in both his first and second version of his Preface, and what makes it ‘neither apostolic nor prophetic’, is that its visionary character means that it does not ‘prophesy in clear, plain words’, as do Christ and the apostles. In the later Preface to Revelation, Luther took up a similar theme and pointed to three types of prophecy in the Bible, one without imagery, which is in every way preferable as teaching prophetically the way of God, the second in images but with interpretation, and the third without either words or interpretation, but in images and figures, of which Revelation is an example. As long as this kind of prophecy remains without interpretation, Luther describes it as ‘a concealed and mute prophecy’, which is of little benefit to Christendom.6 So, what we have here is a declaration of the superiority of the transparency of God’s communication. Apocalypse is about doctrine not the vague ambiguities of visions and dreams. Calvin’s view of Ezekiel’s visions, for example, is not the details of the visions so much as that to which the vision is directed and with what intention. The role of the responsible interpreter is to discern the vision’s aim and particularly the teaching to which it points. The problem with apocalyptic texts is their ambiguity contrasting with the transparency of the gospel, a view which is echoed by Luther in his various comments on the Book of Revelation. This view indicates not only a reaction to the visual culture of the medieval period but also a suspicion of enthusiasm and prophecy which was a live issue, given the prophetic claims made by those on the radical wing of the Reformation.7 This attitude could not be more different to that of William Blake who championed ‘that which is not too explicit as the fittest for instruction’, with the Bible as a book which appealed primarily to the imagination: The wisest of the Ancients considerd what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction, because it rouzes the faculties to act. I name Moses, Solomon, Esop, Homer, Plato … … Why is the Bible more Entertaining & Instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination, which is Spiritual Sensation, & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason. (Blake’s ‘Letter to Trusler’, 1799, E702–703)

The problem with apocalypticism was that the language of vision and appeal to an authority which transcended social status, conventional wisdom and the established institutions, was deemed to be threatening to social order. Two aspects of the theological background are important for understanding the 6

Kovacs and Rowland, Revelation, 44–45. P. Matheson, The Imaginative World of the Reformation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000). 7

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suspicion of apocalypticism in the age of reason. The emergence of a historical approach to the Book of Revelation and the subordination of apocalyptic images to the relative clarity of words are two features of the early modern period which characterise the ways in which apocalypse was managed.

36.2. ‘An Immediate Revelation’: Anne Hutchinson and Gerrard Winstanley An event in 1637 encapsulates the theme of this chapter and the situation of apocalypticism in an age of reason. At the climax of the trial of Anne Hutchinson in New England in 1637 there is a crucial exchange in which after a prudent and careful testimony Anne Hutchinson confesses ‘speaking what in my conscience I know to be truth’. She compares the inner intimations of the divine will, which supersede the written command, by comparing her situation with that of Abraham and is further interrogated by the Deputy Governor: Mrs. H. How did Abraham know that it was God that bid him offer his son, being a breach of the sixth commandment? Dep. Gov. By an immediate voice. Mrs. H. So to me by an immediate revelation. Dep. Gov. How! an immediate revelation. Mrs. H. By the voice of his own spirit to my soul. The governor’s reaction typifies the fear of those in authority, and indeed the intellectual elite more generally, of ‘enthusiasm’, which apocalyptic visions and their subversive potential epitomise. Hutchinson’s public appeal to the authority of ‘immediate revelation’ based on her conviction of her communing with the divine, subordinated the position of institutions like law, religion and tradition to an inferior status. That proved to be intolerable and opened the door to antinomianism, the tyranny by ‘sort of men who follow Anabaptism, Familism, Antinomianism, and other fanatic dreams’.8 John Winthrop thanked divine providence for making Hutchinson ‘lay open her self and the ground of all these disturbances to be by revelation’.9 She demonstrated what

8

On Divorce 14; M. Mayordomo et al., ‘Antinomianism’, EBR 2:233–245. D.D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), 337, 341; Mayordomo et al., ‘Antinomianism’, EBR 2:245; M.G. Ditmore, ‘A Prophetess in Her Own Country: An Exegesis of Anne Hutchinson’s “Immediate Revelation”’, The William and Mary Quarterly 57 (2000): 349–392. 9

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governor Winthrop considered ‘bottomlesse, revelations, as came without any word [of Scripture] or without the sense of the word’.10 The 1630s Antinomian Controversy in New England is the tip of the iceberg of a network of beliefs, which reverberated around Old England in the following decades, in which the primary place was given to the apocalyptic, viewed in its epistemological, rather than eschatological, sense. For example, the importance of ‘immediate revelations’ is confirmed and justified by Anne Hutchinson’s English contemporary Gerrard Winstanley who wrote ‘if you say that visions and revelations are ceased … then you erre mightily’ … (‘Truth Lifting his Head’, CHL 1:41011). Gal. 1 is a chapter which is alluded to in Anne Hutchinson’s similar confession (Hutchinson’s words ‘after he was pleased to reveal himself to me’, Gal. 1:15, cf. Isa. 49:1).12 Gerrard Winstanley described his conversion to another kind of Christian profession using language from Gal. 1 and Revelation. He wrote of the way in which previously he was a devout Christian but ‘God was pleased to reveal his son in me [cf. Gal. 1:16] and caused me to speak what I know from an inward light and power within’ (The New Law of Righteousnes, CHL 1:567). Thus like Paul he entered on a new phase of his life. Paul the apostle had used words of Jeremiah and Isaiah to describe what had happened to him (cf. Gal. 1:15 where Paul alludes to Isa. 49:1 and Jer. 1:5). Paul’s words offered Winstanley a way of articulating his own experience. Prime among the revelations given to him and determinative for him and his companions embarking on the project for which they are remembered, Winstanley was prompted by divine revelation, ‘That the earth shall be made a common Treasury of livelihood to whole mankind, without respect of persons’. That revelation included also a commission to act, as it had done for the prophets of old (Ezek. 2:1–3; Isa. 6:5–9; Jer. 1:6–10). Winstanley too was impelled by the immediate revelation to ‘declare it all abroad, which I did obey’.13 Winstanley begins his treatise The Saints Paradice with a quotation from Jer. 31:34 (‘And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord’). It is not the verse which mentions the law written on the heart (the previous verse). The quotation is put to use as part of Winstanley’s challenge to acceptance of ‘the

10

M.P. Winship, The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson: Puritans Divided (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005), 111–112. 11 CHL plus page number(s) refers to Corns’s et al. edition of Winstanley’s works, see below, p. 783. 12 Ditmore, ‘A Prophetess’, 383. 13 A Watch-Word to the City of London and the armie, CHL 2:80, noted by Ditmore, ‘A Prophetess’, 352, n. 5, from the earlier The New Law of Righteousnes, CHL 1:513.

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tradition from the mouths & pen of others’. Indeed, the whole treatise is a challenge to those ‘professors’ who may know the Bible well and its history, but ‘who worshipped a God, but neither knew who he was, nor where he was’. What is required is ‘a teacher within yourselves (which is Spirit)’ who ‘will teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance [echoes here of John 14:26, 1 Cor. 2:14–15, in addition to Jeremiah], so that you shall not need to run after men for instruction’. Winstanley denies the authenticity of even ‘the most glorious Preacher, or professor of literal gospel’ who may end up as ‘the subtilest hypocrites, if they do not know the power of God’. It is not the words of the letter of the Bible, for example adherence to what is ‘called the ten Commandments’, for ‘it is the manifestations of God in all, or any one of his attributes, shining forth upon, and in his creature’. Milton believed that ‘On the introduction of the gospel, or new covenant through faith in Christ, the whole of the preceding covenant, in other words the entire Mosaic law, was abolished. Jer. xxxi.31–33’ (De Doctrina Christiana, in Complete Prose Works 6:525–532), and that ‘we ought to believe what in our conscience we apprehend the Scripture to say, though the visible church with all her doctors gainsay’.14 Among Winstanley’s more radical contemporaries were Laurence Clarkson and Abiezer Coppe. Coppe was one of the most colourful and controversial figures of his day, and his A Fiery Flying Roll, which provoked parliament’s censure and later the Blasphemy Act of 1650, suggests that he was more interested in challenging the conventional hierarchy of values as a result of his overwhelming experience of being indwelt by God. Coppe in A Fiery Flying Roll 2:18 writes ‘Why should I turn away mine eyes from mine own flesh? Why should I not break bread to the hungry, whoever they be?’15 Particularly evident in mid-seventeenth century radical English nonconformist theology is the assumption that God is present in all, so there is no need to attend to another source of authority. Richard Coppin, a writer who may have influenced Abiezer Coppe, wrote: ‘God is all in one; and so in everyone; the same all which is in me, is in thee; the same God which dwels in me dwels in another; and in the same fullness as he is in me, he is in everyone’.16 This is echoed in a reminiscence of Blake, by Henry Crabb Robinson. When asked about the divinity of Christ, Blake responded ‘he is

14 Treatise of Civil Power, see C. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber, 1977), 314. 15 Cf. Coppe’s words in ‘A Single Eye All Light’ quoted in Mayordomo et al., ‘Antinomianism’, EBR 2:245: ‘we has as lief be dead drunk every day of the weeke, and lye with whores i’ the market place, and account these as good actions as taking the poore abused, enslaved ploughmans money from him’. 16 Divine Teachings, quoted in A.L. Morton, The Everlasting Gospel: A Study in the Sources of William Blake (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1958), 58.

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the only God’ – but then he added – ‘And so am I and so are you’.17 It parallels ‘The worship of God is. Honouring his gifts in other men each according to his genius’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 22, E43; repeated in Jerusalem 91:7, E250). Such reflect the conviction of the innate character of the individual human person as being indwelt by God.

36.3. ‘Jesus Was All Virtue, Acted from Impulse, Not from Rules’: William Blake and the Priority Given to ‘Inspiration’ over ‘Memory’ Blake never uses the word apocalypse or apocalyptic in his writings, but his contemporary, S.T. Coleridge, fascinated as he was by what he read of Blake’s work, wrote: ‘A man of Genius … a mystic emphatically. You perhaps smile at my calling another Poet, a Mystic; but verily I am in the very mire of common-place common-sense compared with Mr Blake, apo- or rather anacalyptic Poet, and Painter!’18 Coleridge’s assessment captures not only Blake’s indebtedness to the Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, but the apocalyptic character of his texts and images, whose intent was (to use Blake’s words) to cleanse the doors of perception, to lift the veil on the everyday world and see it in the light of eternity. This was the heart of Blake’s prophetic vocation. William Blake was not alone in seeing himself as a prophet. His prophetic contemporaries, Richard Brothers (1757–1824) and Joanna Southcott (1750– 1814), offer contrasting pictures of apocalypticism at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.19 Brothers believed that he was the prophet who would be revealed to the Jews as the one to lead them to the land of Israel, and that their government under God would be committed to him, as the agent of the everlasting Covenant with David. He expected this event to take place in 1794 or 1798. Later in his life Brothers expressed his exasperation that this did not take place as he had expected, and in so doing he manifests a theologically rather conventional acceptance of

17

G.E. Bentley, Blake Records: Documents (1714–1841) Concerning the Life of William Blake (1757–1827) and his Family, Incorporating Blake Records (1969), Blake Records Supplement (1988), and Extensive Discoveries since 1988, 2nd edn. (New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2004), 696. 18 C. Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 241. 19 S. Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 4; C. Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians in the French Revolution in France and England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).

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divine inscrutability in respect of the unfulfilled prophetic promises.20 Brothers’s reading of the Scriptures, inspired by revealed knowledge, opened up their true meaning. He it was who expounded the ‘strange’ and ‘difficult’ allusions made by John of the Apocalypse, whose true meaning had been sealed until ‘the full time’ when the appointed person (Brothers) would make known the message. Brothers, like Southcott, turned to Rev. 12 and the vision of the Woman Clothed with the Sun. He saw himself as the man-child, identified with Shiloh, who was to come, identified in the King James Version marginal notes and indeed Jewish interpretation as the messiah. So, whereas Southcott throughout her prophetic activity linked herself with Rev. 12 and the Woman Clothed with the Sun and finally identified herself with the woman who would give birth to the messiah, Brothers thought that he was the messianic child and the naśiʾ, the prince, mentioned in the prophecy of Ezekiel (chs. 37, 44 and 45). His prophecy made quite an impact and was widely distributed, and his followers included figures like the orientalist and Member of Parliament, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed (25 May 1751–18 February 1830). Not surprisingly, his activities attracted the attention of those in power. While he was in an asylum, his prophetic understanding moved from the urgent and violent rhetoric of millennial doom to a more optimistic, utopian vision. The self-consciously marginal and displaced prophet of the earlier writings became God’s agent; the appointed ruler in a new ‘Hebrew Constitution’ for the Jewish people, a key actor in his own apocalyptic drama; and so one who had a significant part in the fulfilment of the scriptural promises. Some of Brothers’s followers later became followers of Southcott.21 Joanna Southcott was born in Devon. In 1792 she claimed to have heard the Spirit of God, warning her that the coming of Christ was imminent. From the start of her prophetic ministry until her death she claimed to be the ‘Woman Clothed with the Sun’ of Rev. 12:1 and the Bride of Christ (Rev. 19:7). Indeed, Southcott believed she was called to be the one whose seed was ‘to bruise the serpent’ (Gen. 3:15). Southcott’s theology was based on her interpretation of the Fall. God’s purposes in redemption were to be fulfilled in the advent of a second Eve who would fulfil the salvation begun by Christ. Like Richard Brothers, Southcott saw herself as the authentic interpreter of the Scriptures. While she affirmed that all truth was contained in 20 R. Brothers, Wisdom and Duty (London: George Riebau, 1805), 35–36; D. Madden, The Paddington Prophet: Richard Brothers’s Journey to Jerusalem (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 21 J. Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992); Madden, The Paddington Prophet; P. Lockley, Visionary Religion and Radicalism in Early Industrial England: From Southcott to Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); M. Niblett, Prophecy and the Politics of Salvation in Late Georgian England: The Theology and Apocalyptic Vision of Joanna Southcott (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015).

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Scripture, she believed that its meaning had not been made clear, and its right interpretation awaited the right moment in salvation history when its import could be revealed. In this she based herself on biblical precedents like Dan. 12:9: ‘for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end’. While she always considered the Bible to have a unique authority, the relationship between her inspired insights and the Bible itself was often ambiguous. It is nowhere better illuminated than in a remarkable communication received by Southcott in April 1806. It followed a dream, in which she dreamt of binding her personal Bible tight with cord before boiling it, only for it to rise up out of the water. As she came to open the boiled Bible it began to disintegrate, such that she required a second Bible in order to read the passages in the Psalms where the first had been opened. The meaning of the dream, revealed by the Spirit, was that the binding of the first Bible referred to the way in which its meaning was hidden (‘perfect so is the mystery of my Bible [that] it is a Book bound up from the wisdom of all men’). The opening of the boiled Bible at the second Psalm referred to the contemporary visitation of the Spirit to Southcott. The second Bible was none other than ‘thy Prophecies, which all men will find is the Word of God, like the Bible that is bound up and sealed up’. Not only was this new activity of the Spirit necessary ‘to throw open all mysteries and make every truth clear, before the Bible can be discerned to what its perfect meaning is’ but also Southcott’s prophecies achieved a status on a par with authoritative Scripture.22 Initially, Southcott’s activity initiated a John the Baptist-like, preparatory movement summoning people to be sealed in imitation of Rev. 6–7 in preparation for the imminent judgement of God.23 In the last year of her life, however, she believed that she was called to actualise her vocation as the Woman Clothed with the Sun of Rev. 12 and literally to give birth to the messiah. She believed that she was pregnant with the male child whom she identified with the enigmatic Shiloh mentioned in Gen. 49:10. That conviction had a remarkable effect on her followers. She died supposedly giving birth to her messianic child. Her followers rapidly believed that, as the text of Revelation says, the messianic child was caught up to heaven. After her death there emerged a series of prophetic movements, which spanned three continents and persist in different forms to the present day. That set in train a series of interpretations of the child’s future coming.

22 Panacea Society (now known as the Panacea Charitable Trust, Bedford, UK), MSS 114, 212–220, ‘Communication given to Joanna Southcott, April 3rd 1806, On Boiling the Bible’. 23 J.K. Hopkins, A Woman to Deliver Her People: Joanna Southcott and English Millenarianism in an Era of Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 20, 33; Juster, Doomsayers, 246–258.

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A younger contemporary of Brothers, Southcott and Blake was John Ward, alias ‘Zion’ Ward (1781–1837). ‘Zion’ was a follower of Joanna Southcott who later believed himself to be her successor. In 1828 he claimed that Joanna had visited him and given instructions to pass on to her surviving followers that they should accept Ward as their leader. Amongst his several claims, he asserted that in himself God was present as he identified himself with the messianic child born to Southcott in 1814. Ward mixed radical politics with millenarianism and theological assertiveness, as Philip Lockley has shown.24 He spoke at the time of agitations connected with the Reform Bill in 1831, attracting large audiences to the Blackfriars Rotunda theatre in London. By appearing in such venues, he became involved with, and possibly influenced by Richard Carlile. Ward asserted that the Bible was not history but allegory and a prediction of the coming messiah, namely, himself. His message was universalist and directed to those who ‘knew no peace’, needing to deny ‘priestcraft’ and accept a message that God is love. He rejected heaven as a discrete place, hell and eternal damnation, the virgin birth and the existence of the historical Jesus. Perhaps not surprisingly, he was imprisoned for blasphemy in 1832. All these figures offer contrasting, though overlapping, examples of the way in which biblical images and figures could be interpreted and applied to themselves in the context of what they deemed to be a critical moment in history. Ward’s claims seem the most extreme, in effect challenging the orthodox Christian understanding of a decisive fulfilment of prophecy in Christ 1800 years before. But all of them take the Bible and apply it in different ways to themselves. Its contents are seen to have special significance for their interpretation of their persons. Several commentators over the years regarded Blake as a paradigmatic apocalyptic enthusiast.25 In his amusing, satirical, work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, we find a challenge to dualism and intriguing echoes of the views of Carpocrates according to Irenaeus.26 In it Blake offers his most explicit and succinct statement about Jesus as the pioneer of radical religion who acted ‘from impulse not from rules’:

24

Lockley, Visionary Religion. E.g. Morton, The Everlasting Gospel; E.P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 26 Adv. haer. 1.25.4: ‘they maintain that things are evil or good, simply in virtue of human opinion’, cf. ‘From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason[.] Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 3, E34). 25

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The Devil answer’d: … did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbath’s God? murder those who were murder’d because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labour of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defence before Pilate? covet when he pray’d for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust off their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, acted from impulse, not from rules.27

It is the critical moment in a debate which persuades the angel to come over to the side of the devils, given that the Jesus whom the angel thought was on his side, as a supporter of the religion of commandments, was in fact an exponent of all that he had been opposing. It is easy to be put off by William Blake’s hyperbole here and as a result fail to see that he has put his finger on something very important in the Jesus tradition, even if one cannot go along with the details of his exegesis. William Blake’s view of Jesus as one who ‘acted from impulse not from rules’ exhibits the same kind of prioritisation of the subjective experience as compared with the subservience to authoritative texts or tradition. Though Blake does not use the word ‘impulse’ very frequently, he probably meant ‘divine impulse’. The priority of ‘intimate impulses’ from God is an issue wrestled with by Milton in Samson Agonistes: ‘That what I motion’d was of God; I knew From intimate impulse’.28 It was part of the language of the activity of the Spirit by the prominent seventeenth-century puritan divine, John Owen who in fact brings together the words used by both Hutchinson and Blake in his phrase ‘an immediate revelation or divine impulse and impression’.29 Elsewhere in the Blake corpus the incomplete verses of The Everlasting Gospel (ca 1820) show Blake contrasting ‘Inspiration’ with ‘Memory’, a regular feature of his writing (e.g. in the Preface found in some versions of Milton a Poem, E95). Jesus lived by the inspiration of the Spirit and exhibited the kind of religious enthusiasm which was despised by the wise of the world:

27

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 24 (E43). Samson Agonistes 222–223, cf. ‘didst plead / Divine impulsion prompting how [he] might’st / Find some occasion to infest [Israel’s] foes’, 421–423, cf. 300–320; R. Grey, The Complicity of Imagination: The American Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 217. 29 John Owen, Pneumatologia (1674), 184, cf. ‘If by some revelation or impulse of the Spirit’ (Sermon 14, ‘The testimony of the church is not the only nor the chief reason of our believing the scripture to be the word of God’). 28

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Like dr. Priestly & [Sir Isaac del.] Bacon & Newton – Poor Spiritual Knowledge is not worth a button! … For thus the Gospel Sir Isaac confutes: ‘God can only be known by his Attributes; And as for the Indwelling of the Holy Ghost Or of Christ & his Father, it’s all a boast And Pride & Vanity of the imagination, That disdains to follow this World’s Fashion …30 Francis Bacon, John Locke and Isaac Newton, pioneers of empirical philosophy and modern science, are a trinity of names which are referred to throughout Blake’s work as representing that occluded vision which Blake criticises and demands it should be extended by imaginative engagement with the world. In a Letter to his friend Thomas Butts (1802) Blake wrote of ‘Newton’s sleep’ instead proposing the need for fourfold vision which contrasts with the single vision of the empiricists: Now I fourfold vision see And a fourfold vision is given to me Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And threefold in soft Beulah sight And twofold Always. May God us keep From Single vision & Newtons sleep. (E722) The charge often made against enthusiasts is that ‘they placed exclusive emphasis on the infusion of grace as an emotional experience, so that once they possessed that emotional conviction, no other principle of ethics could be consulted to question it, as they discarded the notions of reason and of ecclesiastic tradition’.31 This is probably an appropriate assessment of the position taken by Anne Hutchinson. On the other hand, Blake argued that there was a balance between reason and Spirit. Thus Blake writes of the inspiration of the ‘comforter or Desire that Reason may have Ideas to build on’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 6, E35). In writing of the Bible he advocates an immediate appeal to the imagination though reason has its part to play.32 Notwithstanding the rhetoric of the simple contrast between ‘Inspiration’ and ‘Memory’, we should not neglect the complexity of Blake’s work. It should not surprise us, given that for him ‘Contraries’ are the very stuff of existence (‘Without Contraries is no progression’, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 3, E34). As already mentioned, engagement with his intellectual 30

The Everlasting Gospel (E519); Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 192. Gertrude Huehns, quoted in J. Moskal, Blake, Ethics, and Forgiveness (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 14. 32 ‘Letter to Trusler’ (1799), E703, quoted above, p. 559. 31

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ancestors’ work by way of critical response and as a stimulus to his own creativity, is central to Blake’s genius. That is how the dialectic of ‘Contraries’ works for him.33 He mentions as much (e.g. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 5, E35; 21–22, E42). The dialectic between constraint and freedom, Memory as well as Inspiration is crucial. We misunderstand Blake’s apocalyptic thought unless we appreciate the importance of the dialectic between desire and reason, Inspiration and Memory, the prolific and the Devourer. It is not about ‘Inspiration’ negating Memory for it is the very dialectic between the two, which allows the motor of inspiration to function. How else can we understand the way in which Blake engages with the Bible, with Milton and many of his predecessors unless we see someone who allowed ‘Vision’, Inspiration, Apocalypse the prime place to initiate the process which is then worked and thought about and indeed painted and printed. Blake’s revealing words in his Descriptive Catalogue show us an artist who accepted the impotence of the constraints alongside inspiration: The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art. … Leave out this l[i]ne and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist. (Descriptive Catalogue 64, E550)

There is a constant need to ‘transcend the closed circle’ to borrow words of John Bowker,34 so that the Poetic or Prophetic Character (There is No Natural Religion, b, Conclusion, E3) can break the vice like grip of ‘the same dull round’ (There is No Natural Religion, E2). Jon Mee has rightly pointed out in Blake’s later works that there is emphasis on the need for ‘the constant casting off of “Selfhood” … Too great a concern for the continuity of the self could only limit the opportunity of enthusiasm to harvest new forms of knowledge and identity’.35 Whereas Sir Joshua Reynolds warned aspiring painters that ‘mere enthusiasm will carry you but a little way’ (1769) Blake in his annotations to Reynolds’s lectures wrote: ‘Meer Enthusiasm is the All in All!’ (E645) For Blake, ‘What may seem “meer possibilities”’, as Blake puts it in Jerusalem, ‘to those who enter into them they seem the only substances’ (Jerusalem 13:64–65, E158). Piously regulated ‘enthusiasm’ was acceptable to someone like Coleridge though he warned against any tendency to subversiveness, whereas for Blake enthusiasm acted as ‘a Source of Immortal Joy even in this world’ (E705).36 Blake 33 34

Bloom, Anxiety of Influence. J. Bowker, Why Religions Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015),

162. 35 J. Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 258–259. 36 Mee, Romanticism, 263.

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held a positive view of Teresa of Avila (Jerusalem 72:50, E227), whereas Coleridge wrote disparagingly of Teresa’s enthusiasm, ‘she was a Woman’ (Notebooks, iii.3911), who were given to such dangerous ecstasies. What he preferred was a philosophy, which ‘never suffers, much less causes or even occasions, its Disciples to forget themselves, lost and scattered in sensible Objects disjoined or as disjoined from themselves’ (iii.3935).37

36.4. Echoing the New Testament Such ideas have the roots in the Bible, particularly the New Testament.38 As the messianic agent whose vocation was endorsed by a heavenly vision, Paul therein subordinated all human tradition to that apocalyptic moment (Gal. 1:1). Thinking of oneself as a prophet, rather than merely interpreting authoritative prophetic texts, characterises, many aspects of the New Testament. In the New Testament the prophetic is bound up with the messianic and the eschatological, which pervades the New Testament as a whole. It is explicitly found in one of the programmatic biblical texts used by Jesus according to the Gospel of Luke. In Luke 4:18–21 Jesus reportedly applied to himself Isa. 61, where the prophet describes himself as one who is anointed to bring good news to the poor and to bind up the broken-hearted and asserts that he now fulfils that role. Both Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott, in different ways, thought of themselves as both authoritative interpreters of biblical prophecy and as having a prophetic vocation, and indeed as agents in the eschatological drama set out in the biblical writings which they saw being fulfilled in their own lives and times. Blake too saw his words as being in continuity with what John saw on Patmos (The Four Zoas 8.115[111]:4, E385), and in one of his early works, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, over the words ‘As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 3, E34) in Copy F (Pierpont Morgan Library, 1794) Blake has written ‘1790’ immediately above the words ‘new heaven’, which, because of the words ‘it is now thirty-three years since its advent’ probably draws attention to the year 1757, the year of Blake’s birth. For Blake, it is the moment when there is opened up ‘the return of Adam into Paradise’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 3, E34) and the eschatological age is initiated. For Jesus, after his call and testing, according to Mark 1:15, ‘the time (καιρός) is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand’ (cf. John 13:1; 7:6). Such prophetic actualisation is found elsewhere in the pages of the New Testament. Jesus is the apocalyptic Son of Man, John 37

Mee, Romanticism, 291. C. Rowland, Radical Prophet: The Mystics, Subversives and Visionaries who Strove for Heaven on Earth (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017). 38

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the Baptist is Elijah who is to come (e.g. Matt. 11:14 and 17:13), Paul believes himself to be the messiah’s agent of salvation to the nations in the Last Days, and John on Patmos saw in his day the heavens opened just as Ezekiel had seen by the rivers of Babylon. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, they were the ones on whom the ends of the ages had come (1 Cor. 10:11). One of the most striking passages of all is 1 Cor. 2. It is a chapter full of apocalyptic terminology, for example, the language in v. 2 about ‘mystery’ echoes apocalyptic elements such as we find in Dan. 2:28 (and elsewhere in the New Testament, e.g. Mark 4:11; Rom. 16:25; Eph. 1:9; 3:3; Col. 1:26; 1 Tim. 3:16). In 1 Cor. 2:7 we have the sharing of secrets. Paul saw himself and his companions as mediators of divine mysteries (cf. 1 Cor. 4:1). It is reminiscent of the kind of apocalyptic mediation claimed for the Teacher of Righteousness in the Habakkuk Commentary from the Dead Sea Scrolls (1QpHab 7) ‘to whom God made known all the mysteries of the words of his servants the prophets’ (cf. Matt. 11:25–27; 13:35; 1 Cor. 14:2; 15:51; Col. 1:26, cf. Rom. 8:30; 16:25; Eph. 1:4; 3:1–13; 1 Pet. 1:20; Rev. 13:8). Receipt of the Spirit enables ‘immediate revelation’, as 1 Cor. 2:10–16 shows (cf. 1 Cor. 3:16; 6:19). It is the Gospel of John which prioritises ‘immediate revelation’. The Johannine Jesus is one who seems willing to flout the law impelled by some higher call. This appeal to a higher authority becomes the criterion for his action, not the Law of Moses. Like Isaiah who ‘saw his glory and spoke of him’ (John 12:41, cf. Isa. 6:1, 5), what Jesus has seen and heard of, and from, the Father, is the basis of his authority. So John Ashton can write, ‘these claims are, in the strong sense, apocalyptic’.39 In the Gospel of John, Jesus is depicted as a visionary prophet who sees God and reports what he has seen and heard, and is sent by the Father. In ancient Jewish and early Christian tradition, Isaiah was remembered as faithful to his vision who showed hidden things before they happened (Sir. 48:22, 25, cf. Mart. Isa. 2–3). The Johannine Jesus is impelled by ‘divine impulse’, a higher authority than the Torah, which is the basis of his actions. Jesus claims to offer revelation of God (in his person) and also revelation about God in his words from what he has seen and heard in heaven (John 12:49–50).40 Like Jeremiah, Jesus found himself on the brink of death for speaking what he believed to be given to him by God, a message which contrasted starkly with what the prophets and priests of his day asserted (Jer. 28 and 29, cf. John 7). The basic issue arises from his claim to a higher authority than the Law of Moses. The 39

J. Ashton, The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), 116; also 201–205. 40 Further E. Käsemann, On Being a Disciple of the Crucified Nazarene: Unpublished Lectures and Sermons, ed. R. Landau in cooperation with W. Kraus, trans. R.A. Harrisville (Grand Rapids; Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2010), 138–139.

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Gospel of John is among other things a story about the conflict over different sources of authority. It is a narrative of the power struggle over ‘immediate revelation’ as the basis for Jesus’ claim to be God’s agent in contrast with those who saw themselves as disciples of Moses (cf. John 9:28).

36.5. Hermeneutical Reflections We have seen various examples of attempts to negotiate a course between two extremes, one giving greater explicit weight to external authorities and the other to the divinely inspired self, as a source of wisdom as applied to a particular time and place. Blake differed from much Christian mainstream hermeneutics in his conviction that the Spirit is not some privileged property of Christians but that which all humans possess by virtue of their humanity. What one finds in his interpretation is a realistically positive view of humanity. The pouring out of the Spirit on all flesh is the normative experience of humanity; the problem is raising awareness about the perspective which the Spirit gives, which Blake saw it as his vocation to fulfil. One might summarise the heart of his position in the light of 1 Corinthians as one form of the exploration of the discernment of the mind of Christ, which is not already known in advance by resort to any external authority, the Law written on the heart included. Already in 1 Corinthians we find Paul asserting the need to follow his example since he had the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2:16; 11:1). There may well have been a development in Paul’s understanding of this from simply the person being ‘taught by God’ (1 Thess. 4:9) and 1 Cor. 2:10–16 on the one hand, to the more considered and law-friendly Rom. 8, where preexisting rules, albeit written on the heart, are acknowledged,41 not to mention the appeal to wider practice and custom (1 Cor. 14:33).

41

Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 201–207.

Section Four

William Blake, Apocalyptic Poet and Painter

37. Blake and the Bible: Biblical Exegesis in the Work of William Blake William Blake is a biblical interpreter whose work is not likely to be found among those recommended for study by students of the Bible.1 Like his great contemporary Coleridge, however, he stands at the transition to what we know as historical criticism. His method is never systematic and is governed by spontaneity, insight and intuition, not to mention vision. It is captured in a rather dusty response to an enquirer who suggested that Blake might offer an explanation of his poetry and illuminated texts. As the following extract from the letter Blake wrote in response indicates, the explanatory is seen by Blake as reductive. What is important about a text is its allusiveness, its capacity to speak afresh in every situation in which the defined and precise cannot do. Texts which allow the ‘spirit’ to be available rather than confine the reader to the ‘letter’ are those which stimulate the imagination and open the way to the divine. This the Bible did better than any other book (as Coleridge was to put it a little later: ‘in the Bible there is more that finds me than I have experienced in all other books put together’). Blake challenged the subservience to memory rather than allowing imagination to flourish. You say that I want somebody to Elucidate my Ideas. But you ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients consider’d what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction, because it rouzes the faculties to act. I name Moses, Solomon, Esop, Homer, Plato … Why is the Bible more Entertaining & Instructive than any other book? Is it not because they [sic] are addressed to the Imagination, which is Spiritual Sensation, & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason? (‘Letter to Trusler’, K793–794)

This article has two parts. In the first I shall examine Blake’s use of particular biblical themes and their significance for biblical interpretation. I start with Blake’s prophecy and in particular focus on the vision of God enthroned in glory. I shall suggest that Blake’s caricature of the enthroned divinity in his 1 An earlier version of this article appeared in Biblical Interpretation: The Meanings of Scripture – Past and Present, ed. J.M. Court (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 168–184. I am grateful to the editor and publisher for permission to use material from that essay in this article. Quotations come fromThe Complete Writings of William Blake: With Variant Readings, ed. G. Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), cited in text as K, followed by page number(s).

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Europe a Prophecy was part of his challenge to dominant conceptions of God in a way which parallels John’s vision of the Lamb and the throne in the Book of Revelation. Both John’s and Blake’s apocalyptic prophecies offer a transformed perspective on divine monarchy. I shall move on to explore Blake’s approach to the two testaments and the way in which he sets up a dialectic between old and new revelations in ways similar to that found in the Pauline corpus. I conclude the first part of this article with a look at the significance of Blake’s relationship with Milton’s writing, and the way Blake explores the redemptive possibilities, which take place through creative rereading of an earlier author. In the second part of the article I shall offer some reflections on the hermeneutical opportunities and challenges of Blake’s reading of Scripture.

37.1. Prophecy as an Example of Blake’s Use of a Biblical Theme 37.1.1. ‘Would to God that all the Lord’s people were prophets’ William Blake was a visionary.2 He communed with angels and even his dead brother regularly. Early biographers report that he saw his first vision when he saw on Peckham Rye a tree filled with angels. Blake was suspicious of memory, by which he meant the mere repetition of that which was received without the enhancement of that which has been received through the creativity of the visionary imagination. Blake thought of himself as standing in a tradition of prophets. In the preface to Milton he quotes Num. 11:29, ‘Would to God that all the Lord’s people were prophets’. The sense of prophetic vocation and insight equips Blake to offer the meaning of contemporary events, like the biblical prophecies against the nations. Indeed, he recognises the prophets of the Bible as kindred spirits (after all in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell he dines with Isaiah and Ezekiel). The major hero of his own idiosyncratic myth is Los, a figure whose prophetic role is thoroughly explored. Blake can write in the prophets’ style and use their images. Blake’s prophecies were not intended to predict exactly what would happen, for they were written after the events that are described, as he puts it succinctly in a marginal note he wrote in 1798: Prophets in the modern sense of the word have never existed. Jonah was no prophet, in the modern sense, for his prophecy of Nineveh failed. Every honest man is a prophet; he utters his opinion both of private and public matters. Thus: If you go on So, the result is So. He never says, such a thing shall happen let you do what you will. A Prophet is a Seer, not an Arbitrary Dictator. (‘Annotations to Watson’s Apology’, K392) 2

G.E. Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

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The prophecies lay bare the inner dynamic of history and revolution, the potential for positive change that exists and the corruption of those impulses. Any revolutionary optimism that Blake may have harboured in the last decade of the eighteenth century is tempered by a need to plumb the complexities of the human personality and its succumbing to the ‘dark delusions’ of the world, in which religion and theology have all too often played their part. Europe, a continent which was to be briefly lit with the flame of revolution, is seen as sleepy and immune to this spirit of change.3 Europe is entangled in a religion and an ethic which made it impervious to revolutionary change, a dreamy world cut off from reality. Revolution would only produce ‘the strife of blood’ not the bliss of Paradise. The coming of Christ heralds not only the blissful salvation of the Lamb but the wrath of the ‘Tyger’, to use Blake’s contrasting images in Songs of Innocence and Experience. This parallels the awesome consequences of the exaltation of the Lamb in Rev. 5 which results in the cataclysmic apocalypse described in the following chapters. The prophet must speak, but it is no privileged role, for, as Blake’s Isaiah puts it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God’ who cares ‘not for consequences but wrote’, echoing Jeremiah’s words in Jer. 20:9. In the preface to Milton we find some of the recurring themes of Blake’s writing: his campaign against an education based solely on memory rather than inspiration, and his conviction that the domination of classical culture had quenched the vitality of biblical inspiration.4 The New Jerusalem is not something remote or far off but a possibility, something which may be built in England’s green and pleasant land. There is not a disjunction between human activity and divine activity in bringing it about. God is involved through the imaginative and creative work of the artist. Elijah’s chariot is not just part of past history or even future expectation but something which can be the inspiration of a new Elijah in every generation, who is willing to condemn the Baalism of a contemporary culture and politics, which, according to Blake, had led to the capitulation of Christianity to a religion of virtues, rules and the acceptance of war and violence. The spirit and power of Elijah were ever available for those who would exercise their imagination and contemplative thought.5 Prophecy is not a thing of the past, for it is the vocation of all 3 See L. Tannenbaum, Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 168; C. Burdon, The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unravelling, 1700–1834 (London: Macmillan, 1997), 180–208; and M.J. Tolley, ‘Europe: “to those ychain’d in sleep”’, in Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic, eds. D.V. Erdman and J.E. Grant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 115–145. 4 N.M. Goslee, ‘“In England’s green and pleasant Land”: The Building of Vision in Blake’s Stanzas from Milton’, Studies in Romanticism 13 (1974): 105–125. 5 ‘Los is the spirit of prophecy, the ever apparent Elijah’ (Milton 24:71; Jerusalem 44:31; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 24; Byron is hailed as Elijah in Ghost of Abel).

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people.6 The vision of the New Jerusalem is one that is open to all and the task of building belongs to all. What is not often noticed in this poem is its context and the contrasts within it. It is based on a contrast between what is actually the case and what might be. The contrast between the implied questions of the opening lines becomes explicit at the beginning of the second stanza and the hope for Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land. What is needed for that hope to be fulfilled is not just honest endeavour, but ‘Mental Fight’. The use of military imagery here reflects Eph. 6:10, a favourite passage of Blake, which he quotes as a preface to his long poem, The Four Zoas. ‘Mental Fight’ is the process of challenging the way in which dominant patterns of thinking and behaving make it difficult for all God’s people to be prophets. The ‘satanic Mills’ is the grinding logic of the reason of the philosophers, which has to be overcome to allow imagination to flourish in the spirit of biblical religion. In a typically idiosyncratic interpretation of Rev. 14:14–19, in Blake’s painting of William Pitt, ‘The Spiritual Form of Pitt guiding Behemoth’ (Tate Gallery, London) together with its companion ‘The Spiritual Form of Nelson guiding Leviathan’, Blake depicts Pitt as the destroying angel of Rev. 14:14. The war with France is seen as an apocalyptic event. Pitt and Nelson are seen to be agents of the divine will, much like Assyria in Isa. 10:1 or Cyrus in Isa. 45:1–4. Remarkably, given Blake’s political inclinations, these figures are not particularly demonic but are (albeit unknown to themselves) agents of judgement (this is a theme which runs right the way through the often complicated Continental Prophecies, America and Europe). 37.1.2. The Vision of God The Apocalypse of Enoch, brought back from Ethiopia, where it had been preserved by the Ethiopian Church, was first published at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is a book which has fascinated and tantalised biblical scholars ever since because of the many similarities with the passages in the Gospels, particularly the references to the Son of Man, and many commentators have suggested that Jesus and the earliest Christians may have drawn on it. Blake left illustrations for it incomplete at his death in 1827 (though he may have been aware of the book and had access to excerpts of translations from it years before).7 One can understand why this enigmatic work should 6

Burdon, The Apocalypse in England, 181. J. Beer, ‘Blake’s Changing View of History: The Impact of the Book of Enoch’, in Historicizing Blake, eds. S. Clark and D. Worrall (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 159– 178. On the importance of 4 Ezra or 2 Esdras for the exponents of radical Christianity, see A. Hamilton, The Apocryphal Apocalypse: The Reception of the Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 7

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have fascinated Blake. It is a visionary work full of the mythological approach to the world, which characterises much of Blake’s poetry. Its doctrine of the origin of human sin, in contrast with that in Genesis, ascribes the primal sin to the illicit communication of wisdom which corrupts humanity (1 En. 6–18 parallel to Gen. 6).8 Angels teach humanity charms and spells and the art of warfare. The result is, as 1 Enoch puts it, that ‘the world was profoundly changed’. In consequence judgement comes on those who had revealed illicit wisdom and on those who had colluded with them. Enoch, who is considered a prophet in the New Testament Letter of Jude, is commissioned to intercede between God and the angels (1 En. 12:1). He appears as a mysterious figure standing on the boundary between angels and humans with access to divine secrets, a ‘steward of the mysteries of God’ (1 Cor. 4:1), a situation not unlike that in which Blake found himself. Among the unfinished sketches there is one of 1 En. 14:8ff., a chapter which has exercised the minds of students of Second Temple Judaism, because it offers an extended description of the vision of God, the Great Glory, enthroned in the inmost recesses of the heavenly Temple. 1 En. 14 is full of imagery borrowed from Ezek. 1, itself a chapter which became the basis for later visionaries to glimpse again the awesome vision which had appeared to the prophet by the waters of Babylon. The first chapter of Ezekiel exercised Blake’s imagination and was the inspiration of his poem The Four Zoas or Vala. In addition he captures the vision in visual form in ‘Ezekiel’s Wheels’. What is striking about this picture is the prominence of the human figure among the four creatures (man, lion, ox and eagle) which surround the divine throne-chariot. The narrative of the transformation of divine monarchy, begun in the vindication of a slaughtered lamb in Rev. 5, in some ways anticipates Blake’s parody of the monarchical lawgiver and the need for an understanding of God, which is less abstract and remote. Blake ruthlessly parodies the remote deity in Plate 11 from Europe, with his ‘brazen Book That Kings and Priests had copied on Earth, Expanded from North to South’ (see Fig. 4 on p. 687). Here the grim lawgiver appears with his forbidding book of brass. It is that kind of theology which Blake repeatedly challenges, nowhere better demonstrated than in his ‘Job’ sequence.9 The one enthroned is the power, which holds humanity in thrall by means of a religion of law. It is the stern words ‘Thou shalt not’ which determine life rather than mutual forgiveness. This is characteristic of the religion of Europe, dominated by a remote deity,

8 M. Barker, The Older Testament: The Survival of Themes from the Ancient Royal Cult in Sectarian Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1987). 9 William Blake, Blake’s Illustrations for the Book of Job (New York: Dover, 1995), cf. Book of Urizen 4, where the book of brass concerns ‘one King, one God, one Law’.

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too exalted to wipe tears from eyes. For Blake the worship of God involves a recognition of God not as remote divinity, such as he captured so tellingly in his ‘Ancient of Days’ (see Fig. 2, above, p. 559), which forms part of the preface to Europe a Prophecy, but in the person of other men and women who embody the divine image: ‘The worship of God is Honouring his gifts in other men each according to his genius’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 22). John’s apocalyptic vision is a central component of many aspects of Blake’s visionary world and also informs his understanding of his own political situation. As he put it in 1798, in his annotations to his copy of Bishop Watson’s Apology for the Bible, ‘To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life. The Beast and the Whore rule without control’ (K383). Indeed, Blake explicitly traces a continuity between his own mythical world and the vision seen by John, as he makes clear at the conclusion of the Eighth Night of The Four Zoas: Rahab triumphs over all; she took Jerusalem Captive, a Willing Captive, by delusive arts impell’d To worship Urizen’s Dragon form, to offer her own Children Upon the bloody Altar. John saw these things Reveal’d in Heaven On Patmos Isle, & heard the souls cry out to be deliver’d. He saw the Harlot of the Kings of Earth, & saw her Cup Of fornication, food of Orc & Satan, press’d from the fruit of Mystery. (The Four Zoas 8.597–603, K356) Nevertheless, as is evident from the previous quotation, Blake’s use of the Apocalypse represents a visionary continuity with the text rather than a commentary or analysis of it. He stands in the prophetic tradition of which John of Patmos also is a part, whose harsh indignation might enable humans to see that ‘every Kindness to another is a little Death / In the Divine Image, nor can man exist but by Brotherhood’ (Jerusalem 95:27–28). 37.1.3. The Old and New Testaments Blake described ‘the Old and New Testaments as “the great code of art”’ (Laocoön, K775). Yet in his work he offers a radical critique of aspects of Old Testament religion, particularly of law and sacrifice. His is an ambivalent relationship with the Old Testament. At first sight his portrayal of the lawgiving deity, called in his peculiar mythology Urizen (Your-Reason?) seems to be the Old Testament deity in Satanic guise (as is particularly evident in the illustration to Job 7:14), a throw-back to some second-century gnostic theology. Blake, however, uses his stark contrasts between the religion of the Old and New Testaments as a heuristic device to illuminate the antinomies in the human personality and the way society exploits a religion of law to deny imagination and mutual forgiveness. With this aim, Blake probes the fissures

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in the depiction of God within the narrative of Genesis,10 partly to challenge dominant readings of the Bible of his day, in which appeal to an authoritative book was used to inculcate a particular form of moral virtue. Blake, heir to Protestant radical writing in England of an antinomian kind,11 considered a religion based on rules to be contrary to the religion of Jesus. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Jesus exemplifies the protest against the religion of rules: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbath’s God? … turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labour of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defence before Pilate? covet when he pray’d for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust from their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, & acted from impulse, not from rules. (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 24)

Blake wrote books which parody the Pentateuch, particularly the account of creation. The Book of Urizen is the best example. Existing as it does in different versions, Blake wants to deny readers recourse to one authoritative text and, in a manner which has a very post-modern ring to it, challenges the notion of a hegemonic text. Blake subverts the elevation of scripture into a text which, in a transparent manner, could transmit a list of moral rules demanded of the believer.12 The critique of a religion of law, and the pre-eminence of the prophetic and the visionary, both contribute to Blake’s remarkable exegesis of the Book of Job, a project he completed only shortly before his death. We are assisted in understanding the theological significance of Blake’s images of Job by virtue of the fact that, in addition to the watercolours, we have the later engravings in which he comments on what he has portrayed by reference to biblical passages.13 For Blake, Job is like the ‘Lutheran Paul’ who converts 10 Blake exploited the Yahweh/Elohim distinctions long before the source critical solutions of the Pentateuch became fashionable and was probably indebted to the source criticism of Alexander Geddes; see J. Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 165ff. 11 E.P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972); and J.F. McGregor and B. Reay, eds., Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 12 J.L. McGann quoted in Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm, 16. 13 Passages portrayed in the Job sequence: 1.1 (Matt. 6:9; 2 Cor. 3:6); 1.6 (Dan. 7:9; malʾak YHWH ‘angel of the presence’; Ps. 89:26; ‘we shall wake up in thy likeness’); 1.15–19 (Job 2:2); 1.19 (Job 1:12); 2.7 (Satan going forth from the presence of the Lord, Job 30:25; Ps. 104:4); 2.7 (Satan smiting Job, Job 1:21); 2.11 (Jas 3:11); 3.3 (Job 2:12; 3:7); 4.15 (Job 4:17–18); 7.14 (Job 19:22ff.; 20:5; 30:17, 30; 2 Cor. 11:14; 2 Thess. 2:4); 19.21 (Job 14:1; Ps. 22:7?; Job 13:15; 23:10); 32.6 (Job 33:15, 23, 24; 34:21; 35:5, 6); 38.1

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from book religion to the immediacy of vision. The religion of law and sacrifice is diabolical (we may note the contrast between Job sacrificing and praying in 1:5 and 42:8). The remote god of that kind of religion needs to be dethroned, thereby enabling the annihilation of ‘the selfhood of deceit and false forgiveness’ (Milton 15). Job’s conversion comes about as the result of visionary insight. Elihu bears witness to the importance of the visionary as a means of true understanding of God, anticipating the vision of God to Job, and the function of the Elihu sequence is seen as a precursor of the dramatic revelation to Job. The vision of God in the whirlwind is interpreted christologically as a vision of Jesus Christ (similarly also in the New Testament in John 14:8, the latter passage actually being quoted in Blake’s engraving). Blake not only reads his own interpretative agenda into the text of Job but brilliantly exploits the space offered by a text, which is ‘not too explicit’, to read the Book of Job as an account of a conversion not, as most modern commentators have done, as a profound disquisition about the problem of evil, a reading which has to ignore significant parts of this enigmatic text.14 Blake’s concern throughout the illustrations is to challenge the monarchical transcendent god of church and state, and to stress the prominence, which is to be given to the visionary element in religion. Job starts as an adherent of a religion of the letter who is overwhelmed by apocalypse and converted to a religion of the spirit. Blake the prophet had to contest the downgrading of imagination by attention to the ‘minute particulars’ of existence which could ‘rouze the Faculties to act’ (K793). The Paul of Romans cannot bring himself to deny the importance of law (Rom. 7:16) and yet he sees the emergence of another law, which is at odds with the law of God. Paul cries out at the end of Rom. 7 ‘who will rescue me from the body of death?’. The spectre of the other law, standing over against what the ‘inner person’ most desires, is the object of Paul’s critique, just as (Job 38:28; Ps. 104:3); 38.7 (Job 38:31; Gen. 1:2, 6, 9, 11–12); 40.15 (Job 36:29; 37:11; 41:34); The Fall of Satan (Job 36:17; 11:8; 26:6; 11:7; Rev. 12:10; John 12:31; Luke 10:17–18; 1 Cor. 1:26); The Vision of Christ (Job 42:5; 1 Sam. 2:6; 1 John 3:2; Ps. 8:3–4; John 10:30; 14:9, 15–16 adapted, 28); 42.8 (Matt. 5:44ff.); 42.11 (1 Sam. 2:7; Job 38:41; Ps. 136:23); 42.12 (Rev. 15:3; Heb. 10:6, cf. Ps. 51:16); 42.15 (Ps. 139:8, 17; Test. Job 46ff.). 14 On Blake’s Illustrations for the Book of Job, see M. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981); B. Lindberg, William Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Job (Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1973); K. Raine, The Human Face of God: Blake and the Book of Job (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982); eadem, Golgonooza, City of Imagination: Last Studies in William Blake (Ipswich: Golgonooza, 1991), esp. 121ff. on Job; A.H. Wright, Blake’s Job: A Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972); D. Brown, Discipleship and Imagination: Christian Tradition and Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and W.L. Reed, ‘Dimensions of Dialogue in the Book of Job: A Topology according to Bakhtin’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34 (1992): 177–196.

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the Urizenic religion of repression and moral virtue was for Blake. In Milton, Blake writes of the annihilation of selfhood (Jerusalem 45:13; Milton 17:3), which encourages a perverted religion of ‘laws of chastity and sacrifice for sin’ (Jerusalem 49:24).15 In plate 15 of Milton, the ancient code is finally fractured,16 as the Urizenic figure is confronted by a man, to be redeemed under the caption ‘to annihilate the selfhood of deceit and false forgiveness’. The text is surrounded with minstrels suggesting rejoicing: ‘there is joy among the angels in heaven over one sinner who repents’ (Luke 15:25 and Exod. 15:20). Blake rejects sacrificial religion, which involves the denial of prophetic inspiration and the bondage of ceremonial law (Book of Ahania 4, K252).17 A religion of sacrifice and law, is, in Blake’s view, a throw-back to Canaanite theology, which contaminated Israel when it entered the promised land. It is sacrificial religion, which Blake, by his own inspired rereading of Milton, seeks to expunge from the writing of his predecessor, much as New Testament writers sought to reclaim and redeem their literary ancestors in their formulation of a new redemptive vision. Blake protests at the ‘web of religion’, the authoritarian religion of rules and memory, which has enslaved humanity, and so graphically evoked in these words from Europe ‘over the doors Thou shalt not; & over the chimneys fear is written’ (Europe 12). Just as the relationship between law and gospel is a refrain in Paul’s major letters, so throughout Blake’s writing there is a probing of the relationship between the lawgiver and the divine mercy, as well as the rational and the imaginative. While The Marriage of Heaven and Hell suggests that by temperament Blake sided with the prophetic, the hope expressed in Blake’s Jerusalem is for an eschatological integration of imagination and reason when true prophetic religion would be linked with that of Newton, Bacon and Locke, that trinity whose baleful influence, in Blake’s view, epitomised the triumph of reason over imagination in the society of his day. 37.1.4. Milton and Blake Blake was a creative, imaginative interpreter not a detailed exegete. He took earlier texts, whether biblical or otherwise, and allowed them to become part of his mental furniture and imaginative world. For him any rereading of an authoritative text is a creative process. This is exemplified in Blake’s Milton. 15

William Blake, Milton a Poem, eds. R.N. Essick and J. Viscomi, William Blake’s Illuminated Books vol. 5 (London: Blake Society/Tate Gallery, 1993), 12. 16 The Hebrew letters on the tablets of stone make no sense, apart from tohu suggesting ‘chaos’. Elsewhere blots and smudges are found in the image of the book in Urizen 4 indicating that this book of brass really made no sense and were dependent on the priestly elite for their meaning. 17 Tannenbaum, Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies, 233ff.

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In this poem the living poet (Blake) takes up and reformulates the work of a deceased predecessor,18 thereby, through this second act of creativity, redeeming the inadequacies of Milton’s writing and life. Milton is in part a critique by Blake of the turn taken by the seventeenth century poet to a religion of rules. But it is also a moment of inspired recapitulation in which the later poet redeems the earlier’s work, initiated when Blake sees Milton’s spirit enter into his left foot (Milton 14:49–50). In Milton, there is confusion of identity between the writer and the ancient poet. The way in which the latter’s artistic and personal redemption is effected has overlaps with themes in biblical texts where successors take up, take further, refine or even alter the work of a predecessor. Blake’s relationship with Milton is a tandem relationship similar to those scattered throughout the Bible, whereby the persona or charisma of one is carried on and transformed in new situations. One thinks of Elijah and Elisha; John the Baptist and Jesus; and Jesus and the Spirit-Paraclete. Elisha asks Elijah to give him a double portion of his spirit (2 Kgs. 2:9). In the case of Blake and Milton, however, the successor is more important than the predecessor and corrects the work of the earlier poet.

37.2. Hermeneutical Opportunities and Challenges of Blake’s Reading of Scripture In the final section I want to look at the way in which Blake continues to offer readers a means whereby the imagination may itself be stimulated and assumptions challenged. 37.2.1. The World of Imagination For Blake the visionary and imaginative is all-important. Allowing reason to triumph over imagination denies a wisdom ‘Permanent in the Imagination’, through which one could be ‘open [to] the Eternal Worlds’. Such access would be ‘to open the immortal Eyes Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination’ (Jerusalem 5:18). A ‘mental fight’ is required to gain access to that other perspective on existence, particularly given the dominant ideology which militates against it. This perspective can at once be a refuge and a resource for thinking and doing things differently. It is imperative that this is done, for, as Blake’s prophetic hero Los, at the beginning of Jerusalem, asserts, ‘I must Create a System. or be enslav’d by another Man’s. I will not 18 See Essick and Viscomi, eds., William Blake: Milton a Poem, 12: ‘It is an existence Blake wished to overcome and replace with a more fluid and open concept of being where the gulf between self and other is bridged – indeed, annihilated.’

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Reason and Compare: my Business is to Create’ (Jerusalem 10:20). It is only by the suspension of what counts for normality that humanity may glimpse how ‘the dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns’ (The Four Zoas, end of ‘Night the Ninth’). So Blake invokes the exercise of the imagination. The vocation of the reader of the Bible is to become a participant in mental agony, which may confound and also entices from habit and convention,19 which stand like a closed door preventing access to that which is eternal. There is need for a hermeneutical conversion reminiscent of Paul’s suggestion that what is required is not a preoccupation with the letter which kills (2 Cor. 3:6) but the Spirit who offers freedom and life (3:16). Readers are called, like John in Rev. 4, to ‘come up here, to go through an open door, and I will show you what must take place’ (v. 1). Indeed, the use of the door is an image of insight or incomprehension in several prints, e.g. Jerusalem, frontispiece, America, Songs of Experience, London and Jerusalem 84. In London and Jerusalem the old man (a symbol, perhaps, of the ancient deity and a tired culture) is led by a child. Blake’s use of the child leading the old man, reminiscent of the use made by Jesus in Matt. 18 and 19, suggests that innate wisdom may need to guide the wisdom of experience and mere rote learning, to new and more wonderful insights. In a letter (‘To Trusler’, K793–794), Blake suggests that ‘a vast Majority [of children are] on the side of Imagination or Spiritual Sensation’ and ‘have taken a greater delight in contemplating my Pictures than I even hoped’.20 Reading some of Blake’s poems presents formidable problems for interpreters, particularly so with the illuminated books, where the process of reading is complicated by the engagement with the visual images (the opening of Europe a Prophecy is a good example where text and illustration seem to have nothing to do with one another). Readings of the text must be set in the context of the illuminations. Here the problems start, for text and illumination seem to have little contact. We tend to link what we see with what we read. An early commentator wrote with regard to the opening page of Europe, ‘the amount of connection between the texts and the designs … [is] in effect about as small as possible’.21 As the poem goes on in both writing and illumination there is oscillation between the historical and the mythological, with the 19 On this see N. Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 3ff. 20 Children also appear in the two ‘Holy Thursday’ poems in Songs of Innocence and Experience, where Blake uses the images of the Apocalypse as a way of viewing contrasting scenes in contemporary London, see C. Rowland, ‘“Rouzing the faculties to act”: Apocalypse and the “Holy Thursday” Poems’, in The Apocalyptic Imagination: Aesthetics and Ethics at the End of the World, ed. S.B. Plate (Glasgow: Trinity St Mungo Press, 1999), 26–36. 21 A.C. Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Essay (London: J.C. Hotten, 1868).

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boundaries between the two remaining constantly vague as Blake exemplifies the abrupt transitions from heaven to earth, so typical of prophetic writings. The readers/beholders of Blake’s illuminated text find themselves disconcerted, without a stable means of interpreting.22 The indeterminate relationship between writing and illustration demands that readers engage with the text, and their own imagination contributes to making sense of the two.23 There is no escape for the reader who is throughout encouraged to ‘rouze the faculties to act’ in order to find meaning in what is very deliberately ‘not too explicit’. Blake wishes to do all he can to resist the idea that there is an authoritative interpretation offered by authoritative interpreters. His texts are there for all to use and for the stimulation of the imagination. There has been intensive investigation of the popular culture of the late eighteenth century,24 which has enabled one to see that Blake was not totally isolated and idiosyncratic.25 In Blake’s works biblical texts have become part of, and transmuted into, the prophet’s visionary world. The Blakean myth, drawing on an array of contemporary ideas, demands of the reader not some explanatory key so much as the imaginative participation, to explore the tensions and problems that the text poses, for ‘to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature [can be] Imagination itself’ (K793). With eyes attuned we may perceive ‘visions of eternity … [but] we only see as it were the hem of their garments when with our vegetable eyes we view these wondrous visions’ (Milton 26:10). So ‘The Old and New Testaments as the Great Code of Art’ (Laocoön, K777) are just the most symptomatic form of art which can, with proper use, open up the way to the eternal and thereby link the divine and humanity, pervaded as it is with divine imagination, however dulled the sense of it might be. ‘Why’, writes Blake, ‘is the Bible more Entertaining & Instructive than any other book? Is it not because they [sic] are addressed to the Imagination, which is Spiritual Sensation, & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason’ (‘Letter to Trusler’, K794). Blake would have frowned on an exegetical enterprise which meant that imagination was excluded and the way to eternity closed off as a result. The Bible is not to be regarded solely as a history of past events, for ‘the Hebrew Bible and the Gospel of Jesus are … Eternal Vision or Imagination of all that exists’ (A Vision of The Last Judgment, K604). The exegetical task involves 22 William Blake, The Continental Prophecies, ed. D.W. Dörrbecker, William Blake’s Illuminated Books vol. 4 (London: The William Blake Trust/Tate Gallery, 1995), 153. 23 H. Glen, Vision and Disenchantment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), especially 71. 24 E.g. D.V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm; and also on the prophetic context S. Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 25 See Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire.

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reading, hearing, appropriating, in whatever way our faculties allow, and with whatever aids we need to break the ‘mind forg’d manacles’, that discourse in which the conventions and wisdom of the age are passed on without question. Exegesis of the Bible must involve a variety of essays whose aim is to provide ways of rousing the faculties, to offer ever new moments of unveiling, through images, metaphors, additional words or myths. If I look for analogies to Blake’s exegesis, I turn to the enigmatic appropriations of Ezekiel’s vision or the journeys through the heavenly palaces to the divine merkabah in those writings, which come from those shadowy figures who stand at the beginning of the Jewish mystical tradition. Or in The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, in which the reader is asked to place himself/herself within the narrative, thereby in effect creating another story through the act of imaginative identification which has been set in train. Or in the typological and contextual appropriations of the basic ecclesial communities meeting in shanty towns in Brazil and other parts of the Third World.26 All these seem to parallel in different ways Blake’s use of the Bible. The neglect of Blake by biblical exegetes and theologians is to the impoverishment of biblical study and theology. Not only is he a significant epitome of trends in religion at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and an example of the characteristics of radical Christianity, but he also offers a well-documented source for an understanding of the confluence of the visionary and antinomian currents and the distinctive hermeneutical perspective they offer. His myth-making and creative use of Scripture, filtered through personal experience and social upheaval, represents a unique opportunity for the interpreter to see how the visionary mind appropriates and transforms received traditions within a particular, and well-documented, social context. Blake was a visionary, saturated in the Bible and inventive in the way in which he seeks to liberate the Bible from the dominant patterns of interpretation of his day. His exegesis represents a distinctive reformulation of the text, woven as it is into his own mythical world. His work presents peculiar, and at times formidable, problems of exposition and epitomises the difficulty of assessing the interplay between tradition and innovation, which has always been such a central feature of New Testament exegesis. He is one of the most biblically based, and prophetic, poets yet his poems are often only loosely related to the Bible, and reformulate the Bible in new ways, leaving behind the determining character of their original context.27 Mere repetition or even 26 See C. Rowland, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially 109–152. 27 In this respect Blake’s work represents a strong challenge to the work of writers like Richard Hays (Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989], cf. S. Moyise, The Old Testament in the Book of Revelation, JSOTSup 115 [Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995]) who argues that biblical context is carried

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derivative exegesis of what was in the Bible was unable to wrest the Bible from the hands of those who misunderstood it and forged it into a system which supported the political and economic interests of the rulers of empire. A different perspective was needed to tell the story in language which might subvert a Bible in thraldom to dominant ways of interpreting. Blake’s hermeneutical radicalism is, in a sense, already suggested by the Apocalypse itself, which is not a biblical interpretation but itself a reformulation of prophetic predecessors. Blake and John of Revelation present the symbols and myths of Scripture in a new visionary guise, much as Blake accomplished in his mythic writings, which seek to revive their message and challenge the domestication that overcomes metaphorical texts. Blake’s resort to Scripture and myth in his illuminated books are a means by which the complexities of life, and the insight into, and response to, the divine mystery could be expounded. They are, to paraphrase Blake’s own words, examples of a ‘Poetry Unfetter’d’ (Jerusalem 3); the purpose of both is, for Blake, above all, ‘to rouze [our] Faculties to act’ (‘Letter to Trusler’, K793).

over into the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament. Blake, I believe, like Paul uses the language but as a vehicle for a new understanding of the divine message which may at times be at odds with the letter of the text (see further C. Rowland, ‘The Book of Revelation’, in NIB XII [Nashville: Abingdon, 1998], 501–743).

38. William Blake and Ezekiel’s merkabah1 One of the most significant discoveries over the last 50 years of biblical scholarship has been the recognition of the importance of merkabah mysticism for understanding the New Testament and emerging Judaism at the beginning of the Common Era. This essay concerns the important place in the reception history of the prophecy of Ezekiel of the words and images of William Blake (1757–1827). It surveys the contribution, particularly of Ezekiel’s merkabah chapter to Blake’s visionary poetics, prophetic vocation, theology and psychology by relating it to the discussion of Jewish mysticism.2 One of the advocates of the importance of the interface between early Jewish mysticism and Christian mysticism, April DeConick, helpfully points out that ‘mysticism’ is not a word actually used by ancient people to describe their experiences: when the early Jews and Christians describe their mystical experiences in a single word, they do so most often by employing the term apokalypsis, an “apocalypse” or “revelation.” In the Jewish and Christian period-literature, these religious experiences are described emically as waking visions, dreams, trances, and auditions that can involve spirit possession and ascent journeys. … The culmination of the experience is transformative in the sense that the Jewish and Christian mystics thought they could be invested with heavenly knowledge, join the choir of angels in worship before the throne, or be glorified in body.3

As a modern (etic) term, therefore, mysticism refers to a ‘tradition within early Judaism and Christianity centered on the belief that a person directly, immediately, and before death can experience the divine, either as a rapture experience or as one solicited by a particular praxis.’4 1 An earlier form of this essay appeared as the Père Marquette Lecture 2007, C. Rowland, ‘Wheels within Wheels’: William Blake and Ezekiel’s Merkabah in Text and Image (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2007). 2 References to Blake’s texts come from D.V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, newly rev. edn. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) = E; references to the images from M. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981) = B. The order of the plates is different in different versions and this is reflected in some of the references. 3 A.D. DeConick, ‘What Is Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism?’, in Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism, ed. eadem, SBLSS 11 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006), 2. 4 DeConick, ‘What Is Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism’, 2.

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Merkabah mysticism is a very general way of describing a phenomenon often alluded to in rabbinic texts as maʿaseh merkabah, which had to do with the interpretation of the first chapter of Ezekiel. This chapter describes that dramatic moment when the prophet Ezekiel, in exile in Babylon, sitting by a river has a dramatic vision in which he sees God enthroned in glory, on what appears to be a chariot, the Hebrew merkabah. The tortuous description offered reflects the prophet’s difficulty in putting into words exactly what he saw. He saw creatures, eyes, flames of fire and, above a dome, God enthroned, appearing in human form. Not surprisingly this text caught the imagination of later interpreters and it is almost certain that in addition to explaining what went on for Ezekiel, these interpreters also believed that, like Ezekiel, they could catch a glimpse of what Ezekiel had seen.5 There were many things that fascinated the ancient interpreters, but, arguably, most important of all was the way in which the prophet dared to describe the enthroned divinity. The Hebrew of this already shows signs of increasing the reserve. In addition to the piling up of similitudes such as ‘in the likeness of …’ the Masoretic Text, by the omission of one letter, almost certainly changes ‘in the likeness of a man’ to ‘in the likeness of fire’, thereby reducing the anthropomorphism, though this could not be eradicated completely, as the following verse goes on to describe the bodily form of the divinity. This became the basis of extravagant speculations about the body of God in later mystical Judaism, which may have both had their antecedents in Judaism and affected Christianity as it presented Christ as the visible, bodily, appearance of the unseen divinity, the words used in both John 1:18 and Col. 1:15. So, despite the prohibition of images and the repeated assertion that humans could not see God and live, passages like Ezekiel and its companion visionary text, Isa. 6, indicate that not only was God visible in human form but that humans did manage to see the divine and live. In Gen. 1:26–27 the Hebrew which is used for ‘let us create man in our image’ is a word which concerns physical representation (as in a statue) and not some vague likeness which might be related to moral or ethical qualities. Secondly, within the earliest strands of the Hebrew Bible there are references to the malʾak YHWH, the angel of the Lord, which appears in human form, sometimes indistinguishable from humans (Gen. 16), at other times more apparently ‘otherworldly’ (Judg. 13). These biblical examples provide us with parallels to the picture in which a heavenly being possibly acts as God’s representative in such a way that he could be thought of as God himself (e.g. Judg. 13, esp. v. 22).6 While

5 D.J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988), 71. 6 W. Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, trans. J.A. Baker, 2 vols., OTL (London: SCM, 1967), 2:33.

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little detail is given about these angelophanies, it appears that in the earliest strands of biblical tradition there could be an appearance of an angel, which in some sense was regarded as communicating the presence of God himself. Thus it was possible to call this being God (Gen. 31:11, 13) despite the fact that this attribute was derived from his function as God’s representative. William Blake notes the way in which the angel of the Lord accompanied Israel in the wilderness. This was a figure whose appearance was a significant feature of ancient Jewish debate concerning the complex nature of the divinity and the way in which various heavenly figures seemed to be part of the one god. In his A Vision of The Last Judgment, Blake writes of the Angel of the Divine Presence: The Aged Figure with Wings having a writing tablet & taking account of the numbers who arise is That Angel of the Divine Presence mentiond in Exodus XIVc 19v & in other Places this angel is frequently calld by the Name of Jehovah Elohim The I Am of the Oaks of Albion. (A Vision of The Last Judgment, E559)

In the second engraving of the ‘Job’ series Blake enunciated his complex interpretation of the interrelationship within the divinity. In addition to Satan we have ‘The Angel of the Divine Presence’. This figure is identified with the enthroned deity who, like Job, has a book on his lap. The words in English and the Hebrew ‫ מלך יהוה‬are immediately above the figure.7 The deity who points downwards to Job also has his hand on a book and has features similar to those of Job. In two other Blake works, from the last decade of his life, there is reference to the Angel of the Divine Presence. The figure appears in his engraving Laocoön (E273) and in The Everlasting Gospel, where the angel is a creator of humanity and a law-giver, who is reproached by Jesus for keeping humankind in thrall to the religion of law: ‘Thou Angel of the Presence Divine, That didst create this Body of Mine, Wherefore has[t] thou writ these laws And created Hells dark jaws?’ (The Everlasting Gospel, E521) The Angel of the Divine Presence has become the physical form of divinity.

7

This is a brilliant piece of ambiguity. While the phrase is closely linked with the English ‘The Angel of the Divine Presence’ in the image, it actually means ‘Yahweh is king’ (appropriate as God is enthroned in majesty), or ‘Yahweh is Moloch’, a god of the neighbouring nations who required children to be offered as a sacrifice and whose worship is widely criticised in the Hebrew Bible (Lev. 18:21; 20:2–5; 2 Kgs. 23:10; Jer. 32:35).

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1. Blake and Ezekiel The central image of Blake, from whenever he first formulated his mythology, is Ezekiel’s, the Merkabah, Divine Chariot or form of God in motion. The Living Creatures or Four Zoas are Ezekiel’s and not initially Blake’s, a priority of invention that Blake’s critics, in their search for more esoteric sources, sometimes evade. Ezekiel, in regard to Blake’s Jerusalem, is like Homer in regard to the Aeneid: the inventor, the precursor, the shaper of the later work’s continuities. From Ezekiel in particular Blake learned the true meaning of prophet, visionary orator, honest man who speaks into the heart of a situation to warn: if you go on so, the result is so; or as Blake said, a seer and not an arbitrary dictator.8

The various ways in which Ezekiel’s vision informs Blake’s art and illuminated books represent a significant part of his distinctive interpretation of the Bible and are closely related to the understanding of politics and theology, which make him such a distinctive (and neglected) interpreter of the Bible in the history of English theology. Many have pointed out that Blake seems to allude to a kabbalistic doctrine that Adam was a microcosm of the whole universe (Jerusalem, Plate 27). It may be possible to make a case for Blake being influenced by other aspects of Jewish kabbalistic tradition. Blake recognises the prophets of the Bible as kindred spirits; in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he dines with Isaiah and Ezekiel: The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert. that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition. Isaiah answerd. I saw no God. nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded. & remain confirm’d; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote. Then I asked: does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so? He replied. All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing. Then Ezekiel said. The philosophy of the east taught the first principles of human perception: some nations held one principle for the origin & some another, we of Israel taught that the Poetic Genius (as you now call it) was the first principle and all the others merely derivative, which was the cause of our despising the Priests & Philosophers of other countries, and prophecying that all Gods would at last be proved. to originate in ours & to be the tributaries of the Poetic Genius, it was this. that our great poet King David desired so fervently & invokes so patheticly, saying by this he conquers enemies & governs kingdoms; and we so loved our God. that we cursed in his name all the deities of surrounding nations, and asserted that they had rebelled; from these opinions the vulgar came to think that all nations would at last be subject to the jews. This said he, like all firm perswasions, is come to pass, for all nations believe the jews code and worship the jews god, and what greater subjection can be. 8 H. Bloom, ‘Blake’s Jerusalem: The Bard of Sensibility and the Form of Prophecy’, in idem, The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 65–79, at 66.

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I heard this with some wonder, & must confess my own conviction. After dinner … I then asked Ezekiel. why he eat dung, & lay so long on his right & left side? he answerd. the desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite; this the North American tribes practise. & is he honest who resists his genius or conscience. only for the sake of present ease or gratification? (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 12–13, E38)

At first sight in this passage Blake seems to deny what is the obvious reading of both Isa. 6 and Ezek. 1, namely that both prophets had seen God (‘I saw no God. nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing’). The crucial phrase here is ‘in a finite organical perception’. The merely physical sense would not be able to have that additional perception which is required for the exercise of true prophetic genius. It is the exercise of the imagination where the divine in human is most manifest. The point is made most clearly in the other early work where, in There is No Natural Religion (aIV), Blake writes, ‘None could have other than natural or organic thoughts if he had none but organic perceptions’ (E2). What is required in addition to expand (and indeed ‘cleanse’) ‘the doors of perception’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 14, E39) is ‘Spiritual Life’ for ‘Nature Teaches nothing of Spiritual Life but only of Natural Life’ (‘Annotations to Boyd’s Historical Notes on Dante’ [pages 56–57], E634). According to Blake, theological ‘Knowledge is not by deduction but Immediate by Perception or Sense at once Christ addresses himself to the Man not to his Reason Plato did not bring Life & Immortality to Light Jesus only did this’ (‘Annotations to Berkeley’s Siris’ 214, E664). What Blake asserts here is the key to what he elsewhere calls the ‘Poetic Genius’ which is identified with ‘the Spirit of Prophecy’ (All Religions are One, ‘Principle 5’, E1). Blake outlined his peculiar visionary experience in words which are central to his imaginative and allegorical style: What it will be Question’d When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it. (A Vision of The Last Judgment, E565)

Blake resists staying with what appears to be there as if it has no other dimensions to its meaning. One looks through it or around it to appreciate another dimension of existence. This is the same as the ancient Jewish mystics (John included) who, as they read, meditated upon and studied the prophetic visions, found – in biblical words – the ‘door of perception’ opened up another realm of existence to them. For Blake seeing with the imaginative eye was on a par with physical sight.9 In the reader’s engagement with Blake’s texts, word and image jostle 9

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971).

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with each other on the page. Blake demands the involvement of the reader/ spectator in creating meaning from poems in which there is no definitive meaning waiting to be discovered. The kind of interpretative process set up by Blake is illustrated by a passage from one of his letters, which offers a way of understanding the heart of Blake’s hermeneutics. Here Blake comes as close as anywhere to describing what is going on in his work, and it is an emphasis on the effects of the text. It is in a letter where Blake is asked precisely for a code to help the reader/viewer understand his work: You say that I want somebody to Elucidate my Ideas. But you ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients considerd what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction because it rouzes the faculties to act. I name Moses Solomon Esop Homer Plato … Why is the Bible more Entertaining & Instructive than any other book. Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination which is Spiritual Sensation & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason. (‘Letter to Dr. Trusler’, August 23, 1799, E702–703)

38.2. Blake and the ‘Wheel Within the Wheel’ of Joachim of Fiore In his appropriation of Ezekiel, Blake had been anticipated by his great apocalyptic predecessor, Joachim of Fiore.10 Joachim complemented his literary expositions of the Apocalypse with images that encapsulated the heart of his beliefs about history and salvation. Most of Joachim’s remarkable artistic representations concern the nature of history, applying in particular his distinctive typological interpretation of history, which uses both the Apocalypse and Trinitarian theology as an interpretative key, not only for the Bible but also for human history. Joachim’s depiction of Ezek. 1 relates to this. The ‘wheel within the wheel’ reflects his theory of concords between the Old and the New Testament (the new is hidden within the narrative texts of the old).11 The creatures represent different aspects of the life of Christ, forms of interpretation of Scripture, the human character and the different orders of a future society (amplified in his depiction of the New Jerusalem). The centre of the wheel is taken up by Caritas (relevant to the tertius status) and the era of the Spirit. Both Joachim and Blake trace a link between the divine and the human. For Joachim the basic human virtues are embraced by, and contained in, the 10 Liber Figurarum: Rotae Ezechiel, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 258A fol. 16v; ‘The Vision of Ezekiel’, 1517, Palazzo Pitto, Florence (M. Reeves and B. Hirsch-Reich, The Figurae of Joachim of Fiore [Oxford: Clarendon, 1972]). 11 This view goes back at least as far as Gregory the Great: see J.F.A. Sawyer, ‘Ezekiel in the History of Christianity’, in After Ezekiel: Essays on the Reception of a Difficult Prophet, eds. A. Mein and P.M. Joyce, LHBOTS 535 (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 1–10.

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glory of the merkabah. For Blake the relationship between human and divine is more intimate. It is unlikely that Blake knew anything about Joachim, but in certain respects his approach to Ezekiel has much in common with Joachim’s, especially in its allegorising of the text. Blake had used the ‘wheels within wheels’ as part of a critique of the ideology of the thinking of his day: I see the Four-fold Man, The Humanity in deadly sleep And its fallen Emanation, the Spectre and its cruel Shadow. I see the Past, Present and Future existing all at once Before me. O Divine Spirit, sustain me on thy wings, That I may awake Albion from his long and cold repose; For Bacon and Newton, sheath’d in dismal steel, their terrors hang Like iron scourges over Albion: reasonings like vast serpents Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations. I turn my eyes to the schools and universities of Europe And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Wolf rages dire, Wash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth In heavy wreaths folds over every nation: cruel works Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which, Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony and peace. (Jerusalem 15) Here Blake relates the workings of the mind, which produce ignorance via machine-like activity, to the consequences in a society, which produces ‘religion hid in war’. The ways of thinking in vogue at the universities, the mechanised life, has no room for thought, still less for imagination. The water wheels of Newton are mechanical and utterly predictable and contrast with those in Eden. All of this echoes Ezek. 1:16. In Eden the chariot of life surrounded by the four living creatures offers true humanity and the entry into the world of imagination. An altogether more optimistic note is struck in Plate 98 of Jerusalem whose words might be read as a chariot vision. When the infernal trinity ‘Bacon & Newton & Locke’ meet with ‘Milton & Shakespeare & Chaucer’, then ‘The innumerable Chariots of the Almighty appeard in heaven’. In this eschatological scenario ‘the Four Living Creatures Chariots of Humanity Divine Incomprehensible in beautiful Paradise expand. … And the Four Faces of Humanity … going forward irresistible from Eternity to Eternity and they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic …’. Here, at the climax of Jerusalem, the different facets of each human person, and humans in all their particularity, are reconciled with each other. This peaceable face to face encounter echoes John’s Apocalypse in which seeing God face to face marks

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the moment when the fullness of divinity and humanity is revealed and enjoyed (Rev. 22:4). Humanity made in the divine image (the subject of two contrasting poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience) thus reflects the divine. The balance between these characteristics in humanity is crucial. It is the dominance of reason over imagination, which is at the heart of Blake’s critical aesthetics. The four Zoas turn up in both A Vision of The Last Judgment (E561) and in a sketch for the title page of the late Genesis illustrations (B828, 1 and 2), where the contrasting habits of the four creatures are well brought out by Blake in the different postures they adopt. In the full-length poem which describes their activities, they are described as ‘four Wonders of the Almighty, incomprehensible, pervading all, amidst and round about, fourfold, each in the other reflected: they are named Life’s – in Eternity – Four Starry Universes going forward from Eternity to Eternity’ (The Four Zoas 9.281, E393). Their role as an apocalyptically inspired transformation in the human personality is hinted at in A Vision of The Last Judgment, where Blake writes: The Four Living Creatures mention’d in Revelations as Surrounding the throne; these I suppose to have the chief agency in removing the old heavens & the old earth to make way for the New heaven & the New earth, to descend from the throne of God & of the Lamb. (A Vision of The Last Judgment [1810], E561)

Blake completed (in draft form only as he never turned it into a printed text) a work called The Four Zoas written around 1797. Blake wrote in a letter of 1803 to Thomas Butts that he had written ‘a number of verses on a grand Theme … From immediate Dictation, twelve or sometimes thirty lines at a time, without premeditation & even against my will’. This suggests that the poem was the result of what amounts to automatic writing. Its inspiration is, in part at least, Ezekiel, or perhaps Ezekiel as mediated through John’s Apocalypse. The work is essentially an exploration of human psychology in which each creature becomes a multi-faceted aspect of the human personality. It is about the warfare between the different parts of the human character. The poem is complicated not only by the use of Blake’s idiosyncratic imagery but also by his very distinctive use of biblical characters (thus Rahab becomes the chief opponent of Jesus, for example). The dream-like inspiration leads to a tangled story and the sudden change of subject that destroys the appearance of any continuous logical narrative. Blake identified the Zoas with different aspects of the human personality (Jerusalem 32[36]:31, E178; 98:22, E257): the body (which he termed Tharmas); reason (Urizen, the subject of the major critique of rationalist religion in Blake’s work of the 1790s); emotions (Luvah) and, finally, imagination (Urthona). Blake also linked them with the four compass points (Milton 19:18, E112; 34:35, E134). This shows the ways in which Blake explores the human through the exploration of the divine,

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albeit in the form of Blake’s idiosyncratic mythopoiesis. It is the awesome paradox of good and evil in the divine that Blake, following his illustrious predecessor Jacob Boehme, whom Blake greatly esteemed (‘Letter to Flaxman’, E707), seeks to explore.12

38.3. Humanity in Divinity The link between humanity and divinity, as well as the complexity of human personality, is hinted at in Blake’s painting ‘Ezekiel’s Wheels’ (1804, Museum of Fine Art, Boston, B468), and redolent of that humanity in divinity found in the Jewish midrash and early patristic exegesis of the merkabah. What is striking about this picture is the prominence of the human figure among the four creatures (man, lion, ox and eagle) that surround the divine throne-chariot. Whether Blake knew the details of Jewish interpretation, we cannot be sure, though many have suggested that he may have been influenced by cabbalistic ideas, especially in his later works. It is less the establishment of a genealogical connection than the demonstration of an affinity of interest in the merkabah and its relation with the human that I want to suggest. In Gen. 28:12 Jacob’s vision of angels ascending and descending to God was painted by Blake and was in antiquity the subject of much speculation about the link between heaven and earth: R. Hiyya the Elder and R. Yannai disagreed. One maintained: they were ascending and descending the ladder; while the other said; they were ascending and descending on Jacob … Thus it says, Israel in whom I will be glorified; it is thou whose features are engraved on high; they ascended on high and saw his features and they descended below and found him sleeping.13

There is an earthly and heavenly dimension of Jacob’s persona.14 What is important about the patriarch is that his features are those which are part of the divine merkabah and as such looking at Jacob would enable anyone who

12

See K. Fischer, Converse in the Spirit: William Blake, Jacob Boehme and the Creative Spirit (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004). 13 Ber.R. 68:12; cf. Blake, Milton, Plate 15 (E109): ‘As when a man dreams, he reflects not that his body sleeps, Else he would wake; so seem’d he entering his Shadow: but with him the Spirits of the Seven Angels of the Presence Entering; they gave him still perceptions of his Sleeping Body … for when he enter’d into his Shadow: Himself: His real and immortal Self; was as appear’d to those Who dwell in immortality, as One sleeping on a couch of gold.’ 14 Further J.E. Fossum, ‘The Son of Man’s Alter Ego: John 1:51, Targumic Tradition and Jewish Mysticism’, in idem, The Image of the Invisible God, NTOA 30 (Freiburg, Switzerland: Universitätsverlag, 1995), 135–151; S. Bunta, ‘The Likeness of the Image: Adamic Motifs and Anthropology in Rabbinic Traditions about Jacob’s Image Enthroned in Heaven’, JSJ 37 (2006): 55–84, esp. 56–63.

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was aware of this to know something of the secret of the merkabah. This is made more evident in the Targums on Gen. 28:12 where it is stated explicitly that Jacob’s features are those, which are engraved on the throne of glory. There are four versions of this legend, three of which (Pseudo-Jonathan, the Fragmentary Targum and Neofiti) are substantially the same. The version in Ps.-Jonathan is reproduced here: And he dreamed and behold a ladder was fixed on earth and its top stretched to the height of heaven. And behold angels who went to Sodom and who had been banished from them because they revealed the secrets of the lord of the world. And they went until the time that Jacob left the house of his father. And they escorted him in kindness to Bethel. And on that day they went up to the high heavens, spoke and said, Come see Jacob the pious whose features are fixed on the throne of glory which you desire to look on. So the rest of the holy angels of the LORD descended to look on him.

It represents a view we meet elsewhere in the rabbinic tradition where all the patriarchs are identified with the chariot (merkabah).15 In the targumic passage either Jacob was identified with the face of the man on the chariot or possibly with the human form of God seated upon it. The figure of a man was linked with ancestors like Jacob or Abraham. These passages link the human in the midst of the divine with the environs of divinity, much as Blake does in his picture. Blake wants to go further as he does in his poem ‘The Divine Image’. That identification of the divine with the human, which is at the heart of the speculation about the human form of the divinity, is also crucial to early Christianity. Here the pre-existent Christ becomes the human form of the invisible God as biblical theophanic – whether of God appearing in human form or of the Angel of the Lord – are identified with Christ. In early Christian use of this passage the human figure was linked with Christ (John 12:41; Justin, Dial. 126). A repeated visual and poetic theme in Blake’s work is the challenge to divine monarchy and transcendence. As we have noted, the link between humanity and divinity, as well as the complexity of human personality, is hinted at in the painting ‘Ezekiel’s Wheels’, redolent of that humanity in divinity found in the Jewish and early patristic exegesis of the merkabah. What is striking about this picture is that it is the human figure among the four creatures, which surround the divine throne-chariot (man, lion, ox and eagle, Ezek. 1:5, 10) that is prominently depicted. Indeed, in Jewish interpretations (e.g. Ber.R. 47:6; 69:3; 82:6; Targums on Gen. 28:1)16 it is the human figure of a man which was especially picked out and a link established 15 See also b.Hul. 91b. The significance of the form of the ancestors for understanding the likeness of God is stressed also in b.B.Bathra 58a: ‘R. Baʾanah used to mark out caves. … When he came to the cave of Adam, a voice came from heaven saying, Thou hast seen the likeness of my likeness [i.e. Abraham], my likeness itself [i.e. Adam] thou shalt not behold.’ 16 C. Rowland, ‘John 1.51, Jewish Apocalyptic and Targumic Tradition’, NTS 30 (1984): 498–507 = above, pp. 204–214.

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between the divine merkabah and ancestors of the faith like Jacob or Abraham. ‘Ezekiel’s Wheels’ brilliantly conjures up Ezekiel’s extraordinary vision and influences Blake’s reference in Jerusalem 98:12–15 (‘every man stood fourfold; each four faces had’). The prophet lies prostrate at the bottom of the picture, touched by the whirlwind above him, with hands raised in shock. What attracts the viewer’s attention at the centre of the picture is the man, who looks directly at the viewer. Blake depicts three of the creatures as four-headed human figures (though only three of the corners of the chariot are evident and only the front three heads visible, the other two have only two). The beard of the man at the front is tinged with orange, whereas the heads on either side have a blue tinge. Wings sprout from behind the head of the man and above, there appears to be something resembling a hammock (which may be the firmament of Ezek. 1:22). The many-headed figure has wings, reflecting both Ezek. 1 and Isa. 6. The dominant human figure has hands outstretched and his right foot steps forward as if stepping out of the picture towards the viewer. Around the human figure there is a swirling, circular, movement, in which are splashes of red and streaks of blue as well as the orange. The red signifies the fire, blue the crystal of the firmament and orange, possibly, the amber (which translates the enigmatic Hebrew word, ḥašmal) mentioned in Ezek. 1:4, 27 (cf. 8:2). Within the circular movement there are eyes, in the midst of what appears to be a bird’s head, probably reflecting the eagle. At the very top of the picture sits the Almighty on what appears to be a stone seat, with hand raised, as if in blessing, with the last two fingers of his right hand slightly bent. Unlike several of the ‘Job’ pictures, there is no book evident in the picture. ‘The Four and Twenty Elders’ (Rev. 4–5; Tate Gallery, London, B515, 1803–1805) suggests Blake’s grasp of the link of this chapter with Ezekiel’s merkabah and its ongoing interpretation within the Bible. This picture combines chs. 4 and 5 of Revelation, with the rainbow, eyes and the sealed scroll. Here is the enthroned divinity with a scroll in his hand, surrounded by obeisant figures and the swirl of eyes and the evocation of wheels. The rainbow reflects both Ezek. 1:28 and Rev. 4:3. The flames of fire at the bottom evoke Rev. 4:5 which John himself interprets as the ‘seven spirits of God’. The Spirit of prophecy is crucial for Blake, for he identifies it with the ‘Poetic Genius’ (All Religions are One, Plate 8, E1). The lamb in this picture is curiously passive and anonymous. Here a weak creature with no mark of triumph but the marks of its own slaughter turns out to be the agent of God’s purposes. In Rev. 5 the apparent moment of defeat, when a would-be messiah died in apparent failure, turned out to be the decisive moment in history (Rev. 5:5–6). It is no surprise, therefore, that this figure was to become such an important component of Blake’s theological thought, especially in Jerusalem. The last of Blake’s Enoch sketches has him standing before the throne of the Great Glory (National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1826–27, B827 4). It

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is a picture inspired by Blake’s reading of Enoch’s glimpse of the Divine Glory in 1 En. 14:20: Attentively I surveyed it and saw that it contained an exalted throne … one great in glory sat upon it whose robe was brighter than the sun and whiter than the snow. No angel was capable of penetrating to view the face of him, the glorious and the effulgent; nor could any mortal behold him. A fire was flaming around him. A fire also of great extent continued to rise up before him.17

There is a simple canopy formed at the top of the picture, reminiscent of the ‘Four and Twenty Elders’ (B515) and the framework of the opening and closing engravings in the ‘Job’ sequence. The central figure, with horn-like hair coming out of his head, seems to be seated and looking downward. There is a halo around his head with steps leading up to him, and there are heads to the left of the head of the enthroned one. There are two standing figures on either side of the central figure and wavy lines on either side of the scene, especially on the right as the viewer looks, which could be a representation of the streams of fire (cf. Dan. 7:9–10). Plate 46 of Jerusalem has long caused problems for interpreters. It is possible that its flaming chariot has affinities with Ezekiel’s merkabah – the lionheaded human with eagles behind, perhaps with the hooves and horns of the ox. The eyes are there in the serpents, which entwine the chariot, a feature of so many of Blake’s drawings of the divinity. It may be an apocalyptic vision from which the riders in the chariot recoil. We are not told who the inhabitants are but the journey in the fiery chariot causes apprehensiveness and suggests that that journey is one of potential harm rather than joy, something which the merkabah mystics feared as well as their journey to the divine regions. Blake’s concern throughout the ‘Job’ illustrations is to challenge the monarchical transcendent god of Church and state and to stress the prominence which is to be given to the visionary element in religion. Job begins as an adherent of a religion of the letter, but is overwhelmed by apocalypse and converted to a religion of the spirit. This is a sequence which reflects Blake’s major theological concerns, but at several key points indicates Blake’s exegetical insight, not least in his appreciation of the centrality of the apocalyptic dimension of the book and the importance of a christological interpretation of it in the context of interpretation of the Christian Bible. Blake’s focus on the apocalyptic framework of the Book of Job, chs. 1–2 and 40, is used to portray Job’s conversion from a book-religion to a religion of immediacy and vision. The dualistic framework which characterises the opening depictions of Blake’s ‘Job’ sequence is left behind at the end: God in Christ appears to Job and his wife without the apocalyptic, cosmological trappings evident in the opening visions. Therefore, there is a development in Job’s theology, from belief in the divinely transcendent monarch to a religion of 17

Translation by Richard Laurence, which was the version probably known to Blake.

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divine immanence. This change of understanding corresponds with one of Blake’s major political pre-occupations: a challenge to the way in which theology becomes an ideological undergirding for political monarchy. This parallels similar challenges to theological monarchy as a paradigm for earthly politics elsewhere in the Blake corpus, for example, Europe a Prophecy 11 and possibly ‘Ezekiel’s Wheels’. Blake’s harshest caricature of the enthroned monarchical law-giver, and insistence on the need for an understanding of God less abstract and remote, is well exemplified by Plate 11 from Europe a Prophecy (E64, see Fig. 4, below, p. 687; cf. The Book of Urizen [1794], 4:45, E72). The one enthroned with a book of brass has the power which holds humanity in thrall through the web of religion binding them to obedience to a religion of law rather than encouraging mutual forgiveness. Here is the forbidding deity characteristic of the religion of Europe, according to Blake, the remote deity, too exalted to wipe tears from eyes. For Blake, the worship of God involves a recognition of God not as remote creator divinity, captured in his Ancient of Days in part of the preface to Europe a Prophecy, but in the person of others: ‘The worship of God is: Honouring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 22, E43). David Halperin considers that there is a relationship between the golden calf and the ox among the living creatures and the issue of the complex relationship between good and evil in the divinity: ‘the ultimate object of the rabbis’ fears was that the pure and holy god is tangled, not to say alloyed with some great evil’.18 This engraving brings us face to face with the complexities of Blake’s theology. The problem for Job was being trapped in a confined, self-absorbed world of devotion to memory and habit, closed off from the integration of parts of himself and indeed of the wider world. He was cocooned and unable to discern that the god whom he worshipped was a false god. It is selfhood which encourages a perverted religion of ‘laws of chastity and sacrifice for sin’ (Jerusalem 49:24).19 The cloven-hoofed, fearsome, divinity entwined with a snake in ‘Job’ engraving 11 (see Fig. 8, below, p. 693) is not only a threat but is also an agent of promise. This is the recognition of complementarity, what Blake calls the ‘contraries of the human soul’. But what is true of the human soul is true of God also.

18

Halperin, Faces of the Chariot, 248. K. Raine, The Human Face of God: Blake and the Book of Job (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982), 193–203. 19

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The appearance of the demon in engraving 11 shows ‘God is a Satan and a Saviour’.20 Eternal death seems to beckon Job but this turns out to be the moment of redemption, for the satanic intertwined with the ‘god of this world’ paradoxically not only points to the gift of liberation at the very moment that the obligation to the sacred code of commandments is pointed out, but also enables it to happen. Blake here picks up on a theme which the insistently monist Book of Job thrusts on the reader: the fact that Job’s torments are not the result of some malign divine being, but are carried out throughout with the divine permission. The exalted God who looks down so empathetically on what is happening colludes with the persecution of the upright man. It is through (what turns out to be a redemptive) act of Satan that Job can come to see that his theology is in fact a false one, a religion based on obligation, justice and the devotion to memory. It is from the belief in, and service of, this deity that Job has to be delivered to a new theological understanding. For Blake’s Job there is no sycophantic groveling before an all-powerful divinity. Job needed the evidence of his (visionary) experience to understand the extent of his mistaken beliefs about the false god he had hitherto worshipped and, as a result, to come to an altogether different understanding and practice.

38.4. Blake, the Latter-day Ezekiel Both Ezekiel and Blake thought of themselves as prophets. There is one further aspect of Blake’s indebtedness to Ezekiel that we need to explore: Blake’s role as a prophet. At the end of Ezekiel’s prophecy, the prophet is shown the buildings of a city, and is told to note what he sees in it and tell it to the people (Ezek. 40:4). He has the opportunity to walk through its streets and describe what he sees. John as an Ezekiel for his own day, and his contemporary, the writer of 4 Ezra likewise, are similarly commanded to explore the beauty of the cities they are shown in their vision. In 4 Ezra 10:55, for example, Ezra is commanded to ‘go into the city and see the great buildings in all their splendour’. The seer, on entering the city, will encounter such things that his eye cannot take them all in. We may account for the experience described by comparing it with the revelation of the ideal temple city in Ezek. 40–48. The ‘man’ who holds the measuring tools says to the prophet: ‘The man said to me, “Mortal, look closely and listen attentively, and set your mind upon all that I shall show you, for you were brought here in order that I might show it to you; declare all that you see to the house of Israel”’ (Ezek.

20

B. Lindberg, William Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Job (Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1973), 204.

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40:4). Ezekiel is expected to comprehend everything that he sees and hears, and to transmit it to Israel. It is the command to explore the streets of the city, which infuses Blake the poet-prophet in his wonderful poem ‘London’: I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet, Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear: How the Chimney-sweepers cry Every blackning church appalls, And the hapless Soldiers sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls. But most thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlots curse Blasts the new-born Infants tear, And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse. (‘London’, from Songs of Experience) This poem encapsulates his prophetic vocation and his understanding of his activity as well as any other. It is as a latter-day Ezekiel or John that Blake the poet walks the streets of London and sees the marks of the beasts and of the eschatological woes in his midst in this poem.21 The old man guided by the child is an image which recurs in Blake’s illuminated books. Here is the sense that it is the prophet as the child who has access to the mysteries and is able to go through the door into the darkness. The imagery echoes the door open in heaven, but here the illumination is that which belongs to every honest person who is a prophet. Blake the poet-prophet discerns the deeper reality about his social context just like Ezekiel (and the author of 2 Esdras, a work which had great importance for early modern radicals).22 In the tradition of Ezekiel, this time it is to discern ‘marks of weakness, marks of woe’, not the glories of the celestial city or the divine merkabah.

21

E.P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 179–194. 22 A. Hamilton, The Apocryphal Apocalypse: The Reception of the Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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Blake like Ezekiel and John of Patmos, but unlike the early merkabah mystics, explicitly thought of himself as a prophet to his generation. For him the visions became not a kind of retreat into a realm of comfort and escape from the world. Not that the mystical ascent to heaven through the celestial palaces surrounded by threatening angels was ever that for the Jewish mystics. It is when visionary experience informs a sense of the incompatibility of human action and divine justice that the prophet speaks, when, as Blake put it, one sees through the eye and not with it, and ordinary things become transformed in the divine light, whether of salvation or judgement. Blake is a compelling example of the prophetic vocation ready to bear witness to the Beast and Babylon in his midst. His prophetic vision owes so much to the inspiration of his prophetic forebears, not least the strange prophet who saw the divine merkabah by the waters of Babylon, which thereby transformed his life and his hope.

39. ‘Mr Blake, apo- or rather ana-calyptic Poet, and Painter’: Apocalyptic Hermeneutics in Action Writing a commentary on the reception history of the Apocalypse led to an attempt to discern taxonomy of the various interpretative approaches.1 This turned out to be less complex than might appear at first sight, given the extraordinary variety of situations in which this text has been interpreted and the interpretative solutions offered. We found basically three forms of interpretations. The first is what we describe in the commentary as ‘decoding’ which involves presenting the meaning of the text in another, less allusive, form, showing what the text really means, usually relating to historical events or persons. There is some basis for this method in the Apocalypse itself though it only occasionally prompts the reader to ‘decode’ the meaning of the apocalyptic mysteries (Rev. 17:9, cf. 1:20 and 4:5). In this respect at least it is different from its Old Testament counterpart, the Book of Daniel, which is replete with detailed elucidation of its visions (as Luther recognised in his later Preface to the Book of Revelation of 1530). In this form of interpretation an image is seen to have one particular meaning, relating to a particular (usually) historical event or personage. In the second form of interpretation, the interpreter uses the images metaphorically, so that the image is applied to another situation or person, not by way of translating the more allusive image into something less obscure, but, by means of juxtaposition shedding light on a situation to which the image has been applied. In the application of this method there is no suggestion that the application of the imagery is exhausted by that particular application. So, when the imagery of the Apocalypse is juxtaposed with the interpreter’s own circumstances, whether personal or social, so as to allow the images to inform understanding of contemporary persons and events and to serve as a guide for action, there is the possibility of re-application. The meaning of the apocalyptic images is not reduced to one single meaning. Such a method of interpretation has deep roots in the Christian tradition, going back at least to Tyconius.2 1

J. Kovacs and C. Rowland, Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 7–14. 2 Tyconius, The Book of Rules, trans. W.S. Babcock, SBLTT 39 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989); M.A. Tilley, The Bible in Christian North Africa: The Donatist World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997).

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It is essentially a dialectical method. In contrast with ‘decoding’, it preserves the integrity of the textual pole and does not allow the image or passage from the Apocalypse to be identified solely with one particular historical personage or circumstance. As a result the text may be actualised in different ways over and over again. This point is crucial. The Apocalypse becomes a resource not just for the generation of the last days but a resource for living in every generation. There is a third category of interpretation in which a later interpreter ‘acts out’ the revelation. This may happen in two ways. Firstly, there is the appropriation of the Apocalypse by later visionaries, where the words of the Apocalypse either offer the opportunity to ‘see again’ things in their own visionary experience, similar to what had appeared to John, or prompt new visions related to it. Secondly, there is another, dramatic form of interpreting the Apocalypse, in which individuals ‘act out’ details of the text. For example, Joanna Southcott (whom we will consider later) believed herself to be fulfilling in her own life the vision of the Woman Clothed with the Sun pregnant with the messiah (Rev. 12). English-language interpretation of the Apocalypse is littered by ‘decoding’ commentaries and interpretations, and in this respect it differs from this dominant mode of interpretation throughout history. This tradition of interpretation was given a new lease of life by Joseph Mede in the seventeenth century (1586–1639), whose work was taken up and applauded by no less a figure than Isaac Newton (1642–1727).3 Very different, and typical of the second form of interpretation, is the subject of this essay, William Blake. His work in many ways is the classic example of a writer who allowed the apocalyptic imagery to provide his mental furniture in words and pictures and to inspire his own creativity. Even in his own peculiar mythological world, in which the major theological, psychological, as well as his political, struggles are portrayed in works, which he termed prophecy, the inspiration of the Apocalypse is never far from the surface. The one element of the three major modes of interpretation that Blake’s work does not evince is examples of prognostication. His view of prophecy was the ability to speak common sense about a subject and to have one’s imagination so attuned that the restrictions imposed by the senses and culture could be transcended and inner realities laid bare. His interpretation spans political comment explicitly (using Rev. 13 and 17), the psychological application of apocalyptic images, re-interpreting unpalatable elements by reinterpretation, in his prophetic books producing what are in effect his own apocalypses.

3

C. Burdon, The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unravelling, 1700–1834 (London: Macmillan, 1997), 37–67.

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In a remarkably insightful, yet gnomic, utterance, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of Blake that he was a man of Genius – and I apprehend, a Swedenborgian – certainly, a mystic emphatically. You perhaps smile at my calling another Poet, a Mystic; but verily I am in the very mire of common-place common-sense compared with Mr Blake, apo- or rather anacalyptic Poet, and Painter!4

Alluding here to 2 Cor. 3:14 and 18, Coleridge suggests either that Blake himself was ‘anacalyptic’, in the sense that he was able to discern things that other poets or painters could not see, or that his poetry and paintings were ‘anacalyptic’ in that those who engaged with them might be freed of an epistemological veil and thus able to discern the divine mysteries. Coleridge, no stranger to the world of dreams and the fantastic, as his ‘Kubla Khan’ makes clear,5 recognised a kindred spirit in the writings of his contemporary William Blake. It is a reminder that England has an important place in the study of apocalypticism. From the medieval period through to the modern, there have been noteworthy interpreters who have contributed significantly to the interpretation of the Apocalypse, whether as collectors of earlier ideas (as Bede) or pioneering interpreters, like Joseph Mede, and the subject of this essay, William Blake (1757–1827).6 That is not to suggest that the distinctive ideas were always home-grown. The inheritance of the actualising interpretation of Hendrik Niclaes in English Familism, or the reception of the personal apocalyptic metaphysics of Jacob Boehme in the late seventeenth century, suggest it. The seventeenth century was a crucial century for the interpretation of the Apocalypse. Not only did the Cambridge exegete Joseph Mede explore the hermeneutics and meaning of the text but the particularities of the circumstances of civil war and revolution breathed life into convictions that apocalyptic fulfilment was immediate. The antecedents of Blake’s engagement with the Book of Revelation are extensive and complex, and remain to be more carefully mapped. The significant role that the book played in England’s revolution in the seventeenth century makes it an obvious choice, and in this respect the apocalyptic interpretation of Gerrard Winstanley (1609–1676) offers a favourable starting place. It is unlikely that Blake knew Winstanley’s work directly but the likelihood is that it was part of the underground of radical dissent, which

4 M. Ferber, ‘Coleridge’s “Anacalyptic” Blake: An Exegesis’, Modern Philology 76 (1978): 189–193. 5 E.S. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 6 Burdon, The Apocalypse in England.

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permeated aspects of dissenting religion in the eighteenth century.7 Blake was part of an age which looked to the Book of Revelation to interpret their age of revolution and reaction, and this was the case with Winstanley also.

39.1. Blake among the Prophets: Gerrard Winstanley (1609– 1678); Joanna Southcott (1750–1814); Richard Brothers (1757–1824) ‘The Beast and the Whore rule without controls’ (E6118), wrote Blake in the margins of his copy of Richard Watson’s ‘An Apology for the Bible’ (1797). Blake’s appropriation of apocalyptic images in this marginal note is the way in which the apocalyptic images form a theological language by which existence, whether personal or political, is comprehended. Blake wrote these words at the height of the conservative reaction to the revolutionary spirit, stimulated by events in France in 1789, when radicals like Blake feared for their lives. In similar vein, in his depictions of Pitt and Nelson, Blake understood these human figures as angels of destruction ready to unleash the Leviathan of war on a hapless world.9 Such a hermeneutic is typical of Gerrard Winstanley’s (1609–1678) appropriation of the Book of Revelation.10 In this hermeneutic, contemporary life is illuminated by the apocalyptic imagery, as text and life become inter-twined and mutually illuminating. For Winstanley the action of digging the common land is the framework and inspiration through which understanding of Scripture and the divine will take place. Winstanley believed that with the fall of monarchy in 1649 a Kairos had arrived, when the idyll of having all things in common might become a matter of action not belief only. His claim to the common land instituted the life of Paradise once more, when humanity had all things in common, though he recognised that his was a time of struggle on the cusp of greater eschatological realities. The illumination of the meaning of Scripture and contemporary affairs comes when the Bible is allowed to function as a lens through which the world can be perceived afresh in the context of a prophetic witness carried out in the midst of history.

7 E.P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and C. Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 157–180. 8 W. Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. D.V. Erdman, newly rev. edn., with a new foreword and commentary by H. Bloom, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008 (= E). 9 Blake’s Descriptive Catalogue (E530). 10 On Winstanley’s approach to apocalyptic images: Kovacs and Rowland, Revelation, 22, 27, 125–126, 154, 179, 186, 231.

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Winstanley utilises the full range of the dualistic language of apocalypticism as he sees ‘Heaven within oneself’ as the site of apocalyptic struggle: These two powers are Michael and the Dragon, and this battle is fought in heaven [cf. Rev. 12:7] (that is in mankind, in the garden of Eden), where God principally resolves to set up his throne of righteous government, it is not fought in the spirit of Beasts; but in Heaven in the spirit of Mankind, who is the Lord [cf. 2 Cor. 3:16]. And this battle in our age of the world, grows hotter and sharper than formerly; for we are under the dividing of times, which is the last period of the Beasts reign; And he will strive hardest now.11

Winstanley expresses the conviction that the New Jerusalem might be built ‘in this green and pleasant land’. He believed firmly in the coming of a thisworldly kingdom, a belief that is only strengthened by his conviction in 1649–1650 that he was living in the Last Days. Winstanley works with a three-stage salvation history, which is reminiscent of a Joachite view of history.12 In The Breaking of the Day of God (Chapter VI), for example, Winstanley positions his age as between the second and third woes of Rev. 11 and ‘under the sound of the sixth Angel’ that pronounces the death of the Beast, echoing the Joachite preoccupation with the sixth, penultimate, period.13 Christ destroyed the powers of the Beast and thereby offered a model for all who respond in a similar way to the spirit within, to act in the same way. In the ‘prison of Jesus Christ the lamb’, the divine Father fought against the Beast and killed him, for the dragon was cast out of that heaven or Creation, in whom the Father dwelt bodily; for that flesh was wholly made subject to the spirit.14 That paradigmatic overcoming of the Beast in the flesh of Christ is what is about to happen everywhere with the overcoming of ‘covetous unrighteous flesh in every son and daughter’ and the ‘bruising of that Serpent’s head’. The Apocalypse was a book of particular relevance to the revolutionary age at the end of the eighteenth century. S.T. Coleridge understood that too as his ‘Religious Musing’ makes clear,15 but what is of even more interest is that there were other figures in the period who, like Blake, saw themselves as

11 Fire in the Bush, in: G.H. Sabine, ed., The Works of Gerrard Winstanley (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1941), 457. 12 The New Law of Righteousnes, in: Sabine, ed., Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 163, 183, 194, 205 (new edn.: T.N. Corns, A. Hughes and D. Loewenstein, eds., The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 2 vols. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009] = CHL, 1:486, 506, 516, 527); cf. The True Levellers Standard Advanced, in: Sabine, ed., Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 261. 13 A.L. Morton, The Everlasting Gospel: A Study in the Sources of William Blake (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1958); McGinn, The Calabrian Abbot. 14 Sabine, ed., Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 229 (CHL 1:552–553). 15 Burdon, The Apocalypse in England.

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prophets.16 Most famous was Joanna Southcott (1750–1814), visionary and prophetess, who believed she was called to fulfil the role of the woman whose seed was ‘to bruise the serpent’s head’. A decisive experience for Southcott took place in the course of reading Rev. 21 in 1794: I was reading one Sunday, in the Bible, 21st chapter of Revelation, Come hither, and I will show thee the Bride, the Lamb’s Wife. And he carried me away in the spirit unto a great high mountain, where I saw the New Jerusalem descending out of heaven. Hearing this words, [sic] I blushed, though alone by myself. … I went up and was earnest in prayer, and was answered, ‘Thou wast in the spirit, when thou sawest the New Jerusalem descending, with all the host of heaven; and thou wast on a high mountain, where John saw the Spirit. The Spirit is the Spirit of God, that hath visited thee’.17

This autobiographical comment by Southcott shows the way in which engagement with the biblical text and visionary experience merge, as Southcott believed herself to be called to identify with John’s experience of ascent to heaven to see the New Jerusalem. She made an enormous impact on early nineteenth-century England. Those who joined with her in wishing for Satan’s destruction could assist in hastening Christ’s return, if they signed her petition, which meant that they be sealed (in fulfilment of Rev. 7:4). This sealing would provide their protection from the plagues and disasters that would come on the earth, the birth pangs of Christ’s earthly kingdom. Then at the age of 64 she claimed to be fulfilling the visionary prophecy of the Woman Clothed with the Sun of Rev. 12, the one to bear the man-child, whom she called Shiloh.18 Her death came shortly after what appeared to be the terminus of her pregnancy. While Joanna Southcott believed herself called to be the woman who would give birth to the male child of Rev. 12, Richard Brothers (1757–1824) believed himself to be that messianic child.19 At the start of his prophetic vocation, he had visions, as well as conversations with God. He believed that rational reflection on his mystical experiences was a necessity, however. Thereby he could come to an understanding of the way in which his revelations contributed to theological understanding – something like the way in which Peter ponders the significance of the heavenly vision (Acts 10:17). Like Southcott, Brothers placed himself at the centre of his own apocalyptic

16 J.K. Hopkins, A Woman to Deliver Her People: Joanna Southcott and English Millenarianism in an Era of Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982); J. Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992); I. McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 17 Strange Effect of Faith, part 1 (1801), 47–48. 18 Hopkins, A Woman to Deliver Her People, 20, 33. 19 See Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm; D. Madden, The Paddington Prophet: Richard Brothers’s Journey to Jerusalem (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

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drama: the king at the centre of the New Jerusalem, one who had a significant role in the action of the eschatological drama. Southcott distinguished between Scripture and her own prophetic or inspired, interpretative role. While she affirmed that all truth was contained in Scripture, all had not been made clear until the right time. In this she based herself on biblical precedents like Dan. 12:9: ‘for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end’. She believed that Christ came as the Paraclete in her, whereby God used prophets to clarify what is in Scripture, which had not yet been fully explained. Like Brothers, Southcott was in some ways an inspired interpreter of Scripture, who offered the definitive meaning of the biblical text long shrouded in obscurity. Brothers, on the other hand, applied the exercise of his reason to the understanding and explication of his prophetic experience. Blake’s relationship to the Bible was less interpretative and altogether more wide-ranging. The apocalyptic images and themes form the inspiration of his prophecy, but he never devoted himself to the detailed interpretation of the biblical text. It was a prophetic springboard, not an object of study and explication. Southcott and Brothers, in different ways, actualise the text, whereas, though being a prophet in his own way, Blake’s prophetic works are more offsprings of the biblical visions and go their own way in reconfiguring the biblical text. Biblical images are launching pads for new versions of the biblical narrative of salvation. The exact contours of the biblical text are left behind, even if their spirit is largely maintained. Although Blake’s deeply held prophetic convictions are evident in his own illuminated prophetic books, his was, in the end, largely a private testimony, even if in 1809 he made an attempt to make a public impact by mounting a one man exhibition in London, which was a spectacular failure. As a result Blake made less of an impact on the public in his own day than either Brothers or Southcott did. There is none of the utopian spirit of Brothers’s work. What there is, however, is a grasp of human psychology, which suggests that he understood the complexity of the nature of redemption, as well as the interweaving of the individual and the political in bringing that about. Apart from his mini-drama The Ghost of Abel, which he describes as ‘A Revelation in the Visions of Jehovah’20 he does not present any of his works as a revelation or an apocalypse, though he refers to the New Testament Apocalypse as ‘Revelations’.21 That Blake regarded apocalypse as central to his work in both the sense of ‘vision’ or revelation and as ‘unmasking’ is evident from the claims he makes to inspiration, most clearly at the beginning of his final, and longest, work, Jerusalem an illuminated book that is frequently compared with the Book of Revelation: 20 21

E270. E.g. A Vision of The Last Judgment (E558 and 561), and Jerusalem 48:11 (E196).

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Reader! [lover] of books! [lover] of heaven, And of that God from whom [all books are given,] Who in mysterious Sinais awful cave To Man the wond’rous art of writing gave, Again he speaks in thunder and in fire! Thunder of Thought, & flames of fierce desire: Even from the depths of Hell his voice I hear, Within the unfathomd caverns of my Ear. (Jerusalem 3:1–8, E145) Blake thought of himself as standing in a tradition of prophets, most especially with John of Patmos.22 In the following, crucial, passage he explicitly traces a continuity between his own mythical world and the vision seen by John: … Los hears & weeps And Los & Enitharmon took the Body of the Lamb Down from the Cross & placd it in a Sepulcher which Los had hewn For himself in the Rock of Eternity trembling & in despair Jerusalem wept over the Sepulcher two thousand Years Rahab triumphs over all she took Jerusalem Captive A Willing Captive by delusive arts impelld To worship Urizens Dragon form to offer her own Children Upon the bloody Altar. John Saw these things Reveald in Heaven On Patmos Isle & heard the Souls cry out to be deliverd He saw the Harlot of the Kings of Earth & saw her Cup Of fornication food of Orc & Satan pressed from the fruit of Mystery. (The Four Zoas 8.593–604, E385) Blake recognised the prophets of the Bible as kindred spirits, and his own prophecies also mimic their style. It is probable that some at least of Blake’s prophetic texts emerged in the actual process of writing, often without considered forethought, and as the result of what Blake considered divine inspiration.23 In Blake’s case, however, such a process involved a considerable technological feat, as he had to invent a way of enabling prophetic inspiration to be translated immediately into the engraving. Prophecy is not a role reserved for a privileged elite, for, as Blake’s Isaiah puts it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God’.24 That being said, he also had a strong sense of his own peculiar role to open

22

The Four Zoas 8.597ff. J. Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 42–43. 24 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 12 (E38). 23

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the doors of perception and understanding.25 Blake’s drawings and illuminated books are saturated with apocalyptic images. John’s apocalyptic vision especially is a central component of many aspects of Blake’s visionary world, even when he departs from some of its more violent and vengeful themes.

39.2. The Book of Revelation and the Prophetic Struggle The Apocalypse contributes greatly to Blake’s Jerusalem. The harlot daughter (Jerusalem) is the divine bride (Rev. 21); his virgin (Vala) is the whore (Rev. 17). Apollyon (Rev. 9:11) wields a bow (cf. Rev. 6:2) of ‘Demonstrative Science’; the great dragon (Rev. 12–13) is animated by the infernal trinity of rationalism and empiricism.26 These are interspersed with contemporary persons and events as the geography and life of England are swept up into a creative fusion, with little apparent structure or direction. This interpretative approach typifies Blake’s way of viewing his own circumstances in terms of biblical imagery. In all of this, the bare essentials of biblical context carry over as the biblical images are woven into a new constellation of scriptural images. The fires of judgement turn out to be the cathartic water of life, and eternal judgement of the great white throne (Rev. 20) is forgiveness. Blake’s apocalypse, however, unlike John’s Apocalypse, ends in the restoration of all things and universal forgiveness from which no one is excluded. The ending of Jerusalem is as climactic as that in Revelation, where the New Jerusalem comes down from heaven to earth. Blake’s version of God being ‘all in all’ takes place when the trinity of Newton, Bacon and Locke take their places in the chariots of the Almighty.27 The universality of Jerusalem’s address ‘To Jews, Deists, Christians and the Public’ (E144) demonstrates that Blake includes in his audience a group much wider than the church, for his vision concerns universal salvation and identification of the various obstacles in its way. Blake will have none of the dualism of apocalypticism as a manifestation of the permanent state of things, however. Contraries may be present, but opposition in eternity, never. The Book of Revelation, for all of its hope for the ultimate overcoming of the separation between heaven and earth, still presupposes that there will be an eternal separation of that which is opposed to God from the world of the divine. Those outside the eternal city, or condemned to the Lake of Fire, are offered no respite. Revelation lacks any sign

25

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 14 (E39). ‘Bacon & Newton and Locke’, e.g. Jerusalem 54:17, and 98:9 (E203 and 257); further Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 145–150. 27 Jerusalem 98:9 (E257). 26

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of Blake’s ‘contraries’ in which the opposites generate the energy of understanding and change. Separation and ultimate alienation from God are not part of Blake’s understanding of judgement, which is not about condemnation but, rather, catharsis and the preparation for the ultimate restoration of both individual and cosmos as a whole. The frequent allusions to biblical images, such as Ezekiel’s wheels, the image of the mysterious cherubim chariot on Jerusalem (Jerusalem, Plate 46), the Lamb of God, Jerusalem, Rahab and the like, are given meaning by their new context. In this respect, the way in which biblical images and themes are used in Jerusalem parallels Revelation, in which in John’s vision prophetic images and themes are woven into a new linguistic tapestry, which is largely consistent with what we find in the biblical books. Thus, the Lamb, Jesus, and Jerusalem have characteristics which put them on the side of the struggle for good, whereas Caiaphas, Rahab (surprisingly) and Babylon echo their more sinister biblical hues. Blake links Rahab and Babylon, probably because they are mentioned together in Ps. 87:4 (‘I will make mention of Rahab and Babylon to them that know me’) and, as a result, Rahab is associated with the dragon of Rev. 12–13 and 17. The harlot’s collusion (‘fornication’) with the kings of the earth (Rev. 17:2) merges with the way in which Blake uses Rahab as the agent of Jesus’ execution. Collusion of leading Judeans with the Roman colonial power leading to Jesus’ execution (John 11:48–50; 18–19) accurately reflects both history and the Gospel narrative. Rahab signifies collusion with the religion of empire, the idolising of moral virtue and selfsacrifice, and what Blake terms ‘religion hid in war’.28 By this he probably understood the way in which religion blesses the state’s military activities and offers it an ideological justification. Thus, Blake seems to have grasped the complexity of a dehumanising politics and religion and to have encapsulated it in his description of it as ‘Rahab Babylon’.29

28 The Illuminated Books of William Blake, Vol. 5: Milton, a Poem, eds. R.N. Essick and J. Viscomi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 37:43; cf. Jerusalem 75:20 (E231). 29 G.A. Rosso, ‘The Religion of Empire: Blake’s Rahab in its Biblical Contexts’, in: Prophetic Character: Essays on William Blake in Honor of John E. Grant, ed. A.S. Gourlay, Locust Hill Literary Studies 33 (West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press, 2002), 287– 326; and idem, Religion of Empire: Politcial Theology in Blake’s Prophetic Symbolism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016).

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39.3. Text and Image: A New Apocalyptic Perspective Like that of his artistic ancestors who illuminated the Apocalypse, Blake’s art is characterised by the central role that is played by the juxtaposition of two media in text and image as a key mode to stimulate hermeneutical engagement.30 The most accessible of Blake’s illuminated books are his Songs of Innocence and Experience, which he describes as ‘Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul’ (E7). They exemplify the ways in which text, image and contrasting situations can be mutually informative, and in which images are in no sense subordinate to the text in the generation of hermeneutical insight. Two words only link with the Apocalypse and Ezekiel in Blake’s poem ‘London’ as the poet wanders through the streets of London: I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear: How the Chimney-sweepers cry Every blackening Church appals, And the hapless Soldiers sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls. But most thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlots curse Blasts the new-born Infants tear And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse. (‘London’ from Songs of Experience, E26–27) In Ezek. 9 the prophet sees a man ‘clothed with linen, which had the writer’s inkhorn by his side’ (Ezek. 9:3) setting ‘a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst’ of Jerusalem. These words inspire Blake, the poet-prophet’s, observation of what he sees and hears (what he ‘marks’) in the streets of his Jerusalem, London. But the marks here are not the marks for salvation, for, like the 30

W.J.T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

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marks of the beast in Rev. 13:16–17 (cf. 14:9, 11; 15:2; 16:2; 19:20; 20:4), these marks consign the inhabitants to woes brought on by a society which outwardly may be upright. But scratch the surface, one finds a sorry tale of suffering and pain, and it is the vocation of the poet-prophet to ‘mark’ the ‘marks’ of the beast and of the eschatological woes in his midst.31 The first stanza of this poem shows us Blake actualising biblical texts. Words and images, especially from Ezekiel and Revelation, are an inspiration to Blake the poet-prophet convinced as he is that he acts in continuity in his own time and place, with the spirit of prophecy which fired Ezekiel and John. In the two ‘Holy Thursday’ poems from Songs of Innocence and Experience, we have contrasting perspectives on the situation in England. Here the prophetic insight is used to interpret an apparently festive event and to see its deeper meaning. An early commentator on Blake’s work, Benjamin Heath Malkin (1806), wrote of the debt to Revelation in the Innocence version of ‘Holy Thursday’: ‘The book of Revelation, which may well be supposed to engross much of Mr. Blake’s study, seems to have directed him …’.32 ‘Holy Thursday’, Innocence

‘Holy Thursday’, Experience

Twas on a Holy Thursday their innocent faces clean The children walking two & two, in red & blue & green, Grey headed beadles walkd before with wands as white as snow, Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flow

Is this a holy thing to see. In a rich and fruitful land, Babes reducd to misery. Fed with cold and usurous hand?

O what a multitude they seemd, these flowers of London town Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own The hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands

31

Is that trembling cry a song? Can it be a song of joy? And so many children poor? It is a land of poverty! And their sun does never shine. And their fields are bleak & bare. And their ways are fill’d with thorns. It is eternal winter there. For where-e’er the sun does shine. And where-e’er the rain does fall: Babe can never hunger there, Nor poverty the mind appall. 33

E.P. Thompson, Witness, 179–194; Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 152–156. See G.E. Bentley, Blake Records: Documents (1714–1841) Concerning the Life of William Blake (1757–1827) and his Family, Incorporating Blake Records (1969), Blake Records Supplement (1988), and Extensive Discoveries since 1988, 2nd edn. (New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2004), 567. 33 Songs of Innocence and Experience, Plates 19 and 33 (E13 and 19). 32

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‘Holy Thursday’, Innocence Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among Beneath them sit the aged men wise guardians of the poor Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door. In these deceptively simple poems34 there are to be seen contrasts, which are a feature of biblical apocalyptic literature: light and darkness, heaven and earth, the dominant and the subordinate, all of which Blake uses as a gateway to further understanding. Such ‘contraries’ (to use Blake’s word) jolt readers from complacency into seeing the reality of death, as well as the glimmer of hope that is to be found in the midst of death and despair. The wider apocalyptic background is more evident in the Innocence version, in which the children are seen as angels joining with the heavenly host (‘When the whole multitude of innocents their voices raise Like Angels on the throne of heav’n, raising the voice of praise Let Cherubim and Seraphim now raise their voices high’).35 The poet-prophet meditates upon a particular social event in eighteenth century England. There is the focus on a moment, what Blake calls a ‘minute particular’, when the poet may pierce behind the appearances to bring out its inner reality, in apocalyptic fashion, and the contrasting emotions and attitudes which it engenders. The juxtaposition of the two similarly titled poems parallels the stark contrast in Rev. 6–7. In Rev. 6 death and pestilence stalk the earth, while in Rev. 7 the followers of the Lamb exult in their salvation. The children who raise their voice in praise are a small sample of that great multitude of victims, who have ‘washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb’. The grey-headed beadles (Revelation’s elders, Rev. 7:13) are given a subordinate position to the children (‘beneath them sit the aged men’). The children of the ‘Holy Thursday’ poem are not merely passive recipients of the charity of the wealthy. The poet indicates their peculiar quality in the words ‘with radiance all their own’ and in the ‘mighty wind of their song’, echoing Rev. 19:6. Their praise is a moment of assertiveness, when, in Blake’s perspective on the event, the children come to dominate the proceedings. At the end of the evocation of thanksgiving and charity in the Songs of Innocence version, there is a darker dimension to the light of the image and the heart34 H. Glen, Vision and Disenchantment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 120–129, 170–175. 35 Glen, Vision and Disenchantment, 126–127.

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warming scene in the words ‘Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door’. Apocalypse lurks, like the Son of Man, outside, knocking at the door of the Laodicean church in Rev. 3:20, disturbing the wisdom, order and life of comfortable London. In the Songs of Experience version, forbidding and gloomy as its colouring is, there emerges a contrast with the innocent multitude in ‘Paul’s’ cathedral. The marginal designs in the Experience version show a woman contemplating a dead child and the comfort offered to children by a fearful woman. There is a connection with the apocalyptic doom set forth in Blake’s Prophecy Europe a Prophecy, as the dead child and the woman are seen in both the marginal illuminations and Europe, Plate 8(9).36 Lower down on the right of the poem in Songs of Experience, there is the image of a child cuddling up to the woman, reminiscent of the scene of desolation in the frontispiece of America a Prophecy, where a gigantic demon overshadows a woman and a child, naked and overawed, in a desert, dominated by a single cannon. This beast haunts the woman and the child, just like the Dragon in Rev. 12:4–6 and 13– 17, though his chains reflect the temporary respite mentioned in Rev. 20:1–2. In the last stanza of the Experience poem, the words ‘Babe can never hunger there’ echo the more hopeful Rev. 7:16 (‘they will hunger no more’).37

39.4. A Sampling of Blake’s Apocalyptic Images Explicit images connected with the Book of Revelation are especially prominent among the watercolours that Blake painted for Thomas Butt 1800– 1805.38 His ‘The Four and Twenty Elders’39 reflects Blake’s fascination with Ezekiel’s merkabah and its ongoing interpretation within the Bible.40 Ezek. 1 underlies Blake’s depiction of John’s vision in these chapters.41 This picture 36 M.J. Tolley, ‘Europe “To those Ychain’d in Sleep”’, in Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic, eds. D.V. Erdman and J.E. Grant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 114–145. 37 Glen, Vision and Disenchantment, 173. 38 D. Bindman, Blake as an Artist (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 164–165 (M. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols. [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981] = B, 515–524). 39 Rev. 4:4, Tate Gallery, London (B515), watercolour, ca 1803–1805, and Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 224–230. 40 ‘Ezekiel's Wheels’, Museum of Fine Art, Boston, 1803–1805 (B468); H. Bloom, ‘Blake’s Jerusalem: The Bard of Sensibility and the Form of Prophecy’, in idem, The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 65–79; C. Rowland, ‘Ezekiel’s Merkavah in the Work of William Blake and Christian Art’, in The Book of Ezekiel and Its Influence, ed. H.J. de Jonge (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 182–197. 41 Bloom, Blake’s Jerusalem, 65–79; Rowland, ‘Ezekiel’s Merkavah’.

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combines chs. 4 and 5 of Revelation, with the rainbow, eyes and the sealed scroll. Here is the enthroned divinity with a scroll in his hand, surrounded by obeisant figures and the swirl of eyes and the evocation of wheels. The rainbow reflects both Ezek. 1:28 and Rev. 4:3. The flames of fire at the bottom evoke Rev. 4:5 which John himself interprets as ‘the seven spirits of God’ (Rev. 4:5). The Spirit of prophecy is crucial for Blake, for he identifies it with the ‘Poetic genius’.42 The lamb in this picture is curiously passive and anonymous. Here a weak creature, with no mark of triumph but the marks of its own slaughter, turns out to be the agent of God’s purposes. In Rev. 5, the apparent moment of defeat, when a would-be messiah died in apparent failure, turned out to be the decisive moment in history (Rev. 5:5–6). It is no surprise, therefore, that this figure was to become such an important comonent of Blake’s theological thought, especially in Jerusalem. Blake’s ‘Death on a Pale Horse’43 evinces an energy fitting for a depiction of two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, inexorably moving forward the tide of history, which is being unfurled in the scroll, unfolding above their heads (Rev. 6). The horsemen, which loom so large in this picture, also appear in Blake’s depiction of the angel of Rev. 10:1, 5.44 Here we see seven horsemen, which might hark back to Rev. 6 but could, instead, indicate either the peoples and language to whom John is called to prophesy or the seven thunders (Rev. 10:4). This is unusual among the watercolours of the Apocalypse because we see John as a spectator of the enormous apparition before him, faithfully describing what he sees in the scroll laid out on the writing desk in front of him. The enormous size of the angel parallels the enormity of the dragon, which persecutes the Woman Clothed with the Sun in Blake’s depiction. Blake painted two different watercolours of the ‘Woman Clothed with the Sun’.45 Both pictures are dominated by the terrible winged monster with ram’s horns (similar to the depiction of the Great Dragon from the Sea).46 In one, the beast towers over a supine woman, in one of which the moon is literally under her feet and her golden colour indicates the fact that she is ‘clothed with the sun’, whilst in the other, the many-headed monster flies down, as below the woman looks up startled and fearful.47 42

All Religions are One, Plate 8 (E1). Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, ca 1800 (B517). 44 ‘And the Angel which I Saw Lifted up His Hand’, Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art, New York, ca 1803 (B518). 45 Rev. 12:1, Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1803–1805 (B519) and The National Gallery of Art, Washington, ca 1805 (B520). 46 The National Gallery of Art, Washington, ca 1805 (B521), cf. the related image in the Rosenbach Museum, Philadelphia (B583). 47 As in Blake’s sketch, l En. 7:1–15 depicts the seduction of the women by the ‘sons of god’ (B827), 3. 43

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Blake painted ‘The Whore of Babylon’ twice: once in a picture exclusively devoted to the subject48 and once in the context of his illustration of Edward Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’.49 In the first, Babylon points with her finger to the stream pouring forth from the cup in her right hand, in which one perceives acts of violence as well as angelic beings with bowls (Rev. 16) and trumpets (Rev. 8–11).50 The angels hold both bowls and trumpets. Thus, the pouring and the trumpet blasts take place simultaneously as war rages, suggesting synchronicity. There are close links between the iniquity of Babylon and the death and destruction described in the previous chapters of Revelation, especially the trumpet and bowl sequences. The sequence of disasters, described by John earlier in the vision, is linked with the political violence caused by the culture of Babylon and outlined in chs. 17–19. Round about 1795 Richard Edwards commissioned Blake to illustrate an edition of Edward Young’s poem, ‘Night Thoughts’, published in 1742–1745. This was an enormous undertaking for Blake, involving over five hundred watercolours. Blake filled margins with pictures. This picture of Babylon is the title-page to ‘Night the Eighth, Virtue’s Apology: or the Man of the World Answer’d, in which are considered, the Love of this Life, the ambition and Pleasure, with the wit and Wisdom of the World’. Young’s words prompt Blake to understand this socially and politically, not just in terms of personal morals. At the time he painted this picture, Blake was acutely aware of the culture of repression in war-torn England. It was a situation in which, to quote his own words written at the time, ‘The Beast and the Whore rule without controls’.51 As in Rev. 13, where Daniel’s vision is the lens through which John of Patmos views Roman oppression, so in Blake’s image the biblical vision is interpreted of contemporary political realities, rather than of a sequence of world-empires as in Dan. 7. It is a sevenfold, contemporary, imperial and cultural oppression. Blake very pointedly depicts the heads of the beast as contemporary military, royal, legal and ecclesiastical powers. He took the opportunity of this commission to insert his protest against the political repression in the England of the 1790s.52 A similar depiction may be found in Blake’s illustration of Dante’s ‘Purgatorio’ xxxii.85–87, 142–153.53 There is nothing in Dante’s work about what is worn on the heads of the

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British Museum, London, 1809 (B523). ‘Edward Young’s Night Thoughts’, 1795–1797, British Museum, London, B Plate 344 (B330, 345); Bindman, Blake as an Artist, 109–113. 50 G.E. Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), plate 75. 51 ‘Annotations to Watson’s Apology’ (E611). 52 Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise, 100–201. 53 B812 89. 49

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monsters, but Blake gives them crowns, warriors’ helmets and a papal tiara.54 There is a long tradition of political interpretation of apocalyptic images, rooted in Daniel and the Book of Revelation, going back to the radicalism of mid-seventeenth century England. Gerrard Winstanley used the imagery of Daniel and the Book of Revelation to interpret the oppressive behaviour of the wielders of political and economic power of his day.55 The depiction of the binding of Satan (Rev. 20:1–2)56 suggests a struggle between the angel who descends from heaven with the key to the Abyss and Satan. Binding here involves being bound in manacles. This would reverse the process which Blake sees at work in a society which stifles imagination and oppresses the poor, and encourages people to think that this is the divine will.57 The circular shape of the beast resembles the depiction of the heavenly host elsewhere and may be dependent of his depiction of Ezekiel’s merkabah (Ezek. 1:15, B468). Blake’s depiction of the New Jerusalem, with its spacious streets and pure water contrasted with the dark and cramped scenes which must have confronted Blake day by day as he traversed London’s streets. Like Ezekiel’s visionary city (Ezek. 47:1), this city is watered with the river of life ‘flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb’ (Rev. 22:1). In it women and children bathe in a spacious environment, in which the idyll of Paradise merges with the needs of ordinary urban people, to suggest hope and cleanliness rather than squalor. Overhanging the river is the tree of life (Rev. 22:2) and a child pointing towards the river. There is converse between people in peace, as the centrally placed sun shows ‘there will be no more night … for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever’ (22:5). Around the sun dance the angelic host reminding the reader of how Blake saw that physical object as a signifier of divine realities: When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty. 58

Strictly speaking, Blake’s various depictions of the Last Judgement are not dependent solely on the Apocalypse but bring together images and characters in a kind of biblical synthesis. Unusually, Blake wrote at length about ‘The

54 M.D. Paley, The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 162–163. 55 Fire in the Bush, in Sabine, ed., Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 463–471 (CHL 2:188– 197). 56 Fogg Art Museum, Harvard (B585), 1800. 57 He writes of the grasp of ideology in which the ideas of those in power enslave people using the graphic phrase ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ (‘London’, Songs of Experience, E27). 58 A Vision of The Last Judgment (E566).

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Last Judgment’, and a commentary is extant on the Petworth House picture.59 Blake painted other versions of the Last Judgement, which occupied his attention as both a painter and a writer. The longest of these depictions is no longer extant.60 In the Petworth House picture, which is the focus of this discussion, there is movement clockwise, indicated by the direction of the bodies and the change in the colours from dark to light. Christ is the point around which the whole picture seems to revolve. He sits impassively, in contrast with the more active (and threatening) Christ in judgement of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel depiction, which may indeed have been an inspiration for Blake’s own work.61 Here the moment of judgement and the awesome consequences are set out, even if the ultimate fate of those judged is much more optimistic than in most traditional Christian depictions. In Blake’s work the fire of judgement is to be purgative, e.g. Jerusalem 96:27 (E256), where the Lake of Fire becomes the living waters. Thus, at the end of ‘Night the Ninth’ of The Four Zoas, there is talk about passing through fire and not being consumed.62 The contrast in colour between the two sides of the picture underlines the fact that in the right there is a descent into Hades and on the left an ascent back up to the throne of God. Elsewhere, Blake writes of the way he hopes viewers of the picture will identify with its details: If the Spectator could Enter into these Images in his Imagination, approaching them on the Fiery Chariot of his Contemplative Thought, if he could enter into Noah’s Rainbow or into his Bosom, or could make a Friend or Companion of one of these Images of wonder, which always intreats him to leave mortal things as he must know, then would he arise from his Grave, then would he meet the Lord in the Air & then he would be happy. (E560)

It is this process which is depicted in this picture. Judgement is always happening, with eternity always ready and available. This is in line with Johannine eschatology: ‘He that heareth my word and believeth in him that sent me hath everlasting life and shall not come into condemnation but passeth from death to life’ (John 5:24). The Last Judgement for Blake does not mark an event when the good are rewarded and the evil punished, but the purgation of evil in the world.63 ‘Whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual’.64 The variety of the interpretation of the Apocalypse down the centuries indicates that it has not been an ideal text for closing down debate. Luther 59

E552–556, Petworth House, 1808 (B662). Bindman, Blake as an Artist, 165–167. 61 Bindman, Blake as an Artist, 165. 62 E407; further see D. Fuller, Blake’s Heroic Argument (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 150–157. 63 Bindman, Blake as an Artist, 167. 64 A Vision of The Last Judgment (E562). 60

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rightly recognised that the form of Revelation set it apart from Daniel. In the Book of Daniel, the obscure dreams have been rendered more transparent by angelic interpretations. For example, Daniel’s vision of the four beasts rising from the sea and the heavenly scene with the Ancient of Days and the Human Figure who receives divine authority, is made a little less opaque by relating it to the events of history (Dan. 7:1–14). There is little of that kind of explanatory gloss in Revelation. Revelation is a prophetic text and its polyvalent imagery, almost always without explanation, means that it is a text, which more than any other biblical text, manifests open-endedness and lack of closure. Interpreters of the Book of Revelation have tried to deal with its open-endedness by using a form of allegorical exegesis to suggest that the imagery is an elaborate code for this or that historical event, thereby tying the text down to a particular time and place. William Blake’s engagement with the Book of Revelation is typical of one major way of interpreting its apocalyptic images. The more familiar way is the ‘decoding’ method,65 which involves presenting the meaning of apocalyptic images in another, less allusive, form, showing what the text really means. In all his engagement with the Bible, Blake is performing not only ‘Sachexegese’ but also ‘Sachkritik’. He is always pursuing the essential subject matter of the text and is ready to use that as a way of playing down elements in the literal sense, which a literal reading would suggest are distasteful to someone of Blake’s theological sensibilities. His reading is shorn of its punitive and dualistic elements. The fire is therapeutic and a means of purgation into which Albion, the uncomprehending hero of Jerusalem, throws himself.66 The dualistic contrasts throughout his work serve a hermeneutic rather than ontological function. So, Blake contrasts the ‘contrary’ with the ‘negation’,67 the former being a basis for creativity as the dialectical process leads to fresh understanding. Subtly, but firmly, therefore, and without any apology, Blake renders the fearsome apocalyptic images a means of catharsis, rather than an instrument of terror. Judgement is a process not a discrete event. In so doing Blake takes many of the concerns of modern readers about the Apocalypse and reads the book as a sign of hope rather than a message of destruction. Alongside this, the long history of the political role of apocalypticism as a potent tool of political criticism stretching back to Daniel, to which the Apocalypse is itself indebted, and is vividly presented in Blake’s treatment of word and image. The Apocalypse is a vision, or, better, a series of visions. Blake understood the importance of visualisation as a key component of human engagement. Like many other readers of the Book of Job, he reads the whole book through the lens of the words ‘I have heard thee [sic] with the 65

Kovacs and Rowland, Revelation. Jerusalem 96:35 (E26). 67 Milton: Book the Second 40:32 (E142). 66

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hearing of the Ear but now my Eye seeth thee’ (Blake’s version of Job 42:5). These words might stand as the motto for Blake’s hermeneutics. Seeing with the eye of the imagination trumps the words of memory, heard and received from others. The Apocalypse, as a visionary text, engages and, by its startling verbal imagery, is aimed at transforming perception and action of its readers or hearers. The same may be said of Blake’s texts and images. They are ‘anacalyptic’. Readers do not require explanation so much as the will to explore the words and images and act upon them. Herein lies the character of the work of the apocalyptic William Blake.

40. Blake: Text and Image The details of Blake’s life may be briefly told. He was born in 1757 and died in 1827. He was married to Catherine, who in Blake’s later years was a collaborator in his engraving and printing. He lived most of his life in London with the exception of a few difficult years in Felpham, Sussex. Those years were difficult because they marked a time of great personal upheaval, when the ideas which formed his long illuminated poems, Milton a Poem and Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion, took shape. He was put on trial at this time for sedition, for comments he was alleged to have made to an English soldier. Blake was trained as an engraver and pioneered his own technique. This remained the basis of his art. After his move back to London, he lived in obscurity and on the fringes of poverty, indebted to the support of patrons like Thomas Butts, for whom he painted many biblical scenes. Only in the last years of his life was he discovered by a group of artists. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell the narrator tells us that ‘The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert. that God spake to them’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 12, E381). Admittedly, this satirical irreverent critique of religion should not be considered an infallible guide to Blake’s view of the Bible, but two things stand out. First of all: the companionship of the writer and the biblical prophets. Blake thought of himself as a prophet just as they were. After all, ‘every honest man is a prophet’ (‘Annotations to Watson’s Apology’ 14, E617). There is no modest submission to the Bible, for Blake is as much a critic as he is an enthusiastic devotee. But, it is a critical hermeneutic which is both self-involving and every bit as imaginative as the most daring medieval exegete.2 The fact that there is only one extant example of Blake’s Jerusalem is a reminder of the cost, not only in terms of labour but also expense, which probably prohibited any further copies like it being made. The engraving and the printing together enabled this self-proclaimed prophet to 1

E plus page number(s) refers to Erdman’s edition of Blake’s works, see below, p. 775. M.J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); eadem, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 2

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match inspiration with production in ways which have rarely been equalled. The complexity of the words and the designs in Jerusalem should not stop us admiring this example of Blake’s art. Art, for Blake, was not just an aesthetic experience but part of what he termed the ‘mental fight’ needed to build Jerusalem. It was a religious and political activity and was part of the spiritual warfare in which he believed he was engaged, to awaken slumbering spirits from their adherence to state religion and the quenching of the Spirit and the exclusion of the poetic genius. Blake exemplifies as well as anybody the relationship between the Bible and the arts. The text of the Bible is a central part of his intellectual furniture, and yet his work, more than any, problematises the devotion to texts. His juxtaposition of text and image from his earliest illuminated books right the way through to the acme of his engagement with both the Bible and art, in Illustrations of the Book of Job, evinces the way in which he refuses to allow the words to dominate. When he juxtaposes text and image, he allows both to have an effect. His words do not paint pictures, nor do his images serve solely to illuminate texts. Both serve the intellectual counterpoint in a fugal complexity whose completion requires the viewer and reader to complete the hermeneutical circle, for (and in this the Bible is a supreme example) ‘what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction because it rouzes the faculties to act’ (‘Letter to Trusler’, E702). Blake hardly evinces submission to canonical texts. The publication of the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Enoch in 1820 called forth a remarkable sequence of pencil sketches, which complemented Blake’s earlier views of the Book of Genesis as a mythological anthology, the understanding of which was left incomplete at his death. The Bible was crucial for Blake’s poetic genius. It was his inspiration, as well as the object of his criticism, alongside Milton and Swedenborg. Blake’s relationship with the Bible parallels his relationship with Milton. According to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 6 (E35), Milton was on the right side without even knowing it. Milton’s words are so much part of Blake’s intellectual life that he can redeem Milton (which is what happens in Milton a Poem) and can write what Milton would have said if he had thought aright and not been encumbered by his cultural assumptions. Blake not only receives inspiration from tradition but also enables the redemption of that tradition from what he considers its worst excesses. There is great respect for what is received.3 The text from the past, therefore, is no mere object to be studied; it is to be taken in and the reader suffused with its potency. But what it once was, with its own distinctiveness, does not remain the same, for it has to become something else: the medium of a new form of creativity in the one who creates afresh. This is crucial for Blake’s understanding of the Bible. 3

H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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The biblical words have the potential for stimulating the imagination of the reader in ways that transcend the literal sense of the text. Like Milton’s words, they could be wrong and need to be corrected by the later interpreter. This essay examines three key areas of Blake’s engagement with the Bible. What is particularly distinctive about his work is the way in which text and image are juxtaposed, with the latter functioning not as some kind of decorative illustration of words but as the necessary counterpoint to words, often at odds with what is written, or stimulating new ways of construing the words. As we shall see, the acme of Blake’s attempt to juxtapose words and images is found in his Illustrations of the Book of Job where the image takes centre stage and words are relegated to marginal comment. A reader of Blake’s words will rarely find word painting, for the image is allowed to have its own effect and make its own contribution to the interpretative process. Indeed, Blake seems to exemplify the plausibility of Lessing’s thesis in ‘Laocöon’, that poetry and images have different effects, the former being engaged with in a diachronic way, the latter synchronically. The effect of ‘contrary’ media on the same page is crucial to Blake’s art. Some consideration will be given to a sample of the remarkable collection of biblical images that Blake produced for Thomas Butts and the way in which they illustrate his talent as a ‘visual exegete’. Finally, there will be some consideration of Blake’s position in the history of biblical interpretation. His hermeneutic is not that of the detached interpreter. He was himself involved with the text, understanding it, reacting to it, discerning its strengths and weaknesses and bringing out what he considered important about it.

40.1. Text and Image The contrasting views of London in two short poems by Wordsworth (‘On London Bridge’ and ‘London’ of 1802) indicate the perspectives of Blake and Wordsworth. It is not as if Wordsworth is unaware of a problem, but the invocation of Milton and the breathtaking beauty viewed from an Olympian height contrasts with Blake’s altogether more sombre words and image in ‘London’ from Songs of Experience. Here the poet engages with ‘minute particulars’, captured in the image; a decrepit old man is led by a child, while another child takes the opportunity to warm itself from the flames. Here the eye of the ‘poetic genius of the Spirit of Prophecy’ (All Religions are One, ‘Principle 5’, E1) discerns the reality of life at close hand. But his inspiration is not Milton but Ezekiel. After all, for Blake, Milton is part of the problem and, without redemption by the latter-day poetic genius, he cannot be part of the solution. So the words of the Bible are the muse not Milton. The first stanza of ‘London’ shows how biblical words and images, from Blake’s favourite prophets, Ezekiel and John of Patmos, continue in his own time and

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place, to manifest the same spirit of prophecy, which fired Ezekiel and John. Like Ezekiel who wanders through the streets of Jerusalem, the poet-prophet wanders through London, his Jerusalem, and ‘marks’ the sighs and abominations that are done in its midst. Like the mark of the beast in Rev. 13:16, these marks consign the inhabitants of the latter-day Jerusalem to the woes brought about by hypocrisy and exploitation of unfettered trade and warfare, in which the victims are the young men and women and children who find themselves exploited, and both church and monarchy are deeply implicated. The poet-prophet must ‘mark’ the ‘marks’ of the beast in his midst.4 ‘London’ is typical in another respect. Text and image stand side by side, here as a complement to each other but elsewhere in tension with each other. Blake never lets go of the fact that there is no neat dualistic solution. Rather there are opposites, contraries, in society, in humanity, in God even, and he refuses to allow one to negate the other. So, what is central to everything he depicted and wrote was acceptance of, and engagement with, the Other, divine, human or intra-human – ‘Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul’ (Songs of Innocence and of Experience, E7). He wrote the words ‘Opposition is true Friendship’, which are barely legible on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 20, covered as the words are by the image of the Leviathan of negation and destruction. He used two ways of speaking of this, a biblical one, ‘the forgiveness of sins’, the other his own formulation, indebted to a tradition of theology which goes back to Jacob Boehme and even further back, that ‘Without Contraries there is no Progression’. When one reads William Blake’s words in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘All Bibles or sacred codes, have been the causes of … Errors’, one is expecting to find a critique of the Bible, its form and contents, and Blake does not disappoint. What Blake wrote about Bibles and sacred codes applies to all holy books, but the Bible was his inspiration as well as the target of his criticism. Blake may have been influenced by higher criticism and indeed his was the first English poetic reflection of the German higher criticism mediated by Alexander Geddes.5 There is some truth in this. In Blake’s mythical re-telling of Genesis in The First Book of Urizen the surviving copies are, deliberately, at variance with one another in their colouring, and in the order of the plates, thereby challenging the notion of an authoritative text. The opening words of The First Book of Urizen indicate that it is about the origin of hierarchy: ‘the primeval priests assum’d power When Eternals spurn’d back his religion, And gave him a place in the north, Obscure, 4

E.P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 179–194. 5 J.J. McGann, ‘The Idea of the Indeterminate Text: Blake’s Bible of Hell and Dr Alexander Geddes’, Studies in Romanticism 25 (1986): 303–324; M. Goldie, ‘Alexander Geddes at the Limits of the Catholic Enlightenment’, The Historical Journal 53.1 (2010): 61–86.

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shadowy and solitary’ (E70). Its frontispiece (Fig. 3) shows the way in which divinely authorised texts have been handed down in a mechanical fashion, divinely endorsed, devoid of any contemporary inspiration or imagination. In The First Book of Urizen not only do we have a format akin to biblical pages familiar to Blake and his contemporaries, but also when we see the book wesee it covered with undecipherable smudges. Here there is both a tradition of transmission of the text but also of interpretation of the signs on the page, which, according to Blake, was in the control of ‘the primeval priests’. Blake’s various versions of The First Book of Urizen anticipated the questions raised

Fig. 3. William Blake: The First Book of Urizen, Copy C, 1794

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by textual scholars about the transmission of text and its contents.6 What are in effect rival versions of The First Book of Urizen, with different orders of pages and colouring, deliberately make it impossible to know which one is the ‘authorised version’. It is as if Blake wanted us to see that the task of interpretation is never done and the supposedly unproblematic holy book does not come with ready-made answers to life’s questions but also excludes two things, which Blake considered paramount. The first is the ongoing activity of ‘the spirit of prophecy’ or the ‘poetic genius’ in interpreting not only texts, but events and individual existence. Blake implicitly recognises the importance of this at the very start of the book. Indeed, after the opening words, the poet pleads with the Eternals: ‘Eternals I hear your call gladly, Dictate swiftwinged words, & fear not To unfold your dark visions of torment’ (E70). Here the poet-prophet, like Isaiah or John on Patmos, accepts the call to write down the dark visions and probe the nature of religion and its negative effects. The imitation of divine monarchy in human polity is a particular target of Blake’s criticism in the 1790s. Blake here depicts a bat-like divinity with, in all probability, the facial features of George III, an open book of brass on his lap and a papal tiara on his head (Europe 11:5, E64). The text accompanying the image echoes the language of The First Book of Urizen and speaks of the ‘brazen Book That Kings & Priests had copied on Earth’. Blake’s pungent marginal comments on his copy of the Essays of Francis Bacon, James I’s Lord Chancellor, written four years after Europe a Prophecy, suggest that he would not have approved of the extravagant address to ‘the most high and mighty prince, James’ in the preface of the King James Version. For example, commenting on Bacon’s words, ‘The motions of factions under Kings, ought to be like the motions of the inferior orbs; which may have their proper motions, but yet still are quietly carried by the higher motion of “primum mobile”’, Blake quipped waspishly, ‘King James was Bacons Primum Mobile’.7 At one point he wrote the one word ‘blasphemy’ to comment on Bacon’s ‘He then that honoureth him [the King] not is next an atheist’ (E624). As for a king being a mortal god on earth, Blake comments, ‘O Contemptible and Abject Slave!’ In his writing and images about monarchy, human and divine, Blake manifests an antipathy to the obsequiousness, which pervades the ideology of monarchy and royalty, and the sanction which theology gave to kings and priests. He will have none of ‘the divine right of kings’, so beloved of Stuart monarchs. Part of the way in which Blake wanted to get people to understand things differently was through prophecy. That did not mean predicting what would happen, but understanding more deeply what was going on and telling the truth as one saw it. ‘Every honest man [and woman] is a prophet’, he wrote. 6 D.C. Parker, An Introduction to New Testament Manuscripts and their Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 7 ‘Annotations to Bacon’ (E632); H. Adams, Blake’s Margins: An Interpretive Study of the Annotations (Jefferson: McFarland, 2009).

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Fig. 4. William Blake: Europe a Prophecy, Plate 11:5 (B&W), Copy A, 1794

Blake prophesied about the nations, about America and Europe in particular. In both cases he was writing after the event. Prophecy meant helping people to understand the deeper meaning of history, the repressive reaction of the nascent British empire to the American colonies, in America, on the one hand, and the resistance of the ancien regime in Europe to change, on the other, which was in fact being overtaken by revolutionary events in France after 1789 when Blake produced Europe.

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The optimistic tone, which America a Prophecy represents, is evoked in Plate 6 (E53). Here we find a string of allusions, where biblical eschatological passages combine to evoke that sense of a new age, a new beginning, a sense of being part of a ‘visionary republic’ which is so deeply rooted in American culture, indebted to the millenarianism of English religion in the seventeenth century. 1. The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations; 2. The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up; 3–4. The bones of death, the cov’ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry’d. / Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening! 5. Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst; 6. Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field: 7. Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air; 8. Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing, Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years; 10. Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open. 11. And let his wife and children return from the opressors scourge; 12. They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream. 13– 14. Singing. The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning / And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night; 15. For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.

Image: Luke 21:28 Line 1: Rom. 13:12; Isa. 21:11–12 Line 2: Matt. 28:2; John 20:5 Lines 3–4: Ezek. 37:5, 6

Line 5: Jer. 30:8 Line 6: Luke 17:35

Line 8: Isa. 49:9 Line 10: Acts 16:26

Line 12: Gen. 19:26 Lines 13–14: Rev. 6:12; 9:2; 21:23

Line 15: Isa. 11:6; 65:25

But Blake’s optimism about building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land is tempered by a realistic grasp of the forces ranged against the fulfilment of that hope. As the years went by, and in the light of the way in which revolution in France turned out, Blake came to see that a neat equation of revolution with human good was both naïve and dangerous, and his greater engagement with the less optimistic side of the biblical story shows him wrestling with this. In an image from Jerusalem (Plate 76, 52), we find Blake resorting to the cruel death of Jesus at the hands of an alliance of Rome, the colonising power, and a local elite. In a way which is much influenced by the Gospel of John, the cross is seen not as a moment of defeat but of glory, and a glory which humanity can share. Before the cross stands Albion, the embodiment of Britain, whose redemption Blake wrote about in Jerusalem. Redemption meant, to use Blake’s terms, ‘the annihilation of selfhood’. Borrowing imagery, which he took from the Pauline letters, Blake saw salvation as involving a change in attitude and practice, which means dealing with that mix of the habitual and conventional, and the preservation of that which makes us comfortable, in favour of a position which is altogether more risky and open to others. Such a new outlook Blake summarises as the practice of the forgiveness of sins.

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Fig. 5. William Blake: America a Prophecy, Bentley Copy M, 8, 1793

The image in Jerusalem 75, which immediately precedes that of the crucified Christ, is based on Rev. 17. Jesus breaks through death and hell in the teeth of the aggression of Babylon the Great, the Abomination of Desolation, Religion hid in War, to open eternity in time and space. But, as the previous plate shows, Jesus, who acted from ‘impulse not from rules’, impelled by his

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‘Poetic Genius, the Spirit of Prophecy’, executed by crucifixion, fell foul of the wielders of political power of his day, the hierarchy and the Roman colonial governor, at a time when, as in Blake’s own day, ‘The Beast and the Whore rule without controls’ as he prefaced his marginal comments to Richard Watson’s Apology (E611). Following a long tradition of political interpretation of apocalyptic images, based on Daniel and the Book of Revelation, we find the oppression linked to the wielders of political and economic power of Blake’s day. The biblical vision is applied to contemporary political realities as he depicts the heads of the beast as contemporary sevenfold military, royal, legal and ecclesiastical powers. The Illustrations of the Book of Job are the product of Blake’s last years. The ideas recapitulate familiar themes from Blake’s pre-1800 work, such as the critique of divine monarchy, the emphasis on the divine in the human, and the challenge to convention, which comes through inspiration and vision. In the Illustrations Blake uniquely commented on a complete biblical book, though it is a very distinctive form of biblical commentary, in which the epitome of the subject matter of Job is found in twenty-one images, surrounded by biblical references. Here, rather than images illuminating text, as almost everywhere else in the Blake corpus, words have a subordinate position to the centrally placed image. The twenty-two plates epitomise Blake’s expressed desire to enable the Spectator to Enter into these Images in his Imagination on the Fiery Chariot of Contemplation of his Contemplative Thought if he could Enter into Noahs Rainbow or into his bosom or could make a Friend & Companion of one of these Images of wonder which always intreats him to leave mortal things as he must know then would he arise from his Grave then would he meet the Lord in the Air & then he would be happy. (A Vision of The Last Judgment, E559)

Thereby the Spectator is encouraged to make connections with other parts of the Bible, with other images and with life-experiences. Blake reads the Book of Job as an account of the way vision can ‘cleanse the doors of perception’ of a conventionally religious man (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 14, E39). While it is easy to see why some commentators have considered the Illustrations an excuse for Blake to parade his theological interests, I believe we find in the series evidence of a real attempt to make sense of the interpretative problems posed by the book, for example, the relationship between God and Satan. Blake made small changes to the King James Version, most of them insignificant, some which may indicate Blake’s increased knowledge of Hebrew and some which are of greater moment. In the first image (Fig. 6) we see that Job and his wife are surrounded by their children, in pious pose, with books open on their laps. The musical instruments are on the tree. All seems to be well, but it is a time of spiritual exile for Job and his family. In the final image the books have gone and the instruments are off the tree (cf. Ps. 137:3–4; ‘By the Waters of Babylon’

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[Fogg Museum, 1806, B4668]). Beneath the image on the left is a quotation from the Book of Job: ‘Thus did Job continually’, which may sound a note of reproach about the habitual, and unreflective, nature of Job’s religion. In the middle of the altar is Blake’s version of words from 2 Cor. 3:6: ‘for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’ and 1 Cor. 2:14: ‘they [the things of the Spirit of God] are spiritually discerned’.

Fig. 6. William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job, Plate 1, 1825

8

B refers to Butlin’s edition of Blake’s paintings and drawings, see below, p. 775.

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The words on the altar in the right-hand image (Fig. 7) are from Heb. 10:6: ‘In burnt offerings for sin thou hast had no pleasure’ (KJV: ‘In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin thou hast had no pleasure.’). Job has moved away from a religion of sacrifice. In an earlier plate Blake picks up on the contrast between Job who prays for his friends, whilst the friends still continue in their religion of sacrifice (Job 42:8–10).

Fig. 7. William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job, Plate 22, 1825

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Job’s agony elicited one of Blake’s most graphic and disturbing images, seen here (Fig. 8) in the watercolour he painted for Thomas Butts and the engraving from The Illustrations of the Book of Job. Job’s agony and spiritual journey, and the relationship of God and Satan, offered Blake the opportunity to explore not only the ‘contrary states of the human soul’ but also the contraries in the divinity, as we shall see in Plate 11. The terrifying apparition in Job’s nightmare appears, according to the caption, ‘as God’ and now persecutes Job. This being has the characteristics of the divinity seen in previous images but now intertwined with a serpent and with a cloven hoof. The figure points with

Fig. 8. William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job, Plate 11, 1825

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his right hand towards the tablets of commandments, while below Job, other figures stretch up trying to pull him down into the fiery inferno. In the main caption Blake paraphrases Job 7:14, which in the King James Version reads ‘Then thou scarest me with dreams, and terrifiest me through visions’. We are not told in the Book of Job the content of Job’s night visions, but Blake exploits the space left by the text in his image. Below it there is a long quotation from Job 19:22–27, which stays pretty close to the King James Version. Blake seems to apply the words ‘Why do ye persecute me as God’ (Job 19:22) to the terrifying apparition. But in the previous verse in the King James Version (Job 19:21), it is not God to whom Job pleads but his friends, whom he asks to have pity on him. Blake replaces King James Version’s ‘Why do ye persecute me as God’ by ‘Why do you persecute me as God’. In the context of the engraving as a whole, it looks like an address to the hybrid being of his nightmare, who ‘as God’ is persecuting Job. God and Satan together are both implicated in Job’s persecution, captured in Blake’s image of Job’s nightmare experience by the being, which possesses both divine and diabolical characteristics. In this crucial engraving in the Job series we see Job’s agony as he confronts the shortcomings of an understanding of God, who rewards righteousness by prosperity and unrighteousness by punishment, and discovers that the neat separation of the world into joy and woe, God and Satan does not do justice to experience. So his experience, capped by his night visions, brings him face to face with one of the errors taught by ‘Bibles and sacred codes’ as he sees God and Satan intertwined and will come to see that God is not some far enthroned divinity but God with us, the Divine in human. Compared with the later engraving, in the watercolour Hebrew letters are clearly visible. They start with the words that end the commandment to honour father and mother, ‘which the Lord your God giveth thee’ (‫ )אלהך נתן לך‬and then go on to the commands, ‘Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not steal’. So, in the middle of the terrifying vision of judgement is an offer of the divine gift at the very moment Job is made to face up to his failure to keep his obligations. According to ‘The Garden of Love’ (Fig. 9), the church now occupies the space of the garden of love, and restriction and death take the place of joy and desire. Over the doors of the church are the ominous words ‘thou shalt not’, echoing words from the Decalogue (Exod. 20:4, 7, 12–17). Later in the series, in Plate 17 (see above, p. 354), Job sees the God who is with us appearing to himself and his wife. Blake glosses his depiction of the theophany by Job 42:5 in a slightly emended version of the King James Version ‘I have heard [Blake omits ‘of’] thee by [Blake has ‘with’] the hearing of the Ear but now my Eye seeth thee’. Once again, as in Plate 11, Blake has used his own imagination to depict what Job sees of God, the tradition of whose existence and demands Job had hitherto accepted on

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hearsay. This is the moment in the series at which the contents of the books, which we have seen open on the laps of Job and his wife, and the Almighty, earlier in the series, can now be seen by the reader. But the books are situated not in the centrally placed image but around it. From the marginal texts, from the Gospel of John, we discover that the one whom Job and his wife have seen in the theophany is none other than Christ, the divine in human.

Fig. 9. William Blake: ‘The Garden of Love’ from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1789–1794, Copy L

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40.2. Picturing the Bible From 1799 to 1805 Blake painted two series of biblical subjects for Thomas Butts,9 one set of tempera and one of watercolour. Butts became a great supporter and friend. The pictures chosen here can only give a sample of the range of biblical subjects that Blake painted. The series show Blake’s interests: the visionary and the apocalyptic, for example, focusing on the Book of Revelation. There are other clusters around the birth and infancy of Jesus, Christ and children, the Passion and Resurrection, Christ as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy, and an insistence on the spirit of mercy and forgiveness.10 This remarkable collection of biblical images is probably rivalled only by Rembrandt in its comprehensiveness, stretching as it does from Genesis to Revelation. We fail to do justice to the richness of Blake’s theological contribution unless we take seriously his images. Like Rembrandt before him (though Blake was no enthusiast of the Flemish painter), what we find in so many of his images is a distillation of what Ruskin wrote about, images as a medium whereby ‘you may be able to set down clearly, and usefully, records of such things as cannot be described in words’ (Elements of Drawing 1).11 Blake frequently does this brilliantly. One example must suffice which characterises Blake’s ‘visual exegesis’.12 The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (B480, Plate 54) at first sight offers a simple contrast between the two sets of women reflecting the comparison in the parable. But Blake shows us what a close reader he is of the biblical text. He picks up the distinctive Matthaean eschatological symbol of the angelic trumpet from Matt. 24:31, absent in the versions of the eschatological discourse in Mark 13 and Luke 21 (though it is to be found in 1 Thess. 4:16, which is often thought to be dependent on the tradition lying behind the Gospel of Matthew). The contrast at the centre of the image picks up something central to Blake. ‘Contraries’ reflect his life-long struggle with dualism, in which Blake challenged the notion of one state negating another (Jerusalem 10:7–16). His work sets out to ‘Shew[ing] the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul’ (Songs of Innocence and of Experience, E7). ‘Contraries … are necessary to Human existence’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 3, E34).

9

D. Bindman, Blake as an Artist (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 115–131. Bindman, Blake as an Artist, 125; M. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 1:336. 11 E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, eds., The Complete Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), 15:13. 12 M. O’Kane, Painting the Text: The Artist as Biblical Interpreter (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2007). 10

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This is what we find in this image. On the one hand, there is a degree of homogeneity about the colour and demeanour of the wise virgins. In this they are similar to the prim and proper, but ultimately misguided, Comforters, especially in Plates 7 and 10 of Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job. By way of contrast, the foolish virgins are depicted in different and more arresting colours, and in different poses, as they lament their lack of preparedness. The reveille of the last trump, with the Gothic tower and spire suggesting the celestial city, is a wake-up call (Matt. 25:13) encouraging the viewer to cleanse the doors of perception and comprehend the contrary states of the human soul. So, the image reflects Blake’s determination to show that every person has contrary forces at work in them. Blake inveighed against dualism, but inspired as he was by the Bible, he could not get a form of dualism, namely, that way of seeing things by way of contrasts, out of his intellectual system.13 Indeed, it became central to his thought. He did, however, reject the way in which, in the Bible, contrasts were used to negate – holiness over profanity, clean and unclean, God over idols, and elect over reprobate – for these tended to negation rather than embracing contraries. Rather than one quality cancelling out the other, we find in Blake’s work a dialectic at work in human existence, between energy and reason, and the Prolific and the Devourer (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 3 and 16, E34 and 40). So, Blake never frees himself from the inspiration of the Bible and its dualistic contrasts but makes of them something different. Indeed, his own artistic work itself encapsulates the attempt to channel the infinite drive of energy into clearly defined, sometimes tiny, images and words, which can together communicate the Poetic Genius. Thus will be ‘Eternity … in love with the productions of time’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 7, E36). The slaughter in the war with France and the death of children did not go unnoticed by Blake, who found resonances with the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac, as did Wilfred Owen a century or so later. Down the centuries it has been an important story for both Jews and Christians, offering a model of righteous suffering and the willing sacrifice of the son by the Father. But this can mask the terrible nature of the story. This is nowhere better exemplified than in ‘Abraham and Isaac’ (B57, Fig. 10), where Abraham’s dilemma and Isaac’s contrasting clarity about the option his agonised father should take is portrayed. The chilling instructions for the burnt offering, symbolised by the knife in Abraham’s left hand, indicates what a gruesome fate was in store for Isaac. The terrible sacrifice of a child in obedience to the dictates of religion particularly disgusted Blake. He regarded Abraham as a Druid, a group, which throughout his writings, is seen as guilty of child sacrifice (e.g. Jerusalem 27:30–33, E172; 65:63, E217). In the Bible this is 13

L. Damrosch, Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

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linked with the worship of Moloch, (Lev. 18:21; 20:2–5; 2 Kgs. 23:10; Jer. 32:35), a deity which for Blake was a terrible symbol of the sacrifice of children through war (Milton 37:20–25, E137).

Fig. 10. William Blake: ‘Abraham and Isaac’, 1799–1800

40.3. Blake’s Hermeneutics William Blake was mounting his critique of the Bible at the same time as what we now know as historical criticism was emerging, but Blake does not obviously fit into that development, while indicating his sympathy for it in his annotations to Richard Watson’s Apology (E611).14 Hans Frei, in his epoch-making book, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative15 has examined the wider developments in biblical hermeneutics in the late eighteenth century. Blake’s reading of the Gospels betrays little sign of the influence of emerging historical criticism. In one respect Blake was like H.S. Reimarus, the pioneer of the quest for the historical Jesus,16 as he saw Jesus as the leader of an iconoclastic challenge that seemed to fail (The Everlasting Gospel, E523– 14

Adams, Blake’s Margins. H. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). 16 A. Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, trans. W. Montgomery (London: A&C Black, 1911). 15

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524), and he seems to have shared the suspicion of miracles held by some of his contemporaries (E617). Crucially, unlike Reimarus, however, Blake did not need to resort to the hermeneutics of suspicion to maintain his view of Jesus as a radical dissenter who ‘died as an unbeliever’. Rather, like so many non-conformist interpreters before and since his day, he read the Gospel narratives as realistic portraits of the events surrounding Jesus and found in them the picture of a non-conformist Jesus who offended hierarchy and political authorities and paid the penalty for his non-conformity (we heard echoes of this in the extract from The Everlasting Gospel that we looked at). Blake’s attitude to the Bible is in one way suspicious. Thus, he seems quite prepared to assert that some of the Hebrew Bible may have been propaganda and he refuses to accept that its contents, or, better, the construal of its contents by church and state, should be regarded as binding on society. He regarded the Bible as a motley collection of often confusing ideas and irreconcilable tensions whose reduction to a theological system, or a religion of a particular kind of moral virtue had not always influenced for good the fabric of human society. It is important to stress that Blake’s unease with regard to the Bible is rooted not only in the appropriation of it in ecclesiastical and political life but also in the effects of its literal sense. For example, Blake’s explicit and implicit critique of divine monarchy in the Bible depends less on any kind of historical reconstruction than on a reading of the text as it stands, linked, of course, with a keen appreciation of the use made of the Bible by those in power. The Bible provided Blake with the language and intellectual stimuli to extend its themes and create for himself Bible-like myths. His own mythical world was probably created in order to offer a more telling critical perspective on the dominant readings of the Bible in the England of his day. His illuminated books are a continuation of the biblical frame of reference. Put simply: in his myth the prophet-figure on the one hand, and creator/law-giver on the other, vie with each other to illuminate the nature of the distorted fabric of human society and individual personality, and offer a narrative resolution in which an equilibrium is restored. Blake’s ‘Bible-like’ work is part of a deliberate biblical hermeneutic in order to challenge what he perceived to be a dominant and arid literalism and a moralistic religion which quenched the ‘Spirit of Prophecy and the Poetic Genius’ (All Religions are One, ‘Principle 5’, E1). Unlike historical scholarship, Blake was no advocate of the importance of detachment, however. Self-involvement in reading the Bible was crucial for him, even if his exegesis means in effect a rewriting of the Bible and the rendering of its story in new and (one supposes, he hoped) more accessible forms. He shared Coleridge’s emphasis on the involvement of the interpreting subject, and Coleridge’s words in Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit that ‘in the Bible there is more that finds me than I have experienced in all other books put together’ would surely have struck a chord with Blake. Whether in his depictions of biblical scenes, or in his own complex mythology, the Bible

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enabled Blake to plumb the depths of ‘what is Grand’ and ‘not too Explicit’ and had a special power to ‘rouze the faculties to act’, ‘addressed’, as it was in Blake’s view, ‘to the Imagination & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason’ (E702). In sum, for Blake the Bible (and day to day that meant the King James Version) was ‘The Great Code of Art’. Read aright the Bible might achieve transformation of personal and social lives, but Blake seemed to be offering his own illuminated books as a necessary complement to the Bible, which no longer adequately functioned in the way Blake believed it should. To some extent, Blake’s own works stand in the place of the Bible as an alternative revelatory text (as he put it) to ‘rouze the faculties to act’. While his approach places Blake with the premoderns, in his view of the existential potential of the Bible, the way in which he allows its narrative to frame his own prophecy, and his questions about its capacity to do its job, place him on the side of the moderns. We can see him allowing the biblical text to offer the inspiration for a new poet-prophet’s vocation in ‘London’ from Songs of Experience. It exemplifies Frei’s judgement that the biblical text offered an interpretative space, which one might inhabit to inform one’s judgement. Blake identifies himself with Ezekiel and John but inhabiting the biblical text stimulates new ideas and understanding, in which the realities of everyday life of the environment in which the poet-prophet lived and worked offered components of the poet’s mental furniture. The meaning of the prophecies of Ezekiel and John are not left unaffected by the later prophet’s context or the ‘poetic genius’ at work in him. If Blake inhabits the narrative world of the Bible, he re-arranges the furniture of that world in new and creative ways. Ezekiel’s preoccupation with pollution and holiness is left behind reinterpreted, just as John’s Lake of Fire becomes cathartic rather than punitive, without any word of explanation or apology for what he was doing. Blake’s work sits uneasily in the history of the emergence of modern biblical hermeneutics. Blake was opposed to the English Deist tradition about which Frei had much to say, with its emphasis on historical reference and the quest for the intention of the author, and the empiricist tradition in philosophy. John Locke and Francis Bacon (and Isaac Newton) often function as caricatures rather than being fully understood. Blake’s approach to the Bible is not without antecedents. He was part of a tradition of biblical interpretation deeply rooted both in English non-conformity and in aspects of Radical Reformation hermeneutics, which is both humanistic and mystical. It is humanistic in that it presupposes a universal possession of the divine spirit, awareness of which is to varying degrees independent of the ideology of church and state. It is mystical in the sense that it is indebted to the influence of the legacy of the Reformation spiritualists whose work was available in English translation from the seventeenth century onwards. The priority given to the interpreting subject has a long history in late medieval and early modern engagements with the Bible, a tradition of interpretation, which ran

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parallel with the mainstream Reformation position which Frei outlines. Of all the writers on the Bible discussed by Frei, Blake’s position seems to me to be closest to that of Herder, who also searched for the ‘poetic spirit’, which those with the required empathy may discern in ancient texts. As a critic of the Bible, Blake too saw himself as the arbiter of the discernment of the true poetic genius, in the biblical text or elsewhere. What is more, Blake explicitly states the continuity between his own creative mythology and the apocalyptic symbolism of Revelation. John on Patmos already saw the images and used the myth that Blake himself was later to use: … John Saw these things Reveald in Heaven On Patmos Isle & heard the Souls cry out to be deliverd He saw the Harlot of the Kings of Earth & saw her Cup Of fornication food of Orc & Satan pressed from the fruit of Mystery. (The Four Zoas 8.601–604, E385–386) Blake’s mythical world, inspired as it was by the Bible, yields a textual reality, which is parallel to, and functions similarly to, the Bible. We saw when we were considering Blake’s visual hermeneutics that he sought to invite the reader or viewer into his imaginative world. Blake believed himself to be in continuity with what he called the ‘spirit of prophecy’ or ‘the poetic genius’. He believed this lay at the basis of all religion and that, as he put it in All Religions are One, ‘the Jewish & Christian Testaments are An original derivation from the Poetic Genius’ (‘Principle 6’, E1). Blake entered the world of the Bible, found its ideas inspiring and liberating and returned to his situation convinced that merely speaking in the Bible’s words would not allow its word of life to be heard by his contemporaries. He believed that other strategies – image as well as text pre-eminently – were needed to enable the Word, hidden within the words, to speak. His art, his poetry and his life as an engraver, were all directed to this end. In many ways he was a preacher in word and image who had a grasp of what he thought the Bible was about, which prioritised some elements, like the forgiveness of sins, and downplayed others, such as the violence in the Conquest narratives or the notion of divine monarchy. His existential engagement with the Bible, especially the life and teaching of Jesus, represents a distinctive exegetical contribution of this remarkable Christian. We might like to see him explaining in more detail how the fruits of imagination are taken up by reason, which can then build on the ideas generated, as he put it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Nevertheless, however wild the images and strange the texts, we are confronted by a person who allowed technique to match invention and imagination in a remarkably creative enterprise. In it one finds a kind of praeparatio evangelii for his contemporaries so that they may learn to engage afresh with a Bible, which had become a bastion of dogmatic moral virtue and an ancillary to the ideology of a conservative church and state.

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John Ruskin’s words about his own engagement with the Bible aptly summarise Blake’s also: My good wiseacre readers, I know as many flaws in the book of Genesis as the best of you, but I knew the book before I knew its flaws, while you know the flaws, and never have known the book, nor can know it.17

The contents of the Bible were for both an inspiration and an object of criticism. The Bible offered a frame of reference, however much they chaffed against its constraints – how else can one explain Ruskin’s Unto this Last or Blake’s Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion? Blake was a peculiar kind of biblical critic. He lived through some of the defining years of the emergence of modern study, and there are some indications that he may have been aware of certain trends in emerging biblical criticism, but on the whole there is little interest in historical questions. Seeing Blake’s images and reading or hearing his words takes us into a strange visionary world. Blake challenges our tendency to demonise our opponents, to separate out things and people into good and evil, the children of God and the children of the Devil, the good God of Jesus and the bad God of the Old Testament, and so on. This is fundamental to everything else, to his religion, his politics and his understanding of human relationships. This remarkable and enigmatic visionary poet and artist still has much to offer us. This man, virtually unknown in his own time, won a devoted admiration from a small circle of friends and admirers, who knew that they had been in a remarkable, but disconcerting, presence. In the legacy of his work he continues to unsettle those of us who engage with his texts and images and follow his lead through that door depicted at the start of Jerusalem in the journey into interpretation with confidence. I often ask myself the question: what have I most learnt from Blake about the interpretation of the Bible? The answer would be: the way in which he used text and image to open up other dimensions of engagement, which a words-centred religion can so easily downplay. The mistake would be to assume that Blake had cracked the way of engaging with the Bible, resulting in an ‘off the shelf’ hermeneutic which we in later generations can apply. There isn’t one. If we simply resort to Blake’s words and images, we shall end up replacing strange texts with even stranger ones. What he does offer us is an example of hermeneutical creativity, which needs to be ‘minted afresh’ in every generation (Plate 55).18 17

Fors Clavigera (1874), in Cook and Wedderburn, eds., Works of John Ruskin, 28:85. The images are available online at The William Blake Archive website (http://www. blakearchive.org/blake/): Songs of Innocence and of Experience; The First Book of Urizen; Europe a Prophecy; America a Prophecy; Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion; Illustrations of the Book of Job; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; ‘Laocöon’; ‘Abraham and Isaac’, Yale Center for British Art. 18

41. William Blake and the Apocalypse 41.1. William Blake: Ancient and Modern Blake is an important part of the history of religion, not only in terms of the theological concepts which he espoused and his ambiguous position in Enlightenment theology, but also because of the distinctive mode of presentation of his ideas, in which text and image vie with each other on the pages of his illuminated books. His is a form of metaphorical theology in which one medium does not complement the other so much as it provides an essential counterpoint thereby embodying one of Blake’s convictions that ‘Without Contraries is no progression’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 3, E341). Blake’s theology harks back to the apocalyptic mysticism of Jacob Boehme and was explicitly influenced by Milton and Swedenborg, though both end up being foils to his critical creativity as he carved out a distinctive intellectual space for himself, with Swedenborg, in particular, being firmly rejected, even if there are relics of his thought in Blake’s theology. Recently, evidence has emerged of the possible influence of Moravian ideas on Blake as a result of his mother’s involvement.2 Less clear is Blake’s relationship to a longer tradition of radicalism and antinomianism, with which he has often rightly been linked.3 The antecedents go back to the seventeenth century, and further still to the Radical Reformation. The Familism and strands of Anabaptism and Spiritualism linked with the writing of Hans Denck and Sebastian Franck influenced radical non-conformity. Blake is in some sense a classic antinomian, in that a religion of Law is consistently a target of his, epitomised by

1

E plus page number(s) refers to Erdman’s edition of Blake’s work, see below, p. 775. K. Davies, ‘The Lost Moravian History of William Blake’s Family: Snapshots from the Archive’, Literature Compass 3 (2006): 1297–1319; M.K. Schuchard, Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision (London: Century, 2006); and C. Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 230. 3 R. Rix, William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); M. Ankarsjö, William Blake and Religion: A New Critical View (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 2009); Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 157–180; and E.P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 2

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his view of Jesus who ‘was all virtue, and acted from impulse: not from rules’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 23–24, E43). It is not that Blake is opposed to morality even if he is a critic of its conventional examples and its hypocrisy. He came to promote ‘The Gospel [which] is Forgiveness of Sins & has No Moral Precepts’ (‘Annotations to Watson’s Apology’ 108, E619) and also ‘Human Brotherhood’ (‘As God is Love: every kindness to another is a little Death / In the Divine Image nor can Man exist but by Brotherhood’, Jerusalem 96:28, E256). The prerequisite is not an appeal to some static moral code, so much as that human impulse to altruism so easily eclipsed, but which Blake’s work consistently seeks to advocate. Blake is a Janus-like figure who on the one hand sympathises with aspects of the Enlightenment, not least the emphasis on human autonomy and the critique of Christian orthodoxy, but on the other whose biblical interpretation sits uneasily with the prevailing rationalism and historicism of his day and harks back to the imaginative engagement of an earlier age. The notes that he made in his copy of Richard Watson’s Apology for the Christian orthodoxy in the face of the critique of the Bible by Tom Paine reveal this. While Blake’s politics and sympathies lie with Paine, he clearly has little time for the emerging historicism as the way in which the Bible is to be best understood and interpreted. So, Blake rejects Watson’s apologetic use of the antiquity of the Gospels: ‘There are no Proofs that the Earliest of all the Writings of the New Testament was written within the First Century’ (‘Annotations to Watson’s Apology’ 31, E618). The ‘sentiments and examples’ of the Bible are important for Blake, not primarily its historical worth, as he puts it in one of his longer marginal notes: I cannot concieve the Divinity of the books in the Bible to consist either in who they were written by or at what time or in the historical evidence which may be all false in the eyes of one man & true in the eyes of another but in the Sentiments & Examples which whether true or Parabolic are Equally useful as Examples given to us of the perverseness of some & its consequent evil & the honesty of others & its consequent good[.] This sense of the Bible is equally true to all & equally plain to all. None can doubt the impression which he receives from a book of Examples. If he is good he will abhor wickedness in David or Abraham if he is wicked he will make their wickedness an excuse for his & so he would do by any other book. (‘Annotations to Watson’s Apology’ 22, E618)

Blake has no interest in the kinds of debates which were to become typical fare in the emerging historical study of the Bible. His is still a hermeneutic which finds meaning in the text. In a famous letter, in which he takes issue with the narrow-minded demand for a key to his paintings, he stresses the importance of the effects of literature and art (‘The wisest of the Ancients considerd what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction because it rouzes the faculties to act’, ‘Letter to Trusler’, 1799, E702). As far as Blake is concerned, the genius of the Bible is ‘Why is the Bible more Entertaining & Instructive than any other book. Is it not because they are addressed to the

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Imagination which is Spiritual Sensation & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason Such is True Painting and such alone valued by the Greeks’ (‘Letter to Trusler’, E702–703). Here we find an intellectual move which is crucial to Blake’s art and theology: the priority of imagination over reason. As he puts it in one of his earliest illuminated books, ‘the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again’ (There is No Natural Religion [b] Conclusion, E3). What is required as he puts it here is ‘the Poetic Genius which is everywhere call’d the Spirit of Prophecy’ (All Religions Are One, ‘Principle 5’, E1) to stimulate and expand the horizons of human thought and action.

41.2. Illustrations of the Book of Job as an Example of Blake’s Biblical Interpretation In his Illustrations of the Book of Job of 1825 Blake engages first hand with a complete biblical book, though he also engaged in a similar exercise on Genesis, which was left incomplete at his death. Blake’s distinctive form of biblical commentary is found in twenty-one images, surrounded by marginal biblical references. The images seem to be illuminated by the text but the words have a subordinate position to the centrally placed image. Blake’s ‘Job’ recapitulates familiar themes from Blake’s earlier work. Blake has Job being weaned away from God as a transcendent divine monarch demanding obedience to what is written in a holy book. Job comes to see God face-toface and to realise that the divine indwells humans. Blake reads Job as the story of a theological and intellectual journey involving a personal upheaval and apocalyptic vision. In the first image (see Fig. 6, above, p. 691) we see Job and his wife surrounded by their children, in pious poses, with books open on their laps. The musical instruments are on the tree. All seems to be well, but they are unaware that it is a time of spiritual exile for Job and his family in that it is an understanding of God based on what has been received rather than personal experience. Beneath the image on the left is a quotation from the Book of Job: ‘Thus did Job continually’, which may sound a note of reproach about the habitual nature of Job’s religion. In the final image (see Fig. 7, above, p. 692) the books have gone and the instruments are off the tree (cf. Ps. 137:3–4). In the middle of the altar are Blake’s version of words from 2 Cor. 3:6: ‘for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’ and 1 Cor. 2:14: ‘they [the things of the Spirit of God] are spiritually discerned’. The Eliphaz and Elihu engravings (Plates 4 and 10 respectively), as well as the nightmare experience of Job (Plate 11, see Fig. 8, above, p. 693), in different ways, bear witness to the way Blake focuses on the few texts about

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visions and dreams in the Book of Job, which then become an interpretative framework for his reading of the book as a whole. Job’s agony in his ‘dreams and visions of the night’ elicited from Blake one of his most graphic and disturbing images. The terrifying apparition has the characteristics of the divinity seen in previous images but now intertwined with a serpent and with a cloven hoof. The figure points with his right hand towards the tablets of commandments, while below Job, other figures stretch up trying to pull him down into the fiery inferno below. In the main caption Blake paraphrases Job 7:14 which in the King James Version reads ‘Then thou scarest me with dreams, and terrifiest me through visions’. Below the image there is a long quotation from Job 19:22–27. In this crucial image in the Job series Blake depicts Job’s agony as he confronts the shortcomings of an understanding of God who rewards righteousness by prosperity and joy and unrighteousness by the woes of hell fire. In interpreting Job’s terrifying night vision as he does, Blake has Job come face-to-face with one of the errors taught by ‘Bibles and sacred codes’, the neat and tidy compartmentalisation of life and indeed divinity which does not do justice to the complexity of experience. The change in Job’s hermeneutical perspective means that the divine vision takes priority over an understanding of God based on reading holy books, doing good works and engaging in rituals. It is the latter but it is also much more. The decisive moment comes when Job practices love of enemies, and at that moment ‘The Lord turns again the captivity of Job’. In Plate 17 (see Fig. 1, above, p. 354), Job sees that God is not some far off enthroned divinity but God-with-us, Christ the Divine in human, as God appears to Job and his wife. Hence Blake glosses his depiction of the theophany not only with verses from the Gospel of John but by Job 42:5 in a slightly emended version of the King James Version. Blake has ‘I have heard thee with the hearing of the Ear but now my Eye seeth thee’, whereas the King James Version has ‘I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; but now my eye seeth thee’. Note also that Blake does not continue the quotation from the Book of Job to include the words, ‘Wherefore I abhor myself & repent in dust and ashes’. Once again, Blake has used his own imagination to depict what Job sees of God, the tradition of whose existence and demands Job had hitherto accepted on hearsay. An aspect of visionary texts is the way in which contrasts between the visionary world, the world above, and the world below, jostle with one another. The dualistic characteristics of visionary texts appear in Job 1–2 also, where the reader is given a glimpse into the activities of the heavenly court. In the early engravings of the sequence we find the distinct contrast between the heavenly world above and the world below. This disappears in the divine theophany (Job 38–41). The overcoming of the division between heaven and earth is a major theme of the New Testament Apocalypse, where the divide between heaven and earth, the age to come and this age, comes to

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an end when God dwells on earth with humans (Rev. 21:3) (cf. Blake’s Jerusalem 3: ‘Heaven Earth and Hell henceforth shall live in harmony’, E144). Blake’s inclusion of passages from the Gospel of John in Plate 17 indicates the abolition of the distinction between humans and God.

Fig. 11. William Blake: Book of Job, Plate 20: ‘Job and His Daughters’, 1825

In engraving 20 (Fig. 11), Job bequeaths to his daughters an experience rooted in the events of his life. Blake stresses the importance of experience and challenges the hegemony of book religion and gave priority to an experiential faith. In engravings 17 and 18 the key verses are written on both books and scrolls.

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This is the moment when the contents of the books are actually seen by the reader (hitherto we have seen them on the lap of God or Job and his wife, engravings 1 and 2). The first book quotation in engraving 17 relates to Job’s experience of God, the divine in human. The second in engraving 18 suggests that Job’s liberation finally comes through his act of forgiveness. It is only when he prays for his friends that the experience of upheaval in his life, and the change of perspective, are embodied in a changed ethic. It is this experience which Job demonstrates and passes on to his daughters (engraving 20): it is the ‘text’ of life. The Job story becomes for Blake a story about a changed perspective and changed action, in the light of experience, however great the personal trial might be. The components of the text are created by Blake into an effective combination of word and picture, as Job becomes a paradigm for similar existential change in readers as they engage with Blake’s exegesis of the Book of Job. I pretend not to holiness! yet I pretend to love.

These words from Jerusalem (3, E145), where holiness is contrasted with love, point to one of the most significant aspects of Blake’s theology for the study of religion, and are his attempt to protest against the effects of dualism. This is endemic in various forms within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, particularly in the simple contrast between the good power and the evil power, God and Satan, the high god and the demiurge, which has been inherent in both orthodoxy and heterodoxy. It is one of the errors, which Blake criticises in ‘all Bibles or sacred codes’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 4, E34). While Blake’s mythology seems to presuppose such dualism, the contrasts and the oppositions are integral to his understanding of the way in which dislocation and lack of integration is the problem, which needs to be rectified, whether personally or socially. What is clear is that Blake is opposed to a dualistic understanding of divine and human powers in which the triumph of one means the negation of the other, for he wants to see both powers at work within the human person and indeed in the world, and the opposites themselves as a necessary complement in the successful outworking of the process of human engagement. Picking up on strands which themselves have a long tradition within the Christian tradition, stretching back via the theology of Jacob Boehme to the writings of Nicholas of Cusa, Blake challenges Christianity’s preoccupation with holiness as an obstacle to an understanding of human psychology and an impediment to the necessary perspective of the dynamism of the poetic genius.4 Blake’s work is a challenge to the aniconic tradition in religion. Despite being a product of Protestantism, Blake’s emphasis on the visual contrasts 4

L. Damrosch, Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

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with the stern austerity of much Protestantism. The crucial plate of his Illustrations of the Book of Job has as its main text Job 42:5 (‘I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; but now my eye seeth thee’), which summarises so much of his work, as well as encapsulating the way in which Blake reads the book. The immediacy of the vision of the divine transcends the information received in the words of tradition. It portrays Blake’s contrast between Memory and Inspiration and depicts the moment when, to quote the words of the Preface to Milton a Poem, ‘the Daughters of Memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration’ (E95). Mystics such as ‘Fenelon, Guion, Teresa’ (Jerusalem 72:50, E227) are treated with approbation. The mystical and the visionary are given their place in religion and their place in the articulation of a transformative language, which will enhance the intellectual horizons of those engaging with his illuminated books and images. Blake writes as follows in relation to the biblical images and suggests the possibility of mental visualisation which was such a familiar part of medieval exegesis:5 If the Spectator could Enter into these Images in his Imagination approaching them on the Fiery Chariot of his Contemplative Thought if he could Enter into Noahs Rainbow or into his bosom or could make a Friend & Companion of one of these Images of wonder which always intreats him to leave mortal things as he must know then would he arise from his Grave then would he meet the Lord in the Air & then he would be happy. (A Vision of The Last Judgment, E560)

41.3. ‘Every Honest Man Is a Prophet’ Blake saw his words as being in continuity with what John saw on Patmos (The Four Zoas 8.115[111]:4, E385), and in one of his early works, over the words ‘As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 3, E34) in Copy F (Pierpont Morgan Library, 1794) Blake has written ‘1790’ immediately above the words ‘new heaven’, which, because of the words ‘it is now thirty-three years since its advent’ probably draws attention to the year 1757, the year of Blake’s birth. So Blake seems to see himself as some kind of messiah, who opened up ‘the return of Adam into Paradise’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 3, E34) initiating the eschatological age, just like Jesus, who, after his call and testing, according to Mark 1:15, proclaimed ‘the time (καιρός) is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand’ (cf. John 13:1; 7:6). Similarly Paul believed himself to be the messiah’s agent of salvation to the nations in the Last Days, 5

M.J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and eadem, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400– 1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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and John on Patmos saw in his day the heavens opened just as Ezekiel had seen by the rivers of Babylon. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, they were the ones on whom the ends of the ages had come (1 Cor. 10:11). In later works, William Blake thought of himself as a prophet.6 Elsewhere at the start of one of his earliest illuminated works he quotes the classic prophetic words ‘The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness’ (Isa. 40:3; All Religions Are One, E1) in a work which argues for the necessity of rediscovery of ‘the Poetic genius, the Spirit of Prophecy’ to remedy exclusive reliance on sense perception. Blake himself wrote two prophecies about America and Europe in the form of illuminated books, in which, by word and picture, a process of epistemological transformation, personal and political, is sought in the reader through the effects of the texts. Blake’s prophetic writings mirror the obscurity of biblical prophetic oracles. In this age both prophet and recipient of prophecy ‘see in a glass darkly’ awaiting the clarity of understanding which would exceed even what fourfold vision could offer. Indeed, in Lectures 20 and 21 of his Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753) Robert Lowth had described the allusiveness of prophetic discourse in words which resemble Blake’s own interpretative method, stressing prophecy’s obscurity and its abrupt transitions: ‘prophecy in its very nature implies some degree of obscurity, and is always … like a light glimmering in a dark place, until the day dawn and the daystar arose’ (2 Pet. 1:19, a passage which echoes the views we find in 1 Cor. 13).7 Blake’s famous depiction of divinity in ‘The Ancient of Days’ at the beginning of Europe a Prophecy (see Fig. 2, above, p. 559), with the wind blowing his beard, is juxtaposed with the serpent on the following page, embodying energy and desire which disturbs the careful order of the old regime, whose position had been so shaken by revolution whether in France or in the American colonies. There can be few passages more redolent of the revolutionary optimism of biblical prophecy than America a Prophecy, Plate 6 (see Fig. 5, above, p. 689). It reads like an anthology of allusions to biblical passages, which merge to portray the hopeful mood of the young man with eyes raised looking for the ‘redemption’ which ‘draweth nigh’, to quote Luke 21:28. Blake briefly expounded his views on prophecy in 1798 in one of his annotations to Watson’s Apology. Watson, who was Bishop of Llandaff, offered a riposte to Tom Paine’s writings on the Bible. In his own hand Blake gives some of his most explicit views about the Bible, indicating the extent to which he shared the critical spirit of Tom Paine, while sharing with Brothers and Southcott an attachment to its words as ‘Sentiments and Examples’: 6

Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 120–156. R. Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (Boston: Joseph T. Buckingham, 1815), 277, 289; L. Tannenbaum, Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 27. 7

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Prophets, in the modern sense of the word, have never existed. Jonah was no prophet, in the modern sense, for his prophecy of Nineveh failed. Every honest man is a Prophet; he utters his opinion both of private & public matters. Thus: If you go on So, the result is So. He never says, such a thing shall happen let you do what you will. A Prophet is a Seer, not an Arbitrary Dictator. It is man’s fault if God is not able to do him good. For he gives to the just & to the unjust, but the unjust reject his gift. (‘Annotations to Watson’s Apology’, E617)

When Blake states that Jonah’s ‘prophecy of Nineveh’ failed, he seems to mean the prediction, which God commissioned Jonah to announce, namely, that Nineveh was going to be destroyed, did not come to pass (Jon. 3:4: ‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’). The supposed failure of the prophecy of Nineveh’s demise obviously came about because the people of Nineveh repented (Jon. 3:5). This gets to the heart of what prophecy was for Blake. It is not primarily about prediction but the assertion of insight and warning, setting out the situation as it is and getting a response (so ‘Annotations to Watson’s Apology’ 14, E617). The distinction between prophecy as ‘forth telling’ (roughly speaking, pronouncing the truth about society and individuals) and ‘foretelling’ (predicting that which is to come in the future) is important and is needed to complement the variety of prophetic activity in the modern period, and indeed at other times. Blake is to be categorised more as a ‘forth teller’. Prophecy is important and the prerogative of every one. ‘Every honest man is a Prophet’. Indeed, ‘the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 12, E38). Even that apparently most future orientated text, Revelation, is in Blake’s interpretation more about laying bare the realities of history and political oppression than offering a map of the end of the world. In its visions, its threats and promises, and its graphic imagery, it sets forth the reality of what is going on in the world and the pervasiveness of human self-deception, and summons its readers/hearers to change their outlook and practice. It is, to paraphrase Blake’s own words, about ‘cleansing the doors of perception’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 14, E39). This is clear from the overt political reading of the Apocalypse, apparent in a design Blake created to illustrate Edward Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’ (British Museum, 1797). Here we see Babylon seated on the seven-headed beast, interpreting the words ‘Virtue’s Apology, in which are considered, the Love of this Life, the ambition and Pleasure, with the Wit and Wisdom of the World’. Young’s words prompt Blake to broaden their meaning to include the social and the political using the lens of the vision of Babylon seated on the many-headed beast in Rev. 17. At the time he painted this picture Blake was acutely aware of the culture of repression in war-torn England. It was a situation in which, to quote his words, ‘The Beast and the Whore rule without controls’ (‘Annotations to Watson’s Apology’, E611). This picture of Babylon interprets Blake’s sentiments so well and in so doing picks up on a long tradition of political interpretation of apocalyptic images, rooted in Daniel

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and the Apocalypse. The heads of the beasts function as a way of understanding political oppression, and do not refer just to eschatological prediction. Like John’s visionary interpretation of Daniel, these interpretations are not a succession of empires, therefore, but a fourfold imperial oppression, taking place all at once and with differing dimensions. Blake depicts the heads of the beast as contemporary military, royal, legal and ecclesiastical powers, in much the same way as Gerrard Winstanley had interpreted the beasts of Dan. 7 as the fourfold oppressive aspects of contemporary political and economic power in his day.8 Blake took the opportunity of this commission to insert his protest against the political repression in the England of the 1790s giving expression to the violent culture of kings and their ideologues. Blake depicts the monarchical deity with papal tiara and throne with his brazen book of rules in Europe a Prophecy, Plate 12. It is this kind of political culture, which the non-conformist Jesus challenged, according to Blake in The Everlasting Gospel. For, in Blake’s words, he ‘acted from impulse: not from rules’ (see above, p. 704). Blake revealed his ambivalence about prophecy, especially the case in later works like Jerusalem, but there are even passages in earlier texts too (e.g. America a Prophecy, Copies A and O, E52). The contrasting fortunes of Los, the prophetic hero of Blake’s mythological system, indicate the complex relationship between energy and prophecy on the one hand and the need for boundaries which enable definition and comprehension on the other. There is not a simple polarity between restriction and freedom, inspiration and tradition, Law and Prophecy, the authoritarian and solitary Lawgiver, Urizen in Blake’s mythology, and Los, ‘the Eternal Prophet’ complement each other (The First Book of Urizen 10:16). What comes across in the complex poem, Jerusalem is that, however sincere Los’s attempts at redemptive action may be (Jerusalem 93), they do not always achieve their aim, as the energy generated can often lead in a direction different from what was intended. At the climax of Jerusalem there seems to be an irruption from beyond, to solve the despair about the fulfilment of redemption. For Blake this was not in any way a ‘supernatural’ solution, but rather concerns an epistemological ‘break through’. It may seem to come from beyond but in fact it is the result of insight from a hitherto dormant human faculty, which has been eclipsed. It is the way in which an appropriate ethical option is allowed to affect outlooks and actions. What is needed is the casting off of Selfhood, which comes about through being ‘united with Jesus’ as Los recognises (Jerusalem 93:18–19). It is not just building Jerusalem or 8 T.N. Corns, A. Hughes and D. Loewenstein, eds., The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2:188–192; and C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972).

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even the exercise of the poetic genius that counts, but the extent to which ‘the Breath Divine’ (Jerusalem 94:18; 95:2) informs it, and the need for ‘the annihilation of selfhood and false forgiveness’ (Milton a Poem 15). The crucified Christ offers a paradigm for human beings and their relating. ‘When Jesus dies in Blake, he is not a sacrificial victim. He models a way of living.’9 As far as Blake was concerned, however, the prophetic vocation was not a role exclusive to him, as his quotation of Num. 11:29 at the end of the Preface to Milton a Poem suggests (‘Would to God that all the Lords People were Prophets’). Prophecy is democratised, therefore, for ‘Every honest man is a Prophet’. In addition, the complex task of the prophet to help cleanse ‘the doors of perception’ gains increasing prominence. Word and image in Blake’s illuminated books suggest a move away from the ‘innocent’ abandon of revolutionary optimism, as a result of ‘experience’. It was not a retreat into a passive submission to a transcendent divine agency. The issue for Blake was not so much about the relationship between the human and divine but how the work of prophet takes effect, given the distorting effects of the human ego on the prophetic endeavour. Where Blake’s dialectic differs from the traditional Christian morality, however, which he so roundly condemns, is that there must be a real dialectic. To quote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (16, E40), ‘The Prolific’ and ‘The Devourer’ are both necessary in the process of unmasking ‘Religion hid in War, a Dragon red & hidden Harlot’ (Jerusalem 89:53, E249).10 Contraries are crucial; negations are a denial of the outworking of the dialectic (Jerusalem 10:8–16, E153). As Blake put it, ‘Religion is an endeavor to reconcile the two’ but according to Blake that is to destroy existence. Contraries do not involve exclusion and rejection as is often the case with dualistic systems, where the sacred is given priority over the profane.11 Both are needed to enable a comprehensive understanding of the nature of reality. Blake of all poets and artists exemplifies the attempts to channel and direct ‘Poetic Genius aright’ (All Religions are One, ‘Principle 5’, E1), not in the sense of doing what befits conventional propriety, but rather allowing the bounds of his artistic creations to communicate its prophetic challenge. Like the biblical prophetic oracles which had inspired him, his words and images have to be patiently worked with so that they ‘Rouze the Faculties to act’ (E702). Blake plumbed the complexities of the human personality which leads to the ‘dark delusions’ (The Four Zoas 8.111[107]:18, E382), including the delusions of the prophetic ego and the need to ensure 9 S.M. Sklar, Blake’s “Jerusalem” as Visionary Theatre: Entering the Divine Body (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 243. 10 R. Williams, ‘“The human form divine”: Radicalism and Orthodoxy in William Blake’, in Radical Christian Voices & Practice: Essays in Honour of Christopher Rowland, eds. Z. Bennett and D.B. Gowler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 151–164. 11 Damrosch, Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth, 165–169.

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that its potentially counter-productive endeavours were informed by, if not subordinated to, ‘Human Brotherhood’ (Jerusalem 96:16, 21, 28, E255–256).

41.4. The Self-Involving Interpreter Redeems the Text He Reads Milton a Poem is a particularly extraordinary text, even compared with Blake’s other works. In it psychology and hermeneutics coalesce in this complex mix of text and image to show how a later poet can critically understand and correct an earlier poet. But this does not come by means of a conventional act of criticism, so much as by a redemption that is enacted as the inadequacies of the earlier poet are laid bare and acknowledged. One of Blake’s criticisms of Milton is his relationship with women, not least his relationships with his spouses and daughters. This issue is woven into Blake’s myth, as Ololon, a character found in no other Blake work, has a prominent role embodying Milton’s treatment of women and his redemption.12 What we find Blake doing is not simply criticising texts, as his spirit comes to recognise his shortcomings in his life and writing enabling the redemption of the earlier author. What we have here is Blake engaging with one of his great mentors, John Milton, an inspiration for many of his, and previous, generations of writers.13 It is an unconventional process of interpretation, which deserves recognition for its pioneering contribution to the history of hermeneutics in religion. Asking what a text means and the relationship with the past and its traditions of beliefs and practices are part of the fabric of religion. But, anticipating much modern biblical study Blake goes further, and seeks, through the text, to get at the author and what an author intended. What Blake does is to engage with the past, not in the form of a text, but by internalising the person of the writer through his text. That sense of the author being somehow ‘alive’ in his text is evident in a wonderful passage from Milton’s Areopagitica 6: For Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous Dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book: who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good Book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

12

H. Bruder and T. Connolly, Sexy Blake (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and S. Prickett, Modernity and the Reinvention of Tradition: Backing into the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 13

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This is part of Milton’s brilliant apologia for ‘the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing’. Here the persona of authors is to be found in their books. It is ‘the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them’ which becomes part of Blake’s imaginative and spiritual life (Milton 21[23]:4, E115). As a result Blake goes on to enable Milton to confess ‘I in my Selfhood am that Satan. I go to Eternal Death’ (Milton 14[15]:30) and recognise the extent of the inhibition of his ‘Immortal Spirit’ and his need to cast off his addiction to ‘Rational Demonstration by Faith’ and ‘the rotten rags of Memory’ and be clothed with Imagination ‘To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration’. Blake engages with Milton, from his very first reference to the poet in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which starts with a manifesto against the effects of a dualism that reduces Christianity to a religion of restraint and morality, good and evil, right and wrong. Milton’s Messiah is a stern judge rather than the agent of Spirit and Energy, which end up being identified with the Devil, and characterised as evil. In other words, Milton, in Paradise Lost, seems to side with kings and governors, espousing a Hobbesian form of power in which absolute monarchy is a bulwark against the pandemonium of the democratic politics and religion of the English Civil War period in the seventeenth century. Jesus’ promise of the Spirit in John 14–16, and the doctrine of the Descent of Christ into Hell are used by Blake the narrator to criticise Christian orthodoxy’s preoccupation with restraint of Desire and Energy. That spiritual energy had to be rescued by the Messiah from hell to liberate energy, life and desire from the restrictions imposed by Christian orthodoxy. Nevertheless Blake asserts that Milton, almost despite himself, does recognise the energy of the Spirit, but identifies it with Satan rather than with Christ – hence his comment: ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 6, E35). So, the upshot is that Blake grasps Milton’s thought better than Milton did himself, and in Milton a Poem, Blake, having ‘digested’ Milton’s words, and ‘getting inside his skin’, as it were, can redeem the wrong moves that Milton made. Blake’s exercise of poetic genius enables the hints and promise latent in Milton’s work to be released by Blake’s own essay which ‘justify the ways of God to men’ (E95). Blake reads, criticises and so liberates his predecessor’s thought from its bondage to convention. In Milton a Poem Blake redeems Milton and so gives him a second chance to recognise the wrong direction his theology took and to see the drift of what he wrote but failed adequately to express. Blake’s redemption of Milton has its analogies in some modern Christian biblical interpretation. Whether it be the ‘quest for the historical Jesus’ or the ‘mind of Paul’, Biblical scholars have been interested in trying to understand the persons to which the texts bear witness. They seek to engage with the real

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Jesus of their imaginative reconstruction, or with Paul, tease out his motives and aims, and often seek to offer a critique of what is discovered and suggest better ways of expressing their insights, if necessary, liberated from the constraints of their historical assumptions and conditioned assumptions. Thinking the thoughts of scriptural writers like Paul after them and putting the drift of their thoughts better than they did themselves has become part and parcel of some aspects of modern Protestantism.14 The interpreter’s task is not just to sit at the feet of his mentor, but to put right that which the earlier writer did not fully understand, and so effect a better understanding and appreciation of his life and thought. Blake’s Milton is a complex poem and much more is going on than the narrative of a later poetic genius enabling his predecessor to recover that genius which has been encrusted with the rationalism and resistance to inspiration and imagination. Blake’s mythological poem, in which he himself is a crucial actor, is a paradigm for a quest which has many parallels in the history of religion, as later interpreters by their close reading seek to understand texts and those who wrote them. In doing this, later readers identify with earlier authors, but often part company from their opinions in some respects while resonating with them on others. In so doing they criticise the shortcomings of what have come to be seen as authoritative texts, which have hitherto had such a hold on them and the readers’ contemporaries. Blake’s hermeneutical and theological achievement in Milton a Poem is to explore the relationship with the past and the nature of its hold upon us. As we have seen, Blake never makes any secret of his conviction that resort to ‘Memory’ is inferior to ‘Inspiration’. That which has been handed down must always take second place to the Poetic Genius and the Spirit of Prophecy latent in every one, which can stir the embers of the past and fan into flame new insight and wisdom. The past must not become the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ (‘London’, Songs of Experience, E27), which bind a new generation in its thrall. Rather than reject the past Blake recognises in Milton, a muse and a kindred spirit, even if his predecessor might not have recognised such affinity. Thereby there is a hermeneutical act of liberation in the expression of the genius of his predecessor, to enable it to be a stimulus for the intellectual imagination of a later generation. Herein lies the basis of an interpretative method which in different situations was to be the method of non-conformists and progressives, who sought a different relationship with authoritative texts, acknowledging them but not being subjected to their dictates, or to the dictates of those who appealed to their literal sense as a buttress for their power. It is thus not without some justification, then, that when ‘The Ancients’ visited Blake they talked of visiting ‘the House of the Interpreter’!

14

R. Morgan, ‘Sachkritik in Reception History’, JSNT 33.2 (2010): 175–190.

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41.5. Review of the Literature Blake’s inventiveness as a printer complemented an extraordinary imaginative life in which the visionary experience was the foundation for a life of nonconformity. What we have in Blake’s work is the extraordinary mix of technical proficiency as an engraver and printer, which enabled inspiration and production to complement each other, and image and texts to become an essential part of the hermeneutical medium. Images cease to be mere illustrations but are a necessary part of the interpretative process. Blake was a self-involving interpreter, in that it is the effect of the text on him that is most important and the effect of his productions on his readers/viewers as they cleansed the doors of perception.15 While Blake allows the subjectivity of the interpreter full rein, that subjectivity is given its critical contribution also. Few could be more creatively critical than he was of essential aspects of the biblical text. Scholarship on Blake’s work has been pioneered by literary specialists, historians and art historians, rather than biblical exegetes. This has illuminated Blake’s world in ways which have enabled us to appreciate the complex undercurrents of the late eighteenth-century revolutionary sub-culture of which Blake was a part. But in the midst of all this there stands the place of the Bible in the Blake corpus from earliest text to latest. Blake occasionally writes about the Bible, but it is the way in which he engages with predecessors like Milton and Swedenborg, whose politics and visions (respectively) he admires but in whose work he also finds much to criticise, that we can really begin to grasp how he treats the Bible. It is not an authoritative religious code but a stimulus to the imagination which, to use his own words ‘rouzes the faculties to act’. The history of modern religion is incomplete without consideration of Blake’s theology and biblical interpretation. Over the years these have been touched on in various publications but have not loomed large in Blake scholarship, and mainstream theological studies have made little contribution to the debate. The late Illustrations of the Book of Job show Blake in his prime mingling biblical texts and centrally placed images, which encapsulate key moments of the biblical book, all of which have as their aim to trace the experience of Job from conventionality to a life of vision based on inspiration rather than memory.16 So tradition and received wisdom are put in second place. It is the necessity of this kind of experiential wisdom, which he bequeaths to his daughters at the end of the series (see Fig. 11, above, p. 707). Not only is it a masterpiece of engraving but it is also a theological essay, which has few parallels in the history of religion.

15 16

Cf. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 14 (E39). Cf. Milton a Poem, Preface (E95).

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41.6. Links to Digital Materials Students of Blake’s work are very well served by online resources. The wonderful William Blake Archive offers versions of most of Blake’s illuminated books so that students may compare different versions, their colouring and the like. In addition, there are other resources, including many of Blake’s engravings, such as the Illustrations of the Book of Job, and examples of his watercolours of the Bible. The Blake Digital Text project offers the standard modern critical edition of Blake’s poetry and prose by D.V. Erdman as well as an indispensable concordance. 41.6.1. Primary Sources In hard copy, students have in the last few decades been grateful for the standard edition of the illuminated books, and Martin Butlin’s inventory of Blake’s paintings and drawings provides a necessary accompaniment to the poetry and prose (the page reference in the textual commentary on each image is referred to as B followed by page number in this article): Bindman, David. William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job: The Engravings with Related Material. London: William Blake Trust, 1978. Bindman, David, and Tate Gallery for the William Blake Trust, General ed. William Blake’s Illuminated Books. 6 vols. London: Blake Society/Tate Gallery, 1991–1995. Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Edited by David V. Erdman. Newly rev. edn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Butlin, Martin. The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake. 2 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981. Corns, Thomas N., Ann Hughes and David Loewenstein, eds. The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Dörrbecker, Detlef W., ed. The Continental Prophecies. William Blake’s Illuminated Books vol. 4. London: Blake Society/Tate Gallery, 1995. Eaves, Morris, Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi, eds. The Early Illuminated Books. William Blake’s Illuminated Books vol. 3. London: Blake Society/Tate Gallery, 1993. Essick, Robert N., and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton, A Poem. William Blake’s Illuminated Books vol. 5. London: Blake Society/Tate Gallery, 1993. Keynes, Geoffrey, ed. Blake: Complete Writings. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972. Lincoln, Andrew, ed. Songs of Innocence and of Experience. William Blake’s Illuminated Books vol. 2. London: Blake Society/Tate Gallery, 1991. Paley, Morton D., ed. Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion. William Blake’s Illuminated Books vol. 1. London: Blake Society/Tate Gallery, 1991. Worrall, David, ed. The Urizen Books. William Blake’s Illuminated Books vol. 2. London: Blake Society/Tate Gallery, 1995.

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41.6.2. Further Reading Ankarsjö, Magnus. William Blake and Religion: A New Critical View. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2009. Bentley, Gerald E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Bruder, Helen, and Tristanne Connolly. Sexy Blake. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Carruthers, Mary J. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. –. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Damrosch, Leopold. Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Davies, Keri. ‘The Lost Moravian History of William Blake’s Family: Snapshots from the Archive.’ Literature Compass 3 (2006): 1297–1319. Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Lowth, Robert. Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, the notes of Professor Michaelis and others. Boston: Joseph T. Buckingham, 1815. Morgan, Robert. ‘Sachkritik in Reception History.’ JSNT 33.2 (2010): 175–190. Prickett, Stephen. Modernity and the Reinvention of Tradition: Backing into the Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Rix, Robert. William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Rowland, Christopher. Blake and the Bible. London: Yale University Press, 2010. Schuchard, Marsha Keith. Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision. London: Century, 2006. Sklar, Susanne M. Blake’s “Jerusalem” as Visionary Theatre: Entering the Divine Body. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Thompson, Edward P. Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Viscomi, Joseph. Blake and the Idea of the Book. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Williams, Rowan. ‘“The Human Form Divine”: Radicalism and Orthodoxy in William Blake.’ Pages 151–164 in Radical Christian Voices & Practice: Essays in Honour of Christopher Rowland. Edited by Zoë Bennett and David B. Gowler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

42. Blake, Enoch and Emerging Biblical Criticism In Honour of John J. Collins Biblical scholars do not include the artist, poet, self-proclaimed prophet and visionary in their survey of the origins of modern study of the Bible. The subject of this essay is an explanation of why William Blake deserves to be taken seriously in the history of biblical scholarship. Blake was probably the earliest commentator on the Ethiopic Apocalypse, translated into English by Richard Laurence, and the first to exploit the impact of the Roman Catholic Alexander Geddes’s researches in the mythological character of Genesis. With regard to the latter, in 1794 Blake published his illuminated book, First Book of Urizen, which has the format of the King James Bible. Not only is it a parody of the Book of Genesis, but also the various copies are all deliberately at variance with one another, making it difficult to work out which is the Urtext. According to Mark Goldie, it is the first English poetic reflection of German higher criticism. In particular, Goldie suggests that Blake’s idiosyncratic name, ‘Urizen’, may derive from Geddes’s commentary on the Greek meaning of ‘horizon’, the god of tyrannising priests and moralists who requisition folkloric tales and transform them into oppressive legal codes.1 This essay, written in honour of a dear friend and colleague, whose work has helped and inspired me so much over the years, is a series of loosely related studies which have their origin in my studies of the texts and images of William Blake. The opportunity to lecture on Blake at the Yale Divinity School in 2008, with John a member of the audience, was a very special privilege. The essay begins with an attempt to locate Blake in the account of the emergence of biblical criticism offered by the Yale scholar Hans Frei, in his important study, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.2 The second part seeks to relate Blake’s work to its assessment by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and to Coleridge’s own writing on the mystical and the apocalyptic. The third and final part considers Blake’s fascination with the figure of Enoch, who makes an occasional but significant appearance in Blake’s images, though only 1 M. Goldie, ‘Alexander Geddes at the Limits of the Catholic Enlightenment’, The Historical Journal 53 (2010): 61–86, at 69. 2 H. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Cenury Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).

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occasionally in his writings.3 It includes consideration of some of Blake’s predecessors who took an interest in Enoch, his antecedents in English theological writing, with particular regard to the little known work of Jane Lead. Finally, the study concludes with a consideration of the contrasting understanding of ‘apocalyptic’, including Coleridge’s assessment of William Blake as an ‘apo- or rather ana-calyptic Poet, and Painter’.

42.1. Blake’s Position within Emerging Biblical Criticism Whatever his knowledge of the emerging higher criticism of the Bible, William Blake’s inclinations took him in a parallel direction, similar, but largely parallel, to it. There are a variety of ways in which he anticipates the kinds of development which are commonplace in modern biblical theology: his espousal of ‘Sachkritik’ and his willingness to recognise that the Bible is part of the problem for the modern world, as well as supplying the resources which might contribute to a solution. His critique of divine monarchy, his espousal of divine immanence and his clear preference for autonomy over against heteronomy all evince typical features of Enlightenment biblical criticism. Yet there are other aspects to his work which look back to older ways of engaging with the Bible: the importance of self-involvement and imagination. Blake sits awkwardly in the development of biblical study as sketched by Hans Frei.4 William Blake was mounting his critique of the Bible at the same time as a different kind of biblical criticism was emerging, with which we are familiar, and with which it would be easy to identify Blake. Hans Frei examined the wider developments in biblical hermeneutics in the late eighteenth century. Blake’s reading of the Gospels betrays little sign of the influence of emerging historical criticism. Indeed, he explicitly denies much interest in questions of the date and purpose of a biblical text, and related interpretative questions which have become the stock-in-trade for historical critics. What counts are ‘sentiments and examples’: ‘I cannot concieve the Divinity of the books in the Bible to consist either in who they were written by or at what time or in the historical evidence, which may be all false in the eyes of one man & true in the eyes of another but in the Sentiments & Examples.’5 On the 3 Milton 37:36 (E138); Jerusalem 7:25 (E149), 75:11 (E230). References to Blake’s writings are taken from W. Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. D.V. Erdman, newly rev. edn. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). The reference is introduced by E followed by the page reference to that edition. 4 C. Rowland, ‘Blake: Text and Image’, in The Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts, ed. S. Prickett (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 307–326, esp. 321–323 = above, pp. 698–701. 5 ‘Annotations to Watson’s Apology’ (E618); G.I. James, William Blake: Annotations to Richard Watson; An Apology for the Bible in a Series of Letters Addressed to Thomas

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basis of his reading of the Gospels, Blake regarded Jesus as a radical dissenter who ‘died as an Unbeliever’.6 Blake saw in the Gospel narratives a nonconformist Jesus who offended religious hierarchy and political authorities and paid the penalty. Blake’s attitude to the Bible asserts that some of the Hebrew Bible may have been official propaganda (‘Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose Public RECORDS to be True’).7 What is more, Blake’s explicit and implicit critique of divine monarchy in the Bible reflects his suspicion of hierarchy. Yet the Bible provided Blake with the language and intellectual stimuli to extend its themes and create Bible-like myths. His own mythic world was probably created in order to offer a more telling critical perspective on the dominant readings of the Bible in the England of his day. His illuminated books are pervaded with a biblical frame of reference. Prophet and priest, charismatic and legislator, are in a dialectical relationship. They exemplify the ways in which Blake’s work evinces a biblical hermeneutic which takes biblical themes and challenges what he perceived to be a dominant and arid literalism and a moralistic religion which quenched the ‘Spirit of Prophecy and the Poetic Genius’.8 Blake was an involved reader and critic, but one whose faculties were roused to act by the Bible.9 While Blake’s view of the existential potential of the Bible places him with the premoderns, the way in which he allows its narrative to frame his own prophecy (later in his life), suggests his doubts about the Bible’s capacity to do its job and places him in the world of modernity. But Blake’s work sits uneasily in the history of the emergence of modern biblical hermeneutics. Blake’s approach to the Bible continues patterns of biblical interpretation we find in seventeenth-century English nonconformity and the humanism and mysticism of radical Reformation hermeneutics, which emphasised the importance of Spirit over received wisdom, embodied in institutions like the Bible, state or church.10 The experience of the interpreting subject takes precedence. Blake explicitly states continuity between his own ‘Poetic Genius’ and that which inspired the prophecies of Ezekiel, John and other biblical prophets.11 Blake’s mythical world, inspired as it was by the Bible, yields a textual reality which is parallel to, and functions similarly to, the Bible. He sought to Paine 8th ed. 1797 (Cardiff: Regency Reprints III University College Cardiff Press, 1984), 22. 6 ‘Annotations to Watson’s Apology’ (E614). 7 ‘Annotations to Watson’s Apology’ (E617). 8 All Religions are One, ‘Principle 5’ (E1). 9 Cf. ‘Letter to Trusler’ (E702). 10 S. Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973). 11 The Four Zoas 8.595–598 (E385).

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invite the reader or viewer into his imaginative world, a world similar to that which the medieval exegetes found in the Bible:12 If the Spectator could enter into these Images in his Imagination, approaching them on the Fiery Chariot of his Contemplative Thought, if he could enter into Noah’s Rainbow or into his Bosom, or could make a Friend or Companion of one of these images of wonder, which always intreats him to leave mortal things (as he must know), then would he arise from his Grave, then would he meet the Lord in the Air & then he would be happy.13

Blake believed himself to be in continuity with what he called the ‘spirit of prophecy’ or ‘the poetic genius’. He believed this lay at the basis of all religion and that, as he put it in All Religions are One, the Jewish and Christian Testaments are ‘an original derivation from the Poetic Genius’.14 The importance of self-involvement is just as crucial for Blake’s great contemporary, S.T. Coleridge. In oft-quoted words from Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, Coleridge wrote: In my last letter I said that in the Bible there is more that finds me than I have experienced in all other books put together; that the words of the Bible find me at a greater depth of my being; and that whatever finds me brings with it an irresistible evidence of having proceeded from the Holy Spirit. But the Doctrine in question requires me to believe that not only what finds me, but that all that exists in the sacred volume bears witness for itself that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit.15

The opening words parallel Blake’s belief that the Bible was the book which above all stimulates the imagination. But Coleridge parts company with Blake, for he goes on to confess, ‘And here, perhaps, I might have been content to rest, if I had not learned, that, as a Christian, I cannot, must not, stand alone’. Blake was content to rest there, and never made his peace with organised religion. Nor would Blake have been as sanguine about Coleridge’s claim that ‘all that exists in the sacred volume’ proceeded from the Holy Spirit. According to Frei, before modernity, Christian theologians had read the Bible primarily as realistic (‘history-like’) narrative which told the overarching story of the world, from creation to the Last Judgement. The coherence of this biblical story was made possible by typological interpretation. From the eighteenth century onwards, people started reading biblical narratives as 12

M.J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); eadem, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 13 A Vision of The Last Judgment (E560). 14 All Religions are One (E1). 15 A.J. Harding, ed., Coleridge’s Responses: Selected Writings on Literary Criticism, the Bible and Nature, Vol. 2: Coleridge on the Bible (London: Continuum, 2008), 168– 169.

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offering a window onto history or moral guidance. In this way of reading, the meaning of a realistically-told story should not be reduced to some kind of moral axiom. The characters and episodes are not dispensable, as reduction of biblical narratives to general principles distorts their meaning. A Christian exegesis must respect the narratives’ shape without any questions arising from the readers’ experience. The question of the real history lying behind the biblical stories did not arise. Premodern Christians made sense of their own lives by locating their stories within the context of that larger story. In modernity, daily experience seemed to define what was ‘real’ and so the meaning of the Bible became located in the reader’s world rather than the reader in the context of the Bible. What is important for Frei are Erich Auerbach’s words on the Bible: ‘Far from seeking … merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, it seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history.’16 Not a great distance from Blake’s hermeneutics.

42.2. Coleridge’s Insight into Blake’s Work Over the years, several commentators have pointed to the way in which the term ‘apocalyptic’ was taken up and used at the beginning of the nineteenth century to describe a particular development of prophetic eschatology. As J.M. Schmidt shows in his invaluable study, Friedrich Lücke’s survey of apocalyptic writings, first published in 1832, made a strong case for the continuity between prophetic and apocalyptic texts, but, following K.I. Nitzsch, he used the word ‘Apokalyptik’ as a means of designating the peculiar form of eschatology that he found in the apocalyptic texts.17 Thus Lücke saw Revelation as ‘the revelations of the end of all things’ and offered an outline of the content of ‘apocalyptic’ based on this, which has pervaded scholarly, and indeed popular, understanding ever since. In some ways, it is strange that the eschatological should have dominated Lücke’s discussion, as a decade before his study, Laurence’s English translation of the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Enoch had been published (the German translation of A. Dillmann did not appear until 1851; Richard Laurence’s translation was first published in 1821). Lücke made much of the difference that the discovery of this text would have 16 E. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W.R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 15; quoted by Frei, Eclipse, 3. 17 Lücke’s and Nitzsch’s ideas are discussed by J.M. Schmidt, Die jüdische Apokalyptik: Die Geschichte ihrer Erforschung von den Anfängen bis zu den Textfunden von Qumran (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1969), 97–119. Cf. F. Lücke, Versuch einer vollständigen Einleitung in die Offenbarung Johannis und in die gesammte apocalyptische Litteratur (Bonn: Eduard Weber, 1832); K.I. Nitzsch, ‘Bericht an die Mitglieder des Rehkopfschen Prediger-Vereins über die Verhandlungen v. J. 1820 (Wittenberg, 1822)’.

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on the study of the origins of apocalyptic ideas, though it is The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ which provides the foundation for Lücke’s characterisation of apocalyptic ideas as ‘Apokalyptik’, a pattern of eschatological religion. This religious perspective of ‘Apokalyptik’ was characterised by the following: imminent expectation, radical contrast between present and future, the hope for another world breaking into and overtaking this world, the doctrines of angels and demons, as well as complex visionary imagery. A decade or so before Lücke published his book, S.T. Coleridge assessed the writings of William Blake and judged that they were produced by a man who was both ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘mystic’. In a remarkably insightful, albeit gnomic utterance, Coleridge called William Blake a man of Genius – and I apprehend, a Swedenborgian – certainly, a mystic emphatically. You perhaps smile at my calling another Poet, a Mystic; but verily I am in the very mire of common-place common-sense compared with Mr Blake, apo- or rather ana-calyptic Poet, and Painter!18

In this assessment Coleridge probably picked up on Blake’s complex interpretation of Paul in 2 Cor. 3:14, 18. Coleridge suggests either that Blake himself was ‘anacalyptic’, in the sense that his mind was unclouded and able to discern things that other poets or painters could not see, or that his poetry and paintings could enable those who engaged with them to have that ‘anacalyptic’ experience also: the veil is removed from the mind to discern the deeper things about God and the world. Coleridge seems to use the words ‘mystic’ and ‘apocalyptic’ virtually synonymously. Here we see a man who understood very well what the mystical and the apocalyptic were about, having been steeped in the Book of Revelation and in the visionary experience (if his poem ‘Kubla Khan’ is anything to go by). Moreover, he saw these as related ways of talking about a similar phenomenon, which he found in Blake’s work. What we find in the use of ‘apocalyptic’ in these passages from Coleridge and Lücke is that they pick up on different aspects of the Book of Revelation: Coleridge stressing the visionary and revelatory, Lücke, the cataclysmic and eschatological. It is worth adding that both of these approaches to the Book of Revelation have been intertwined in its reception history through the centuries. Coleridge himself was accused of being a mystic, a charge to which he demonstrated sensitivity, as mysticism came to be used as a derisory term in the eighteenth century. In a fascinating discussion in Aids to Reflection, Coleridge discusses the nature of mysticism. Coleridge has in his sights the writings of Jacob Boehme, which he clearly abhorred – strangely, because he

18 S.T. Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. E.L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956– 1971), 4:833–834; C. Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 241.

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admired the somewhat similar metaphysical writings of Emanuel Swedenborg who, as we saw, was quoted in discussing Blake. Coleridge tries to make a distinction between what Douglas Hedley describes as a disciplined speculative form of thought, aimed at the vision of God, and self-indulgent visionary enthusiasm, from which Coleridge wants to dissociate himself.19 Coleridge sees the person who refers to what he calls ‘inward feelings and experiences’ as a mystic; the grounding of belief and conviction and indeed doctrinal innovations on such experiences he terms mysticism.20 He clearly was suspicious of such personal revelations and any attempt to link them with the divine mind. He has no time for the quest for affirmation by the mystic, by persuading others to enjoy such experiences. Such a contagious activity ‘is apt to collect a swarm … and therefore merits the name of fanaticism, or as the Germans say, Schwärmerei’.21 Coleridge considers mystics to be of two kinds: a fanatical mystic, who attempts to impose his vision on the rest of society, and the enthusiastic mystic, whose mysticism may be regrettable but can co-exist with other, better qualities. The fanatical mystic is a menace to society, while the enthusiastic mystic is harmless. The first allows his dreams to be confused with reality, only to be greeted with incredulity, but the enthusiast writes about it, borrowing from the sacred scriptures. The second kind is able to discern the difference between fantasy and reality and is able to distinguish a dream of truth, whereas ‘in the bewildered tale of the former there is truth mingled with the dream’.22 This latter mystic is an enthusiast of a nobler breed, writes Coleridge. Coleridge’s words written about Jacob Boehme could equally well have been written about Paul: The craving for sympathy, strong in proportion to the intensity of his convictions, impels him to unbosom himself to abstract auditors; and the poor quietist becomes a penman, and, all too poorly stocked for the writer’s trade, he borrows his phrases and figures from the only writings to which he has had access, the sacred books of his religion.23

Indeed, to digress, if we apply Coleridge’s contrast between harmful and harmless mysticism to the New Testament, and to Paul in particular, the answer we get is ambiguous. On the one hand, we find the Coleridgean suspicion to be enunciated by Festus in his comment to Paul that he is out of 19 D. Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 282. 20 S.T. Coleridge, Aids to reflection in the formation of a manly character on the several grounds of prudence, morality, and religion, ed. J.B. Beer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 337. 21 Coleridge, Aids to reflection, 338. Incidentally, this is possibly one of the earliest recorded usage of this German word in English-speaking theological discussion. 22 Coleridge, Aids to reflection, 340. 23 Coleridge, Aids to reflection, 339.

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his mind: ‘Too much learning is driving you insane’ (Acts 26:24). This is an interesting comment on what Paul describes as a ‘heavenly vision’, to which he ‘was not disobedient’ (Acts 26:19–20). In some respects this Lucan account is supported by Paul’s own account in Gal. 1–2, where the wisdom derived from apocalypse rather than human tradition forms the basis for his understanding of his own divine agency. On the other hand, part of what seems to be going on in 1 Corinthians is exactly this process – although, ironically, it is to others that Paul seemed to be typical of the self-indulgent visionary enthusiasm that he criticised in Corinth. 1 Corinthians is distinguished by its ethical demands and is peppered with appeals to tradition (e.g. 1 Cor. 7:10; 11:2; 14:37), to Paul’s own role as a steward of divine mysteries (4:1; 2:1, 6), to his own apostolic authoritative pronouncements (7:6, 8, 12; 11:33; 16:1) and to his example (4:16; 9:1–23; 11:1). A discussion of both apocalyptic and mysticism must include the diachronic perspective, so that the genesis of the terms of our modern debate may be elucidated. One wonders what Blake would have made of being called a mystic. After all, he was not concerned with disclosing mysteries but with seeking to set up moments of ‘apocalypse’. To the extent that this is what Coleridge meant, he understood Blake and his work well. Mystery for Blake is about obfuscation, about false consciousness and deceit, the removal of which is at the heart of Blake’s work, to quote one of his most famous lines: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite’ – though we should note that he never uses the word ‘apocalyptic’ or any of its derivations.24 That said, he was capable of writing what was enigmatic in order to, as he put it, ‘rouze the faculties to act’.25 The tantalising and apparently obscure was a means of enabling ‘apocalypse’, not preventing it, as the reader or viewer works hard to see and understand things differently.

42.3. Blake and the Figure of Enoch The enigmatic reference to Enoch in Gen. 5:24 generated both a welter of speculation about his person and a range of literature attributed to him.26 The legend of Enoch’s righteousness, his position in heaven and his wisdom provided opportunities for displaying a vast array of information in the apocalyptic mode concerning astronomy, eschatology and paraenesis. Enoch ascends to heaven, in a description reminiscent of the visions of Ezekiel and Isaiah and a prototype of later visions of God in the Jewish apocalyptic and

24

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 14 (E39). ‘Letter to Trusler’ (1799), E702. 26 See, e.g., C. Rowland and C.R.A. Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament, CRINT 12 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 33–62. 25

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mystical tradition (1 En. 14). Elsewhere, in the Greek of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus in the Catholic Bible – the English translation of which work might probably have been known to Blake), at Sir. 44:16, Enoch heads the list of famous men, as he ‘pleased the Lord, and was translated, being an example of repentance to all generations’. At Sir. 49:14, his translation to heaven is again noted. He is said to have been unique (‘none was created like him’), which is proved by his translation from the earth; Enoch’s end was similar to that of Elijah (cf. 2 Kgs. 2:11). In Wisd. 4:10–11 (also in the Christian Apocrypha), in an allusive reference in all likelihood to Enoch, a man is said to have been ‘snatched away’, with a verb used in the New Testament as a term for the ascent to heaven (cf. 2 Cor. 12:2–4; 1 Thess. 4:17; Rev. 12:5). The Book of Enoch was brought back from Abyssinia in the eighteenth century. It had its translation into English in 1821 by Richard Laurence, Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Oxford. Since that date in particular, the Book of Enoch has been a significant part of the biblical studies world, but interest in Enoch antedates this significant event.27 Hessayon writes: ‘far from being neglected, Enoch and the books under his name had preoccupied monks, chroniclers, rabbis, Kabbalists, Academicians, magicians, Catholic theologians, Protestant divines, Orientalists, sectarians and poets alike’ for centuries before.28 Blake’s concern reflects a fascination with a retelling of the dramatic story of the Giants and their rape of the women. While the contrast between the apocalyptic stream of Second Temple Judaism and the mainstream Temple and Law-based religion has been a feature of discussions of ancient Judaism since the publication of Laurence’s translation into English and Dillmann’s into German, it has been only the eschatological dimension of 1 Enoch, not the myth of the Watchers, that has caught scholarly imagination, though in recent years scholars have noted the importance of the Enochic literature both for the understanding of apocalypticism and the nature of the power struggle in Second Temple Judaism. Michael Stone suggested that the heterogeneous character of apocalypticism is better reflected in 1 Enoch, such that eschatology, and the supposedly distinctive character it takes in the apocalypses, should be questioned.29 1 Enoch offers a different religious ethos, based on wisdom and esotericism rather than the accurate 27

A. Hessayon, ‘Og King of Bashan, Enoch and the Books of Enoch: Extra-Canonical Texts and Interpretations of Genesis 6:1–4’, in Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England, eds. idem and N. Keene (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 5–40; G.E. Szönyi, ‘Promiscuous Angels: Enoch, Blake, and a Curious Case of Romantic Orientalism’, The Romanian Journal of English Studies 8 (2011): 37–53. 28 Hessayon, ‘Og King of Bashan’, 40. 29 M.E. Stone, ‘Lists of Revealed Things in the Apocalyptic Literature’, in Magnalia Dei, the Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, eds. F.M. Cross et al. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976), 414–452; idem, ‘The Book of Enoch and Judaism in the Third Century BCE’, CBQ 40 (1978): 479–492.

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interpretation of the Mosaic Law. It is possible that this is something which has its roots in the struggles during the Second Temple period.30 The attraction of figures like Job and Enoch for Blake is that they are outside the ‘covenant story’, which has as its major theme the Law on Sinai. The Enoch story harks back behind Moses to an earlier period without the Law and one that does not foreground the ‘Thou shalt not’ of Gen. 3 (though the latter seems to be presupposed in the Apocalypse of Enoch). Like Paul in Galatians, who moved back to Abraham in order to deconstruct the Mosaic covenant and the Law, so Blake’s move to the visionary Enoch, and Job, peculiar recipients of divine wisdom, bolsters a perspective on the true nature of religion.

Fig. 12. William Blake: ‘Enoch’, ca 1807

In Blake’s lithograph (1806–1812), we have a scene reminiscent of the early images in the Job cycle of 1825, with the patriarch surrounded by humans and angels, obviously depicted as an inspiration of the arts.31 These reflect sentiments we find in another text that was part of the canon of the Ethiopic Coptic church: the Book of Jubilees, which, like the Apocalypse of Enoch,

30

R. Elior, The Three Temples: On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism (London: Littman, 2004). 31 D. Bindman, William Blake: Catalogue of the Blake Collection in the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge (Cambridge: Heffer, 1970), 559; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, P. 397–1985.

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was popular among the community which left behind the Dead Sea Scrolls. In Jubilees, the brief reference to Enoch depicts the patriarch as the divinely appointed scribe. This is similar to, for example, Jub. 4:21–22: ‘And he was therefore with the angels of God six jubilees of years. And they showed him everything which is on earth and in the heavens, the dominion of the sun, and he wrote everything …’ György E. Szönyi has suggested that the image of Enoch as the ‘father of the arts’ derives from a popular eighteenth-century handbook of painting and art history, Henry Bell’s 1728 An Historical Essay on the Originall of Painting.32 Here it is stated that the origins of painting had to be looked for among the antediluvian patriarchs, Seth and Enoch included. In ‘The Epitome of James Hervey’s “Meditations among the Tombs”’ (1820–1825), Enoch has a prominent place, like the Almighty, with a scroll in his hand. He looks backward and resembles his Master.33 Enoch may be a scribe, but the fact that both God and Enoch have scrolls in their hands parallels the contrast between the first and last images in the Job illustrations, where after Job’s redemption, the books disappear to be replaced by scrolls (see Figs. 6 and 7, above, pp. 691 and 692).34 Noah also is given a prominent place, as in the Apocalypse of Enoch (= 1 Enoch). Moses and Elijah appear along with Christ in the transfiguration scene above the eucharistic table, itself paralleling the way in which the eucharistic table was sometimes surrounded by a depiction of the transfiguration in late medieval iconography. William Blake may be one of the earliest commentators on the Book of Enoch. We have five pencil sketches, which he probably completed shortly before his death in 1827.35 What he has picked out for illustration is almost entirely to do with the story of the Watchers in the first twenty chapters of 1 Enoch. There are five sketches in the collection in the National Library of Art in Washington. The first sketch in the series has been linked with a later chapter in 1 Enoch, depicting, so the argument goes, the appearance of the Son of Man/Elect One in 1 En. 46. It is understandable why Blake should have gravitated to 1 Enoch once he discovered it, given its contents. In his Descriptive Catalogue, Blake writes that ‘the Prophets describe what they saw in Vision’ (E541). Blake sees himself similarly. His visionary journeys are akin to those ascribed to Enoch in the first part of the Apocalypse of Enoch, in which the wonders of the antique world were opened up to him: ‘The Artist having been taken in vision into the ancient republics … has seen the wonderful originals called in the Sacred Scriptures the Cherubim’ (E531). 32

Szönyi, ‘Promiscuous Angels’. Tate Gallery, London, 1820 (B770). B refers to Butlin’s edition of Blake’s paintings and drawings, see below, p. 775. 34 Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 5, 69. 35 See Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 106–118. 33

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In Blake’s Enoch sketches, which were probably left incomplete at his death, the focus is on the story of the Watchers. Enoch himself probably makes an appearance in only the final sketch.36 Blake’s images focus in a graphic and explicit way on those parts of the Book of Enoch which highlight the sexual violence of the sons of God against women. In his later works, Blake had much to say about ‘Religion hid in War’. Indeed, in one of the most remarkable juxtapositions in the Blake corpus we see – in the contrasting images on Plates 75 and 76 of Jerusalem – a scaly seven-headed beast entangled with a mermaid on one plate and, on the other, a man embracing the crucified Jesus. Tony Rosso has suggested that here Blake presents a dramatic visual confrontation between Rahab Babylon and Jesus. Here we find the epitome of the fallen world, the repetition of a primal act of violence perpetrated on women by the sons of God, according to the Book of Enoch, which then pervaded the world, politically, socially and economically.37 The Enochic myth shows that the corruption of the world cannot be reduced to individual human actions, as it is a superhuman act of violence done to women. The publication of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch had far-reaching effects on New Testament study, the consequences of which interpreters have had to wrestle with ever since. The affinities of parts of this heterogeneous text with parts of the New Testament heralded the recognition that eschatology, the hope for a new age on earth, was part of the thought world of the New Testament and perhaps of Jesus himself. The ebb and flow of scholarly research has seen the constant recognition that eschatology is key to understanding the New Testament and the complex movements to which the primary texts of Christianity bear witness. Even those who deny that Jesus was infected by such ideas recognise that at some point there was an injection of such ideas, which pervaded the New Testament. The Book of Enoch is a heterogeneous collection, but the apocalyptic and the eschatological pervade it, along with interest in the natural world and the sweep of human history. The implications of this for understanding the origins of Christianity have been recognised. Franz Overbeck, friend of Friedrich Nietzsche and potent influence on Karl Barth, and Albert Schweitzer in his epoch-making study of the historical Jesus, made eschatology the key to understanding the origins and evolution of Christianity. The diminution of the eschatological energy,

36

See Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 102–118. G.A. Rosso, ‘The Religion of Empire: Blake’s Rahab in its Biblical Contexts’, in Prophetic Character: Essays on William Blake in Honor of John E. Grant, ed. A.S. Gourlay (West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press, 2002), 287–326; cf. idem, Blake’s Prophetic Workshop: A Study of the Four Zoas (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1993), 141– 142; and idem, The Religion of Empire: Political Theology in Blake’s Prophetic Symbolism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016). 37

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which impelled the first Christians, to be replaced by a more institutional and community-oriented religion, more akin to what we know today, thanks to the legacy of Augustine, has been a significant part of New Testament scholarship. There is an influential and widespread view that the first Christians, in contrast to their Jewish contemporaries, expected the imminent culmination of history and ultimately, the appearance of a spiritual kingdom; whereas the latter considered that the expectation was on the historical plane. On the contrary, Christianity started out with a messianism akin to that which is characteristic of Judaism. As György E. Szönyi and Ariel Hessayon have shown, long before the publication of Laurence’s English translation, the Watcher story had already been available in two earlier English renderings, as the Book of the Watchers survived in the Greek transcription of Syncellus (eighth–ninth century CE).38 The discussions of Johannes Drusius and August Pfeiffer are of particular interest because of their detail. It was first summarised in English by Samuel Purchas in 1613, before Mr. Lewis translated and published the full Greek text in a popular edition in 1715.39 The Enochic literature bears witness to an underworld of apocalyptic and mystical ideas in ancient Judaism, perhaps a counterpoint to the mainstream traditions that found expression in both the Bible and later rabbinic sources. The figure of Enoch is part of that underworld of esoteric religion in the early modern period. Recent research has shown that Enoch formed part of an undercurrent of esotericism and magic in early modern England. An important example of this was John Dee (1527–1608), for whom Enoch was a paragon of the kind of communion with the angels that he enjoyed.40 For Dee in Elizabethan England, Enoch – by the help of the lost lingua Adamica, or Enochic language – was a channel of revelations (‘A true & faithful relation of what passed for many yeers between Dr. John Dee … and some spirits’). It was hardly surprising, given the enigmatic words in Gen. 5:22–24, that Enoch offered his later devotees a model of access to heavenly wisdom. Part of the undercurrent in English religion in the seventeenth century and onwards was the impact of Jacob Boehme. Boehme’s ideas affected English religion as the result of the writings of William Law and lesser-known figures like John Pordage (1607–1681). This was very different in its intent from the esotericism of Dee and more concerned with what can best be termed a spirituality, in which sharing of the eschatological life in this age was the goal of divine service. It is one of the other lesser known figures, Jane Lead 38

Szönyi, ‘Promiscuous Angels’; Hessayon, ‘Og King of Bashan’. Hessayon, ‘Og King of Bashan’, 31. 40 G. Parry, The Arch-conjuror of England: John Dee (London: Yale University Press, 2011); G.E. Szönyi, John Dee’s Occultism: Magical Exaltation Through Powerful Signs (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 145–151, 209–210. 39

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(1624–1704), who especially deserves attention, because she wrote a work entitled The Enochian Walks with God Found out by a Spiritual traveller whose Face towards Mount-Sion Above was Set.41 In this piece, she notes that though, as a woman, she has no right to speak, on the basis of a daring interpretation of 1 Cor. 11:5 she nevertheless claims the right: ‘Christ being my head-covering’. Its subject matter – ‘what was opened and revealed to me last Year 1693’ – is based on ‘a most Essential and Experimental ground’. The word ‘experimental’ is used advisedly. Not only did Lead find her own voice, distinct from her male mentors like Boehme, but it is also her visionary experience, which is a distinguishing feature of the book. She refers to the character Enoch only occasionally, but those who know the Enochic literature will find echoes of it on every page. Though it is doubtful whether Lead knew the Enochic corpus, she uncannily entered into the spirit of the works that, in their several guises, depict Enoch, whose lot had to do with the angels (cf. 1 En. 12:1). This unfolding of heavenly mysteries about theology and ultimate redemption offers hope for the salvation of the fallen angels; as Christ more successfully recapitulates Enoch’s proclamation to the rebellious angelic spirits (almost certainly echoing 1 Pet. 3:18–20, cf. 4:6) and describes how the journey to higher theological understanding might be prosecuted. Its aim is to declare how ‘in this present Life there should be found any to ascend to the New-Jerusalem, to feat and worship GOD there’. This belongs to ‘the Enochian Life’, when ‘in Enoch’s Spirit [some] are raised to walk with GOD, and so are taken up in the Spirit wholly’. What she offers is a ‘true, and single account of what in my Spiritual Travels I have seen, known, and understood, by being admitted into that Heavenly Court’. The traveller who takes up ‘Enoch’s Walks’ will be ‘translated from a Terrestrial Life to a Celestial’ when ‘an Earthly Creature [is] turn’d into a Spiritual’. There are echoes of writers throughout the seventeenth century who found, in the apocalyptic images of the Bible, not some indicator of a future reality but the possibility of divine life here and now. Chief among these was the Netherlands writer Hendrik Niclaes, whose impact at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century matched that of Lead a hundred years later. Here the world of the apocalypse is one that can be lived out in the human heart and in the life of the elect community. What is more, this was carried out by those who superficially lived respectable lives as pillars of society and members of the Church of England. The underground nature of 41

J. Lead, The Enochian Walks with God, Found out by a SPIRITUAL-TRAVELLER whose Face towards MOUNT-SION Above was Set. Gen. 5. Verse 22 ([London]: D. Edwards, 1694). S. Bowerbank, ‘Lead, Jane (1624–1704)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds. H.C.G. Matthew and B.H. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. 32, 959–961.

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Familism is an aspect of non-conformity that is the tip of the iceberg of religion at this period. Often enough, apocalyptic ideas were part of that story.42 Lead was a founding member of the Behmenist group in London at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, whose influence stretched much further in the years after her death. As we see from the following extracts, what we have is the exposition of a realised eschatology, in which access to the celestial spheres, vouchsafed to the successors to Enoch who travel thither, might be enjoyed. Jane Lead, along with John Pordage, was a key figure in the reception of Boehme’s theology in England. She was also co-founder of the Philadelphian Society. In anticipation of Blake, Lead emphasised reclaiming the imagination as the one faculty capable of overcoming a narrow perspective of reason and sense experience. In her The Revelation of Revelations (1683), she had offered a reading of those apocalyptic images which related almost entirely to the spiritual progress of the individual. ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ are identified with different aspects of struggle in the religious life. In Lead’s interpretation, Christ rides all the horses. On the white, his arrows destroy unbelieving spirits. The red horse deals with the deep-seated stirrings, which arise from the sources of evil. The black horse brings famine on the beast. The fourth puts to death ‘the evil principle in the earthly life’. Jane Lead relates her visions to John’s, asserting the ‘continued run of the Spirit throughout all ages’ and ‘preaching the same Doctrine by his Spirit in the Apostles after his Ascension’: The First of this is to them that do question, Whether there be any Spirit of Prophecy or Revelation given forth since the Apostles deceased, as believing all dyed with them? This would be a sad and deplorable thing, if God should since that Age cut off the spring of Revelation from its original, that so the Sheep and Lambs of Christs flock should no more expect to be fed from the fresh springing Pastures, where no footing hath been, as also to drink of those flowing Rivers of Life that renew daily from the fount of the Godhead; let such but call to mind and consider those many Scripture-Prophecies and Promises concerning the continuation of this Gift unto the very end of time, both in the old and new Testament; I shall mention only some of the latter; John 14.16, 17, 18. 2 Cor 4.8. 1 Cor 2.10, 11, 12, 13, 14. John 2.28. Heb 8.9, 10, 11. Many more than these Scriptures could call up for confirmation of the continued run of the Spirit throughout all Ages, Christ by his Spirit comforting us, saying, Lo, he would be with his to the end of the World. Now, as from the Lord, I beseech you, not to eclipse the light of the Day-star (2 Pet 1.19.) in your own Souls, nor quench the Spirit, nor despise Prophecying, then may the witness of Jesus rise in you, to confirm this most glorious Ministration, as a burning Lamp of Revelation.43

That which most inhibits spiritual growth is reason. In a daring interpretative move, Lead’s application of the apocalyptic images to the inner life sees her understand a key characteristic of the participants in the millennial reign as 42 43

D. MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History (London: Allen Lane, 2013), 163–190. J. Lead, The Revelation of Revelations (London: A. Sowle, 1683), 128.

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the subduing of the hegemony of reason. Here is her interpretation of ‘beheading’ in Rev 20:4: The first particular concerns those Persons in whom this Reign is to begin, who are such as have been Beheaded, suffering an inward spiritual Martyrdom, for the hope of a Resurrection in a God-head-Body and Spirit. The manner of Death is here to be taken notice of; they are said to have been Beheaded, that is, who have their Head Life, where the rational Understanding is seated, and from whence all sensible operations go forth, cut off, and separated from them, because by means of it the Dragon and Beast have found place to establish their Kingdoms in Man, and have been hereby in all Ages upheld; the main of the Serpents strength having always lain in the Craft and Subtlety of Reason, which is the Fore-Head mark of the Beast.44

The key to the Apocalypse is in effect an extended meditation on Luke 17:20–21: the timing of ‘the Lord’s Reign’, which ‘many have Calculated, and puzzled their Spirits about’, but all ‘in vain’, for ‘if we will know how near the time is, we must not look without us, but in the unsealed Book of Life within us’. During the decade of her involvement with The Philadelphia Society (1694–1704), her book on Enoch, The Enochian Walks with God (1694), expounded ‘the universal restoration of all creation to its original harmony’, including the fallen angels.45 For Jane Lead, espousal of what she describes as the ‘Enochian Life’ reflects not only a grasp of the significance of Gen. 5:24, but also its impact in New Testament passages like 1 Pet. 3:18. The exalted state of Enoch is well brought out in the following extract from The Enochian Walks with God. But now methinks, I hear some say at the Reading of This, Oh! You have mentioned a high and lofty State, which is as a new thing that hath not been declared; as that in this present Life there should be found any to ascend to the New-Jerusalem, to feast and worship GOD There; This, you will say belongs to the Enochian Life; but That Age of the World is not yet come, so as to know a Translated State. We grant it, that it is not common, only peculiar to some, that in Enoch’s Spirit are raised to walk with GOD, and so are taken up in the Spirit wholly. But we may hope This day of the Spirit is coming on, whereby it shall be known more universally; in the which Angelical Spirits shall ascend, and That Divine Principle shall open, that now hath been so long shut up: Then you will know a New-state of Living, that you never knew before; for it will turn the Love of all mortal Things out of the Hearts-door: This will in very deed be known. Seeing we have thus far proceeded in opening This Divine Mystery, we shall not stop here, but go on to reveal and communicate to such as desire to be Fellow-Travellers with me to This Holy City, the New-Jerusalem, the Track having been shewed unto me. 46

44

Lead, The Revelation of Revelations, 25. Bowerbank, ‘Lead, Jane’. 46 Lead, The Enochian Walks with God, 7. 45

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Life with God is even more clearly linked with the divine presence, that is, with the immediate environs of the throne of God. It is linked with the Cherubim and Seraphim in a second extract, with its bearing similarities with 1 En. 12 and 14: For whereever God in Christ, in the Spirit doth abide so purely, they may often be taken up in the Spirit, into Heavenly Court, There to see, and view what makes up the Heavenlyborn Family. But take Notice such as comes up here, will find themselves as another TranslatedEnoch, that may keep their Walks with God; in which Path of Light may be seen the Seraphims, and Cherubims, guarding along up to This Sion-Seat of Glory, In which filled up with Light-streamers of Glory, delighting the Heavenly Train of Saints, There, all appearing in Robes of Glittering Garments, which Here do follow Christ their Head, in great Order, according to every One’s Degree, Rejoicing with Him by whom they have overcome, and gotten Victory over all Worlds; now to reign as Kings with Christ their Mighty Lord and King, this Mount-Sion-World, thus open-fac’d, and was seen. Then saw I all these Innumerable Throne-Princes, their Homages and Obeysance, given to the High, and Lofty Alpha, triumphing forth Redeeming-Praises. Oh how pleasant it is to see what an United Love-Hermony from the Highest to the Lowest degree of These Glorified Saints, all with Crowns, but some more highly Dignified; as Kingly Priests, which had Breast-Plates, set all with Stones that sparkled out with Sparks of Fire. These, all next to the Glorified Person of Christ, had their Golden Tents, and their Temple to Worship; the Form of which was only a more Christaline Light, which God the Supream Majesty opened to be the Glory of it; to which the lower Ranks and Orders of Spirits, were sometimes admitted to worship There.47

Lead’s interpretation of apocalyptic images has a long history in Christian theology, stretching back to Tyconius and Methodius.48 It is the kind of individualising and internalising of apocalyptic images, pervaded with a realised eschatology that is familiar to us from the Familist theology,49 inspired by Hendrik Niclaes and Lead’s older English contemporary Peter Sterry (1613– 1672),50 who wrote: ‘Christ teacheth us to seek a City, not of this Creation, whose Builder, Building, and chief Inhabitant is God. He teacheth us to find this new Hierusalem, which is above us, within us, and there to dwell. He discovers this City with its Citizens in our Spirits, and draws us into it.’51 The

47

Lead, The Enochian Walks with God, 22. J. Kovacs and C. Rowland, Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 49 C. Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 50 See V. de Sola Pinto, Peter Sterry, Platonist and Puritan, 1613–1672: A Biographical and Critical Study with Passages Selected from his Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934). 51 P. Sterry, The Teachings of Christ in The Soule (London: R. Dawlman, 1648), 42; S. Apetrei, Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. 228–230; D. Wallace, Shapers of English Calvin48

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Enochian Life is one sign of what Gerrard Winstanley describes as ‘Christ rising in Sons and Daughters’, an experience in this age that will be more widely enjoyed. This offers access to the heavenly court, provided that one continues to walk with God. Then the kind of vision vouchsafed to John the seer will be the joy of others who can ‘reign as Kings with Christ their Mighty Lord and King’ (cf. 1 Cor. 4:8; Eph. 2:6; Rev. 3:21).

*** Blake’s spiritual ancestors lie with the prophets of the Bible. Throughout his work, there is a criticism of priestcraft: its separation of life into neat compartments, and its devotion to memory rather than inspiration. Jeanette Winterson captures this well in her contrast between priest and prophet, which is particularly apt, as far as Blake’s work is concerned, in relating to the character of its inspiration, its form and its content: The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they’re supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons.52

Despite the attempts of biblical scholars to bear out the old Jewish view that the prophets were just interpreters of the Torah and so disciples of Moses (m.Aboth 1:1, cf. Deut. 18:15), Blake lived in an era of self-proclaimed prophets, most of whom have been consigned to history; it is only Blake, with his ringing declaration, ‘Would to God that all the Lord’s people were prophets’, who is remembered.53 Unlike his immediate contemporaries, Southcott and Brothers, Blake saw himself more as a latter-day Isaiah or Ezekiel, rather than fulfilling scripture. In this sense, Southcott and Brothers were more like the Jewish view of the prophets as interpreters of Moses than like bearers of new revelation, which Blake clearly thought he was. His words took up the ancient words and images, but they were shaped into new and contextually relevant words, mimicking the prophetic genres. Like the biblical prophets, Blake was a relatively marginal figure, and like them, his work was, and continues to be, treasured by his disciples. This essay has traversed a welter of different topics, themes and biblical interpreters. The route has attempted to embrace apocalyptic interests, particularly in connection with the figure of Enoch and the books attributed to him, and those who have evinced an interest in the enigmatic figure who ism, 1660–1714: Variety, Persistence, and Transformation (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 51–86. 52 J. Winterson, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (London: Pandora, 1985), 161. 53 Num. 11:29; Preface to Milton (E96).

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makes his brief appearance in Gen. 5:21–24. It has touched on some apocalyptic interpreters whose names would not usually form part of the exegetical history of biblical studies. These neglected biblical interpreters and their apocalyptic interests have formed the heart of this essay. They demonstrate not only a neglected experiential and visionary interest (perhaps even a tradition), but also ways of reading the Bible, including its apocalyptic imagery, which has many parallels in Christian tradition, but the distinctiveness of which deserves acknowledgement. All of these interpreters, at the very least, qualify Hans Frei’s thesis about the nature of early Protestant exegesis. They suggest that Frei’s description should be complemented by a more mystical dimension of interpretation, in which text and tradition are complemented by, and even subordinated to, the immediate experience. From the early Anabaptists via the Familists, Gerrard Winstanley to Blake, who lived as modern biblical criticism emerged, there is an exegetical strand which has resisted the hegemony of the text and its supreme authority, leaving space for ‘the Experimental’ as the key to theological interpretation. In the experimental journey, the figure of Enoch, and the traditions about him, offered a catalyst for the imaginative exegesis touched on in this essay, whose characteristics reflect that of the late medieval period. In this form of exegesis, self-involvement is evident, contrasting with the growing historicism and detachment, which have been such a pervasive feature of modern biblical study. At least in Blake’s case, this self-involvement is never linked with a naïve acceptance of the Bible, for the biblical text is throughout subordinated to the subjective, imaginative experience, in much the same way as we find in the earlier interpreters that we have examined. This selfinvolvement puts the interpreting subject at the centre, rejecting the hegemonic status of the text, whose role is, as Blake succinctly put it, to ‘rouze the faculties to act’.

Section Five

Coda

43. ‘Open thy mouth for the dumb’: A Task for the Exegete of Holy Scripture* The title ‘Dean Ireland Professorship of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture’ is one which might give the impression that exegesis is rather an arcane enterprise properly carried out only in academic institutions. But the texts, which are the object of exegetical endeavour for students of religion and history, are also the texts, which inspire faith and provide guidance for practical living for millions of men, women and children in the contemporary world. Though most of them would not use the term, exegesis is being carried out in a multitude of different ways and for different ends by a huge variety of people. That is to say, the exegesis of Holy Scripture concerns texts, which are peculiar in the extent of their contemporary as well as in their historical significance. The interpreter of Holy Scripture will find him or herself engaged in an activity, which will need to take cognisance of a wide range of interpretative questions precisely because the object of enquiry is Holy Scripture, the foundation texts of contemporary communities of faith as well as important evidence for ancient religion. A continuing challenge for the critical exegete is how to match the competing demands of the academy with those of the ordinary reader. One historical example of this tension will serve to bring out several themes, which I want to explore in this lecture. The example is an exchange recorded in an unusual collection of testimonies brought together by the Mennonites, a small Anabaptist Church that came into being in the sixteenth century. In Flanders, in the middle of that same century, a chandler called Jacob was detained for his Anabaptist activities and subsequently questioned by a certain Friar Cornelis in the presence of the recorder and clerk of the local court. During the discussion Jacob quoted the Book of Revelation in support of his views, which provoked a heated response from his interrogator:

* Inaugural Lecture as Dean Ireland’s Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture, Oxford University, 11th May 1992.

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‘What do you understand about St. John’s Apocalypse?’ the friar asked the chandler. ‘At what university did you study? At the loom, I suppose? For I understand that you were nothing but a poor weaver and chandler before you went around preaching and rebaptizing. … I have attended the university of Louvain, and for long studied divinity, and yet I do not understand anything at all about St John’s Apocalypse. This is a fact.’ To which Jacob answered: ‘Therefore Christ thanked his heavenly Father that he had revealed and made it known to babes and hid it from the wise of this world, as it is written in Matt. 11:25.’ ‘Exactly!’ the friar replied, ‘God has revealed it to the weavers at the loom, to the cobblers on the bench, and to bellow-menders, lantern tinkers, scissors grinders, brass makers, thatchers and all sorts of riff-raff, and poor, filthy and lousy beggars. And to us ecclesiastics who have studied from our youth, night and day, God has concealed it.’1

We catch a glimpse here of the heat generated by the exegesis of Holy Scripture in a particular torrid period of church history. What is typical about the dialogue, though disconcerting none the less, is not only the polarisation of the academically trained on the one hand and the amateur interpreter of Scripture on the other, but the implication that the academic endeavour is superfluous. It prompts the question: if Jacob is right in asserting that he and those like him have an insight denied to the wise of this world, has the university anything to contribute to the exegesis of Holy Scripture? In the second half of my lecture I shall try to respond positively to that question. I will suggest that the patterns of biblical exegesis, which have emerged in parts of Latin America over the last twenty years, offer an example of the way in which the academic endeavour and the practical faith of the nonprofessional reader can be found fruitfully alongside one another, rather than in a relation of mutual hostility. In particular I shall look at the way in which liberation theologians have sought to articulate a theology on behalf of the poor, and so to ‘open their mouths for the dumb’, as Proverbs exhorts us to do (cf. 31:8), by speaking up for those who cannot speak for themselves. It is my contention that a New Testament exegete has a role to play by contributing his or her expertise to the insights of the academically untrained, particularly to those of the poor and marginalised. In the first part of this lecture, I want to touch on an area, which has been a major concern of mine: the apocalyptic and mystical tradition of early Judaism and its relevance to the exegesis of the New Testament. As we have seen, Jacob the chandler quotes from two books of the New Testament, Revelation and the Gospel of Matthew, and I wish to suggest the importance of Revelation and the apocalyptic tradition for the interpretation of the New Testament. In particular, I want to show how certain passages in Matthew, when linked to the apocalyptic tradition, reveal the theological privilege of the poor and insignificant.

1

In T.J. van Braght, Bloody Theater, or, Martyrs’ Mirror (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1950), 775. I am grateful to Dr. Alan Kreider for drawing my attention to this material.

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Revelation, the principal example of apocalyptic in the New Testament, is certainly a strange book. Its message of doom and its baffling symbolism have been, and continue to be, something of an embarrassment to Christian theology, never more so than in an age when the futuristic and fantastic have gained such prominence in popular culture. Yet its role in contemporary religion is more prominent than might appear at first sight. In addition to the part it plays in the eschatological scenarios of those forms of Christianity, which anticipate an imminent end of the world,2 Revelation has proved to be an important resource for the successors of the sixteenth-century Anabaptists among the poor of the Third World.3 Its resolute critique of political institutions and its message of hope resonate profoundly with those engaged in life and death struggles. Its influence on contemporary religion should then be the concern of any one interested in the exegesis of Holy Scripture. The biblical exegete may have a contribution to make to the clarity of interpretation of a book rich in potential for misunderstanding and destructive application, so that instead it may be affirming of human dignity. It is, in any case, a task fraught with difficulties, since appropriate guidelines for an interpretation centred on the text differ so widely. Yet such intractable problems of interpretation are at the centre of any discussion of the contemporary exegesis of Holy Scripture. Because of them there is a temptation to play down the importance of Revelation and to locate the heart of Christianity elsewhere than in its dynamic symbolism. The problems posed by the Book of Revelation are of such magnitude that it would not be surprising to find Friar Cornelis’s experience at his university echoed by theological students down the centuries. More especially, in the last couple of centuries, its thought-world and awesome visions of judgement have been seen as prime examples of a kind of eschatology and mythology from which Christian theology needs to be liberated. Yet there is a widespread recognition that the exegesis of Holy Scripture in all its diversity must take Revelation seriously. For one thing, its importance for understanding the origins of Christian theology cannot be over-estimated – a fact which has not gone unnoticed in this university. Oxford has had several scholars who have helped to elucidate it, not least my two immediate predecessors who have in different ways shed light on this difficult book, George Caird in his com-

2

See e.g. A.G. Mojtabai, Blessed Assurance (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986). One example is A.A. Boesak, Comfort and Protest (Edinburgh: St. Andrews Press, 1987). Grassroots study of the Book of Revelation in Latin America is the subject of a study by Pablo Richard of the Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones, San José, Costa Rica (Apocalipsis: Reconstrucción de la esperanza [San José, Costa Rica: DEI, 1994]; English translation: Apocalypse: A People’s Commentary on the Book of Revelation [Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1995]). 3

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mentary and his work on biblical imagery,4 and Ed Sanders5 on first century ideas of the future, which provide an indispensable background to the understanding of Revelation. In recent times the discussion of Revelation has tended to concentrate on the historical background of the book.6 The real gains in this area have to be set alongside the neglect of Revelation as an apocalypse and the neglect of the critical examination of its use in history.7 The interpretative possibilities of apocalyptic make it a threat to our desire for a neat, systematic presentation of its message. Moreover, because the distinctiveness and form of its imagery seem to place an impenetrable veil between the reader and the meaning, the removal of that veil is thought to be a necessary precondition for some grasp of the underlying historical realities. A distorted picture has, it is thought, to be corrected by offering an account which more nearly corresponds to conventional reality. But in doing this we risk devaluing the mode of presentation. The imagery and the genre are themselves a central component of the meaning. They demand of the reader a different perspective on the interpretative process and on the world as we normally understand it. Conflicting symbolism and vividness of portrayal confront us with a dimension of reality, which can throw our habitual perspective on things out of gear. The apocalyptic tradition can prompt a potent commentary on contemporary culture and political arrangements, and it is no surprise that many turn to the Book of Revelation to provide inspiration for a different perspective on both culture and politics. Theodor Adorno could have been talking about Revelation when he wrote: The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.8 4 G.B. Caird, The Revelation to St. John the Divine (London: Duckworth, 1966); idem, The Language and Imagery of the Bible (London: Duckworth, 1980). See also earlier A. Farrer’s commentary on Revelation (The Revelation of St. John the Divine: Commentary on the English Text [Oxford: Clarendon, 1964]) and his Rebirth of Images (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947). 5 E.g. in Jesus and Judaism (London: SCM, 1985). 6 Most recently in L.L. Thompson, The Book of Revelation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 7 This is touched on briefly in C. Rowland, Radical Christianity: A Reading of Recovery (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). 8 Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 247. The importance of messianism and mysticism in the work of members of the Frankfurt School like Adorno and Benjamin should be noted. Both were close friends of the pioneer of the study of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem. See D. Biale,

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In the last twenty years there has been a growing recognition that the idiosyncratic form and contents of Revelation may in fact offer more to the exegesis of the New Testament than has usually been granted. Of course, apocalyptic has for a century or more featured in discussions of the New Testament. It has been considered an essential ingredient in any explanation of the origins of Christianity. But apocalyptic has frequently been understood exclusively as being about the expectation of the imminent end of the world, and Revelation has been seen as a principal witness to this kind of religious outlook with its depiction of the cataclysmic upheavals which precede the coming of the kingdom of God.9 As a result, early Christianity has been characterised as a movement preoccupied with a fervent hope for the winding up of history. There is a long overdue questioning of that consensus and of the accuracy of the understanding of apocalyptic which underlies it. Ancient apocalypses unveil secrets, some of which (though by no means all) relate to the future. So they are not solely concerned with the end of the world for, above all, they seek to reveal the truth about God and the universe. In this they are at one with themes which run throughout the whole of the New Testament. There is no book of the New Testament whose interpretation will not be illuminated by the perspective of apocalyptic. My colleague, John Ashton, has recently shown how the Gospel of John, which conventional wisdom has put at the farthest remove from the thought-world of apocalyptic, is only fully comprehensible in its form and content in the light of the apocalyptic tradition. It may not contain the usual imagery of the apocalypses, but its concern is to present an ‘apocalypse in reverse’ (to quote Ashton), a disclosure in the form of a narrative concerning Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospel of John offers a revelation of the invisible God.10 You will recall that Jacob the chandler identified himself with the babes of Matthew’s Gospel to whom are revealed mysteries hidden from the wise of this world, and a reading of Matthew which takes as its starting place the claim of a hermeneutical privilege for the insignificant can indeed receive further illumination from the apocalyptic tradition. There is an apocalyptic and mystical thread running throughout Matthew’s narrative. From the dreams of Joseph and the Magi, which protected the infant Son of God, to the dream of Pilate’s wife before the crucifixion, knowledge through dreams, and revelation of a kind familiar to us from the apocalyptic tradition, are an important element in Matthew. Here too it is the religious tradition, of which Revelation is the supreme example, that can illuminate this element in the Gospel. There Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). 9 C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982). 10 J. Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).

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are affinities between the revelations vouchsafed to apocalyptic seers and the mystics of early Judaism. The mystical tradition of early Judaism has an obscure history but it is generally thought to have had its origins early in the Second Temple period and to have formed part of the mysteries which were of concern to Jewish apocalypticists.11 One of the subjects of this mystical lore discussed in the rabbinic literature is the meditation on the chariotchapters of Ezekiel. The vision of the glorious God enthroned on the cherubim-chariot, the merkabah, was a source of wonder and fascination as is evident from the fragments, which much scholarly work in recent years has made available to us. In the fully-fledged mystical account the vision of the divine throne-chariot in heaven was the goal of a heavenly ascent. The evidence suggests that the New Testament writings are contemporary with this period of Jewish mysticism and in Matthew’s Gospel there are certainly similarities with some of the descriptions of the throne-theophany tradition. At the conclusion of the eschatological discourse we find an awesome judgement scene without any parallels in the other synoptics.12 Here the heavenly Son of Man sits on the throne of glory. But the attainment of this vision is not infinitely remote and difficult of achievement. In the parable of the sheep and the goats (25:35–46) we find an interpretation, which situates the glorious theophany in the mundane circumstances of human need. Thus, surprising as it seems to them, the righteous learn that they have in fact met the glorious occupant of the throne of glory in the persons of the naked and the hungry. The moment of judgement is brought into the present and its outcome determined by patterns of reaction to those who appear to be nonentities. The language at the end of this judgement scene echoes that which is used earlier in the Gospel: to receive the disciple and the child means to receive Jesus (10:42; 18:5). Behind these verses lies a well-known Jewish concept of agency, in which the representative acts on behalf of the sender. So the one throned in glory is located also among the outcasts, here and now, in the midst of the earthly city and not only in heaven on the last day. The links with the throne-theophany tradition of Jewish mysticism do not stop there, however. In Matt. 18 the disciples ask Jesus who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. He answers by taking a child and instructing the disciples to become like it. To identify with the child is to be truly great. In this chapter it becomes clear that the child is linked with another key term in

11

There are contrasting approaches to the study of early Jewish mysticism. See D.J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988) and I. Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, AGJU 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1980). C.R.A. Morray-Jones has examined Halperin’s arguments in his Cambridge dissertation on Merkabah Mysticism and Talmudic Tradition. 12 For the history of interpretation see S.W. Gray, The Least of My Brothers, SBLDS 114 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989).

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Matthew’s Gospel, ‘the little ones’. In 18:5 Jesus is portrayed as speaking of the children as ‘these little ones’. Here too, response to the child or the little one is the same as response to Jesus. Just as fulfilling the needs of the hungry and the thirsty means doing it to the heavenly Son of Man, so receiving a child means receiving Jesus (v. 5). A woe is pronounced on those who cause one of them to stumble, for ‘these little ones’ are they ‘who believe in me’ (v. 6). There is something special about the child. Once again echoing the language of the throne-theophany tradition, their angels have the privilege of beholding God’s face (v. 10). To behold the face of God is the climax of the mystic’s heavenly ascent. That was something denied to ordinary mortals and to the angels also. The angels of Matthew’s little ones are no ordinary angels, therefore. They stand in close proximity to the throne of glory and share in that destiny vouchsafed to the elect in the New Jerusalem (Rev. 22:4) of seeing God face to face. They are linked with those who in worldly terms are insignificant but who, from the divine perspective, carry a particular privilege. It is that insight which is granted to the truly humble and the child-like in the verse quoted by Jacob the chandler: ‘I thank you, Father, lord of heaven and earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the wise, and revealing them to the simple.’ The divine favour, which rests on children in Matthew, is given added significance by the mystical tradition, which lies behind the Gospel. The position of children in the ancient world was much inferior to the more childcentred world of today. They were, as a matter of course, often treated, by our standards, brutally.13 On the other hand, children were widely believed to be in close contact with the divine world by virtue of their marginality. In Matthew, where the child moves to centre-stage, these contrasts are evident. The child Jesus poses a threat to the king in Jerusalem in the opening narrative. Later it is children alone who greet the meek and lowly king as he enters Jerusalem. In contrast, the hierarchy seeks to persuade Jesus to rebuke the children. To place a child in the midst of the disciples is to challenge the assumption that the child has nothing of worth and can only be heeded when it has received another’s wisdom. The ordering of things, which characterises the adult world, is not, after all, the embodiment of wisdom and may in fact be a perversion of it. Here is a perspective, which challenges the received wisdom. So there are elements in Matthew’s Gospel, which indicate how important the contribution of the apocalyptic and mystical tradition may be to exegesis. In a discipline in which all things are constantly being made new, these traditions continue to provide an area of research and study from which fresh perspectives on Christian origins and the interpretation of the New Testament 13

See T.E.J. Wiedemann, Adults and Children in the Roman Empire (London: Routledge, 1989).

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can be expected. For the rest of my lecture I want to talk about the kind of fresh perspectives on New Testament interpretation, which are coming to us from the poor and insignificant of our own day, and to say something about those exegetes who are working with and on their behalf. In spite of intense and varied efforts in this century to create societies based on ideals of equality, vast numbers of people remain pushed to the sidelines with little opportunity to contribute to the dominant discourses, which shape our world. To these people certain exegetes have addressed their theological work and have embarked on an exegesis of the Bible with their concerns in mind. They have examined ways in which our identity has been formed in relation to wealth, race and gender. The result has been the evolution of a theology, which articulates their insights. These varying concerns have influenced theology in Europe and North America as well as the socalled Third World over the last decade and have been given the label ‘liberation theology’.14 This theology has a reputation for being one, which loosely links left-wing politics and Christianity, and in so far as left-wing politics usually begin idealistically enough with plans for improving the lot of the poor, this is more or less true. Rarely, however, is there any naive identification with revolutionary movements. Liberation theology has become synonymous with the names of famous men from Latin America, but its effectiveness has depended on the devotion of sisters, and catechists of both sexes, who have inspired this distinctive theological approach. Theirs is a constant engagement with life at the base of society and with the interpretation of both Bible and tradition which is going on there, while it is their purpose to persuade those with power, spiritual, financial or intellectual, to put their resources at the service of the weakest in society. At an individual level it may mean a decision to live and work alongside the weak and marginalised, as well as teaching in university or seminary. Liberation theology has emerged in different forms wherever there is poverty or resistance to injustice. The initial dynamism may have been in Latin America and the church communities of the base, but it is matched by parallel movements in Asia and in the increasingly influential feminist theology in Europe and North America. One of the most important aspects of liberation theology has been the fostering of an interest in the study of the Bible among poor people. Challenging interpretative insights have often resulted, and there has been a new lease of life for books like Revelation. Faced with the need to convince the theological establishment, liberation theologians have felt it necessary to articulate this exegetical wisdom in the form of conventional theological 14 There are useful surveys of this movement in P. Berryman, Liberation Theology (London: I.B. Tauris, 1987) and C. Smith, The Emergence of Liberation Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

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treatises. But in all of this, the priority in interpreting the Christian tradition is given to the present suffering and exploitation of the underprivileged. The emphasis put on human experience echoes important aspects of the exegetical approach, which have been dominant over the last two hundred years. The rise of historical critical scholarship has involved opening a space for the interpreter’s experience of the contemporary world. The quest for the Jesus of history, for example, sought to free the real Jesus from the rigidities and confines of orthodox interpretation. An important component of the critical enterprise has been the assertion that contemporary experience must claim a place in the interpretative process. Liberation theology continues that demand. Theologians in Latin America have made their interpretative starting place the present life in shanty towns, the land struggles, the death squads and the shattered lives of refugees. It is here that its distinctiveness, as compared with mainstream theology, is most marked. Jon Sobrino, who has for years worked in war-torn Central America, makes the point well when he argues that the agenda of European theology has been more interested in thinking about and explaining the truths of faith than in living them.15 For theologians in Latin America, however, faith is in dialectical relationship with real life, and the obscurities of faith are illumined at the same time as the world’s wretched condition is confronted and alleviated. Here are all the central features of liberation theology: close connection between faith and practice, and the belief that there has been a recovery of a theological method, which accurately reflects biblical truth. Sobrino has worked on in El Salvador in the midst of a protracted and bloody civil war in which vicious killings by death squads create a climate of fear. Those, like Sobrino, whose theology seeks to take seriously the plight of the poor, are names on the hit-lists of these squads. As we all remember, five Jesuit colleagues of Sobrino paid with their lives, in November 1989, for their particular way of understanding theology. Theirs was no facile identification of a clerical and academic elite with the poor. Neither was their theology one that ignored the intellectual rigour of careful critical scholarship. They recognised the importance of education and influence, and the necessity of putting them at the service of those in desperate need of them.16 It was a similar insight that led Dietrich Bonhoeffer to recall the royal advice at the end of Proverbs, as he sought to exhort others in his country and beyond to raise their voices in protest and to take action at the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis. The words of Proverbs exhort the elite: ‘Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; oppose any that go to law against them; speak out and pronounce just sentence and judgement for the wretched 15

E.g. J. Sobrino, The True Church and the Church of the Poor (London: SCM, 1984). J. Sobrino, Companions of Jesus (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1990). 16

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and poor’ (Prov. 31:9). They were words which Bonhoeffer used often in those dark days. None saw more clearly than he the necessity for a committed and controversial role for church and theologian: According to the witness of the New Testament, the Church is a city on a hill. … It has to make itself distinct and be a community which hears the Apocalypse. It has to testify to its alien nature and to resist the false principle of inner-worldliness. … The Church takes to itself all the sufferers, all the forsaken of every party and status. ‘Open your mouth for the dumb’ (Prov. 31:9). Here the decision will really be made whether we are still the Church of the present Christ.17

Bonhoeffer perceived that those like him who did wield power in church and academy had a responsibility to use that power in the service of those who were being so brutally victimised. In such a situation, he wrote, the Church has to be a community, which hears the Apocalypse. Who would think otherwise in the dire circumstances in which Bonhoeffer was living? Yet the irony is that suspicion of the Apocalypse has been widespread. Had not Luther himself initially said harsh things about the Book of Revelation? It is one thing to perceive the importance of apocalyptic and Revelation for the understanding of the New Testament; it is another to allege that such ideas have a continuing relevance for the contemporary life. In 1933 Revelation embodied a resource for theology, which provided a perspective on the terrible events facing Bonhoeffer.18 But there have been other situations where the Book of Revelation has encouraged flight from the world into the fantastic and the destructive. Comparisons of these different applications raise questions about its use. The apocalyptic character of Revelation can hardly be thought to have been a thoroughly wholesome influence in the history of the Church. It has too often provided an important ingredient in the construction of scenarios anticipating the imminent end of the world, ones which have ignored the obligation to minister to those in any kind of need. It is here that the exegete of the Holy Scripture has a role to play. The patient attempts to do justice to the integrity of this text, and thereby to assist in ensuring that the uses to which it is put are consonant with being creative and life-affirming, is an important part of that role. I said earlier that in certain respects apocalyptic has been central to the interpretation of the New Testament. Apocalyptic is described as ‘the mother of Christian Theology’ by Ernst Käsemann in a very influential essay.19 By that he means that the earliest Christian theology was dominated by the belief 17 From D. Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures and Notes 1928–1936, trans. E.H. Robertson and J. Bowden (London: Collins, 1965), 324–325. 18 See E. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Christian, Contemporary, trans. E. Mosbacher (London: Collins, 1977), 207. 19 In his New Testament Questions of Today, trans. W.J. Montague (London: SCM, 1969).

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in the imminent end of history. As I suggested, there is a growing consensus that apocalyptic consists of more than fantastic speculations about the end of the world. The study of its genre and imagery has enabled a more nuanced assessment of it to be made. Nevertheless, Käsemann’s view is one which is widely held, due largely to a book, the publication of which we mark the centenary this year. In 1892 there appeared the first edition of a little work by Johannes Weiss on the preaching of Jesus, which still forms a central component of the discussion of the Gospels.20 In it he challenged the theological liberalism of his day by denying that Albrecht Ritschl’s understanding of the kingdom of God corresponded to the teaching of Jesus. Ritschl’s concept of the moral society evolving over the years, in accordance with providence, was far removed from the world of the Jewish apocalypses, which Weiss considered the proper context for the understanding of the teaching of Jesus. If one studied the likely setting of Jesus’ proclamation of the reign of God, he argued, it provided none of the comfort of moral progress. Instead there was a vision of imminent doom and a fierce desire to see a new world come about. Gone was the myth of the respectable Jesus. In its place there was an apocalyptic figure, a man possessed by the belief that the end of all things was at hand. Convinced as he was that, as a New Testament historian, there was no other responsible way of reading the evidence, Weiss reluctantly conceded that exegesis – namely, the interpretation of the New Testament in the light of its historical context – had to separate from theology. As a religious person one might wish to espouse Ritschl’s understanding of the kingdom. But in that case, Weiss maintained, one had to allow theology and exegesis to follow their own respective paths. Biblical exegesis did not, he thought, support the theological solutions of his contemporaries, for its insights disclosed a very different world of ideas and practice from that envisaged by the theologian.21 That problem is at the heart of the critical task, and much of twentieth century New Testament interpretation has been concerned to bridge the gap between ancient text and contemporary thought. There is always the temptation to espouse the radical solution: to cut off theology from exegesis or abandon academic theology and turn to the real issues, say of the alleviation of human need, as Albert Schweitzer did. Schweitzer stands as one of the giants of New Testament theology in the twentieth century. Just before the First World War he left behind a brilliant career both as a musician and as a biblical exegete to work as a missionary doctor in West Africa. There is the 20 J. Weiss, Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, trans. R.H. Hiers and D.L. Holland (London: SCM, 1971); English translation of the first edition, Göttingen, 1892. 21 On Weiss, see now B. Lannert, Die Wiederentdeckung der neutestamentlichen Eschatologie durch Johannes Weiss, TANZ 2 (Tübingen: Francke, 1989). I am grateful to Zöe Bennett who raised important questions about the received wisdom on Weiss’s contribution to New Testament theology.

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same heroic quality about his life as about his picture of Jesus, so similar to that portrayed by Weiss. He saw Jesus as one who was fired with apocalyptic zeal and who was led to accept death in the earnest expectation of forcing the wheel of history, so that the kingdom of heaven might be realised on earth.22 Schweitzer’s was a heroic departure from academic theology to respond to the Lazarus who confronted the European Dives, as he put it. It seemed to be either academic theology or committed practice, though, in the event, he managed to continue his exegetical work. Still, his action epitomises the problem of relating liberation theology to the academic environment. In the latter, cool contemplation of the issues informs action, whereas in the former, it is the priority of committed action, which forms the basis for theological reflection. Compared with Schweitzer, who struggled to keep together the strange Jesus of Jewish eschatology and the contemporary world, liberation theologians seek to bridge the gap between contemporary responses to poverty and suffering, and the responses reflected in Scripture. Intellectual life is to be rooted in committed action alongside the poor. As a result, they tell us, their way of viewing the world is transformed.23 Commitment to the needs and to the perspectives of the poor and marginalised illuminates a fundamental ingredient of the Bible. Thus the application of their contemporary concerns to Scripture is not an imposition on the text but enables an understanding of something, which is at the very heart of Scripture. Such a claim is so serious that the examination of it is a worthwhile task for anyone engaged in the exegesis of Holy Scripture. Liberation theology’s overt commitment to involvement in practical activity for the betterment of humanity can make it an obvious target for criticism.24 It may seem at times to be naively attached to particular causes with little adequate theological foundation. Liberation theologians may on occasion be guilty of allowing other agendas to determine the exegesis of Scripture. But in this they have probably drunk no deeper of their particular ‘spirit of the age’ than other brands of exegetes and may perhaps be more open about their interpretative prejudices. What is encouraging is that there is a growing appreciation of the mutual benefit, which may be gained from dialogue between First and Third World theologians. The opportunity to study the Bible on a full stomach and without 22 E.g. The Quest of the Historical Jesus, trans. W. Montgomery (London: A&C Black, 1931). 23 G. Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (London: SCM, 1974). 24 Among criticisms could be mentioned the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s Libertatis Nuntius (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1984) responded to by J.L. Segundo, Theology and Church: A Response to Cardinal Ratzinger and a Warning to the Whole Church, trans. J.W. Diercksmeier (London: Chapman, 1985), and most recently by J. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

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threat to life and limb is one which many liberation exegetes I know would want to encourage. There is value in having a biblical interpretation, which can be based on the resources of human memory, which the rich tradition of an institution like Oxford offers. Oxford’s theological tradition is itself shaped by its context. Nevertheless, its library resources, for example, offer access to neglected features of the Christian tradition, which can facilitate ‘brushing history against the grain’ (to quote Walter Benjamin’s words). The exegete of Holy Scripture has to engage with a variety of disciplines, and he or she will find that the interpretative process does not fall neatly into separate compartments. There are a variety of gaps which have to be bridged: historical and theological, theoretical and practical, for example.25 It is the contribution of liberation theology to have reminded us of the importance of the dialectic between the disciplines in which we engage and Scripture’s concern for the poor and the outsider. Theology has always sought to be a formal enterprise in which the intricacies and perplexities of the life of faith have received a careful and systematic analysis. In the last two hundred years theology has had a difficult relationship with the Church. A central part of theological education is the constructive dialogue between academic theology and the life of the Church. Oxford’s Faculty of Theology has had over the years a fruitful relationship with those training men and women for full-time ministry. The exegesis of Holy Scripture, which is sensitive to contemporary issues, but critically aware, has an indispensable contribution to make to wider theological education. It is a Janus-like enterprise. It cannot afford to confine its interests to the ecclesiastical only. Its location in the university invites and enables it to seek a broader horizon for its task. The committed exegete will benefit from the disciplines and resources of the university, but there is a need for contextual theology and conventional theology to share their agenda.26 The importance of an environment, such as that in which we work, is that it is a place where profound differences can exist, and advocates of opposing positions can be better enabled to see more clearly the shortcomings and strengths of the case they seek to present. The regular interaction of liberation theologians with ordinary readers indicates that the scope of theological education extends far beyond the walls of university or seminary. The success of 25

See N. Lash, Theology on the Way to Emmaus (London: SCM, 1986), 37ff. and 75ff. Liberation theologians have drawn on A. Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual to describe the dialectic between their professional theology and commitment to the poor (see further C. Rowland and M. Corner, Liberating Exegesis: The Challenge of Liberation Theology to Biblical Studies [London: SPCK, 1990], 44). The relationship between conventional theology and the option for the poor is an uneasy one. However hard the organic intellectual tries, the power relationships between him/her and the ordinary reader remain unequal. That has to be recognised, otherwise naive notions of equality can mask the privileged position of the intellectual. 26

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a recent ecumenical Bible study course27 in Britain, based on Latin American liberation theology, shows us that there is a large constituency in the churches ready to engage in continuing education in biblical studies and theology. That is an enterprise which requires sensitivity and imagination in its preparation and execution but is an exciting prospect for the exegete of the Holy Scripture. The New Testament theologian has a role to play in all of this and Ernst Käsemann, whom I quoted earlier made the point forcefully when he wrote: The history and exegesis of the New Testament, whether we like it or not, exercise a function in the life of the Church and relate to the community in which Christians live. If however the one is abstracted from the other, not only is sacrifice offered on alien altars but the claim of the object we study and the service we might render are both alike misconceived. To make my point very aggressively indeed, I do not know Dom Helder Câmara personally … but were my work of no possible help to him in his troubles, I would not remain a New Testament scholar.28

Those involved in the exegesis of Holy Scripture may have their contribution to make to the complex task of interpreting texts which are still part of the fabric of communities in the contemporary world. What counts as an appropriate use of the scriptures in contemporary debate? Are we in danger of misunderstanding the biblical texts if we see them as political documents? These are issues which have often divided opinion in recent years. Problems will always arise when the use of the Bible becomes a function in the critical analysis of a prevailing ideology. The agnosticism of the academic exegetical enterprise may rightly make us cautious of precipitate commitment. Nevertheless, commitment of one kind or another is likely to confront anyone who reads the Bible in the light of the needs of the world. The title of this lecture is the quotation from the Book of Proverbs, which Bonhoeffer used in the 1930s to describe the task of the Confessing Church in raising its voice on behalf of the Jews, and in the course of what I have tried to say, I have outlined an exegetical task, which seeks to reflect similar concerns. By a happy coincidence this lecture comes at the beginning of Christian Aid Week, a regular feature of the life of the British churches, Christian Aid being one of the aid agencies of the British churches. For years now it has been supporting poor people in many parts of the Third World in various practical ways and in turn has been the recipient of a fund of wisdom and insight from those poor communities, which are its partners. At the heart of its work is the belief that the issue of poverty is a practical concern integral to the practice of religion. Over the next few years, therefore, it is to embark on 27

Living the Good News ([London:] Christian Aid, 1991). E. Käsemann, ‘The Problem of New Testament Theology’, NTS 19 (1973): 236. Helder Camara was for many years Archbishop of Recife and Olinda in the north-east of Brazil and a leading proponent of liberation theology in the pastoral practice of the Brazilian Church. 28

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a project in which an attempt will be made to persuade the churches and the community at large of the priority of our responsibility to the poor and needy. An important ingredient of that attempt will be the theological foundation for a commitment to the poor, and it is to that that I shall be endeavouring to make a contribution. Here in particular the interpretation of Scripture forms a central part. Conventional exegetical skills will be called upon and will need to be exercised with as much rigour as in the commentary or monograph. There is need to explore whether a response to the poor should be a central component of the life of the churches and the community generally and not an optional extra. Such work takes place against a background of renewed discussion about the meaning and scope of charitable activity. Care for our fellow human beings should need no theological rationale, yet the lack of consensus in society, as well as in the Church, demands that attention be given to this. That continues to be so in the churches where doubts are often expressed about particular forms of the practice of charity. The reason for this is not too hard to seek. Whether we like it or not, texts are locuses of struggle. In their production they betray the ideological conflict of their day, and in the history of their use they have served very different ends. They can enable change; but they can just as easily be co-opted in the service of the status quo or of a dominant ideology. Biblical texts in particular are tied up in a particular set of human struggles because of their authoritative status, and the careful exposition of their use is a necessary part of the interpretative enterprise. In all of this the exegete of Holy Scripture will have to negotiate a path which avoids an imperious position, dictating the precise details of meaning and laying down the criterion of what is acceptable. There will always be room for the task of discerning the original meaning of the text, involving the necessary linguistic and historical work. But alongside that there will be the need to promote critical awareness of the contemporary context of interpretation. Such a critical awareness is very much in the spirit of apocalyptic, whose alternative perspective has often supplied that creative distance, hinted at by Adorno, when he wrote that ‘perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world’. But if Jacob the chandler quotes Scripture to exclude the wise of this world from understanding the Scripture, in the New Testament, the Gospel of Luke appeals particularly to those with resources to put them at the disposal of the disadvantaged.29 Thus human beings in all their diversity can each play their part in contributing to the needs of the world. Finally, to conclude with what has been the main concern of this lecture – the task of the exegete to speak for the dumb – the balance of factors, which 29 See, e.g., P.F. Esler, Community and Gospel in Luke-Acts, SNTSMS 57 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and H. Moxnes, The Economy of the Kingdom (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988).

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exclude or render some voiceless in the interpretative process, demands constant vigilance. And in that quest for vigilance, the exegete will contribute expertise, not so much to answer questions as to offer a resource for an informed reading. Biblical interpretation cannot provide answers, but it can assist by suggesting questions, which will show up the sort of distortions all too easily masked by complacency. The task is to sharpen the insight of all those involved in the exegesis of Holy Scripture. That means the most careful attention to the details of the text. And if the fulfilment of these concerns promotes discussion, perhaps we will also need to recognise that discussion alone can never fully do justice to texts, which ultimately may best be understood by living and praying them.

44. The Visionary Prophetic Performance of Scripture: A Tribute to Nicholas Lash (1934–2020), Norris–Hulse Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge, 1978–1999 44.1. My Debt to Nicholas This essay here published for the first time is a tribute to my friend, Nicholas Lash. It has its origin in a lecture given at a conference to mark Nicholas’s retirement which should have formed part of a volume in his honour but was not included. Its subject matter makes it a fitting conclusion to this collection. As I was about to come to Cambridge from Newcastle in 1979 Nicholas Lash’s brother (who was a colleague in the now defunct Department of Religious Studies at the University of Newcastle) gave me a paper written by Nicholas on ‘the performance of Scripture’,1 with the words ‘you will have more need of this than I will’. How right he was! Nicholas used a musical analogy which makes the major point of his essay very clear: The fundamental form of the interpretation of Beethoven[’s music] consists in the performance of his texts. The academics have an indispensable but subordinate part to play in contributing to the quality and appreciation of the performance. … Christian practice, as interpretative action, consists in the performance of texts which are construed as ‘rendering’, bearing witness to, one whose words and deeds, discourse and suffering, ‘rendered’ the truth of God in human history.2

The essay remains an indispensable resource and epitomises so much of what I learnt from Nicholas. It is something to which I always refer students of biblical exegesis, who are caught up in the web of historicism. His recognition that Scripture is something to be performed, lived and acted upon and not just analysed is something I have slowly, and often painfully, come to see. In this final essay in this collection I gladly pay tribute to Nicholas. My essay will explore what it means to perform Scripture when that scripture is not a narrative, or collection of ethical maxims, but a visionary 1 Nicholas Lash, ‘Performing the Scriptures’, in idem, Theology on the Way to Emmaus (London: SCM, 1986), 37–46. 2 Lash, ‘Performing the Scriptures’, 41–42.

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prophetic text. How can we speak of enacted or performed interpretation of visionary texts? The two visionary and prophetic texts which are the focus of this study have a long interpretative history, the prophecy of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse. The first chapter of Ezekiel as well as being the key text for the mystical tradition in Judaism (maʿaseh merkabah) is a central component of Christianity’s primary visionary text, the Apocalypse. Following on the work of Michael Lieb in The Visionary Mode,3 I want to suggest that there is parallel Christian interest in Ezekiel’s merkabah vision but one which extends further than he suggested and should include the prophetic and artistic work of William Blake. The two examples considered in this essay, are, first, one of the earliest witnesses in rabbinic literature to engagement with the first chapter of Ezekiel (referred to as merkabah because of the reference to the chariot on which God was enthroned in Ezekiel’s vision), and the ways in which visionary texts were taken up by the English visionary artist and poet, William Blake (1757–1827) in his texts and images. The exegesis and understanding of visionary prophetic texts may come about in a visionary mode as they had done for the original prophets and visionaries. Such readers of these texts interpret by performing these texts so that they see what the prophets saw. To quote the words of David Halperin: ‘When the apocalyptic visionary “sees” something … we may assume that he is seeing the … vision as he has persuaded himself it really was, as [the prophet] would have seen it, had he been inspired wholly and not in part.’4 Inspired by Nicholas Lash’s essay on ‘the performance of scripture’, I shall consider the examples of the ways in which visionary and apocalyptic texts were ‘performed’ by a radical exponent of scriptural performance, William Blake. His is another example of scriptural ‘performances’ in which biblical texts function as an imaginative catalyst for understanding God and the world, though, distinctively in Blake’s case, inspiration and interpretation are combined with the production of, and so completely, performed in, his illuminated books. As we shall see, he writes of his desire to ‘rouze the faculties to act’. The images in Blake’s work juxtaposed as they are with text are crucial to this process. Whether or not Blake used Ezekiel’s vision as the trigger for his own visions, the visionary inspiration of Ezekiel, similar to John of Patmos, was an essential component of his own visionary, poetic and artistic world.

3 M. Lieb, The Visionary Mode: Biblical Prophecy, Hermeneutics, and Cultural Change (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991). 4 D.J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988), 71.

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44.2. Tannaitic Rabbis and the Prophetic Performance of Scripture A passage in the tractate Hagigah from the early Jewish mishnah collection, the Tosefta, expands the allusive reference to Ezekiel’s merkabah vision in the Mishnah. The Tosefta contrasts an authentic chain of tradition with warnings, sometimes implicit, about what happens when others than those authorised perform the Scriptures. For related reasons the interpretation of both Ezekiel and the Apocalypse was subject either to restricted access or the imposition of a deliberate inculcation of ‘sound’ interpretation. This is already evident in one of the earliest passages dealing with the merkabah, t.Hag. 2:2. The performance of visionary and prophetic texts in the work of William Blake suggests that they have a part in the description of an ongoing Christian interest in Ezekiel’s merkabah. Interest in God’s throne and the one seated upon it, as well as the cosmos and its origins, formed key aspects of Jewish mysticism. This interest almost certainly antedates the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, our knowledge of which is derived in the main from apocalyptic writings, which in part antedate the Christian era. It already had a long history from the very earliest times after the return from exile in Babylon down to the hasidic movements nearer our own day.5 The publication of the material from Caves 4 and 11 at Qumran has given considerable support to the view that the origin of the idea of a speculative, visionary interest in the heavenly Temple, liturgy, and the existence of a complex angelology have a long history in ancient Judaism. According to the Mishnah (m.Hag. 2:1) two biblical passages provide the foundation of this speculative interest: Gen. 1 (maʿaseh bereshith) and Ezek. 1 (maʿaseh merkabah). Reading Ezek. 1 was severely restricted by ancient Jewish teachers because of its use by visionaries and the dangers to faith and life which such visionary activity posed (m.Meg. 4:10; t.Meg. 4[3]:31ff.; b.Meg. 24a–b). The reconstruction of the content of merkabah tradition in the late first century is not easy, and there has been a difference of opinion about what was involved in it. One way of looking at the phenomenon is that meditation on passages like Ezek. 1, set as it is in Exile and in the aftermath of a previous destruction of the Temple, would have been particularly apposite as the rabbis sought to come to terms with the devastation of 70 CE. We know Paul was influenced by apocalyptic ascent ideas (2 Cor. 12:2–4). Indeed, he emphasises the importance of this visionary element as the basis of his practice 5

G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 3rd rev. edn. (New York: Schocken, 1954); I. Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, AGJU 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1980); Halperin, Faces of the Chariot; C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982), 1; P. Schäfer, The Hidden and Manifest God, trans. A. Pomerance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).

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(Gal. 1:12 and 1:16, cf. Acts 22:17). The apocalypse of Jesus Christ became the basis for his practice of admitting Gentiles to the messianic age without the Law of Moses.6 A passage from rabbinic texts has often come to mind as I have thought about the performance of Scripture. The language used in it actually relates explicitly to this issue, and in this case what it might mean to ‘perform’ a visionary/prophetic text such as Ezek. 1. It comes in a passage in both the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds and the Tosefta where the material relates directly to the brief reference in the Mishnah (m.Hag. 2:1) concerning the exposition of Ezekiel’s vision of the divine merkabah. That reads as follows: They do not expound upon the laws of forbidden relations before three persons, but they do expound them before two; or about the Works of Creation (Gen. 1) before two, but they do expound them before one; or about the Chariot [Ezek. 1] before one, unless he was a sage and understands of his own knowledge.

In the Tosefta version this is immediately followed by a story of two rabbis, Eleazar ben Arak and Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, who had an important role in the emergence of rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Yohanan was riding on his donkey with Eleazar riding behind him. The latter asked his teacher to teach him about the merkabah. At first Yohanan demurs quoting the mishnaic teaching but then relents, at which point Yohanan dismounts from his donkey and wraps himself in his prayer shawl and sits under an olive tree. In the talmudic versions Eleazar asks why Yohanan has acted so, to which Yohanan responds that he could not continue to ride an ass while Eleazar expounds the merkabah chapter, as the Divine Presence and the ministering angels would be with them. When Eleazar begins, fire comes down from heaven and envelops the trees. There is a paean of praise, and an angel confirms that it is indeed the divine merkabah that Eleazar has spoken of. Then Yohanan kisses Eleazar and says: ‘Blessed is the LORD, the God of Israel, who has given a son to Abraham our father who knows and understands how to expound the glory of our Father in Heaven!’ He goes on to commend Eleazar because, unlike some, he not only expounds well but performs well. Eleazar’s performance of Scripture not only earns his teacher’s fulsome praise but also the angelic testimony that the divine mysteries have been set forth by Eleazar. Perhaps he has demonstrated in his performance that he ‘is a sage and understands of his own knowledge’ the mysteries of heaven?

6

See A.F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven, SJLA 25 (Leiden: Brill, 1977); J.E. Fossum, The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord, WUNT 36 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1985); Rowland, The Open Heaven, especially 94–110; L.W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (London: SCM, 1988).

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Following this story there is the enigmatic story of the four teachers who entered a garden (in Hebrew pardes), only one of whom, Rabbi Akiba, entered and came out again ‘whole’. Of the rest, one died (Ben Azzai), one was afflicted (Ben Zoma; an additional story in the sources suggests that in the opinion of a senior colleague he had become infatuated with the mysteries of the cosmos), and one ‘cut the shoots’ (he is called ‘the Other’ in the sources but is to be identified with Elisha ben Abuyah, about whom rabbinic legend says that he saw the angel Metatron and wrongly assumed that he was a divinity alongside God). There is an interesting juxtaposition in rabbinic collections concerning visionary material of a line of accepted teachers and others mentioned, whether by name or anonymously, whose involvement, indeed infatuation with those parts of Scripture with visionary or speculative potential caused problems for themselves and their peers. The inclusion of the ‘outsiders’ of the rabbinic circles in the sources serves to remind the reader that this is a dangerous business and that it is the respected teachers who should be followed like Rabbi Akiba. While there is a concern with tradition in the sense of a carefully delineated body of ideas and a respected chain of practitioners, there is also a practice which may have been controlled as is hinted at in the story of Yohanan and Eleazar. However much they may have tried, warned and threatened, there were potential risks for any ‘performing this scripture’ as they opened themselves up to the powerful images of fire, light and the dynamics of divine irruption found in Ezek. 1. Even a tradition of interpretation cannot prevent the visionary potential of texts like Ezekiel having adverse consequences because of their visionary potential. That potential could lead to those who would wish to do so, to see for themselves what Ezekiel had seen. We cannot be sure why Yohanan believed that Eleazar had ‘performed well’. Perhaps the recitation had enabled Yohanan to see again what Ezekiel had seen? Eleazar’s words had an effect, if other versions of this story are followed, where the angels come to listen to the divine mysteries which Eleazar’s words open up – an apocalyptic moment indeed!

44.3. William Blake and the Prophetic Performance of Scripture There is that visionary appropriation of Scripture in which the prophetic or apocalyptic words offer the opportunity for a later seer, poet or artist to ‘see again’ what had appeared to prophets and seers in the past or become a means of prompting new visions whereby there can be a discernment of higher spiritual realities. This is well exemplified in the engraving by Jean Duvet (1555), in which the artist clearly represents himself as John the visionary. William Blake’s relationship to the Bible and particularly to its visionary texts falls into this category.

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There was always a desire to manage and control the interpretation and the transmission of a body of esoteric or visionary knowledge, which offered the parameters, and indeed the content of what may be understood. Nevertheless with visionaries such careful conditioning is out of the question. In Blake’s Milton a Poem he describes himself as an incarnation of Milton’s spirit to redeem attitudes and positions taken by his poetic predecessor. It is also a moment of inspired recapitulation in which the later poet redeems the earlier’s work, initiated when Blake sees Milton’s spirit enter into his left foot (Milton 14:49). The idea of a living poet (Blake) taking up and reformulating the work of a predecessor is akin to the process of identifying pseudonymously with a seer of the past such as Enoch found in the apocalypses of ancient Judaism and early Christianity. Conventional temporality is abolished as the departed reappear and are expounded or rewritten in the present. When Blake saw Milton’s spirit enter into his left foot, what happened was the blurring of identity and time, as the eternal and the temporal merge, and the reader shares the mental dislocation this brings about. ‘Blake was not the first (see the Book of Revelation) … to plunge into a kind of madness to lift us outside the normal so that we can see normality as only one among many imaginable ways of reading, seeing, feeling, thinking, living’.7 The visionary experience is too spasmodic and occasional and too restrictive to suggest that tradition as a body of knowledge to be received and passed on would be entirely appropriate to describe what is going on. E.P. Thompson and others have sought to place Blake in a radical tradition of politics and scriptural interpretation with varying degrees of plausibility.8 What we can say with regard to all this material, is that there exists a disposition, a cast of mind and outlook, which led to the visionary, and the mystical. Blake himself revered Teresa and other Christian mystics and to that extent drew on their inspiration as he obviously did with Ezekiel and John of Patmos. Michael Lieb in his fascinating study draws on the work done on the origins of Jewish mysticism and its relationship with the apocalyptic tradition of Second Temple Judaism and its appropriation by early Christians to suggest that the ongoing practice of visionary merkabah exposition is not something confined to Judaism. By reference to some little known early Christian material he extends the study from the origins of the early Christian mystical tradition and the interpretation of the Song, Ezekiel and Revelation down to Dante. He draws attention to the catalytic and creative potential of Ezekiel and its ability to prompt new formulations of what is already a suggestive and 7

R.N. Essick and J. Viscomi, eds., William Blake, Milton a Poem (Princeton: William Blake Trust/Princeton University Press, 1993), 10. 8 E.P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and C. Rowland, Radical Prophet: The Mystics, Subversives and Visionaries who Strove for Heaven on Earth (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017).

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multi-faceted text. At the very core of the merkabah tradition is its propensity to assume new forms. In Lieb’s view the merkabah generates new meaning and new modes of perception, that are forever multiplying, of hermeneutics of transformation and visionary re-enactment. It is a dynamic repository of ever-changing meanings that are inscribed and reinscribed in that circle of reciprocity that occurs between hermeneut and text. He also draws attention to another feature of the tradition and its appropriation (and this is something which relates to Nicholas Lash’s essay): the way in which the reader herself becomes the object of attention and is herself interpreted and converted. This is something to which Samuel Taylor Coleridge drew attention when writing of the Bible in the following way: ‘in the Bible there is more that finds me than I have experienced in all other books put together’. What begins as the prophet beholding the vision ends with an awareness that it is not the prophet who beholds so much as the vision that beholds him. Lieb argues that there is a line of vision and an ongoing preoccupation seeing again what Ezekiel had seen.9 The impact of Ezekiel’s vision suggests an appropriation, which manifests some of the characteristics we find in the Jewish tradition. One writer, whom Lieb does not mention in this context, though in subsequent correspondence with me he has confirmed that if he had taken the story any further he would have been bound to include him is William Blake. Ezekiel’s merkabah has a prominent place in Blake’s work, forming the inspiration of his major poetic work The Four Zoas, in which the mysteries of the human character are plumbed. The link between humanity and divinity, as well as the complexity of human personality is hinted at in the painting ‘Ezekiel’s Wheels’, redolent of that humanity in divinity found in the Jewish midrash and early patristic exegesis of the merkabah. William Blake’s painting ‘The Twenty-Four Elders’ in Tate Britain is a dramatic picture dominated by the bearded Almighty with a scroll with seven seals in his right hand radiating glory. He is surrounded with a beautiful sea blue topped by a rainbow and above and around his head are creatures with heads of an eagle, a lion, an ox and a man merging one into another, the whole scene full of eyes reminiscent in colour and appearance of a peacock in full plume. At the forefront of the picture are figures doing obeisance laying their crowns before the Almighty and right at the front of the picture are seven heads with tongues of fire. The whole brilliantly captures the ‘jasper and carnelian’, the emerald rainbow and the twenty-four elders, clad in white garments, the seven torches of Pentecostal fire burning before the throne all of which are mentioned in John’s first heavenly vision. It seems to epitomise monarchy. More on that anon. But a moment’s reflection suggests that in Rev. 4 there is no scroll in the hand of the Almighty. That follows in the next chapter. After seeing the glory 9

Halperin, Faces of the Chariot, 71.

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of God John sees the Almighty with a scroll and hears one of the twenty-four elders asking ‘who will open the scroll’. At this point John weeps because no one is found worthy to open the scroll. He is told not to weep, because ‘the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals’. Then John notices something which had hitherto slipped his attention: And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders, I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain … he went and took the scroll from the right hand of him who was seated on the throne and … the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders … sang a new song, saying, ‘Worthy art thou to take the scroll and to open its seals’.

Just like John who saw first a throne and the glory of the Almighty, a viewer of Blake’s picture too would be forgiven for not noticing what appears to be the points of a crown and under it, almost invisible in the glorious surroundings there is what at first sight seems to be a comatose animal. This insignificant creature is easily missed as our attention is caught by the kaleidoscopic effect of variegated images and colours. The lamb who has been slaughtered becomes the key to the interpretation of history. The Lion of the tribe of Judah turns out to be a weak, dead creature who is key to the unmasking of the pretensions and harmful effects of political power both in John’s and in our own day. The values of the world are turned upside down as the meaning of the prophetic promise of a king who will reign in righteousness, when the craving of the hungry will be satisfied and the thirsty will no longer be deprived of something to drink, is interpreted by the Lamb that was slain. This is key to John’s Apocalypse of Jesus Christ. Understanding the mystery of God means grasping that the least and those who are insignificant, are key to divine rule: ‘whoever becomes humble like this child is greatest in the Kingdom of God’ (Matt. 18:4). Blake, the intrepid visionary prophet, sees what Ezekiel had seen in his vision, but, like John, Blake’s other prophetic inspiration, had grasped the true meaning of the rule of God. When at last the New Jerusalem comes (Rev. 21), God descends to earth with the Lamb; the boundary between God and humanity, heaven and earth, is removed; God becomes all in all, and wipes tears from every eye and sorrow and sighing shall be no more (Rev. 21:4). A repeated visual and poetic theme in Blake’s work is the challenge to divine monarchy and transcendence. We see this most in Blake’s remarkable exegesis of the Book of Job,10 a project he completed only shortly before his death. Job is like the ‘Lutheran Paul’ who converts from book religion to the immediacy of vision. Job’s conversion comes about as the result of visionary insight. Elihu bears witness to the importance of the visionary as a means of 10

C. Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 13–72.

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true understanding of God, anticipating the vision of God to Job, and the function of the Elihu sequence is seen as a precursor of the dramatic revelation to Job. The vision of God in the whirlwind is interpreted christologically as a vision of Jesus Christ, (similarly also in the New Testament in John 14:8, the latter passage actually being quoted in Blake’s engraving). Blake’s concern throughout the illustrations is to challenge the monarchical transcendent god of church and state and to stress the prominence which is to be given to the visionary element in religion. Job starts as an adherent of a religion of the letter who is overwhelmed by apocalypse and converted to a religion of the spirit. It is a sequence which reflects Blake’s major theological concerns but at several key points indicates Blake’s exegetical insight, not least in his appreciation of the centrality of the apocalyptic dimension of the book and the importance of a christological interpretation of it in the context of interpretation of the Christian Bible. Blake’s focus on the apocalyptic framework of the Book of Job in Job 1–2 and 40–41 is used to portray Job’s conversion from a book-religion to a religion of immediacy and vision. The dualistic framework which characterises the opening depictions of Blake’s ‘Job’ sequence is left behind at the end, where God in Christ appears to Job and his wife without the apocalyptic, cosmological trappings evident in the opening visions. Blake’s parody of the monarchical law-giver and the need for an understanding of God which is less abstract and remote is well exemplified by Plate 11 from Europe (see Fig. 4, above, p. 687), whose text reads ‘Albion’s Angel rose upon the Stone of Night. He saw Urizen on the Atlantic; And his brazen Book That Kings & Priests had copied on Earth Expanded from North to South’. The one enthroned with book of brass, is the power which holds humanity in thrall through the web of religion. It is the stern words ‘Thou shalt not’ determining life rather than mutual forgiveness. Here is the forbidding deity characteristic of the religion of Europe, a remote deity, too exalted to wipe tears from human eyes. For Blake the worship of God involves a recognition of God not as remote creator divinity, captured in his Ancient of Days which forms part of the preface to Europe a Prophecy, but in the person of others: ‘The worship of God is. Honouring his gifts in other men each according to his genius’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 22). John’s apocalyptic vision is a central component of many aspects of Blake’s visionary world and also informs his understanding of his own political situation. As he put it in 1798, ‘To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life. The Beast and the Whore rule without controls’ (‘Annotations to Richard Watson’s Apology’, E611).11 Indeed, Blake explicitly traces a continuity between his own mythical world and the vision seen by

11

E plus page number(s) refers to Erdman’s edition of Blake’s works, see below, p. 775.

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John, as he makes clear at the conclusion of the Eighth Night of The Four Zoas: Rahab triumphs over all; she took Jerusalem Captive, a Willing Captive, by delusive arts impell’d To worship Urizen’s Dragon form, to offer her own Children Upon the bloody Altar. John saw these things Reveal’d in Heaven On Patmos Isle, & heard the souls cry out to be deliver’d. He saw the Harlot of the Kings of Earth, & saw her Cup Of fornication, food of Orc & Satan, press’d from the fruit of Mystery. (The Four Zoas 8.597–603, K356)12 Blake’s use of the Apocalypse indicates a visionary’s sense of continuity with the New Testament text rather than a conventional commentary or analysis, for Blake believed that he stood in the prophetic tradition of which John of Patmos was a part. That Blake saw himself as a prophet is seen in the form of the great continental prophecies, America and Europe where he too functions as a prophet who speaks about kingdoms, peoples and nations (cf. Jer. 1:5 and 10; Rev. 10:11).13 To interpret the prophetic texts was to perform them, or better to reenact them in a representation of the prophetic vocation. So prophetic texts became a catalyst for prophetic activity by Blake in his own situation. That is not to suggest that Blake’s prophecies have any straightforward relationship with biblical texts. Indeed, they are shot through with Blake’s own idiosyncratic mythopoiesis. There is a reason for this, however. In Blake’s day the Bible had ceased to be a vehicle of the Spirit and was the foundation of a religion of rules and regulations serving the interests of the powerful. It had ceased to be a medium of the Spirit. Blake found that he had to shape a new language to liberate the Bible itself, so that it could once again express the joy of human life and of the love of God, which contemporary images and doctrines inhibited rather than facilitated. The old imagery needed to be reborn, and the Scriptures become a present truth and quickening, life-giving words. Blake’s prophecies were not intended to predict exactly what would happen, for they were written after the events that are described, as he puts it succinctly in a marginal note he wrote in 1798: Prophets in the modern sense of the word have never existed. Jonah was no prophet, in the modern sense, for his prophecy of Nineveh failed. Every honest man is a prophet; he utters his opinion both of private and public matters. Thus: If you go on So, the result is So. He never says, such a thing shall happen let you do what you will. A Prophet is a Seer, not an Arbitrary Dictator. (‘Annotations to Watson’s Apology’, E617) 12

K plus page number referring to Keynes’s edition of Blake’s works, see below, p. 775. See L. Tannenbaum, Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 168. 13

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The prophecies lay bare the inner dynamic of history, the potential for positive change that exists and the corruption of those impulses. There is throughout a recognition of the tensions between prophetic denunciation and hope for change on the one hand and the suspicion that revolutionary change may result in injustice and chaos. There is none of the optimism about revolution expressed in Coleridge’s early Religious Musings written roughly contemporary with Blake’s prophecies,14 indeed, quite the reverse. Throughout Europe Blake recognises the way that revolution can be subverted and be turned into a destructive monster as well as the multi-faceted forms of resistance to change in a conservative society. So, there was a need to plumb the complexities of the human personality and its succumbing to the ‘dark delusions’ of the world in which religion and theology have all too often played their part. In many respects the famous words popularly known as Jerusalem epitomise Blake’s prophetic vocation (Preface to Milton): And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England’s mountains green: And was the holy Lamb of God On England’s pleasant pastures seen! And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills? Bring me my Bow of burning gold; Bring me my Arrows of desire: Bring me my spear: O Clouds unfold: Bring me my chariot of fire! I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem In England’s green & pleasant Land Would that all the Lord’s people were Prophets. Numbers xi. 29.15 This famous passage was written by a man without any formal education, whose wisdom is that of the streets, of popular culture, and the conventional arts of the apprentice. Although Blake’s apprenticeship laid the foundation

14 See J. Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). 15 This follows the punctuation found in the original.

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for his artistic work, he never allowed technique to triumph over vision or creativity. His was a campaign against an education based solely on memory rather than inspiration and his conviction that the domination of classical culture had quenched the vitality of biblical inspiration. What is not often noticed in this poem is its context and the contrasts within it. As we have seen, the immediate context of these stanzas is a challenge to the dominance of a way of thinking which is based on classical culture. Blake sees this as the contributory cause of the corruption of the Christianity of his day, both in its moral outlook and its preoccupation with abstract reason. In the stanzas which are popularly known as Jerusalem the allusions to the Scriptures include a clear reference to the Apocalypse. Here there is a distinctive feature in his interpretation. The New Jerusalem is not something remote or far off but a possibility, something which may be built in England’s green and pleasant land. There is no disjunction between human activity and divine activity as God is involved through the imaginative and creative work of the artist. The texts are applied to the writer and his contemporaries. Elijah and his chariot are not just part of past history, or even future expectation, for they typify the necessity of poet-prophets to challenge the idols of the Ahabs and Jezebels of his own day, a society which has become subservient a religion of rule and accepting of war and violence. The prophetic spirit was available for those who would exercise their imagination in contemplative thought and prophetic struggle. So prophecy is not a thing of the past. As the closing quotation indicates, it is the vocation of all God’s people. The building of the New Jerusalem involves all. Secondly, Jerusalem itself is based on a contrast between what is actually the case and what might be. The contrast between the implied question of the opening lines becomes explicit at the beginning of the second stanza and the hope for Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land. What is needed meantime is ‘Mental Fight’, language reflecting the military imagery of Eph. 6:10. ‘Mental Fight’ is the process of challenging the way in which dominant patterns of thinking and behaving make it difficult for all God’s people to be prophets. Blake understood better than any one the enormous difficulty confronting those who sought to challenge and promote a way of life governed by the life of the Lamb. Simply putting the Bible in the hands of people was not good enough to deal with the stumbling blocks. It was not lack of learning which could be rectified by the experts so much as the way in which the cultural values of society had so permeated the consciousness and lifestyle of ordinary people. What was required, therefore, was the disinfecting of the mind-set, values and practices which contradicted the way of the Lamb. Blake the poet and prophet knew that the dominance of theology by the god of the philosophers had permeated the approach to the wisdom of the Scriptures. To set that wisdom free required of the interpreter techniques which would enable the dominant and all-pervasive ideology to be recognised. The interpreter’s role then was to offer that intellectual stimu-

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lation which would act as a way of enabling people to find for themselves what the text enabled them to see what made for their peace. Blake does not see his role as a master of hermeneutics so much as a facilitator, to provide the means of cleansing the doors of perception to see the infinite (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 14). His task was that of enabling the conversion to a way of truth demonstrated in apprehending the divine image in ‘heathen, turk or jew’, to quote his poem ‘The Divine Image’: And all must love the human form, In heathen, turk or jew. Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell, There God is dwelling too.

44.4. The Apocalypse and the Prophetic Performance of Scripture To return now to the Apocalypse: it was the catalyst in succeeding centuries for a variety of forms of interpretation. The Apocalypse only occasionally prompts a quest for the meaning of the mysteries (e.g. 17:9, cf. 1:20 & 4:3). In this respect it is remarkably different from its Old Testament counterpart, the Book of Daniel, which is replete with the detailed elucidation of its apocalyptic allusions. Most modern readers of the Apocalypse approach the text with a thoroughgoing historicism, whether it is orientated to the past or the future. In the academy, there is the relating of the visions to their ancient, first century context. In this interpretative approach questions are concerned with the meaning for the original author and readers and with the need to decipher the complex symbolism and its relationship to the particular circumstances in which Christians in late first century CE Asia Minor found themselves. Of importance in understanding the resort to its imagery in the contemporary world, is seeing the way the book has been used to interpret history, present and future, in some respects tracing a pedigree back through Newton, Mede to the successors of Joachim of Fiore. As important is a long tradition of allowing the Apocalypse to give deeper meaning and significance to contemporary events. This ‘actualisation’ (i.e. reading the text in the light of new circumstances), has not usually required the text of the Apocalypse being ‘decoded’, so that the apocalyptic imagery is ‘translated’ into a less exotic narrative of persons and events. Rather, the imagery of the Apocalypse functions as an imaginative ‘prompt’, and is used as an interpretative lens with which to view history. Detailed analysis gives way to imaginative response to text and wider context. It becomes, for example a challenge to discern Babylon and Jerusalem in the world around.

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The former ‘is an allegory of the condition of death, the focus of apocalyptic judgement whereas Jerusalem is about the emancipation of human life in society from the rule of death, an anticipation of the end of time’.16 This is a mode of interpretation with roots in the Christian tradition, going back at least to the time of Tyconius, whose influence on Augustine was immense. As a prophetic book, the Apocalypse has offered space for women and men to enable their spiritual vocations flourish, whether or not they are regarded as theologically qualified according to the canons of this age. Men and women found in this allusive text a licence to resist and question received religion and practice (much as Blake did). A canonical text opened a door for an experience of God which enabled them to transcend the boundaries imposed by what was conventionally possible. In much of this form of interpretation we are not dealing with the kind of analytical exegesis which is so typical of academic discourse in which historical context and the precise meaning of words and phrases, or for that matter, the intention of the author are dealt with. Instead, it is a rather indirect relationship with the Scriptures in which the words become the catalyst for discernment of the divine way in the present. In it the wisdom of experience as the vehicle of the ways of the Spirit are given pre-eminence, sometimes at the expense of the written word. What counts is not so much what it meant to Isaiah, Jesus or Paul but what import these words may have in the circumstances of the present. In this regard Karl Barth is at one with the radicals when he wrote: ‘why should parallels drawn from the ancient world be of more value for our understanding of the epistle than the situation in which we ourselves actually are and to which we can therefore bear witness’.17 What one finds in this use of Scripture is that the text becomes a catalyst for interpretation, a gateway to new understanding. Blake describes it well in seeking to explain why detailed explanations of his own images and symbols miss the point. Language and images function in an apocalyptic way, a hermeneutical device which opens up the imagination. Blake demands of the reader imaginative participation, to explore the tensions and problems that the text poses. You say that I want somebody to elucidate my ideas. But you ought to know that what is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the ancients consider’d what is not too explicit as the fittest for instruction, because it rouzes the faculties to act. I name Moses, Solomon, Esop, Homer, Plato … Why is the Bible more Entertaining & Instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination, which is Spiritual Sensation & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason. (‘Letter to Trusler’, E702–703)

16 W. Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (Waco: Word, 1973), 114. 17 K. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. E.C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 11.

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For Blake the exegetical task involves reading, hearing and appropriating, in order to overcome that which prevents insight. Apocalyptic exegesis of the Bible’s visionary texts likewise uses the texts as a springboard for new understanding which can, as seems to have been the case for some early Christian appropriations of such texts, create new moments of understanding. The ‘rouzing the faculties’ led to new and at times radically different understanding of the meaning of the original text, so that the mysterious figure on the throne was linked with Christ, the Lamb that was slain in John’s merkabah vision in Rev. 4–5, and, a thousand years later, in Francis of Assisi’s decisive vision on Mount La Verna in 1224, when Francis saw in the midst of the seraph a crucified man and was convinced that he was identified with Christ crucified.18 The relationship to earlier Scripture whether in the Apocalypse or Blake’s pictures or poetry is oblique. Biblical language becomes a mode of discourse in which the original context and purpose, and, most importantly, the literal sense of the text cease to be of primary concern. In the visionary imagination of John of Patmos and Blake and other visionaries prophetic texts are echoed so extensively. This is an indication of the ‘visionary mode’ rather than any deliberate attempt to write a commentary on these texts. It is not exegesis in any conventional sense, although it is interpretation of these texts even if it does not attend to the minute detail of the original. It is more an appropriation so that earlier prophecies are quite simply the means whereby visions are expressed and perhaps even engendered. It is a way of reading which contrasts with the kind of close reading of the text which focuses on the letter and the accompanying intention of the text as we have it which invariably includes the attempt to ascertain the situation of author and first readers. Parallels to this kind of exegesis are to be found in the appropriations of Ezekiel’s vision in the journeys through the heavenly palaces to the divine merkabah in writings in the Jewish mystical tradition. The scriptural involvement of those who practise the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola is also similar. Here the reader is asked to place herself within the narrative, thereby in effect creating another story through the act of imaginative identification which has been set in train. Likewise the typological and contextual appropriations of the grassroots communities who meet in shanty towns in Brazil and other parts of the Third World and allow the reading of the Bible to fructify the engagement with the realities of life and practical engagement to exemplify the scriptural hope, seem to parallel the performance of Scripture considered here. The New Testament harks back to the Old, but often just as we find in Blake’s and other visionary and mystical works, the relationship is oblique. It rarely is about exegesis, nor is it entirely dependent. It does not involve a repudiation of Moses or the prophets. Rather there is the recognition that the 18

Discussed in Lieb, The Visionary Mode, 302–303.

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pattern of Moses the visionary is more important than Moses the law-giver. It is the former which offers a paradigm for that way to new understanding of God and the divine purposes which is found in the New Testament. Of Moses God said: ‘When there are prophets among you, I the LORD make myself known to them in visions; I speak to them in dreams. Not so with my servant Moses; he is entrusted with all my house. With him I speak face to face – clearly, not in riddles; and he beholds the form of the LORD’ (Num. 12:6–8). Just as Moses had beheld God on Sinai, so too John of Patmos had been in the Spirit and seen the form of God. Such appropriation and repetition of the way to the divine encapsulated in the words of Scripture were taken up, and this led to new forms of wisdom and practice. Indeed, as the one who outshone Moses Paul presumed to have access to greater mysteries than were received to Moses. Such contrasts are captured in the performance of the Scriptures offered by William Blake. Blake is also helpful in connection with trying to understand the nature and the ancient mode of approach to texts like the Gospels as well as prophetic texts. In that wonderful account of his hermeneutical method in the ‘Letter to Trusler’ Blake comes close to the approach to the words (and deeds?) of Jesus as ‘oracles’ suggested by Papias, according to Eusebius (Hist. eccl. 3.39.5). In the fragment preserved by Eusebius of his exegesis of the dominical oracles Papias writes of Matthew ‘bringing the logia together in the Hebrew tongue and each interpreting as they were able’. Papias suggests that he and other Christians approached the collections (Justin’s ‘memoirs of the apostles’) in a way very different from the analytical mode typical in the modern academy. They were enigmatic oracular words (including pronouncements and stories) which (to paraphrase Papias’ words) each one ‘divined as they were able’. These collections, therefore, were ‘oracles of God’ by which interpreters were to be teased, guided, challenged and provoked as they sought to understand the way of Jesus Christ. God through the spirit uses these words to ‘speak’ to people as their ‘faculties are rouzed’. Exegesis, therefore, becomes the ability to find ways of being receptive to these collections of ‘oracles of the Lord’ to be able to hear and respond to the life which these words offer. This way of reading his texts is not about putting oneself in control of the text, trying to subject its meaning to the understanding and reason but allowing oneself to be subject to the text’s meaning. In the visionary mode human experience moves beyond what is apparent to physical perception to open up perceptions of other dimensions of existence and other perspectives on ordinary life, which a purely analytical or rational approach would miss. Such experiences have their origin in an approach to texts in which the pursuit of the meaning of the text is not a detached operation but may involve the interpreter, who thereby becomes a recipient of insight rather than one whose rational power imposes meaning on the text. It is a way of reading in which the text is put on a level above one-

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self, the reader tries to be open and to bring the mind into submission to the text and its effects. It contrasts with the situation when the reader seeks to understand and master the intricacies of the text, by comparing it with other texts or by using those techniques of interpretation by which the enigmas can be mastered. This latter way of reading is typical of the various midrashic modes, both ancient and modern, even if there is a significant difference between, say, the ‘closed’ readings of the Habakkuk Commentary and the more ‘open-ended’ approaches in the rabbinic midrashim, the latter being in certain respects more akin to the visionary potential of the mystical readings. In some forms of the interpretation of Ezek. 1 the meaning of the text may come about as the result of seeing again what Ezekiel saw. This may arise in the form of a vision (as appears to have been the case for John the visionary on Patmos), rather than by an explanation of the details of what Ezekiel saw. In this performance of Scripture reliving Ezekiel’s vision in a related, though different way and in different circumstances, enables the possibility of the apprehension of divine wisdom as a result of drawing on the critical potential of the text afforded by a visionary/revelatory text.19 Understanding it results in blurring the boundaries between the mystical and the apocalyptic. If I had to attempt a differentiation between them, I would do so on the basis of suggesting that the New Testament Apocalypse offers a particular form of mysticism, anticipated in the biblical prophetic texts (especially the Book of Daniel) in which historical and eschatological dimensions to the divine knowledge unveiled are particularly prominent and which relates to existence of a group or groups rather than merely the spirituality of the individual visionary or mystic. A word in conclusion. If we take the performance of Scripture seriously, as is suggested by those who enact and ‘actualise’ the Scriptures, the narrow focus of much scriptural pedagogy needs to be questioned. Do we not need a different kind of pedagogy, which complements that which dominates in the academy but which will enable students of the Scriptures to understand better what it means to ‘perform’ them in all their rich diversity? This will demand a less analytical approach and involve more scope for the imagination in the approach to scriptural texts, perhaps akin to some features of the methods which have emerged in popular movements influenced by liberation theology and the wealth of methods of scriptural interpretation explored in the life of the church.20 That kind of approach seems to be the implication of Nicholas Lash’s reminder that the performance of the Scriptures is incomplete if we engage only in historical reconstruction which is at most part of the prolegomena of a scriptural study. The biblical texts may be best understood by those who seek to engage with their modern address, promise, commission, 19

Cf. the earlier reference to Halperin, Faces of the Chariot, 71. Cf. Z. Bennett and C. Rowland, In a Glass Darkly: The Bible, Reflection and Everyday Life (London: SCM, 2016) which is indebted to Nicholas Lash’s work, see 163–164. 20

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praise, pardon and liberation. Indeed, ‘they will not and probably cannot be “read” in this self-involving performative way from within horizons and lifeworlds in which different beliefs set a different hermeneutical agenda’.21 The importance of a lived affinity between the interpreter and the biblical text is an indispensable part of the appreciation of sacred Scripture. That is something that the apocalyptic visionaries, the merkabah mystics, and William Blake, whom S.T. Coleridge described as an apocalyptic poet and painter, recognised very well. They knew about ‘performing the Scriptures’. It is the importance of this that Nicholas Lash has brought to our attention, as the following words indicate: central part of the Christian interpretation of Scripture ‘consists in the performance of texts which are construed as “rendering”, bearing witness to, one whose words and deeds, discourse and suffering, “rendered” the truth of God in human history’.22

21 22

A. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics (London: Harper Collins, 1992), 616. Lash, ‘Performing the Scriptures’, 42.

Particulars of First Publication 1. ‘The Visions of God in Apocalyptic Literature’ The Journal for the Study of Judaism 10 (1980): 137–154. 2. ‘Apocalyptic literature’ Pages 170–189 in It is Written: Scripture Citing Scripture. Essays in Honour of Barnabas Lindars, SSF. Edited by Donald A. Carson and Hugh G.M. Williamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 3. ‘Apocalyptic: The Disclosure of Heavenly Knowledge’ Pages 776–797 in The Cambridge History of Judaism. Edited by William D. Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 4. ‘A Man Clothed in White Linen: Daniel 10.6ff. and Jewish Angelology’ Journal for the Study of the New Testament 24 (1985): 99–110. 5. ‘The Book of Daniel and the Radical Critique of Empire: An Essay in Apocalyptic Hermeneutics’ Pages 447–468 in vol. 2 of The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception. Edited by John J. Collins and Peter W. Flint. VTSup 83. Leiden: Brill, 2001. 6. ‘“A Door Opened in Heaven”: A Comparative Study of the Character of Visionary Experience in Ancient Judaism and Christianity’ (with Patricia Gibbons and Vicente Dobroruka) Pages 41–56 in Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism. Edited by April DeConick. SBLSS 11. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006. 7. ‘Apocalyptic Literature’ Pages 342–358 in The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology, Edited by Andrew Hass. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 8. ‘Mysticism Recorded: Text, Scripture, and Parascripture’ Pages 347–359 in Religion: Secret Religion. Edited by April DeConick. Farmington Hills: Macmillan Reference USA, 2016.

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9. ‘“The heavens were opened and I saw visions of God”: The Open Heaven – Nearly Four Decades on’ Forthcoming in Re-Imagining Apocalypticism: Apocalypses, Apocalyptic Literature, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Edited by Lorenzo DiTommaso and Matthew J. Goff. Society of Biblical Literature Early Judaism and Its Literature. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. 10. ‘The Vision of the Risen Christ in Rev. 1.13ff.: The Debt of an Early Christology to an Aspect of Jewish Angelology’ The Journal of Theological Studies 31 (1980): 1–11. 11. ‘Apocalyptic Visions and the Exaltation of Christ in the Letter to the Colossians’ Journal for the Study of the New Testament 19 (1983): 73–83. 12. ‘John 1.51, Jewish Apocalyptic, and the Targumic Tradition’ New Testament Studies 30 (1984): 498–507. 13. ‘Keeping Alive the Dangerous Vision of a World of Peace and Justice’ Pages 75–86 in Truth and its Victims. Edited by Wim Beuken, Sean Freyne and Antonius Gerardus Weiler. Concilium 200. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988. 14. ‘The Parting of the Ways: The Evidence of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic and Mystical Material’ Pages 213–237 in Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways A.D. 70 to 135; The Second Durham-Tübingen Research Symposium on Earliest Christianity and Judaism (Durham, September, 1989. Edited by James D.G. Dunn. WUNT 66. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1992. 15. ‘Apocalyptic, the Poor, and the Gospel of Matthew’ Journal of Theological Studies 45 (1994): 504–518. 16. ‘Apocalyptic, Mysticism, and the New Testament’ Pages 405–421 in vol. 1 of Geschichte – Tradition – Reflexion. FS Martin Hengel. Edited by Peter Schäfer. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1996. 17. ‘The Lamb and the Beast, the Sheep and the Goats: “The Mystery of Salvation” in Revelation’ Pages 181–191 in A Vision for the Church: Studies in Early Christian Ecclesiology in Honour of J.P.M. Sweet. Edited by Markus Bockmuehl and Michael P. Thompson. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997.

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18. ‘Apocalypse, Prophecy, and the New Testament’ Pages 149–166 in Knowing the End from the Beginning: The Prophetic, the Apocalyptic, and their Relationship. Edited by Lester L. Grabbe and Robert D. Haak. JSPSup 46. London: T&T Clark, 2003. 19. ‘The Temple in the New Testament’ Pages 469–483 in Temple and Worship in Biblical Israel. Edited by John Day. London: Continuum, 2005. 20. ‘Prophecy and the New Testament’ Pages 410–430 in Prophecy and the Prophets in Ancient Israel: Proceedings of the Oxford Old Testament Seminar. Edited by John Day. London: Continuum, 2010. 21. ‘“Intimations of Apocalyptic”: The Perspective of the History of Interpretation’ Pages 128–146 in John’s Gospel and Intimations of Apocalyptic. Edited by Catrin H. Williams and Christopher Rowland. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013. 22. ‘Joachim of Fiore and the Theology of the New Testament’ Pages 35–52 in Joachim of Fiore and the Influence of Inspiration: Essays in Memory of Marjorie E. Reeves (1905–2003). Edited by Julia Eva Wannenmacher. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. 23. ‘The Apocalypse: Sensitivity and Outsiders’ Pages 401–417 in Sensitivity towards Outsiders: Exploring the Dynamic Relationship between Mission and Ethics in the New Testament and Early Christianity. Edited by Jacobus Kok, Tobias Nicklas, Dieter T. Roth and Christopher M. Hays. WUNT 364. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014. 24. ‘The Book of Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ’ Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. Published online: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.43. 25. ‘Paul as an Apocalypticist’ Pages 131–154 in The Jewish Apocalyptic Thought and the Shaping of New Testament Thought. Edited by Benjamin E. Reynolds and Loren Stuckenbruck. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017. 26. ‘“Eschatology properly understood, and acted on”: A Perspective on Eschatology in Honour of Andrew Chester’ Unpublished. 27. ‘Why Albert Schweitzer’s Writing on the New Testament Is so Important’ The Schweitzer Institute 1 (2021): 43–56.

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28. ‘“Diversely and in many ways God spoke by the Prophets”: The Perspectives of the New Testament and the Texts and Images of William Blake on the “Prophetic Word”’ Chapter 3 in Prophetic Witness and the Reimagining of the World: Poetry, Theology and Philosophy in Dialogue. Edited by Mark S. Burrows, Hilary Davies and Josephine von Zitzewitz. London: Routledge, 2021. 29. ‘Apocalypse and Violence: The Evidence from the Reception History of the Book of Revelation’ Pages 1–18 in Apocalypse and Violence. Edited by Abbas Amanat and John J. Collins. New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 2004. 30. ‘English Radicals and the Exegesis of the Apocalypse’ Pages 160–178 in Die prägende Kraft der Texte: Hermeneutik und Wirkungsgeschichte des Neuen Testaments. Ein Symposium zu Ehren von Ulrich Luz. Edited by Moisés Mayordomo. SBS 199. Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 2005. 31. ‘Imagining the Apocalypse’ New Testament Studies 51 (2005): 303–327. 32. ‘Tyconius and Bede on Violent Texts in the Apocalypse’ (with Ian Boxall) Pages 161–179 in Ancient Christian Interpretations of “Violent Texts” in the Apocalypse. Edited by Joseph Verheyden, Tobias Nicklas, Andreas Merkt. NTOA 92. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011. 33. ‘“By an immediate revelation … by the voice of his own spirit to my soul”: A Perspective from Reception History on the New Testament and Antinomianism’ Pages 173–192 in Law and Lawlessness in Early Judaism and Early Christianity. Edited by David Lincicum, Ruth Sheridan, and Charles M. Stang. WUNT 420. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019. 34. ‘The Reception of the Book of Revelation: An Overview’ Pages 1–26 in The Book of Revelation and Its Interpreters. Edited by Ian Boxall and Richard Tresley. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. 35. ‘British Interpretation of the Apocalypse: A Historical Perspective’ Pages 225–244 in The Book of Revelation: Currents in British Research on the Apocalypse. Edited by Garrick V. Allen, Ian Paul, and Simon P. Woodman. WUNT 2.411. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015. 36. ‘“Pride & Vanity of the imagination, That disdains to follow this World’s Fashion”: Apocalypticism in the Age of Reason’ Pages 231–250 in The Cambridge Companion to Apocalyptic Literature. Edited by Colin McAllister. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

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37. ‘Blake and the Bible: Biblical Exegesis in the Work of William Blake’ International Journal of Systematic Theology 7 (2005): 142–154. 38. ‘William Blake and Ezekiel’s merkabah’ Pages 29–46 in After Ezekiel: Essays on the Reception of a Difficult Prophet. Edited by Andrew Mein and Paul M. Joyce. LHBOTS 535. London: T&T Clark, 2011. 39. ‘“Mr. Blake, apo- or rather ana-calyptic Poet, and Painter”: Apocalyptic Hermeneutics in Action’ Pages 793–812 in Die Johannesapokalypse: Kontexte – Konzepte – Wirkungen. Edited by Jörg Frey, James A. Kelhoffer and Franz Tóth. WUNT 287. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012. 40. ‘Blake: Text and Image’ Pages 307–326 in The Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts. Edited by Stephen Prickett. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. 41. ‘William Blake and the Apocalypse’ Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. Edited by John Barton. Published online: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.44 42. ‘Blake, Enoch, and Emerging Biblical Criticism’ Pages 1145–1165 in Sibyls, Scriptures, and Scrolls: John Collins at Seventy. Edited by Joel Baden, Hindy Nadjman and Eibert Tigchelaar. JSJSup 175. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016. 43. ‘“Open thy Mouth for the Dumb”: A Task for the Exegete of Holy Scripture’ Biblical Interpretation 1 (1993): 228–241. 44. ‘The Visionary Prophetic Performance of Scripture: A Tribute to Nicholas Lash (1934– 2020), Norris–Hulse Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge, 1978–1999’ Unpublished

List of Illustrations Page 354: Fig. 1. William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job, Plate 17, 1825. Johannine texts interpret Job 42:5 Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Page 559: Fig. 2. William Blake: ‘The Ancient of Days’, Europe a Prophecy, Plate 1: Frontispiece (left) and Plate 2: Title Page (right), 1794 Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Page 685: Fig. 3. William Blake: The First Book of Urizen, Copy C, 1794. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Page 687: Fig. 4. William Blake: Europe a Prophecy, Plate 11:5 (B&W), Copy A, 1794. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Page 689: Fig. 5. William Blake: America a Prophecy, Bentley Copy M, 8, 1793. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Page 691: Fig. 6. William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job, Plate 1, 1825. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Page 692: Fig. 7. William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job, Plate 22, 1825. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Page 693: Fig. 8. William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job, Plate 11, 1825. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Page 695: Fig. 9. William Blake: ‘The Garden of Love’ from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1789–1794, Copy L. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Page 698: Fig. 10. William Blake: ‘Abraham and Isaac’, 1799–1800. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Page 707: Fig. 11. William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job, Plate 20: ‘Job and His Daughters’, 1825. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Page 729: Fig. 12. William Blake: ‘Enoch’, ca 1807. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Bibliography For collections of Gerrard Winstanley’s and William Blake’s works, the following abbreviations have been used: B CHL E

K

Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake. 2 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981. The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley. Edited by Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes and David Loewenstein. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Newly rev. edn. Edited by David V. Erdman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982; with a new foreword and commentary by Harold Bloom, ibid., 2008. William Blake, Complete Writings: With Variant Readings. Edited by Geoffrey Keynes. London: Oxford University Press, 1972.

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Index of Ancient Sources Hebrew Bible Genesis 1 1:2 1:6–7 1:6 1:7 1:11–12 1:16 1:26–27 3 3:6 3:15

31:11 31:13 49:10

73, 155, 267, 759–760 256, 280, 638 255 280, 638 39 638 412 646 519, 729 295 409, 519, 587, 595, 620 738 17, 70, 153, 158, 193, 727, 735 75, 635 50 41 646 210 688 422 19, 214 211 207–208, 210, 213, 242, 287, 320, 653– 654 647 647 6, 601, 621

Exodus 3:1 15 15:1 15:11

286, 311 293 40 291, 386

5:21–24 5:24 6 15 15:17 16 19:1 19:26 22 28 28:5 28:12

15:20 19:16 20:4 20:7 20:12–17 22:30 23:20 23:30 24:10 25 25:4 25:9 25:20–22 25:40 26:1 26:35 28:4 31:18 32 33:11 33:19 33:20 34:6–7 34:6 40

639 34, 353 694 694 694 281 259, 325 259 122, 157 361 191 278, 308, 420, 467 361 316, 420 191 38 190 360, 558 321 346 614 42 51 205 278, 308, 467

Leviticus 10:10 16:17 18 18:8 18:21 20:2–5 20:26 21:23 26:1 26:30

426, 564 94 236 426 647, 698 647, 698 426, 564 564 567 567

824 Numbers 6:9 6:18 11 11:29 12:6–8 12:7–8 15:37–39 22:22 24:17 25:1 25:38–39

Index of Ancient Sources

323 323 487 468, 487, 632, 713, 737 772 462, 465 122, 157 385 338 338 191

Deuteronomy 4:2 4:12 13 18:11 18:15–22 18:15 18:18–20 18:19 18:20 22:10 32:11

341, 468 206, 286 59, 113, 304 127 333 47, 304, 332, 737 342 304 304 341 256, 280

Judges 5:30 13 13:22

34 646 646

1 Samuel 2:6 2:7

355, 638 638

2 Samuel 7:5–7 7:6–7 7:10–13 7:10 7:13 7:14

316 322 567 322 316, 322 47

1 Kings 6:23 7:23 7:26 8:19

34 39 39 567

8:20 8:27 22:16 22:19–23

322 322 49, 269 462

2 Kings 2:9 2:11–12 2:11 23:10 23:24

128, 640 154 728 647, 698 125

Isaiah 2:3 2:18 6

6:1ff. 6:1 6:3 6:5–9 6:5 6:8–9 6:9 7 7:14 8:7 10:1 11:4 11:6 13:10 21:11–12 24–27 34:4 40:3 42:1 42:3 45:1–4 45:22 48:16 49 49:1 49:9 53 53:1

317 567 32, 37, 40–41, 49, 80, 83, 139, 179, 206, 239, 268–269, 272, 331, 348, 461– 463, 565, 646, 655 73, 80 32, 334, 565, 627 83 617 565, 627 306 321 340 263 264 634 51 688 47 688 67 47 710 334 264 634 79 306 466 306, 338, 563, 574, 617 688 335, 467 65

Index of Ancient Sources 53:3 53:4 56:7 60:19 61 61:1 61:6 64:1 65:17 65:25 66:1 66:20 66:22

467 264 317 327 334, 461, 465 334 324 255, 280, 309 345 688 322 51 345

Jeremiah 1:4–5 1:4 1:5 1:6–10 1:9 1:10 1:11 1:13 4:12 4:23–27 7:11 7:12 15:10–18 15:10 15:20 17:5–8 20:7–18 20:7–12 20:9 21:7 23 23:21 26 28 29 30:8 31 31:31–34 31:31–33 31:31 31:33 31:34 32:35 51

338 466, 468 306, 574, 617, 766 617 342 385, 766 399, 571 399, 571 47 462 317, 465 318 464 334, 465 465 464 334 464 633 47 59 306 318 566 75, 566 688 568 429, 549 554, 569 561 428, 447, 495, 562 375, 554, 569, 617 647, 698 295, 389, 400, 573

Ezekiel 1–2 1

1:1 1:4 1:5–12 1:5 1:7 1:10 1:12 1:13 1:15 1:16 1:17 1:18 1:19 1:22–26 1:22 1:23 1:24 1:26–27

1:26 1:27

1:28 2 2:1–3

825

417 3, 16–17, 32–33, 35, 37–38, 40–42, 44, 48–52, 67, 73– 74, 83, 86, 88, 95, 119–121, 123, 129, 139, 154–155, 157, 159, 163–164, 167, 180, 188, 191, 236, 237–239, 267, 270– 272, 274, 294, 319, 331, 341, 348, 353, 368, 389, 399, 461– 463, 502, 506–507, 564, 571, 608, 635, 650, 655, 674, 759– 761, 773 255, 270, 280, 309, 334, 464, 468 35, 122, 157, 344, 608, 655 82 654 187 32, 211, 654 191 34, 38, 187, 400 32, 677 187, 651 34 37, 41 35 400 34, 39, 655 187 41, 96, 186 3, 15, 18, 38, 42, 52, 188–189, 191, 212 33, 35, 37, 189, 192, 241, 526 32–35, 122, 157, 187–190, 344, 608, 655 38, 187, 190, 655, 675 417 617

826 2:1 2.3 2:4 2:9 3 3:1ff. 3:1–3 4 4:7 4:12–13 5 8 8:2

8:3 9 9:2ff. 9:2 9:3 9:4 10 10:1 10:4 10:16 11:27–33 12 12:1 13:11 14 19:7 20:25–26 24:15–24 24:24 26:26–27 27–28 27 27:12ff. 27:12–36 27:13 27:30ff. 27:30–36 28 28:13 29 36 36:25–27 36:26–29 36:26–28

Index of Ancient Sources 256, 417 417 306 468 124, 161 270 341, 468 400 37 463 463 50, 191, 507 122, 157, 188–192, 194, 344, 399, 526, 571, 608, 655 189 671 189 95–96 671 162 319, 399, 571 34 189 35 334 463 620 47 35 620 321 463 463 562 295, 389 400, 573 295 389 294, 390 294 390 627 37–38, 96, 187, 190 627 568 429, 549 462 316

36:26–27 37 37:5 37:6 39 40–48 40:4 43:2 44 45 47:1 47:4 47:5 47:12

375, 569 6, 399, 571, 620 688 688 400 332, 399, 571, 608, 658 658–659 469, 560 6, 620 6, 620 34, 38, 677 606 606 606

Hosea 2:3 2:9 2:14 6:6

389 389 389 264

Joel 1–2 3:1–5 (ET 2:28–32) 3:1–2 (ET 2:28–29) 4:18–19

462 332, 464 372 462

Amos 5:25–27 7:7 8:1

321 399, 571 399, 571

Jonah 3:5

711

Micah 1:4 3:12 4:1–4

51 318 317

Zechariah 1–8 1:8 1:18 2:1 2:11 3:1 4:2

48, 67 399, 571 399, 571 399, 571 306 399, 571 38, 399, 571

Index of Ancient Sources 4:3 5:1 10 13 13:2ff. 14:8 14:18 14:20 14:21

596 399, 571 38 59, 113 67 38 34 74 317

Haggai 2:1

155, 178, 235

Malachi 3:1 3:3 3:5 3:23 (ET 4:5)

259, 281 316 295, 390 306, 332, 334

Psalms 2 8 8:3–4 13 18:8 22:7 46:6 51:16 55:6 82:1 87:4 89 89:26 94:1 97:5 104:3 104:4 104:9 110:1 132 136:23 137 137:3–4 139:8 139:17

52 262 638 51 51 637 51 638 191 38 604, 670 47 637 189 51 638 637 386 419 47 638 294, 389 690, 705 638 638

1:5 1:12 1:21 2:2 3:7 4:12–13 4:17–18 4:17 7:14 11:7 11:8 13:15 14:1 19:21 19:22ff. 19:22–27 19:22 20:5 23:10 26:6 30:17 30:25 30:30 32:8 33:15 33:23 33:24 34:1ff. 34:21 35:5 35:6 36:17 36:29 37:11 38–41 38–40 38–39 38 38:28 38:31 38:41 40–41 40 41:34 42:5

Job 1–2 1:1

38, 503, 656, 765 352

42:8–10 42:8

827 638 637 637 637 637 352 637 424 636, 694, 706 638 638 637 637 694 637 694, 706 694 637 637 638 637 637 637 352 352, 637 637 637 76 637 637 637 638 638 638 353–354, 706 503 76 51 638 638 638 765 656 638 351–353, 355, 503, 638, 680, 694, 706, 709 692 638

828

Index of Ancient Sources

42:10 42:11

352 132

Proverbs 1:8 4:1–4 4:10 4:20 5:1 6:20 13:1 15:5 22:13 31:8

263 263 263 263 263 263 263 263 263 17, 742

Daniel 2

2:18 2:19 2:22 2:28 2:31ff. 2:45 2:47 3 3:5–6 3:25 4 5:9–10 5:18 5:22 5:26–27 6:10 7

7:1ff. 7:1–14 7:1–8 7:9–10 7:9

97, 99, 101, 109, 132, 133–136, 142, 345, 423, 494, 580, 676 100 302 423, 563 423, 563, 627 66 135 302 99, 132 292 55 133 186 186 186 186 132 17, 31, 49–51, 52–56, 75, 77, 94, 97, 101, 109, 116, 134–135, 142, 160, 273, 332, 345, 385, 400, 494, 573, 580, 597–598 66 399, 571, 679 53 54, 80, 656 33, 35, 37, 44, 55, 68, 74, 87, 90, 94– 95, 120, 186, 191, 194, 273, 637

7:10 7:11 7:13–14 7:13

7:14 7:17 7:18 7:21–22 7:21 7:22 7:23 7:25 7:26 7:27 7:28 8 8:3ff. 8:3–12 8:13 8:15–16 8:15 9–10 9 9:25 9:26 10–11 10

10:1ff. 10:1 10:2–9 10:2–3 10:3ff. 10:5–6 10:5ff. 10:5 10:6ff. 10:6–7 10:6 10:8–9 10:9 10:11 10:13 10:16

34, 82 105 55, 186, 189, 573 55, 89, 92–93, 96, 109, 133, 186, 465, 573 54 56, 273 54 56 56 54 56 56 54 54, 99 54 48, 53, 68 66 399, 571 86 187 55 134 49, 60, 75 134 134 133 15, 18, 87–88, 93– 94, 96, 134, 186– 188, 331 45 302 321 197 95 55, 90, 186–187, 189, 270–271 108, 185–188 50, 187 18, 85–96 87, 89, 95–96 44, 87, 94, 187– 188, 190 187 256 188 83 92–93

829

Index of Ancient Sources 10:21 11:35 11:36 12:1 12:2 12:6 12:7 12:9 13 14:11 17 18 18:4 19:3

83, 187 302 134 47, 55, 396 132 69, 134 61 347, 621, 667 160 133 598 133 133 133

1 Chronicles 17:6–7 24:7–18 28:12 28:18 29:23

322 38 35 278, 308, 420, 467 194

2 Chronicles 3:16 4:7 16:14 21:12

308 38 31 125

Septuagint, Symmachus, Theodotion/Deuterocanonical Books Genesis 5:24 Numbers 15:38 Tobit 13–14

728

Isaiah 6:1

32

88

316

Wisdom of Solomon 4:10–11 728 4:11 276, 306, 420 9:4 36, 191 Sirach 3:12ff. 3:21–23 3:22 3:23 18:4–6 20:30 24 29:29 30:11–14 38 39 44:16 48:22 48:25 49:8

49:14 276, 306, 420

76 176 243 367 175 175 316, 320 175 175 334, 464 367, 462 276, 306, 728 179, 465, 565, 627 179, 465, 565, 627 31

Ezekiel 1:27 Symmachus 1 1:16 9:2 Daniel 7 7:9 7:13 10 10:3ff. 10:5–6 10:6–7 10:6 10:16 Theodotion 7 7:9 7:13 10 10:6 10:16 10:18

188 88 88 88

94 90, 94–95, 186, 268 92–93, 95–96, 186 92–94, 96 95 90 95–96 94–95 93 89 87 89, 95, 186 89 87 89, 275 89

830 2 Esdras 3–14 5:45

Index of Ancient Sources

137 137

7:28–29 11–12 13

137 496 134

Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Apocalypse of Abraham 10–11 203, 321 10 190, 423 10:5–9 190 10:9 259, 281, 325 11 87, 91–92 11:1–2 190 11:2 272 15ff. 70 17–19 41 17–18 74, 120, 155, 205 17 33, 49, 190, 198, 201, 268 17:1 41 17:7ff. 42 18ff. 68 18 81, 83 18:3 41 18:6 41 18:8–9 41 18:9 42 18:11 41 18:12 37 19 191 19:5 42 20ff. 68, 204, 234, 240 27ff. 68 29 41

13 14 20 23 25ff. 25–30 26–27 32 35–40 36ff. 38:2 44 44:14 46 48 48:1ff. 48:24 48:30 51:7 53ff. 53–76 54:13 59:2 77:13 80 82 85:10 88:5ff.

234 204, 234 234 234 47 234, 345 396 234 234 68 71 234 202 234 68, 234 70 202 234 234 68 234 202 71 234 234 234 69, 234 234

Apocalypse of Zephaniah 9:12ff. 87

3 Baruch 1:8

70

Ascension of Isaiah → Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah

1 Enoch 1 2–5 6–18 6:1ff. 7:1ff. 7:1–15 7:6 12–14

32 75 635 75 210 675 210 272

Assumption of Moses 4:5 2 Baruch 3 6

234 234

831

Index of Ancient Sources 12:1 13:1 13:4ff. 14

14:1ff. 14:2ff. 14:8ff. 14:9 14:11 14:13 14:17 14:18ff. 14:18 14:19 14:20–21 14:20 14:21 14:22 14:24 25:46 37–71 46 46:3 62:2 66–67 71 71:7 71:10 71:14ff. 72ff. 72 72:2 85ff. 89ff. 89–90 89:1 89:55 89:59 89:73 90:39 91:12–13 93 93:4

635, 733 269 269 3, 32, 34, 41, 44, 49, 179, 195, 240, 254, 268–269, 279, 316, 351, 635, 728 269 269 31, 68, 74, 120, 269, 502, 635 199–200, 423 32, 256 33 256 83, 205 32, 37 34 80, 256 32–33, 74, 120, 155, 212, 656 33, 211, 283, 287, 310 82 423 316 53, 257, 283 75, 94, 730 186 47 568 68, 81 35 33 193 68, 70 137 75 66, 68 273 273 273 568 83 316 317 316 68 396

93:6 99:14 106:2

71 71 94

2 Enoch 1 3:3 8 20:3–21:1 20:3–4 22–23 22 22:2 22:8 23 25–26 33:10 42:8ff. 45:3 55–56

93 39 35 415 201 193 49, 212, 268, 421 93 277 68 120 89 258, 283 316 74

3 Enoch 1 1:12 2–3 10 12 14 15 15:2 16 18 19:6 20 22:8 24 30 35:1 39 48(c)

41–42, 82 201 82 193 193 193 188 38 193, 419 198 36 42 37 36 83 36, 198 198 188

4 Ezra 3:2ff. 3:4ff. 3:7 3:8 3:19 3:20ff. 3:20

68 51 68 233 71 204 233

832 3:30 4:1ff. 4:7–8 4:8 4:20 4:21 4:30 4:37ff. 5:36 5:45 6–7 6:5 6:17–28 6:18ff. 6:38ff. 7:16 7:17ff. 7:19 7:28ff. 7:28–29 7:62ff. 7:71 7:74 7:102–103 7:118 7:129 8:3 8:21 8:27 8:50–51 8:52 9:13 9:23–29 9:31ff. 9:37 10:55 11–12 11 12 12:51 13 13:10 14 14:9 14:10 14:38–48 14:46

Index of Ancient Sources 233 233 51 205 242 233 233 232 233 232 345 233 396 232 74, 120 76, 233 71 233 232 232 233 76 233 233 233 233 233 205, 242, 286 233 233 233 233 126, 156 71 233 658 68, 109, 573 573 52, 75 126, 156 54, 75, 109, 228, 232, 244 47 60, 234 54 69 126, 156 60

Joseph and Asenath 14 85, 87, 91–92, 187, 321 14:3–5 89 14:3 89 14:5–6 93 14:7 89 14:9ff. 93, 95 14:13–14 87 14:13 93 14:14 93 14:15ff. 88, 93 14:15–16 87, 96 14:15 88, 93 14:17 88 14:18 88 14:19ff. 94 14:21 94 14:23 93 14:24 88, 94 14:28–29 87 14:29 93 14:31–33 88 14:31 88 14:32–33 88 Jubilees 1:15–18 1:27 2:2ff. 3:7 4:17ff. 4:20ff. 4:21–22 4:23 23:8–32 23:25 23:26ff.

316 322, 567 74, 120 322, 567 70 269 730 193 316 316 71

Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah 2–3 627 2:7–11 126, 156, 179, 565 2:9 248 3:6–10 180, 565 4:14ff. 247 5:7 565 6ff. 68, 79 6:10 513 7:2 80

833

Index of Ancient Sources 7:13–15 7:16 7:18–19 7:21 7:37 8:8 8:14 8:26 9:1–3 9:9–10 9:9 9:10 9:13 9:27ff. 9:31ff. 10:1 10:8ff. 10:13 11:3 11:7–8 11:14 11:17 11:22

80 79–80 80 80, 199 201 79–80 277 82 45 79 38 82 79, 307 43 201 80 79 79, 248 80 79 79 79 277

17:27

47

Pseudo-Philo Liber antiquitatum biblicarum (L.A.B.) 28 39, 74, 120 Testament of Abraham 7 89 11 49, 268 Rec. A 12 256 Rec. B 8 39 11 193

Psalms of Solomon 17 47

Testament of Job 46ff. 48–49 48

638 201 42, 268

Testament of Levi 2–3 2:7 3:5 5:1 16ff.

68 39 325 37 68

New Testament Matthew 1:20 1:23 2:12 2:13 2:19 3:16 4:23 5:12 5:17 5:18 5:21–48 5:32 5:44ff. 6:3–4 6:9 6:12 7:21–23

65, 281, 365 320–321, 331, 464 257 65, 365 65, 365 213 261 335 566 567 333 566 638 536 637 394 392

7:22 7:23 8:20 9:13 9:36 10:21 10:26 10:32 10:42 11 11:7–11 11:10 11:11ff. 11:12–13 11:13 11:14 11:25–27

336 428 298, 392 264 261 302 65, 303, 536 261 261, 746 259–260, 281 260 334 302 566 566 465, 627 314, 366, 423, 563, 627

834 11:25–26 11:25 11:27 12:7 12:8 12:17–21 12:20 12:28 12:39 12:40 12:42 13:35 13:41 13:57 14:5 16:4 16:14 16:17ff. 16:17 17:6 17:9 17:13 17:14 17:17 18 18:4 18:5 18:6 18:10 18:20 18:21–25 19 19:10 19:13 19:25 19:28 20 20:20ff. 21:9 21:11 21:14 21:15 21:16 21:20 22:44

Index of Ancient Sources 65, 258 65, 258, 262–264, 283, 302, 742 302 264 320–321 335 264 334, 464 334 463 534 65, 258, 314, 423, 563, 627 428 334 332 262 332, 465 256 65, 262, 302, 365, 385 256 256 256, 465, 627 332 262 258, 262, 641, 746 258, 764 746–747 258, 747 246, 258, 283, 309, 747 320, 330, 557 392 641 262 262 262 2, 376, 455 391 262 262 334 262 65, 262 262 262 419

23:2 23:28 23:29–38 23:35ff. 23:35–37 24:1 24:3 24:4–5 24:5 24:6 24:11 24:12 24:15 24:24 24:25 24:31 24:35 24:38 24:42 25 25:13 25:15 25:31ff. 25:31–46 25:31–45 25:35–46 25:37 25:40 25:45 26:8 26:24 26:31 26:33 26:61 26:68 27:19 28:2 28:5 28:16 28:19

360, 558 428 335 295 385, 390 262 262 292 263 263 292, 336 428, 562 536 292 263 696 567 295, 390 263 298 697 263 109, 244, 261, 289– 290, 297–298 257, 283, 392, 394 320, 330, 392 746 297, 392 261 261, 297, 392 262 263 263 262 318 334 65, 365 688 281 262 320, 330

Mark 1:10 1:11 1:13 1:15 1:22 2:23–28

319, 334, 461 334, 464 109 5, 626 334, 464 264

Index of Ancient Sources 2:26 3:28–29 3:28 4:11 4:22 6:4 7:19 8:28 8:29 9:2ff. 9:6 9:41 10:43 11–13 11:15–19 11:17 11:18 11:27–33 11:30 12:40 13 13:2 13:7–13 13:8 13:9 13:14 13:26 14:56–58 14:58 14:62 14:64 14:65 15:29 15:38 15:39 16:8

317 334 464 423, 563, 627 303 334, 465 566 332 185 86 256 261 222, 230 317 317 317–318, 465 318 334 333 318 373 318 373 396 386 243 109 318 316–318 109, 186, 289, 311, 465 566 334 317–318 319 317 256

Luke 1:9 1:17 1:21 1:22 1:23–24 1:33–34 1:67 1:76 1:78 2:13

317 334 317 275, 317 464 334 301–302, 334 301 519 65, 302

2:14 2:32 2:35 2:36 2:38 3:22 4:16–30 4:16–18 4:18–21 4:24 4:44 6:1–5 7:16 7:26–27 7:26 7:28 7:32 7:39 8:28 9:23 9:29 9:33 9:35 9:51 10:16 10:17–18 10:18 10:21–24 10:21 10:23–24 10:23 10:42–45 10:42–43 11:20 11:30 11:49–51 11:49 11:52 12:2 12:8 13 13:33–35 13:33–34 13:33 13:35 15:25 16:16–18 16:16

835 519 65, 302 65, 302 301 302 203, 213 334 465 626 301, 334, 465 465 264 301, 334 334 301 333 333, 464 301 385 456 256 256 304 323 335, 465 638 109, 302, 365 366 65, 302 278, 332 307 387 292 334 463, 465 334, 465 302, 385 71 65, 302–303 261 696 465 335 336, 384, 465 301 639 566 302, 320, 333–334, 376, 566

836 16:17 17:20–21 17:27 17:30 17:34 17:35 19:10 19:41–44 19:47 20:6 21 21:24 21:26ff. 21:28 22:15 22:29–30 22:37 22:64 22:65 23:45 24:19 24:23 24:30 John 1 1:1–18 1:6 1:10 1:14

1:17–18 1:17 1:18

1:21 1:23 1:25 1:28 1:29 1:31 1:32 1:33 1:37 1:41 1:45

Index of Ancient Sources 566 735 395 65, 302 407 688 384 318, 324 318 301 696 244, 328 244 244, 469, 688, 710 318 220, 244 335 334 301 317 301, 334 275 303

288 286 260, 282, 320 242 205, 242, 260, 282, 285, 311, 352, 473– 474 346 178, 180, 204 42, 179, 205, 213, 240, 285–286, 310– 311, 342, 350–351, 356, 415, 465, 646 342 342 342 286 517 65, 303, 342 212–213 212, 288 286 286 286, 334, 342

1:49 1:51

2:11 2:12 2:13 2:15 2:17 2:19 2:21–22 2:28 2:31 3 3:8 3:11 3:13 3:14 4 4:11 4:13 4:16 4:17 4:18 4:19 4:20–24 4:22 4:25 4:44 5:17 5:18 5:19 5:24 5:27 5:36 5:37 5:39 6:14 6:16 6:45 6:46

7 7:3 7:4

287 19, 179, 204–214, 240–241, 284, 286, 288, 310, 320, 350– 351 65, 303 212 317 318 317 317–318, 361 319 734 260 288 213 566 204, 206, 213–214, 241, 287 320, 361 317, 330 425 425 734 734 734 342 320 317 316 334, 342 565 565 360 362, 678 109 342 206, 241, 285–286, 310, 350, 575 179, 286, 311 334, 342 212, 288 342, 414 179, 205–206, 240, 285–286, 311, 342, 351, 360, 465 566, 627 213 65, 303

Index of Ancient Sources 7:6 7:12 7:16 7:23 7:37 7:40 7:52 8 8:2–11 8:2 8:14 8:38 8:52–53 9 9:3 9:16 9:17 9:28–29 9:28 10:30 10:33 11:47 11:48–50 12:28 12:29–50 12:29 12:31 12:32ff. 12:32–33 12:32 12:33 12:38 12:41

12:42 12:44–45 12:44 12:45 12:47ff. 12:49–50 12:49 13:1 13:3 13:11 13:34 14–17 14–16

5, 626, 709 597 205, 286, 335, 465 565 425 334, 342 342 360 357, 557 360 213 360, 465, 566 342 565 65, 303 348 334, 342 565 26, 566, 628 355, 638 565 318 670 350 566 288 638 284 320 310 361 65, 342 85, 179, 206, 240, 285–286, 311, 351, 355–356, 465, 503, 565, 627, 654 415 335 465 465 205 179, 360, 566, 627 465 5, 626, 709 213 597 566 356 342, 715

14:7 14:8

837

14:11 14:15–16 14:16–17a 14:16 14:17 14:17b 14:19 14:20 14:21 14:21a 14:21b 14:23 14:26 14:28 14:41 15:26 16:13 16:13a 16:29 17:6 17:22 17:24 17:25 18–19 18:6 18:30 18:37 19:7 19:37 20:2 20:5 20:31 21:1 21:23 21:24–25

355 179, 285, 310, 350, 465, 638, 765 179–180, 205, 240, 286, 342, 351, 355– 356, 474, 638 355 638 355 353 353, 355 355 242 353–355 242 355 355 242, 320, 355 554, 618 213, 354–355 353 302, 353 302, 342, 366, 505 302 347 65, 303 361 242, 345, 347, 378 289, 311 670 213 566 289 566 242 213 688 185, 204, 347 65, 303 376, 455 346

Acts 2:2–3 2:17–21 2:17 2:18 2:44 3:20

353 305 301, 332, 372, 464 301 380 185

14:9

838 3:22 4:8 4:34 5:38–39 5:39 6–7 6:7 6:13 6:14 7 7:31 7:38 7:41–42 7:44 7:46 7:47–49 7:47 7:48 7:49 7:50 7:52 7:53 7:54 7:55 7:56 8:32–33 8:39 9 9:2 9:12 10–11 10 10:10 10:11 10:17 10:19 10:20 10:28 10:34 10:38 10:41 11 11:2 11:17–18 11:18 11:27–28 11:27 11:28

Index of Ancient Sources 333 302 380 321 304–305, 337–338 318, 446 316 567 319 321, 323, 327, 330, 598 256 322, 568 321 322, 568 322, 567 317 567 322, 567 322 319 302 567 567 302 207, 287, 565 335 276, 306, 420 336, 338, 466 466 256 304 303, 336 303 207, 287, 465 666 303, 336 303 303, 336 303, 336 334 303 366 303 305 305 466 301 304, 339, 466

13:1 15 15:13 15:20 15:28 15:29 15:32 16:26 17:6 17:24 21 21:4 21:9–10 21:9 21:10–12 21:11 21:12–14 21:14 21:17–26 21:18–26 21:19 21:25 22 22:4 22:17

26 26:10–11 26:16 26:19–24 26:19–20 26:19 26:24 27:23 28

301 303 304 562 304 562 301 688 446 317, 322 324 338 301–302 304, 466 466 323, 332, 464 338 305 421 323 323 562 336, 338, 466 466 120, 158, 238–239, 274, 276, 306, 308, 366, 419, 760 336, 338, 466 466 417 432 727 275 414, 727 276, 306, 419 321

Romans 1:16–19 1:17–19 1:17–18 1:19 1:29–30 2:9 2:13–16 2:13–14 3:5–7 3:8 3:21–23

312 308 278, 302, 420 303 429 373 393 299 428 421 312

Index of Ancient Sources 3:21 3:22–25 3:22 4:1 5:3 6 6:1 6:5 6:19 7 7:1–7 7:6 7:16 8 8:1–14 8:1–11 8:3–9 8:3–4 8:3 8:4 8:5 8:9 8:16 8:18–25 8:18–23 8:18–19 8:20 8:21 8:23 8:28 8:30 8:35 10:4 11:3 11:25 11:33 12 12:1 12:6 13 13:4 13:12 14 14:9 15:4 15:5 15:15–16 15:25

65, 303 308 278, 420, 433 627 373 428, 547 421, 428 202 562 638 562 428 638 339, 561, 569 429 375 429, 563 428 375, 429 434, 447 424 289 424 372 372–373 303 429, 563 297, 392 339, 372, 374, 466 396 423, 563, 627 373 360, 429, 562 335 65, 177, 277, 307, 374, 420 65 324 324 339–340, 466 101, 479 494 688 446 446 366, 374 424 324 323

16 16:25 16:27 1 Corinthians 1–4 1–2 1:1 1:7 1:11 1:18 1:23–25 1:26 2

2:1–16 2:1 2:2 2:4 2:5 2:6–8 2:6–7 2:6 2:7 2:9ff. 2:9 2:10–16

2:10–11 2:10

2:11 2:12 2:13 2:14–15 2:14 2:15 2:16

839 279 65, 177, 302, 423, 563, 627 278, 420

561 348, 444 65 275, 280, 289, 302, 305, 311, 366 279 280, 313, 366, 432 430 638 99, 177, 279, 308, 339, 423–425, 427, 429–430, 434, 563– 564, 627 165 177–178, 423, 727 423, 563, 627 291 424 420 65, 278, 307 178, 280, 424, 563, 727 26, 177, 291, 423, 563, 627 248 255, 278, 307, 319 340, 375, 424, 429– 430, 457, 563, 569, 627–628 422 65, 172, 176–177, 278–279, 291, 302, 308, 420, 423–424, 563–564, 734 734 425, 563, 734 278, 291, 308, 425, 734 554, 618 312, 691, 705, 734 430 278, 308, 424–425, 563, 569, 628

840 3:1 3:9 3:13 3:16 3:17 3:18–19 4 4:1

4:6 4:8 4:10 4:16 5–6 5 5:1–5 5:1 5:3–5 5:3–4 5:3 5:4 5:9–11 5:13 6:9–10 6:9 6:13 6:19

7:1 7:6 7:8 7:10 7:12 7:25 7:26–31 7:29–31 8–10 8–9 8 8:9–13 9:1–23 9:1 9:14 10 10:6

Index of Ancient Sources 424, 426, 564 278, 308, 420 303 178, 317, 324, 426, 564, 568, 627 317, 324 278 339, 467 65, 177–178, 307, 366, 420–421, 432, 463, 563, 635, 727 425, 564 339, 380, 737 278, 308, 420 178, 430, 727 426 425–425, 427 425 426, 429 426 467 339 128 427 426, 429 429 431 229 178, 317, 319, 324, 426, 429, 434, 564, 568, 627 425 178, 430, 727 178, 430, 727 178, 429–430, 727 178, 430, 727 339, 430 434 396 434 446 423, 430, 562 429 178, 430, 727 376, 413, 456 128 430 383, 546

10:11

10:14 11:1 11:2 11:5 11:13 11:26 11:33 12–14 12 12:10 12:13 12:30 13 13:1 13:2 13:8–10 13:8 13:9 13:12 14 14:2 14:5 14:13 14:20 14:22–25 14:23 14:25 14:26 14:30 14:32 14:33–37 14:33–34 14:33 14:34 14:37 15:3–7 15:3 15:20–28 15:24–28 15:25

326, 339, 366, 372, 374, 376, 383, 466, 523, 544, 546, 627, 710 429 178, 424, 429, 431, 563, 569, 628, 727 178, 430, 727 340, 393, 500, 582, 733 340 495 178, 430, 727 301, 339, 374, 380, 418, 466 324 373 339, 466 373 339, 429–430, 446, 710 340 177 472 473 77 77, 312, 340, 347, 472–473 338, 340, 432 302, 423, 563, 627 373, 430 373, 430 340 340 302 430 304, 338 304 336, 340 447 413, 432 569, 628 340 178, 430, 727 376 456 435 419 134

Index of Ancient Sources 15:49 15:51 16:1 2 Corinthians 1:16 1:22 2:9 2:15 2:16 3–4 3 3:2 3:3 3:6 3:12–18 3:14–18 3:14 3:16–17 3:16 3:18 4 4:1ff. 4:1 4:6 4:8 4:10 5:2 6:2 6:14–7:1 6:14 6:16 8–9 10:10 10:11 11:14 12 12:2ff. 12:2–4

12:2 12:4 12:6

415 177, 276, 307, 420, 423, 563, 627 178, 430, 727

238 339–340, 374, 466 425 313 178, 421, 432 178, 420–421, 562 254, 277, 306–307, 313, 420–421, 467 446 375, 429, 561–562 366, 637, 641, 691, 705 16 366 172, 362, 663, 725 278 467, 641, 665 172, 259, 283, 310, 362, 421, 663, 725 307 277 277 415, 425 734 339, 413, 467 516 374 178, 324, 426 428, 562 317 323 467 467 637 420 201, 238, 274, 279 2, 9, 120, 158, 177, 340, 419, 432, 463, 728, 759 238, 275–276, 302, 306, 308 425 276, 306

Galatians 1–2 1 1:1–16 1:1–4 1:1 1:12–16 1:12

1:15 1:16

2 2:2 2:19–20 2:20 3–4 3:19 4:5 4:8–10 4:9 4:24 5:16–26 5:19–21 6:11 Ephesians 1:4 1:9 1:14 1:17 1:21 2:6 2:19–21 2:21 3:1–13 3:2–4 3:3 3:5ff. 3:5–12 3:5

841

727 617 424 339 278, 308, 433, 563, 626 338, 419, 432, 466 65, 120, 158, 246, 274–275, 302, 305, 308, 352, 366, 376, 424, 457, 574, 760 306, 563, 617 120, 158, 246, 274– 275, 305, 308, 339, 352, 366, 374, 376, 418, 466, 574, 617, 760 303 302 418, 433, 457 128, 339, 378, 413, 429, 444, 563, 596 338, 466 322, 567–568 561 323 561 313, 366 375 429 339

423, 563, 627 423, 563, 627 339, 466 302 82, 247 308, 426, 737 324 317 423, 563, 627 574 278, 302, 307, 420, 423, 563, 627 246–247 376 302

842

Index of Ancient Sources

3:6 3:10 4:11 4:12 6:10 6:11

308 426 339, 466 324 487, 634, 768 308

Philippians 2:5 2:6 2:16 3:6 3:8 3:15 3:20 3:21

424 415 421 352 596 302 446 202, 415

Colossians 1:5 1:12 1:15ff. 1:15–20 1:15 1:16 1:19 1:24 1:25–27 1:26 1:27 2 2:2–19 2:2–11 2:3 2:6–8 2:9 2:11 2:12 2:13–15 2:14–15 2:14 2:16ff. 2:16–18 2:16 2:17

202 201 185, 196 415 42, 286, 356, 646 82 203 128, 339, 467 466 65, 278, 302, 307, 420, 423, 563, 627 429, 563 196 196 426 179, 196, 241, 351, 356 420 196, 202–203, 356, 415 196, 201–202 202 360 255, 319 196 197 415 195–198, 200–201, 424–426 196

2:18 2:19 2:21–22 2:21 2:22–23 2:23 3:1 3:4 3:6 1 Thessalonians 2:13 2:15 3:3 3:7 4 4:3–8 4:8 4:9 4:16 4:17

85, 196–198, 200– 202, 268 196, 202 198 415 197 200–201 201–202 302 200

5:19–20 5:19 5:21–22

466 335 373 373 135 429 457 414, 429, 569, 628 696 276, 306, 407, 420, 728 374 339–340, 466 373

2 Thessalonians 1:7 2 2:3–8 2:3–6 2:3 2:4 2:9 5

65, 302 243 428 380 302–303 317, 637 292 302

1 Timothy 3:16 4:1–2 4:1 4:8 4:14

423, 563, 627 375 336, 373 203 302

2 Timothy 1:5–7 1:14

302 302

843

Index of Ancient Sources Hebrews 1–3 1:1–4 1:1–2 1:1 1:2 1:4 1:5 2:2 4 4:14 4:16 6:4 6:5 6:19–20 6:19 6:20 7:1 7:11 7:27 8–10 8:1 8:5 8:8–13 8:8–12 8:9 8:10 8:11 9:9 9:13 9:23–24 9:24 9:25 9:26 10:1 10:6 10:11 10:19 10:20 12:1 12:2 12:22 12:29 13:12–13 13:12

85, 201 371 348, 473 330 185, 326 327 324 322, 567 566 324 326 339, 372, 466 247 326 324 324 324 324 324 325 326 325 562 562 734 734 734 324, 326 326 326 324–325 324 326 325 638, 692 324 324 324 326 324 326 326 330 326, 381

James 3:11

637

1 Peter 1:5 1:7 1:10–12 1:11–12

1:11 1:12 1:13 1:20 2 2:5 2:9 2:22 3:18–20 3:18 3:20 3:22 4:6 4:13 4:17 5:1 5:13

303 65, 302 315, 332, 464 65, 109, 179, 241, 258, 278, 301, 307, 351, 371, 374 302 211, 287 65 423, 563, 627 330 324 324 335 733 735 248 82, 255, 319 733 65, 302 536 303 294, 389

2 Peter 1:19 1:20 3 3:3–7

710, 734 373 245 455

1 John 1:1 2:16 2:18–20 2:18 2:19 2:20 2:22 2:27 3 3:2 3:4 4:1

242, 342 295 375 404 384 341 404 341, 569 243 340, 353, 355, 372, 638 428 302, 336, 373, 375

2 John 7

404

844 Jude 11 13 18 Revelation 1–12 1

1:1–2 1:1 1:3 1:5 1:6 1:9–11 1:9 1:10–16 1:10 1:11 1:12 1:13ff.

1:13–17 1:13–16 1:13

1:14–15 1:14 1:14a 1:15 1:16–17 1:16 1:17 1:19 1:20 2–3 2 2:5 2:11 2:13 2:14 2:15–19 2:16 2:20ff.

Index of Ancient Sources

338 541 375

514 3, 18, 87, 89, 91– 92, 129, 138, 164, 273, 408, 586 513, 588 63 300, 400 370, 468 324 138 50, 269, 386, 409 461 116, 153, 158, 160, 608 176 116, 160 18, 44, 85–88, 95, 185–194, 231, 256, 270, 274, 282, 573 272, 321 347 15, 18, 92–93, 95, 108–109, 185–187, 300, 309, 573 185 94, 186, 400 186 186 423 191, 611 116, 160 218, 253, 384, 397 140, 143, 401, 590, 661, 769 83, 143 423 347 133 92, 140 222, 230, 338, 385 392 96, 347 133

2:20 2:22 2:24 3:17 3:20 3:21 4ff. 4–5

4:1–5:10 4

4:1ff. 4:1

4:2ff. 4:2–3 4:2 4:3

4:4 4:5 4:6–7 4:6 4:7 4:8–9 4:8 4:9–10 5

5:4 5:5–6 5:6–9

222, 230, 338, 423 373 423, 563 389 674 545, 737 218, 228 3, 218, 229, 274, 343, 398, 502, 570, 571, 605, 655, 771 159 3, 35–37, 39–42, 49, 55, 68, 81, 83, 120, 122, 129, 139– 140, 158, 164, 205, 218, 228, 268, 272, 274, 398, 496, 514– 515, 573, 580, 581, 605, 608, 641, 655, 675, 763 270 205, 270, 285, 300, 311, 327, 356, 537, 641 241 205 50, 153, 158, 211, 269, 608 38, 140, 143, 187, 189–190, 272, 401, 590, 655, 675, 769 38, 82, 674 4, 38, 168, 353, 504, 655, 661, 675 521 39 83 83 37, 40, 43 198 54–55, 122, 139, 143, 164, 231, 272– 273, 385, 399, 408, 503, 586, 605, 633, 635, 655, 675 116, 160 274, 340, 655, 675 399, 605

Index of Ancient Sources 5:6 5:9 5:10 5:12 6–22 6–9 6–7 6 6:1ff. 6:2 6:8–9 6:9–10 6:9 6:10 6:12 6:14 6:15 6:16 6:19 6:38ff. 6:46 7 7:4 7:7 7:9 7:10 7:13 7:14 7:15 7:16 7:17 7:32ff. 8–11 8–9 8:1 8:2–11:18 8:2 8:3 8:6 8:7 8:8 8:11 8:12 8:13 9:2 9:3

37, 134, 353, 381, 432, 532 292, 387, 389 324 231 143 514 601, 621, 673 47, 139, 385, 514, 603, 673, 675 66 515–516, 669 512 327 133, 516 295, 390 688 360 292, 295, 390, 409, 519, 587 512, 519, 587 327 51 346 139, 231, 293, 673 666 517 52, 389 231 52, 116, 160, 673 133, 373, 393 327 674 139, 517 51 514, 676 139, 385 539 537, 539–543 535, 540 327 540 532, 541 541 407 542 541 688 386, 579

9:7 9:10 9:11 9:13 9:14 9:15 9:20 10–11 10 10:1ff. 10:1 10:3 10:4 10:5 10:8–11 10:9–11 10:9 10:10 10:11 11–12 11

11:1–14 11:1 11:2–13 11:2–3 11:2 11:3–12 11:3 11:4 11:7 11:8 11:9 11:10 11:11 11:12–20 11:12 11:13 11:14 11:15 11:17–18

845 611 533 669 327, 596 386 542 233 139, 339, 344, 384, 466 124, 161, 218, 229, 369, 542–543 272 87, 191, 481, 675 543 675 675 543 116 270, 385, 468 160 331, 369, 385–386, 464, 766 408–409, 517–518, 528, 587, 609 43, 134, 139, 222, 229, 328, 369, 384– 385, 393, 408, 480, 505, 518, 541, 587, 595–596, 665 542 116, 160, 294 468 596 385 341 596 587 133, 386, 408, 518, 587 381, 385–386 596 292, 387 386, 390 542 386 596 341, 408, 518 386 386

846 11:18 11:19 12–13 12

12:1 12:3 12:4–6 12:4 12:5 12:6 12:7 12:10–12 12:10 12:11 12:12 12:13–17 12:14 12:17 13

13:1–2 13:1 13:2 13:3 13:4 13:7 13:8 13:10 13:11ff. 13:11–16 13:11 13:12 13:13 13:14ff. 13:14–17

Index of Ancient Sources 292, 388, 542 327, 596 669–670 5, 51, 393, 409, 488, 505, 518–520, 587–588, 596, 601, 603, 620–621, 662, 666 512, 675 371, 520, 577 674 409 276, 306, 420, 728 596 386, 665 516 638 133 295, 390 674 596 384, 596–597 51, 75, 109, 116, 133–134, 138–139, 141, 291–292, 345, 382, 385–388, 399– 400, 405, 469, 481, 491, 498, 570, 573, 578–579, 597, 603– 604, 662, 676 597 400, 573 39, 140, 386, 400, 573 292–293, 387–388, 400, 573 51, 291, 385–386, 400, 573 386 293, 388, 423, 563, 627 51, 133 292 386 400, 573 292, 386 51 296 391

13:14 13:15 13:16–17 13:16 13:17 13:18 14 14:1 14:3 14:4 14:5 14:6ff. 14:6 14:8 14:9 14:10 14:11 14:12 14:14–19 14:14 15 15:2 15:3 15:5–16:21 15:5 15:18ff. 16 16:2 16:4 16:6 16:7 16:10 16:13 16:14 17–19 17–18 17

17:1 17:2 17:3 17:4

292–293, 387, 573 294 672 162, 292, 387 294, 390 347 139, 481, 517, 573 292–293, 387 292, 387 393 293, 532 272 293, 420 139 292–293, 387, 672 292, 387 292, 387, 672 222, 251, 293, 370, 384 634 87, 92–93, 634 40, 293 40, 292–293, 384, 672 40, 638 539 327 242 47, 139, 385, 514, 676 292, 387, 579, 672 385 295, 390 532 385 346 292, 386 514, 676 484, 500, 582 53, 108, 138, 345, 382, 388–392, 399, 405–406, 472, 491, 504, 514, 570, 578– 579, 597, 603, 662, 669–670, 689, 711 389 388–390, 670 116, 153, 160, 389 388–389, 514

Index of Ancient Sources 17:5 17:6 17:7 17:9–14 17:9–11 17:9–10 17:9 17:10 17:14 17:15 17:16 17:17 18–19 18 18:3 18:4 18:6 18:9ff. 18:11ff. 18:11–13 18:11 18:13 18:14 18:15 18:20 18:22 18:24 19 19:2 19:3 19:5 19:6 19:10 19:11ff. 19:11–16 19:11 19:18 19:19 19:20 20–22 20–21 20 20:1–3 20:1–2

292, 387 292, 295, 389–390 714 4, 168 410 116 140, 143, 401, 504, 590, 661, 769 398 386, 494, 580 389 387, 389, 494, 580 597 296, 391 389 388–389 294 494, 580 294 295 389 294, 390 294–295, 389–391 294 390 390 390 295, 390 573 292, 387 139 292 673 80, 199, 291, 302, 339, 370, 386, 466 66, 109, 573 516, 541 494, 580 292 386 292, 387, 672 139 137 520, 603, 669 518 674, 677

20:2–10 20:2 20:3 20:4 20:6 20:7 20:12 20:14 20:15 21–22

21 21:3 21:4 21:6 21:8 21:10 21:22 21:23 21:24–25 21:27 22:1 22:2 22:4

22:5 22:6 22:7 22:8–9 22:9 22:10 22:11 22:15 22:16 22:18–20 22:18–19 22:18

22:20

847 518 535 408, 518, 587 292, 387, 672, 735 324 408, 518, 587 291–292 532 386 327, 342, 405, 484, 500, 521, 579, 582, 584 140, 218, 228–229, 242, 666, 669, 764 205, 242, 285, 311, 327, 352, 707 764 521 295, 327, 390 116, 160, 389 317, 327 688 346 606 38, 517, 606, 677 606, 677 205, 258, 283, 285, 286, 292, 310–311, 327, 340, 347–348, 352, 356, 387, 652, 747 327, 606, 677 302 300 199 291, 386, 397 347, 468 327 295, 327, 390, 606 519 251 346, 397 77, 159, 300, 341, 346, 409, 468, 505, 513, 588 66

848

Index of Ancient Sources

Dead Sea Scrolls Rule of the Community (1QS) 2:22–26 415 2:22–23 201 5:23ff. 201 5:23–24 415 6:8ff. 201 6:8–10 415 11 326 11:5–9 176 11:5–7 176 11:7–8 56, 201 Pesher Habakkuk (1QpHab) 2:2 7 7:1ff. 7:1–5 7:1

176 277, 307, 423, 462– 463, 563, 627 61 176 574

War Scroll (1QM) 17:5–8 17:7

54 55

Hodayot (1QHa) 3:20ff.

3:20 10:13 11:10 11:13–14 12:27–28 15:26–27

326 176 326 56 176 176

4Q402 4

268

4Q403 1 i 1–29 1 i 41–46 1 ii

268 268 268

4Q405 14–15 20 ii 20–22 20 ii 21–22 23 i 23 i 13 23 ii

268 120 74, 81, 120 415 268 268

4Q417 2 11–13

176

4QŠiroth Šabbat ha-‘olam 1 37 56

Hellenistic-Jewish Literature Josephus Antiquities 1.60 8.79

295, 497 39

Jewish War 2.397 5.219 6.122 6.280 6.281ff.

6.285–287 6.288 6.289 6.300–301 6.300 6.301ff.

328 338 305 318 323 479

318 42 328 323 479

Philo of Alexandria On the Migration of Abraham 89–93 568

849

Index of Ancient Sources

Rabbinic and Related Literature Mishnah, Tosefta, Talmud, and Extracanonical Tractates Mishnah ʾAboth 1:1 2:8 3:1 Berakhot 5:5 Ḥagigah 2:1

Megillah 4 4:10 4(3):31ff. Tosefta Ḥagigah 2:2 2:3–4 2:3 2:5 2:6 Megillah 4:28 4[3]:31ff. 4:34 Soṭah 13:2 13:3

42c.25ff. 432, 462, 737 238 84 335 4, 72–73, 211, 236, 243, 267, 338, 564, 759–760 73 121, 236, 506 236, 759

4, 759 120, 239 40 39, 280 256 74, 120 121, 506 73 58, 67 302, 332, 464

Palestinian Talmud Ḥagigah 2:1 238, 267 77ab 280 77a 73, 122, 507, 526, 608 77a.45ff. 73 77a.67–68 73 77b 39–40, 119, 239, 256 77c 73 77c.8ff. 76 Yoma 42c 94

190

Babylonian Talmud Baba Batra 58a 212, 287, 654 Baba Meṣiʿa 59a 304, 337 Ḥagigah 12a ff. 73 12b 43, 190, 325 13a–16a 4 13a 39, 41, 43, 76, 122, 157, 176, 236, 507, 526, 564, 608 13b 344, 526, 608 14a 155, 194, 236 14b–15b 74 14b 40, 43, 74, 119, 239, 257 15a 39, 193, 256, 419, 425 Ḥullin 91b 188, 208, 210, 287, 654 Megillah 3a 188 24a–b 121, 236, 506, 759 24a 344 24b 74, 120 Menaḥot 43b 88, 122, 157 45a 236 Sanhedrin 28b 190 38b 193, 203, 259, 281 97b 61 Šabbat 14b 236 ʾAboth de R. Nathan 23a 198 ʾAboth de R. Nathan [B] 13 238

850

Index of Ancient Sources

Targum Fragment Targum Genesis 5:24 276, 306 28:12 209, 654

Targum to the Prophets Ezekiel 1:27 93 8:2 93

Targum Neofiti I Genesis 22 28:12

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan Genesis 5:24 193 28:12 209, 502, 654

Targum Onkelos Genesis 28:12

259, 283, 310 209, 654

Isaiah 43:12

41

209, 502

Midrash Mekilta deRabbi Jishmaʿel on Ex 12:3 335 Sifre Numbers on Num 12:8 115 Berešit Rabbah 2:4 47:6 68:12 69:3

335 122, 157

39, 256, 280 258, 283, 310, 502, 654 207, 210, 287, 653 258, 283, 310, 502, 654

82:6

211, 258, 502, 654

Shemot Rabbah 28

188

Shir ha-Shirim Rabbah 1.4 40, 120, 239 1.10.2 124, 161, 525 Pirke de R. Eliezer 1:2 238 35 211

Hekhalot Literature Hekaloth Rabbati 18

279

24 56a

43 36

Apostolic Fathers Barnabas 2:6 8–9 16:7 16:8

568 568 323, 568 568

1 Clement 40

328

Didache 11

338, 340

851

Index of Ancient Sources 11:7 11:8 13:3

302 474 328

Hermas Visions 3.10.6

198

Martyrdom of Polycarp 9 388 10 293 12 293

Nag Hammadi/Gnostic Texts Apocryphon of John (NHC II,1, III,1, IV,1) 5 82 8:15ff. 82 10 341 59:20 79

Hypostasis of the Archons (NHC II,4) 141:22–23 79 143:20ff. 82 Untitled Work (On the Origin of the World) (NHC II,5, XIII,2) 150:11ff. 82 152:31ff. 82

Excerpta ex Theodoto § 37 82

Christian Authors and Works Acts of Christian Martyrs Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis 4 96 11 96 Augustine The City of God 15.5

497

Clement of Alexandria Stromateis 5.21 37 Epiphanius Panarion 33.3.1–7 33.3.10

568 568

Eusebius Church History (Hist. eccl.) 3.3.14–16 313 3.23.1–4 512

3.28.3 3.39.5

403, 576 772

Hippolytus Apostolic Tradition 20:6 279 Hugh of St. Victor Didascalion 3:10 124, 161, 344, 525 Irenaeus Against the Heresies (Adv. haer.) 1.25.4 622 5.26.1–5.36.3 140, 403, 575 5.30.3 410 5.33.3–4 403, 576 Justin Martyr Dialogue with Trypho (Dial.) 34–35 323 35 323

852

Index of Ancient Sources

46:6–7 80 114 116:3 126

323 140, 575 203, 415 324 503, 654

Minucius Felix Octavius 32

328

Origen Commentary on the Gospel of John (Comm. John) 2:31 89, 281–282 13:5–6 425, 564

Quran Sura 27:44

40

Index of Modern Persons Abrahams, I.…280 Abrams, M.H.…147, 526–527, 649 Adams, H.…686, 698 Adler, W.…69 Ådna, J.…316 Adorno, T.W.…235, 289, 443, 447, 473, 744, 755 Agamben, G.…437, 446 Agricola, J.…550–551 Alexander, J.J.G.…530 Alexander, P.S.…72, 193, 304, 337 Allison Jr., D.C.…364, 417 Andreae, J.V.…405, 579 Ankarsjö, M.…703, 719 Apetrei, S.…599–600, 612 Ashton, J.…8, 18, 20, 23, 65, 81, 175– 176, 177, 178–179, 240, 255, 285, 289, 311, 342, 350–351, 413, 465, 516, 565, 575, 627, 745 Attridge, H.W.…325 Atwood, M.…149 Auerbach, E.…724 Aune, D.E.…70, 201, 231, 247, 328, 331 Aylmer, G.E.…102 Bacher, W.…194 Bachmann, M.…316 Back, S.…193 Backus, I.…402, 576 Bacon, F.…624, 700 Badiou, A.…437 Balz, H.R.…81, 186, 188–189 Bammel, E.…3 Bandstra, A.J.…195–196, 198, 202 Barbel, J.…85, 192 Baring-Gould, S.…480 Barker, M.…58, 69, 328, 635 Barltrop, M.…5 Barr, J.…297 Barrett, C.K.…30, 204, 206, 322, 325, 567

Barth, K.…329–330, 457, 731, 770 Barton, J.…67, 253, 300, 341 Batiffol, P.…88 Bauckham, R.…8, 79–80, 117, 231, 235, 247, 294, 369, 390 Baumgarten, J.…250, 271 Beale, G.K.…52, 89, 95 Beer, J.…502, 634 Beker, J.C.…250, 252, 376, 413 Bell, H.…730 Benjamin, W.…20, 235, 395, 443–444, 753 Bennett, Z.…8, 9, 14, 16, 23, 751, 773 Bentley, G.E.…172, 521–522, 555, 603, 619, 632, 672, 676, 719 Berdini, P.…510 Berger, K.…85 Bernet, C.…579 Berryman, P.…748 Bethge, E.…750 Betz, O.…239, 275 Biale, D.…235, 744 Bietenhard, H.…34, 38, 190, 194 Billerbeck, P.…40, 198, 202, 567 Bindman, D.…107, 352, 361, 674, 678, 696, 718, 729 Black, M.…86, 188, 213 Blake, W.…1, 4, 5, 13–16, 18, 20–22, 24–25, 107–109, 127–128, 144, 146–148, 150, 153, 162–163, 172, 181, 299, 336, 351–363, 398, 409, 429, 433, 444, 452, 468–474, 486– 489, 494, 501–504, 506, 508, 511, 514–515, 521–522, 524, 544, 549, 551–553, 555–556, 558–561, 568– 569, 570, 589, 591–592, 598–599, 602–607, 609–611, 614, 619–626, 631–738, 758, 761–769 Blickle, P.…97 Bloch, E.…20, 235, 437–439, 442, 445, 448, 458

854

Index of Modern Persons

Bloom, H.…5, 24, 549, 559, 614, 625, 648, 674, 682, 714, 719 Bloomfield, M.W.…144 Böcher, O.…241 Bockmuehl, M.N.A.…65, 277, 308, 415, 467 Boehme, J.…181, 431, 598, 610, 612, 663, 725–726, 732 Boer, E.A. de…614 Boesak, A.A.…296, 391, 743 Boff, L.…214, 223 Böhlig, A.…30, 44, 78, 282 Boismard, M.-É.…208 Bokser, B.Z.…88 Bonhoeffer, D.…17, 22, 490, 749–750, 754 Bonner, G.…227, 383, 529, 532–533 Borgen, P.…206, 284, 335 Bornkamm, G.…204 Bosch, H.…512–513 Bousset, W.…40, 186, 574 Bowerbank, S.…733, 735 Bowker, J.…2, 31, 57, 158, 166, 417, 560, 625 Box, G.H.…41, 87, 190 Boxall, I.…21, 409, 529, 542, 588, 603, 611 Boyarin, D.…313, 346, 367 Boyer, P.…108, 113, 407, 482, 490, 591 Bradstock, A.…8, 11, 97, 102, 483– 484, 487, 499, 522, 582–583 Brady, D.…105 Braght, T.J. van…742 Bright, P.…383, 532–535 Brightman, F.E.…491, 579 Brothers, R.…6, 619–620, 626, 664– 669 Brown, D.…503, 638 Brown, R.E.…204–205, 316 Bruder, H.…714, 719 Buchan, E.…600 Bühner, J.-A.…65, 85–86, 214, 306, 342 Bullard, R.A.…30 Bultmann, R.…223, 442 Bunta, S.…653 Bunyan, J.…142, 144, 146, 582 Burchard, C.…88, 187 Burdon, C.…13, 146, 405, 494, 507, 579, 594, 612, 633–634, 662–663, 665 Burkitt, F.C.…454, 532, 535–536, 538

Burney, C.F.…207 Burr, D.…365, 370, 494, 496 Butler, J.M.…482 Butlin, M.…452, 488, 504, 521, 604, 606, 638, 645, 674, 691, 718 Butts, T.…602–603, 611, 624, 683 Caird, G.…743–744 Calvin, J.…135, 141, 512, 614–615 Carleton Paget, J.N.…323, 455, 457, 568 Cameron, R.…414, 600 Capp, B.S.…100, 494, 580, 594 Carey, F.…401, 492, 510, 512, 586, 590 Carlile, R.…622 Carruthers, M.J.…4, 18, 119, 124, 161, 168, 343–344, 367, 410, 510, 524– 525, 572, 607–610, 681, 709, 719, 723 Cary, M.…494–495, 498, 505, 580, 583, 598 Casey, M.…52, 89, 95 Charles, R.H.…37–39, 92, 188, 494, 574, 593 Charlesworth, J.H.…70, 241, 266, 277 Chernus, I.…267 Chester, A.…10, 20, 80, 325, 436, 446 Chilton, B.D.…316 Clark, A.…600 Clarke, E.G.…214 Clarkson, L.…548, 551, 554, 618 Cogley, R.W.…594 Cohen, M.S.…73, 271 Cohn, N.…102, 378, 405, 436, 442, 477, 480, 490, 580 Coleridge, S.T.…15, 22, 115, 146, 172, 173, 361, 431–432, 452, 507–509, 526, 619, 626, 631, 663, 665, 721, 723–727, 763, 767, 774 Collins, J.J.…7, 46, 53, 66, 70, 74, 95, 124, 170, 204, 223, 226, 230, 266, 273, 277, 313, 343, 364, 396, 407, 416, 516, 520 Colpe, C.…186, 188 Como, D.R.…427, 549, 561 Connolly, T.…714, 719 Conrad, J.…145 Cook, E.T.…696, 701 Coppe, A.…548, 551, 554–555, 562, 618 Coppin, R.…555 Corner, M.…8, 753

Index of Modern Persons Corns, T.…1, 102, 595, 712, 718 Cotton, J.…553 Cromwell, O.…495, 497 Crossley, J.G.…566 Cullmann, O.…185 Cunha, E. da…477 Dahl, N.A.…85, 206, 284 Daley, B.E.…108, 134, 370, 459, 575 Dalman, G.…89 Damrosch, L.…606, 697, 708, 713, 719 Dan, J.…267 Danby, H.…72 Daniélou, J.…93, 192, 228, 315 Dante Alighieri…144, 181 Darby, J.N.…135, 407 Davidson, D.…524 Davies, W.D.…59, 63, 72, 227, 279, 297, 356, 427, 440, 517–518, 703, 719 Davis, J.…550 Dawson, D.…25 Day, J.…52 Dean-Otting, M.…74, 269 DeConick, A.D.…151, 367, 645 Dee, J.…612, 731 Deichgräber, R.…43 Denck, H.…551, 703 Denis, A.-M.…41, 190 Deppermann, K.…99, 401, 405, 479– 480, 580, 590 Derrida, J.…290 Deutsch, N.…78, 266 Dewey, A.J.…414 Dibelius, M.…199 Dickens, C.…145 Dieterich, A.…37 Díez Macho, A.…208 Dillmann, A.…724, 728 Ditmore, M.G.…552–553, 563, 616– 617 Dobroruka, V.…126, 477 Dodd, C.H.…568 Dodds, E.R.…71 Donaldson, J.…516 Doresse, J.…30 Dörrbecker, D.W.…470, 560, 718 Doubles, M.C.…208 Downing, J.…599 Drews, A.…455 Dronke, P.…131, 506 Drury, J.…512, 513, 587

855

Drusius, J.…731 Duff, J.…71 Dunn, J.D.G.…85 Dürer, A.…511, 515–516, 586 Duvet, J.…511–512, 523, 590 Eagleton, T.…293, 437 Eaves, M.…718 Edwards, R.…521 Eichhorn, J.G.…115, 173, 507 Eichrodt, W.…192, 646 Elior, R.…729 Eliot, G.…145 Eliot, T.S.…149 Ellis, E.…148 Emerton, J.A.…32, 186 Emmerson, R.K.…404, 407, 491, 510, 576, 584–585, 589 Engels, F.…387, 438, 459, 570 Erdman, D.V.…5, 107, 409, 468, 521, 570, 602, 614, 642, 645, 681, 718 Esler, P.F.…279, 295, 390, 755 Essick, R.N.…639–640, 718, 762 Evans, C.A.…195–196, 198–200, 202– 203, 316 Eyck, Jan van…408, 516, 586 Fallon, F.T.…45, 78, 82, 194, 248 Farrakhan, L.…155 Farrer, A.…744 Fekkes, J.…117 Ferber, M.…172, 362, 663 Feuillet, A.…189 Firth, K.R.…578–579, 594, 596 Fisch, H.…145 Fischer, K.…653 Fishbane, M.…74, 312, 367 Flannery-Dailey, F.…115, 167 Foerster, W.…195 Food, S.…543 Ford, J.M.…39 Fossum, J.E.…15, 50, 80–81, 86, 272, 275, 282, 286, 415, 653, 760 Francis, F.O.…195, 197–201, 415, 600 Franck, S.…551, 703 Frankfurter, D.…124 Fredriksen, P.…97, 499, 506, 538–539, 576, 583 Frei, H.…25, 698, 701, 720–721, 723, 738 French, T.…585, 594 Friedländer, M.…78 Frye, N.…641

856

Index of Modern Persons

Fuller, D.…678 Füller, R.H.…185 Gadamer, H.-G.…25, 181 García Martínez, F.…268 Garnsey, P.…264, 294 Garrett, C.…505, 600, 619 Geddes, A.…720 Geissen, A.…87 Gemeinhardt, P.…551 George, K.A.…87, 93 Georgi, D.…246, 376 Gerber, W.…282, 309 Gibbons, P.…117–119 Giles, J.A.…530 Ginsburger, M.…208 Ginzberg, L.…210 Glasson, T.F.…32, 252 Glen, H.…642, 673–674 Goldberg, A.…31, 194 Goldie, M.…684, 720 Goodenough, E.R.…191, 194 Gooder, P.R.…420 Goodman, M.…249, 479 Goodwin, B.…230 Goslee, N.M.…633 Goulder, M.D.…275 Gower, J.…145 Gowler, D.…9, 16, 23 Graetz, H.…82, 193 Graham, E.…483 Gramsci, A.…753 Grant, R.M.…78–79, 84, 248 Grässer, E.…202 Gray, S.W.…746 Green, J.B.…319 Grey, R.…556 Grotius, H.…406, 579, 591, 612 Gruenwald, I.…45, 48–49, 70, 72–73, 75, 78–80, 82, 95, 189, 210, 227, 235, 253, 266–267, 343, 525, 608, 746 Gryson, R.…529, 540 Gunther, J.J.…195 Gutiérrez, G.…752 Hall, D.D.…422, 552, 616 Hall, R.G.…79, 214 Halperin, D.J.…4, 49, 71–72, 123, 157, 163, 168, 235, 253, 266, 269–270, 313, 343–344, 367, 412, 463, 506, 526, 572, 646, 657, 746, 758–759, 763, 773

Hamburger, J.F.…510 Hamilton, A.…137, 634, 659 Hannah, D.…325 Hanson, P.D.…50, 58, 62, 66–67, 169, 205 Harding, A.J.…173, 723 Harmer, J.R.…388 Harnisch, W.…50, 232 Harrington, D.J.…343 Harrison, J.F.C.…5, 600 Hartman, L.…47, 51–52, 75 Hays, R.B.…643 Hedley, D.…431, 726 Hegel, G.W.F.…458 Heller, R.…512 Hellholm, D.…7, 170, 266 Helms, C.R.…575 Hengel, M.…9, 58, 71, 172, 192, 226, 266, 284 Hennecke, E.…66, 78 Herzmann, R.B.…144 Hessayon, A.…612, 728, 732 Hill, C.…97, 102, 105, 141, 484, 494, 497–499, 578, 580, 582, 637, 712, 719 Himmelfarb, M.…74, 117, 124, 127, 245, 279 Hinds, H.…494, 523, 580 Hirsch-Reich, B.…364, 371, 408, 520– 521, 577, 585, 650 Hobby, E.…483, 494–496, 500, 523, 580–582 Hoffman, M.…141, 405, 479–480, 580 Hofius, O.…30, 190, 255, 266 Holmes, M.W.…388 Holtz, T.…93–94, 185–188 Holtzmann, H.J.…454 Hooker, M.D.…196 Hopkins, J.K.…6, 294, 505, 519, 601, 621, 666 Horbury, W.…2, 316 Horgan, M.P.…61 Horrell, D.G.…378–379 Horsley, R.A.…319 Houlden, J.L.…477 Howell, V.…481 Huehns, G.…558, 624 Hügel, F. von…33 Hughes, A.…1, 102, 712 Humphrey, J.…551 Hurst, L.D.…266, 325 Hurtado, L.…16, 81, 231, 254, 272, 275, 325, 760

Index of Modern Persons Hutchinson, A.…14, 15, 21, 422, 549, 551–553, 556, 558, 562–563, 614, 616–619, 623–624 Huxley, A.…149 Ilgner, F.C.…551 Isaacs, M.E.…325 Jacobson, E.…444 James, G.I.…721 James, M.R.…584, 594 Jameson, F.…214, 232 Jellinek, A.…43 Jennings, T.W.…437 Jeremias, J.…44, 67, 72, 207 Jervell, J.…203, 208, 286 Jewett, R.…380 Johnson, A.R.…192 Johnson, L.T.…304 Johnson, S.E.…196 Jonge, M. de…204, 207 Juster, S.…6, 601, 619, 621 Kaiser, C.B.…16 Kanagaraj, J.J.…65, 179 Kandinsky, W.…512 Kannengiesser, C.…532 Kant, I.…458 Karrer, M.…515 Käsemann, E.…29, 413, 447, 566, 627, 750–751, 754 Kauffmann, C.M.…520 Kearns, R.…52 Keene, N.…728 Kehl, N.…195, 198, 201, 203 Kerby-Fulton, K.…144 Kermode, F.…61 Keyes, G.…97, 108, 110, 718, 766 Kierkegaard, S.…441 Kim, S.…81, 86, 203, 275, 418 Kinney, D.…584 Kisch, G.…39 Klassen, W.…478, 481, 492 Klein, P.K.…515, 584–585 Knibb, M.A.…51, 62, 233 Knight, J.M.…8, 79, 96, 181, 247 Knox, J.…428, 547 Knust, J.W.…360 Koresh, D.…481, 490 Kovacs, J.…8, 11, 138, 140, 328, 341, 368, 402, 510, 516, 543, 574, 594, 600, 603, 612, 615, 661, 664, 679, 736

857

Kraabel, A.T.…196–197 Kraft, H.…39 Kraus, W.…447 Kraybill, J.N.…294, 390 Kreider, A.…293, 328, 382, 459, 742 Kretschmar, G.…192 Kuhn, H.-W.…198, 201, 247 Kusio, M.…567 Kvanvig, H.S.…69 Labib, P.…44 Lähnemann, J.…195 Lane Fox, R.…71, 382 Lang, A.S.…422 Lannert, B.…751 Lash, N.…23, 447, 753, 757–774 Laurence, R.…171, 452, 593, 656, 720, 724, 728 Law, W.…732 Layton, B.…60 Lead, J.…21, 598–602, 612, 732–736 Lee, A.…505, 600 Légasse, S.…264 Lentzen-Deis, F.…207–208 Lerner, R.E.…371, 375 Lessing, G.E.…683 Levine, R.M.…477 Lewis, K.…510, 516 Lewis, S.…525, 584–585 Lewis, W.…365 Lieb, M.…4, 25, 72, 121, 155, 181, 400, 507, 509, 525, 528, 608, 758, 762–763, 771 Lieu, J.…323 Lightfoot, J.B.…388 Lincicum, D.…555 Lincoln, A.T.…195, 198, 200, 255, 266, 434, 718 Lindberg, B.…352, 355–356, 638, 658 Lindsay, H.…591 Lo Bue, F.…531, 533 Locke, J.…624, 700 Lockley, P.…6, 620, 622 Loewe, R.…127 Loewenstein, D.…1, 102, 712 Lohse, E.…195, 197, 199–200, 202– 203 Loisy, A.…456 Long, T.M.S.…296 Lorenz, R.…85 Lowth, R.…501, 710, 719 Lücke, F.…171, 724–725 Lueken, W.…199

858

Index of Modern Persons

Lumsden, D.W.…539, 541 Lust, J.…95 Lutaud, O.…102 Luther, M.…131, 141, 173, 402, 405, 457, 504, 528, 550, 570, 576, 578, 586, 615 Luz, U.…177, 262, 417–418 Lyon, R.…145 Lyonnet, S.…199 Macaskill, G.…172 MacCulloch, D.…434, 523, 734 MacDermot, V.…115, 343 Mach, M.…275, 282, 309 Mack, P.…483, 494–495, 500, 523, 580, 581, 582 Mackay, T.W.…529 MacRae, G.W.…30, 78, 82, 194 Madden, D.…620 Maier, H.O.…513, 588 Maier, J.…30, 32, 36, 40, 44, 188, 409, 574 Major, G.…551 Makdisi, S.…551 Malkin, B.H.…602, 672 Mannheim, K.…111, 246, 332, 335, 377–378, 441 Marcus, J.…241 Marmorstein, A.…42, 94, 190, 194, 202 Marsh, C.…600, 736 Marshall, E.…529–531, 535, 537, 540, 541, 542 Martin, D.…489 Martin, R.P.…200 Martyn, J.L.…204, 241, 253, 289, 366, 376, 413 Marx, K.…387, 438, 441, 443, 458, 485, 498, 583 Matheson, P.…97, 99–101, 478, 615 Mayordomo, M.…427, 548, 550, 552, 562, 616, 618 Mayr-Harting, H.…584 Mazzaferri, F.D.…300 McCalman, I.…666 McGann, J.L.…637, 684 McGinn, B.…175, 313, 365, 404, 407– 408, 416, 491, 510, 551, 571, 576, 584–585, 589, 594 McGregor, J.F.…637 McGuckin, J.A.…282 McKelvey, R.J.…316 McNamara, M.…208, 210, 286 Meade, D.G.…71

Mede, J.…134–135, 142–143, 401, 405, 406–407, 494–495, 505, 514, 536, 578–579, 590–591, 594, 609– 610, 612–613, 662–663, 769 Mee, J.…107, 511, 620, 625–626, 637, 642, 666, 767 Meeks, W.A.…191, 195, 199, 206, 226, 250, 347, 363, 378, 415 Meer, F. van der…407–408, 510, 517, 530, 584–586 Mein, A.…614 Meir, R.…191 Memling, H.…514, 586 Merkur, D.…115, 124 Michaelis, W.…192, 207 Michel, O.…317 Michl, J.…37 Milbank, J.…752 Milik, J.T.…67, 69 Milton, J.…128, 145, 163, 353, 408– 409, 427, 471, 519, 549–550, 556, 560, 582, 604, 614, 623, 625, 638– 640, 642, 652, 679, 681–683, 698, 714–715, 717, 762, 767 Minear, P.S.…227, 294 Mitchell, M.M.…425, 564 Mitchell, W.J.T.…671 Mojtabai, A.G.…490 Moloney, F.J.…207, 213 Moltmann, J.…235, 395, 442, 458 Montefiore, C.G.…127 Montgomery, J.A.…87, 186, 188 Moore, G.F.…63 Morgan, N.J.…594 Morgan, R.…472, 716, 719 Morray-Jones, C.R.A.…3, 8, 72, 266, 277, 306, 350, 415, 419, 421, 426, 432, 434, 575, 727, 746 Morrison, C.D.…101 Morton, A.L.…555, 618, 622, 665 Moskal, J.…359, 558, 624 Moule, C.F.D.…53, 200, 428, 433, 450–451, 547 Moxnes, H.…755 Moyise, S.…117, 643 Müller, H.-P.…75, 186, 196 Munck, J.…246, 376 Müntzer, T.…18, 21, 98–102, 109, 111, 113, 135–136, 142, 377, 405, 437, 440–442, 478–483, 490, 494, 580 Murrin, M.…594 Musurillo, H.…346

Index of Modern Persons

859

Myers, C.…319 Mynors, R.A.B.…531

Quinby, L.…411 Quispel, G.…78, 190, 206, 213

Neusner, J.…31, 239 Newman, C.C.…81, 275 Newport, K.…411, 481–482, 494 Newsom, C.A.…15, 74, 254, 267 Newton, I.…135, 401, 495, 505, 590, 613, 624, 662, 700, 769 Niblett, M.…6, 620 Nicholls, D.…291, 503 Nickelsburg, G.W.E.…50, 70, 169 Niclaes, H.…663, 733, 736 Niditch, S.…52 Nietzsche, F.…458, 731 Niklaes, H.…598 Nissen, A.…52 Nitzsch, K.I.…724 Nordheim, E. von…51 Numbers, R.L.…482

Rad, G. von…75 Radford Ruether, R.…11, 14, 440–441, 472 Raine, K.…638, 657 Rajak, T.…249 Räpple, E.M.…511 Ratzinger, J.…225 Reay, B.…637 Reed, W.L.…638 Reeves, M.…12, 364, 371, 404, 408, 505, 519–521, 577, 585, 610, 650 Reim, G.…207 Reimarus, H.S.…698–699 Rensberger, D.K.…242, 345 Richard, P.…743 Ricœur, P.…117–118, 127, 214 Rießler, P.…41 Ritschl, A.…454, 751 Rix, R.…703, 719 Roberts, A.…516 Robinson, H.C.…555, 618 Robinson, J.M.…84, 450 Rollins, W.G.…29 Rosenau, H.…316 Rosenzweig, F.…444 Rössler, D.…52, 72 Rosso, G.A.…473, 604, 670, 731 Rost, L.…31 Rowland, C.…3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14–16, 26, 48, 50–51, 62, 68–69, 71, 74, 80–82, 86, 95, 101, 124, 138, 140, 162, 167, 172, 177, 179, 187, 195– 197, 203, 225–227, 230–231, 237, 239–241, 245, 252, 254–257, 259, 266–267, 270–272, 275, 280–282, 286, 289, 297, 299, 304, 309, 313, 320–321, 327–328, 337, 341, 344, 350–351, 364, 366, 368, 387, 398, 402, 406, 415, 419, 421, 425–426, 428, 432, 434, 478–479, 483, 488– 490, 494, 497, 506, 508, 510, 516, 522, 524, 543–544, 557–558, 562, 567, 571, 574–575, 582, 594, 596, 600, 603–604, 606, 609, 612, 615, 619, 626, 628, 641, 643–645, 661, 664, 669, 674, 679, 703, 710, 719, 721, 727, 730–731, 736, 744–745, 753, 760, 762, 764, 773 Rowley, H.H.…31–32, 593 Rudolph, K.…78

Odeberg, H.…2, 166, 206–208, 240, 266, 284 O’Donovan, O.…295–296, 391 O’Hear, N.…611 O’Kane, M.…696 Olivi, P.J.…365, 496 Orwell, G.…149 Osten-Sacken, P. von der…75 Overbeck, F.…442, 444, 731 Owen, J.…556, 623 Ozment, S.…722 Paine, T.…469 Paley, M.D.…146, 521, 527, 677, 718 Pancaro, S.…204–205 Parker, D.C.…686 Parry, G.…612, 732 Paschal, R.W.…242 Paulson, R.…471–472 Pearson, B.A.…60 Pelikan, J.…578 Percy, E.…195, 197–198 Pfeiffer, A.…731 Philonenko, M.…87 Pinto, V. de Sola…600, 736 Pippin, T.…522 Plöger, O.…58, 67, 169, 187 Pordage, J.…732 Porete, M.…551 Potestà, G.L.…365 Prickett, S.…714, 719 Procksch, O.…188

860

Index of Modern Persons

Ruskin, J.…391, 701 Russell, D.S.…593 Sabbe, M.…282, 309 Sabine, G.H.…102, 106, 485, 582, 665, 677 Sanders, E.P.…137, 195, 246, 412, 433, 447, 450–451, 460, 744 Saperstein, M.…452 Sawyer, J.F.A.…650 Schäfer, P.…72, 156, 167, 199, 267, 276, 412, 759 Schaffer, E.S.…115 Schiffman, L.…15 Schiller, G.…407–408, 411, 510, 584– 585, 586 Schmidt, J.M.…7, 66, 171, 451, 724 Schmithals, W.…29 Scholem, G.…2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 25, 30–33, 42, 49, 72, 79, 81, 154, 166, 168, 180, 189–190, 197, 202, 210, 235, 239, 252–253, 257, 266, 279, 400, 414–415, 439–440, 463, 506, 571– 572, 744, 759 Schrenk, G.…317 Schubert, K.…31 Schubert, P.…428 Schuchard, M.K.…703, 719 Schüssler Fiorenza, E.…291, 296, 381, 391, 522 Schwarz, R.…99 Schweitzer, A.…10, 20, 66, 167, 195, 199–200, 203, 246, 417, 433, 442, 449–460, 698, 731, 751–752 Scofield, C.I.…135, 143, 407 Scribner, R.W.…528, 586 Segal, A.F.…71, 74, 81–82, 84–86, 156, 177, 190, 193–194, 202–203, 206, 231, 240, 254, 275, 284, 305, 413, 760 Segundo, J.L.…752 Sevi, S.…427 Shaffer, E.S.…173, 507, 663 Shakespeare, W.…145 Shantz, C.…158, 177, 418 Shaw, J.…5, 6, 602 Shelley, P.…146 Simons, M.…481 Sklar, S.M.…472, 713, 719 Smelik, W.F.…277, 306 Smith, C.…748 Smith, J.Z.…89, 260, 282, 320

Smith, M.…44, 63, 71, 195, 203, 286, 303 Smith, R.H.…586 Smolinski, R.…482 Soards, M.L.…241 Sobrino, J.…749 Southcott, J.…5, 6, 505, 519, 602, 619, 621–622, 626, 664–669 Southey, R.…146 Sperber, A.…189, 208 Sproxton, J.…486 Stanton, G.N.…261, 263 Stayer, J.M.…102, 478, 480 Steinberg, R.M.…518 Steinhauser, K.B.…531–532 Steir, F.…192 Stemberger, G.…208 Sterry, P.…600, 736 Stone, M.E.…7, 9, 45, 46–47, 54, 62, 66, 68–70, 75, 115, 123–124, 156, 168–169, 195, 343, 415, 463, 576, 728 Strack, H.L.…40, 198, 202, 567 Strauss, D.F.…454 Strawbridge, J.R.…423 Stringfellow, W.…113, 401–402, 488, 545, 590, 770 Stroumsa, G.G.…72, 415 Strugnell, J.…34–36, 191, 201, 268 Stuckenbruck, L.T.…80, 271–273, 281, 435 Sullivan, K.…8 Swedenborg, E.…172, 549, 614, 682, 703, 717, 726 Sweet, J.P.M.…3, 290, 299 Swinburne, A.C.…641 Swinburne, R.…153 Szönyi, G.…612, 728, 730, 732 Tabor, J.D.…275, 306 Talmage, F.…267 Tannehill, R.C.…202 Tannenbaum, L.…633, 639, 710, 719, 765 Taubes, J.…10, 11, 20, 427, 437, 439– 445, 448, 458 Taylor, K.…230 Theißen, G.…218 Thiselton, A.C.…380, 430, 508, 552, 774 Thompson, E.P.…107, 232, 511, 622, 637, 659, 664, 672, 684, 703, 719, 762

Index of Modern Persons Thompson, L.L.…744 Tigchelaar, E.J.C.…268 Tilley, M.A.…383, 546, 603, 661 Tolley, M.J.…633, 674 Tomson, P.J.…178, 431 Tondelli, L.…371, 577, 585 Train, J.…600 Trapnel, A.…118, 495–496, 506–507, 523, 581–582 Trevett, C.…312, 342, 372 Trevor, M.…33 Tuckett, C.M.…335, 567 Turdeanu, É.…190 Turner, D.…438 Urbach, E.E.…31, 61, 72, 412 Urban, D.V.…556 Underwood, T.L.…505, 595 Unnik, W.C. van…207 Vaillant, A.…33 VanderKam, J.C.…50, 69 Velázquez, D.…409, 513 Vermes, G.…35 Vielhauer, P.…7 Viscomi, J.…501, 639–640, 668, 718– 719, 762 Wainwright, A.W.…574 Waldon, J.…428 Walker, P.W.L.…316 Wallace, D.…552, 736 Walliss, J.…411 Walton, S.…322 Walzer, M.…481, 484, 494 Wannenmacher, J.E.…371 Ward, B.…530, 622 Watson, F.…110, 261, 297 Watson, R.…602, 664, 690, 698, 704, 710–711, 721 Wedderburn, A.…696, 701 Weinrich, W.C.…532–533, 535, 538, 540 Weinstein, D.…518, 537 Weiss, J.…17, 66, 167, 252, 442, 453– 455, 459, 751–752 Wengert, T.J.…550

861

Wengst, K.…222, 230, 264, 294, 395 Wenham, D.…243 Wentworth, A.…21, 489, 499–500, 506, 582 Werner, M.…10, 192 Wertheimer, S.A.…36 Wesley, J.…551 Wewers, G.A.…45, 72, 267 Wheelwright, J.…553 White, P.…155, 524 Whittaker, C.R.…294 Widengren, G.…60 Wiedemann, T.E.J.…264, 747 Williams, A.L.…198 Williams, C.H.…179, 565 Williams, G.H.…480 Williams, J.…584–585 Williams, M.J.…607 Williams, R.…445, 713, 719 Willoughby, H.R.…530 Wilson, N.G.…517 Windisch, H.…207 Winship, M.P.…553, 617 Winstanley, G.…1, 14, 18, 21, 102– 107, 110–111, 113, 135, 406, 440, 469, 482–486, 489–490, 497–499, 506, 508, 553–555, 582–583, 595– 598, 609–610, 614, 617–618, 663– 669, 677, 712, 737–738 Wintermute, O.…60 Winterson, J.…737 Winthrop, J.…422, 616–617 Wire, A.C.…380 Wolfson, E.…115, 344, 367 Wordsworth, W.…147, 683 Worrall, D.…718 Wright, R.M.…584, 638 Xavier, C.…126 Yeats, W.B.…148 Yoder, J.H.…230 York, A.D.…210 Young, E.…108, 604, 711 Zimmerli, W.…188–189 Žižek, S.…437

Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Edited by Jörg Frey (Zürich) Associate Editors: Markus Bockmuehl (Oxford) ∙ James A. Kelhoffer (Uppsala) Tobias Nicklas (Regensburg) ∙ Janet Spittler (Charlottesville, VA) J. Ross Wagner (Durham, NC)

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Mohr Siebeck

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