Appendix G: The Apocalyptic Literature595

The Apocalyptic Literature is a characteristic product of Jewish national and religious thought. It was a favorite literary method of a particular age, and was born of a travail of soul which strove to find expression for those new currents of thought and feeling that came to the surface in later Judaism. Following the decadence of prophecy it belonged to the period of Jewish oppression, and voiced the heart-cry of a people true to God in the midst of national distress. Though anticipated in fragmentary parts of earlier prophecies, as in Ezekiel and Zechariah, the style of Apocalyptic first found definite form in the book of Daniel, which became the type of all subsequent Writings of this class that flourished so abundantly in the two centuries preceding and the century following the beginning of the Christian era. Couched in language that is characteristically figurative and symbolical the literary form is at once marked and significant, and reached its highest development in the canonical Apocalypse which has given name to the whole class. The essential limitations of this class of literature are clearly recognizable; its ideas move within a narrow range, its point of view is sombre and unequal, and its center of interest is mainly eschatological. It occupies a sphere peculiarly its own, a world of pious and often fantastic dreams—“for prophecy as it lost its footing on the solid earth took refuge in the clouds”;596 it wrote the word mystery large across its page, and revelled in the weird and shadowy; but beneath its peculiar phantasy lay a profound religious motive—it sought to stay the troubled souls of men in time of storm, and in its deeper purpose strove to reconcile the righteousness of God with the sufferings of his people. In the form of strange and sometimes even grotesque symbolic visions—thought couched in symbols burning and vivid, which no other figure of speech could so well convey—and under the name of some hero of the past, it sketched in [pg 255] outline a history of the world, the origin of evil, the future victory of righteousness, and the final consummation of all things through which alone, according to the Apocalyptic view, the providential rule of God could be vindicated.

There still exists a not inconsiderable remnant of this very interesting literature, though the greater portion has perished in the wreckage of time. The principal books still extant are the Apocalypse of Baruch; the Ethiopic and Slavonic Books of Enoch; the Ascension of Isaiah; the Book of Jubilees; the Assumption of Moses; the Testaments of the XII Patriarchs; Second Esdras (known also as Fourth Ezra); the Psalms of Solomon; and the Sibylline Oracles. The late recovery of some of these from apparent oblivion is a matter of history, and their recension and translation by European and American scholars is not without interest to the general student. The study of this literature as a distinct class is one of the notable contributions to knowledge by the modern critical school. These Jewish Apocalypses were widely read in their day, and they both partook of and leavened the thought of their time, for they incorporated and expressed the current mysterious hopes and beliefs of the people. Their influence is distinctly traceable in the diction of the New Testament, and the Book of Enoch is obviously quoted in the Epistle of Jude. These works ranked very high with the primitive Christians, and this led to their being reedited by early Christian writers, and, it is generally thought, to the interpolation of later ideas. There is, however, a very wide variation of opinion concerning the extent to which changes have been introduced, and this is one of the puzzling questions that confronts the textual critic. Then, also, beside these changes in the older books, a new series of Christian Apocalypses sprang up, influenced no doubt by the Apocalypse of John. A considerable number of these have survived, such as the Apocalypse of Peter, of Paul, Thomas, Stephen, Cerinthus and others, but the greater portion have been lost, and those we have are decidedly inferior both in style and conception to the earlier Jewish works of which they are a feeble imitation.

It is difficult for us to conceive the conditions of mind and thought that gave rise to such a literature. [pg 256] In itself it affords an interesting psychological study. The Oriental is a mystic by nature, and many of his ways of thinking can never be quite clear to the Western mind. The Jew in times past was the great figure of the Orient, as he has also been well named “the most commanding figure in history”; for whatever he may now be, the Hebrew which we find in his literature is enveloped in the atmosphere of the East. The Hebrew writers as a class are unique. Although devoid in a large measure of the humanistic idea of literature for its own sake, they yet subserved the truest aim in that they brought to the surface and made verbal those deeper tides of thought and feeling which move and flow in the universal heart, those wide-spread and enduring currents which they instinctively felt were shared by the men of their own generation. Writing only for a religious purpose, and because they had a message for life, the development of their thought-forms was more or less incidental, and was the product alike of the man, his religion, and his environment. So that while we especially emphasize the national conditions which contributed so largely to the birth of this literary form, we should not forget that behind all that which was temporary and passing lay the Semitic mind and the Mosaic cult.

The rise of Apocalyptic marks a transition stage in the development of Hebrew thought that is of momentous significance, for it led to clearer views of immortality, and truer conceptions of God's relation to the world of men, as well as to a distinct clarifying of the Messianic hope. Its deeper roots are found in the failure of prophecy. No living voice was heard among the people speaking for God as in former days. Prophecy had grown senile and was in decay; it had become a thing of the past, and in its place had followed the scholastic work of the scribes, mechanically interpreting the messages of old. But, as is pointed out by Charles, “Scribism could not satisfy the aspirations of the nation: it represented an unproductive age of criticism, following a productive age of prophetic genius.” And Apocalyptic was the spontaneous outcry of a heart-hunger which refused to be fed on the barren husks of labored interpretation served up by the scribes. It was in the true line of succession to prophecy, [pg 257] and though it fell far behind the prophetic message both in its form and content, and was even feeble in comparison, yet, as Charles has said, “It attested beyond doubt the reappearance of spiritual genius in the field of thought and action.” There is assuredly something that is profoundly pathetic in this deep heart-cry of the Jewish people which rings mournfully out of the far past; for even at this remote distance of time and space we cannot read without emotion their enduring record of sorrow and suffering, of longing and hope, if we share at all in the wider world of religious experience.597

The apocalyptists were evidently conscious that they had no new message for their generation, and this conviction led to certain well-defined results. First of all they fell back upon the old message for most of their ideas; but with singular skill they contrived to present them in new form. The essential elements of their thought were taken from the Old Testament prophecies, while the material framework was drawn from without. They attempted in their own way to develop an esoteric meaning in the prophecies of the past, and for this purpose called to their aid the bold and striking imagery of the Eastern mind. They laid under contribution the luxuriant symbols of Babylon, Persia, and the surrounding nations; they gathered the rarest figures from the accumulated stores of poetry, art, and religion; and then with a fertile fancy they interwove these all in the fantastic fabric of their dreams. Then, again, they hid their own personality, and masked under the name of some great religious hero of the past. Enoch and Moses, Isaiah and Baruch, served as a thin disguise for the real authors who remained unknown,—for the Apocalyptic writings are all pseudonymous so far as known, with the apparent exception of the Apocalypse of John, and the Shepherd of Hermas,—and yet we cannot say that there was any real motive of deception in this, if we take into account the views of authorship which then prevailed, for “the ethical notion of literary property is a plant of modern growth”.598

The fashioning of Apocalyptic was influenced by many different causes, but the most marked and significant [pg 258] of them all is to be found in the existing national conditions of the time. By the captivity in Babylon Judah had been brought within the sweep of the great tide of history; the world became vaster; prophecy had a new and broader outlook, and its thought was forever after interpenetrated by an element of Apocalyptic. The strange figures of Babylonian imagery were absorbed by the Hebrew mind, and enshrined in their subsequent literature. On the other hand the nation itself was in decay; the power of the past had been broken and destroyed; and “it was terror and oppression”, in good part at least, as Stevens has well said, “that gave this new trend to their thought”. They had drunk deeply of the bitter cup of national distress; the encroachment of the world-empires had envenomed the past, embittered the present, and overshadowed the future; the glorious promises of God had thus far failed of any substantial realization, and the contrast between promise and fulfilment was too wide to be overlooked. But the Hebrew with sublime courage did not lose faith in God because of the delay. Apocalyptic voiced his answer to the problems of the time, and it, like Prophecy and the Wisdom Literature, was rooted in certain ethical conceptions which are fundamental to its thought, such as that God is holy, that the world in which we live is a moral world, and that righteousness must win.599 And this gave to the apocalyptist his theme:—the Fortunes of the Kingdom of God, and how they are to be reconciled with all that God has said; for God must be vindicated, he is forever true, and his word cannot fail. This thesis was maintained in two ways. First, by attempting a wider view of the problem of sin and righteousness. That became the question no longer of a single nation, but of the whole race—for under the stimulus of new and wider conditions, a great enlargement of the Hebrew spirit took place. There must be a providential and moral order in the universe which if sought out will give the true meaning of history. The divine purpose must be interpreted through the broader sphere of the world's life. This standpoint had now become possible through the wider world-view produced in later Judaism by contact and intercourse with other nations. And thus Apocalyptic came to express [pg 259] both a deeply wrought theodicy and a Semitic philosophy of history. Second, the apocalyptist completed his vindication of God by shifting the center of attention from the present to the future. The more certain it became that no present realization of his hopes was possible, the more surely he turned to a future age that would abundantly recompense all the pain and disappointment of the past. It was this that made the outlook of Apocalyptic essentially eschatological. Beginning with the history of the past veiled under the form of prophecy, the apocalyptist rushes on to predict the future, for there he finds the victory. The End! The End! is his cry,—the End that victory may come—for God is to be vindicated only by the consummation of all things, and history can only be read aright in the light of its finality. The answer of the End is the key that Apocalyptic offers to the mystery of all that “which was and is and is to come”; and it is this persistent effort to read the mind of God concerning the future that gives to Apocalyptic an element of peculiar interest. For though it is often like the voice of “an infant crying in the night * * * * and with no language but a cry”, it has yet a deep significance all its own; it was a form of thought by which God led his people into clearer views of truth, and to new and larger vision.600 Upon the other hand the shifting-point in every apocalypse from history to prediction can usually be made out without essential effort; for beneath the form of symbols and symbolic actions can ordinarily be discovered the chief actors and principal events of the past and present which correspond to history; while the things of the future which are predicted, reach out at once to extravagant proportions. Thus each Jewish apocalypse by its content and movement, serves to mark out its own horizon and reveal its own environment.

The general prevalence of the Apocalyptic form in the period in which it was used may be accounted for [pg 260] partly by its suitability to the theme which it treated, and partly by the prevailing conditions of national surveillance. Its visions and symbols and dream-movement were peculiarly adapted to meet the conditions of a writing which did not dare to make plain its bitter reproaches of the foes of Israel. Its hidden meaning, also, answered well to hint darkly what lay in the future; and its fantastic imagery appealed to the imagination.601 The pervasive element of mystery served to invest these writings with a subtle charm that all the intervening lapse of centuries and even the present temper of a scientific age have wholly failed to dissipate. The effort of most modern Jewish scholars to attribute the Apocalyptic Literature to Essenism cannot be sustained; neither can we accept the gratuitous assertion of Montefiore, that “the Apocalyptic writings lie for the most part outside the line of the purest Jewish development”. SchÜrer and Charles reflect the opinion of the majority of Christian scholars in maintaining its nearer relation to Phariseeism, though admitting it to be “a product of free religious thought following older models”, and showing distinctive marks of Phariseeism in some of its parts and of Sadduceeism in others. At the same time most authorities are willing to grant the probability of Wellhausen's suggestion, that “the secret literature of the Essenes was perhaps in no small degree made use of in the Pseudepigrapha, and has through them been indirectly handed down to us”.

The value of Apocalyptic is increasingly recognized as a storehouse of Jewish and Jewish-Christian thought in the age preceding and in the early part of the Christian era. It forms the necessary connecting link between the Old Testament and the New, and is especially rich in messianic and eschatological conceptions. It is the chief source of information through which we can trace the changes that occurred in Jewish belief, and the later development of Jewish thought, in the period immediately preceding the time of Christ. It carries us back, in effect, to the thought-world of the first century, and enables us, as SchÜrer aptly says, “to reconstruct the thought, the aspiration, and the hopes of pious Jews [pg 261] in the generation that first heard the gospel, and even of the Apostles themselves; for however Christ's thought transcended the thought of his time, that of the Apostles did not, except so far as the Holy Spirit illumined them for special ends.” And, as Charles remarks, “If the Apocalypses were edited later they only reflect more fully the thought of that age, and they exhibit what is subsumed throughout in Christ's teachings.” We can see in these writings not only a transition stage in Judaism preparatory to the gospel, but how this modified Jewish thought fits in with the gospel teaching. They show, for example, how the Old Testament idea of the future life grew in depth and compass in those centuries which precede the Christian era; and how this advance was retained and enlarged, modified and exalted, by Christ himself and by the Apostles; and how, also, the expansive growth of the messianic hope, which was sometimes almost wholly submerged, but which always contrived to reappear with increasing clearness, contributed to that popular expectancy, though in some degree also to that general misapprehension, of the Messiah's mission which the New Testament everywhere reveals. And they enable us to appreciate how the divine method of gradual advance in spiritual knowledge was operating during those prevening centuries which have so often been regarded as barren and fruitless; and how this advance contributed its due proportion to the marvellous results attained in the life of our blessed Lord and in the period of the apostolic church. The force of this conclusion is, of course, partially annulled if we assume, as has been done by some, that many of the clearer messianic references in the Apocalyptic writings are Christian interpolations. But the present tendency of critics is toward a less destructive view than formerly prevailed. Charles, for example, maintains that the possibilities of Jewish thought should be given full scope, and nothing attributed to Christian interpolation, or to Persian or other external origin, except that which cannot be reasonably accounted for from Jewish sources. The general independence of Israel's religious development has certainly come out more clearly from the investigation. As has been pointed out by Fairweather, “With the exception of certain modes of thought and expression, [pg 262] including the visionary style so much employed by Ezekiel, the patriotic Jew apparently brought back with him from Babylon no new literary possession.... Many scholars explain the eschatological development of the Apocryphal period on the theory of the contact of Judaism with foreign systems of thought.... But, as Nicolas has said, ‘Ideas do not pass ready made and complete from one nation to another like the fruits of industry which are transported in caravans.’... There may be, however, stimulus without transference, and this appears to be what really happened in the case before us.”602

The Apocalyptic Literature undoubtedly served a splendid purpose, for its effects were both wide-spread and in many respects beneficial. It served to rebuke sin, to maintain righteousness without any present prospect of reward, to keep alive the rich hopes of the future, to comfort God's children in the midst of distress, and to cultivate a patriotic spirit that cherished the nobler ideals of the past; while at the same time it formed a secure depository for those new concepts of truth that sprang up during the long era of preparation for the Messiah, and it thereby contributed a rich quota of thought and phrase to that greater future which was then drawing near to its birth. “In general Apocalyptic furnishes the atmosphere of the New Testament. Its form, its language, and its material are extensively used.... The simplest way to describe the relation is to say that Jesus and the writers of the New Testament found the forms of thought made use of in Apocalyptic Literature convenient vehicles, and have cast the gospel of God's redemptive love into these as into moulds. The Messianism of the apocalyptists has thus become unfolded into the Christology of the New Testament.”603 But upon the other hand Apocalyptic reveals a type of thought that can scarcely be regarded as healthful. It had no deep or abiding sympathy with the great overshadowing world-sorrow which it measurably apprehended, and it proposed no present remedy for the unhappy fortunes of Judaism. It dealt too largely with the future hopes of the nation, and did not like prophecy address itself to the immediate possibilities of the present; [pg 263] and it thereby robbed life of one of its chief incentives to action, viz. the hope of present success. For it gave up hope of the world as it was, and thereby produced a world-despair that could not be counteracted by the prospective world-joy which glowed in the messianic promise. According to Apocalyptic perspective, “the present served mainly as a back-ground of shadow for developing the richer light of the coming age;” and, “the proper design of the world was to be found in its ending and not in its longer continuance.” Even with the wider world-view which the apocalyptists possessed, history lost its value; for they at least partially misread the providential order of the world. As Stevens has forcibly said, they “viewed the method of God as ictic and sudden, and not detailed and patient”,—the very opposite of the divine method in history. And such an interpretation of life produced its inevitable results in dreams of an hallucinary but impossible future. It developed and cultured a form of mysticism that has left a permanent impression upon the Christian church—a mysticism that takes refuge from present evils, and from worse that are deemed impending, in the hope of an ultimate and protracted future of blessing wrought by cataclysmic revolutions, and leading up to a new manifestation of the divine Person upon earth, and to new conditions of life in the world of nature.604 For it is in Apocalyptic rather than in Scripture that we find the source of that pessimistic view which has prevailed in various circles of the church in all ages, that looks for the world to grow continually worse as the centuries go on, until by a great climax of the future a new order of things shall be introduced that is essentially different in its divine manifestations and in its spiritual ordering from all the past. But notwithstanding the many defects of this class of writings, and their manifest extravagancies, they were yet divinely used, and evidently filled an exceptionally large place in the far-reaching providential plan of God for the education of the Jewish nation, and through them of the world, just as God is ever using human and imperfect means for wise and beneficent ends.