RICHARD BAUCKHAM
‘APOCALYPSE’ (from Greek apokalupsis, ‘revelation’) is the term used to describe a type of ancient Jewish and Christian literature. In popular modern usage it has come to mean ‘the end of the world’, but in this essay it will be used exclusively for a genre of literature. A definition of this genre that would be widely accepted is: a work with a narrative framework in which otherwise inaccessible knowledge is revealed by an otherworldly agent of revelation (such as an angel or Jesus Christ or God) to a human recipient (cf. J. J. Collins 1979: 9). Most apocalypses are pseudonymous, ascribed to an authoritative biblical figure, in whose name the work is written. (A few, including the book of Revelation [or Apocalypse of John] in the New Testament, are ascribed to their real author, but they will not concern us here.) Many works of this type were called ‘apocalypses’ in the ancient period, but others did not have this word in their title, while the word was occasionally used for works that do not come within the definition I have just given. Since the content of apocalypses was often prophetic, it is not surprising that ancient authors sometimes used the term ‘apocalypse’ for works that would more accurately be called prophecies, though sometimes they did distinguish the two. In this essay I restrict the term ‘apocalypse’ to works that fit the definition I have given and I distinguish them from ‘prophetic works’. These differ from apocalypses in that the prophet speaks either in his or her own person with prophetic authority or quotes prophetic utterances attributed directly to God, in the manner of the biblical prophets. Again we shall confine our discussion to pseudonymous examples, attributed to prophetic figures from the Bible or (in the case of the Sibyls) pagan antiquity. Of course, all genres have borderline cases and some writings have the characteristics of more than one genre. We should not be too rigid about genre definitions, but the distinction I have made between apocalypses and prophetic works is useful for our present purposes.
Apocalypses and prophetic works differ from other genres of Early Christian Apocrypha in that they constitute literary traditions already well established in Jewish usage before Christian authors adopted them. In the case of these genres there is direct continuity between the Jewish and Christian traditions. Not only the book of Daniel (the only apocalypse in the Hebrew Bible), but also non-canonical Jewish apocalypses were read and valued by early Christians, who sometimes produced redacted versions of them as well as writing similar works of their own, which often draw on material from the Jewish apocalypses. Surprisingly, the New Testament apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, exercised little influence on these Christian apocalypses. Jesus’ revelatory discourse about the future (Matt. 24; Mark 13; Luke 21) was rather more influential, but most early Christian apocalypses owed more to the Jewish tradition than they did to the New Testament.
In order to classify the Early Christian Apocrypha of these kinds, I shall distinguish three different types of apocalypse and two different types of prophecy. First, there are apocalypses that reveal the course of history and the eschatological future of history. They work with a predominantly temporal axis. Second, there are apocalypses that reveal the contents of the other world, the unseen world that can only be visited, in this life, by visionaries taken out of this world so that they can travel through the various heavens with their varied contents. This type of apocalypse works with a predominantly spatial axis. The contents may include meteorological and astronomical phenomena in the lower heavens, as well as, in the highest heaven, the throne of God and the angels who worship before it. The places of the dead, paradise and hell, are sometimes located in the heavens, sometimes elsewhere. So the interest of this kind of work can be quite varied. The fate of persons after death is often the most important or sole concern, but other heavenly mysteries feature too. Scholars of early Judaism and the New Testament tend to be most familiar with the first of these two types of apocalypses, but the second type is also very old and was popular among both Jews and Christians from the late Second Temple period onwards. The two types may overlap. For example, a tour of the other world may include some eschatological prophecy.
A third type of apocalypse I call ‘Questions’. They take the form of questions posed by the biblical figure to whom the work is ascribed and the answers given by the heavenly revealer. The subject matter can range widely over the same kind of topics as the other two types of apocalypse address. This third type of apocalypse seems to be a purely Christian development, without Jewish precedent. The two types of prophetic work I shall distinguish are, first, those which adopt the style of the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and, secondly, those that belong to the tradition of Sibylline prophetic oracles.
I shall discuss these five categories of literature in general and then give more detailed attention to a few major examples: the Ascension of Isaiah, and the apocalypses of Peter, Paul, and Thomas. In relation to the five categories of literature I shall refer to Jewish examples that were read and preserved by Christians. It is important to realize that most of these works eventually fell out of favour in Greek-speaking Christian traditions, and so have been preserved for us in translations into Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian, Old Slavonic, and other languages, depending on the branch(es) of Christianity in which they survived. The Christian reception history of these Jewish works needs to be studied in connection with the similar literature written by Christians.
The Old Testament book of Daniel is the earliest example of this genre of Jewish literature, while the New Testament book of Revelation is also an apocalypse of this type. It includes the spatial axis of revelation in that the prophet John is taken up in vision to the divine throne room in heaven, but the purpose of his vision of the worship of God in heaven is to enable him to understand and to receive the revelation of the future, the coming of God’s kingdom on earth, that the rest of his visions comprise. In this respect it resembles the nearly contemporary Apocalypse of Abraham (Charlesworth 1983: 689–95), preserved only in Old Slavonic but originally a Jewish work of c.100 CE (Harlow 2013). There too the seer ascends to the heavenly throne room, from which he looks down on the earth and sees in vision the whole course of human history, from Adam and Eve to the end of history.
The Ladder of Jacob, a work that similarly survives only in Old Slavonic (Charlesworth 1985: 401–11), is likewise a Jewish work of perhaps c.100 CE, to which Christian additions have been made in Slavonic. The Apocalypse of Baruch (2 Baruch) (Charlesworth 1983: 615–52), another Jewish work of the late first century CE, is now extant only in Syriac. These works may have had only limited circulation in Christian circles, but the Apocalypse of Ezra (4 Ezra) (Charlesworth 1983: 517–59; Stone 1990; and in editions of the English Apocrypha as 2 Esdras 3–14), from roughly the same date, was evidently valued widely by Christians and influenced the writing of Christian apocalypses, as we shall see. It is noteworthy that all these apocalypses were read and valued by Christians, even though they were written well after the beginning of the Christian movement. Presumably this late origin was not known by their Christian readers, who valued their prophecies of the Messiah among other aspects of their content. Also particularly popular among Christians were the various works ascribed to Enoch and included in the collection we know as 1 Enoch, several parts of which are apocalypses of the historical-eschatological type.
The Apocalypse of Peter, one of the earliest of the Christian apocalypses, represents Jesus, after the resurrection, expanding on the eschatological discourse that he had given to his disciples before his death (Matt. 24). It will be discussed in more detail later. A lesser-known work in which the risen Christ similarly expands, at the request of the disciples, on his previous teaching, forms the first part of the Syriac Testament of our Lord (1.2–14: Cooper and Maclean 1902: 49–59), the rest of which is a manual of church order from the fifth century. The apocalypse is certainly older than the rest of the work, and is also known in a somewhat different form in an Ethiopic version (The Testament of our Lord in Galilee). Its narrative of the signs preceding the parousia draws on Matthew 24 and other parts of the New Testament, but also includes material, such as a physical description of Antichrist, that is paralleled elsewhere in Christian apocalypses and prophetic works. Its general theme of the increase of evils of all kinds as the end of history approaches, culminating in the reign of Antichrist, his deception of the world, and persecution of the elect, is common in Christian literature of this kind. This apocalypse may be quite early, but has so far been studied hardly at all (see A. Y. Collins 1979: 77–8).
The Apocalypse of Thomas is known in two recensions. The shorter and probably earlier recension, following a brief general description of the evils of the last days, focuses on the last eight days of this world’s history, describing the signs in the heavens that will be seen on each of seven days and the deliverance of the elect on the eighth day. It will be discussed in more detail later. The longer recension places before the account of the eight last days a narrative review of the history leading up to the end. Following an account of apostasy in the church, the narrative takes the form of a succession of kings (Roman emperors), good and bad, with summaries of events in their reigns. Surprisingly this narrative ends before the appearance of Antichrist. It must have been an independent text before being joined to the account of the eight last days.
The model for apocalyptic narratives of this kind, recounting the reigns of a succession of kings leading up to the last events of history, was chapters 10–12 of the book of Daniel. In such narratives, many of the kings were already figures of the past when the text was written, though they belonged to the future from the point of view of the seer to whom the prophecy is fictionally attributed. Such texts can often be dated approximately by determining the point in the narrative where a transition is made from events in the real author’s past, events we can identify historically, to the part of the narrative that was future from the real author’s standpoint and does not correspond to history. Usually but not always, the real author places himself and his readers not too far from the eschatological climax of history. However, identifying the point of transition is not always straightforward, both because the descriptions of rulers and events can be vague or cryptic, and because the texts were sometimes updated by interpolations in the course of transition (cf. DiTommaso 2005: 104–7). In the case of the longer recension of the Apocalypse of Thomas, however, the textual indications point to the middle of the fifth century.
The purpose of such reviews of history, presented as prophecy and as prelude to the still future events of the last days, was not merely to authenticate the work by means of prophecies that appeared to have been already fulfilled, but, more importantly, to convey a sense that history proceeds according to a predetermined divine plan. When evil seems out of control, in reality it is subject to the overriding purpose of God, and the final redemption of the faithful is assured, provided they remain faithful through the trials of the last days.
The longer recension of the Apocalypse of Thomas is probably the first Christian apocalypse of this type that we have, though one passage in the Christian Sibylline Oracles provides a short narrative of Roman emperors (Sib. Or. 8.50–72). But one of the apocryphal Daniel apocalypses, the Seventh Vision of Daniel, is an apocalypse of this type written not much later (c.484–91) (La Porta 2013: 414–15). Whereas the longer recension of the Apocalypse of Thomas comes from the west of the empire and was probably composed in Latin, the Seventh Vision of Daniel was written in the east in Greek, though now extant only in Armenian. It records a seventh vision additional to the six visions in the canonical book of Daniel. A significant feature is that it appears to predict a sequence of many generations subsequent to the real author’s time and prior to the final events of world history. Eschatological imminence is not essential to this kind of apocalypse.
A large number of other apocryphal Daniel apocalypses were written, in the Christian east, from the fifth to at least the tenth century, and there are even Islamic examples, written in Arabic, and a Jewish example in Hebrew (DiTommaso 2005, chapter 3, describes twenty-four Daniel apocalypses; see also Henze 2001). Most have in common a narrative review of history as a series of rulers, together with a cluster of end-time motifs, such as the last Christian emperor, the figure of Antichrist, Gog and Magog, and the return of Enoch and Elijah. The profusion of such works should be related to the turbulent times in which they were written, including the Muslim conquest of much of the Byzantine Empire. A closely related work is the Apocalypse of (Pseudo-)Methodius, attributed to Bishop Methodius of Olympus (d. 311). Composed in Syriac, c.692, and well known in both Greek and Latin versions, it proved hugely influential, not only in the east but also, unlike the Daniel apocalypses, in the Latin west (Reinink 2005: chs 5–10; Himmelfarb 2010: 128–35; Garstad 2012).
The Greek Tiburtine Sibyl, which is known in a sixth-century version of a late fourth-century original (Alexander 1967; Buitenwerf 2013), is more like an apocalypse than the other Sibylline books in Greek (it is not one of the standard collection discussed later). Whereas they are prophetic oracles delivered by the Sibyl in hexameter verse, this work is a prose account of the Sibyl’s interpretation of a vision or dream that a hundred judges in the city of Rome have had and ask her to interpret. The vision and the Sibyl’s interpretation present a scheme of world history from creation to the end, comparable in some ways with the content of some of the Sibylline Oracles, but also resembling the Daniel apocalypses.
The term ‘other world’ here refers to parts of the cosmos that are not normally accessible to living people but which it was thought could be visited in the kind of visions that are described in these apocalypses. Early Jewish apocalypses of this type include visits to the places of the dead (either where they presently are or where they will be after the last judgement), but also display wide-ranging interests in other secrets of the cosmos, such as the courses of the heavenly bodies, the sources of meteorological phenomena, and the various angelic inhabitants of the heavens, as well as the divine throne and those who worship around it in the highest heaven. By contrast, most Christian apocalypses of this type—and certainly the most popular ones—focus exclusively on the fate of the dead (Bauckham 1998: 81–96). It was on this important subject that they were valued as adding to the relatively meagre information to be found in the New Testament. Christian thought, imagination, and art throughout the centuries (though especially in pre-modern periods) have been richly fed by this tradition of apocalyptic visions.
The oldest Jewish apocalypse in which a seer tours the ‘other world’ in visions is the Enochic Book of Watchers (1 Enoch 1–36) (third or early second century BCE). Around the beginning of the first century CE a major shift occurred in the kind of cosmology that informs such apocalypses. Apart from the divine throne in heaven, the sights seen by Enoch, including the places of the dead, were located at the furthest extremities of the earth, but later apocalypses envisage a series of seven heavens above the earth, each much greater in height than the one below, culminating in the throne of God in or above the seventh heaven. Thus in 2 Enoch (Charlesworth 1983: 91–213), probably a Jewish work of around the first century CE, the kinds of sights that in the Book of Watchers Enoch had seen at the edges of the earth are relocated to the lower heavens.
The case of 3 Baruch (Charlesworth 1983: 653–79) is particularly instructive for our purposes. In an originally Jewish work from c.100 CE, Baruch ascends through five of the seven heavens and sees such interesting sights as the source of the rivers, the paths of the sun and the moon through the heavens, the garden of Eden, heavenly birds that continuously praise God, and the way in which angels present the prayers of humans to God. He does not see the dead except in the special instance of those who built the tower of Babel (3.2–7; 4.3–8). But we have 3 Baruch only in two Christian recensions, in Greek and Old Slavonic, and Christian additions to the text can be distinguished by the fact that each addition appears in only one of the two recensions. Both recensions contrive to introduce the souls of the dead into Baruch’s vision but in different ways (Bauckham 2001: 183). For example, the Greek recension identifies the heavenly birds as the souls of the righteous engaged in singing praise to God (10.5), while the Slavonic recension adds to the end of the text visits by Baruch to the places where the righteous dead rejoice and the wicked dead are punished (16.4–8). These Christian adaptations of the Jewish work illustrate how Christian interest in this type of apocalypse was especially focused on the fate of the dead.
Another historical development of which we must take account is in views of the intermediate state, the condition of the dead between their death and their bodily resurrection at the end of history. In the older view, the dead are in Sheol or Hades, awaiting their resurrection and the last judgement, which will either consign them to hell or admit them to paradise. This does not necessarily mean that they are presently in a neutral condition: the wicked may be understood to be waiting in fear for their future punishment, the righteous in joyful anticipation of their coming reward (4 Ezra 7.75–101; 2 Enoch 40.13J). This older view survives in only two Christian apocalypses, one of which is the Apocalypse of the Virgin that forms the final part of the Syriac Transitus Mariae (Bauckham 1998: 346–60) (this is one of four different apocalypses attributed to the Virgin Mary). When the Virgin sees hell, with the smoke and the stench of sulphur and the roar of the flames coming from it, she also sees the wicked viewing it from a distance, knowing that it is the punishment that awaits them at the day of judgement. When she sees paradise, she sees the righteous similarly viewing it from afar, delighting in the prospect of their future rewards. It is interesting that this apocalypse while featuring the places of the dead also includes sights of some of the other mysteries to be seen in the various heavens, such as the storehouses of the weather and the angels engaged in ceaseless praise of God, as well as the heavenly Jerusalem in which God dwells. All these features suggest that, although the present form of the work probably dates from the fifth century, it draws on much older material. The other Christian apocalypse, in which the old view of the state of the dead survives, is a Byzantine apocalypse which Court calls the Third Apocalypse of John (Court 2000: 104–31), though, as in 4 Ezra 7.75–101, there are no visions, just an account.
Most of the Christian apocalypses that deal with the fate of the dead have a different view of the intermediate state. In this conception the dead are already, prior to the last judgement, in either hell or paradise, suffering punishment in hell or enjoying the delights of paradise. This development probably first appeared in pre-Christian Jewish apocalypses, in particular in an Apocalypse of Elijah, of which only quotations have survived (Stone and Strugnell 1979: 5–85). It was a development within the Jewish tradition, but it may well have been influenced by Greco-Roman pagan accounts of descent to Hades, where the differing fates of the dead could be observed (Bauckham 1998: 19–32). Certainly, the Jewish and Christian apocalypses borrowed from such accounts some of the specific punishments that the damned in hell are depicted as suffering. What the new conception of the present conditions of the dead made possible, in Jewish and Christian apocalypses, were tours of the punishments, in which the seer is able to observe in each case what kind of sinner was suffering what kind of punishment. This particular subgenre of apocalyptic vision became very popular (Himmelfarb 1983; Bauckham 1998: 49–80), along with visits to the righteous in paradise that tended to be far less detailed than the accounts of hell. Clearly the paraenetic potential of a visionary account of hell was much enhanced when the seer could describe differentiated punishments actually being exacted. Adulterers, for example, could be warned of exactly what terrifying fate is awaiting them at death, and each major type of sinner similarly. Along with this development went the advent of apocalypses exclusively concerned with the fate of the dead.
The oldest of these that we know may be the Apocalypse of Zephaniah, which survives in Coptic in a rather fragmentary condition (Charlesworth 1983: 497–515). Scholars are divided as to whether it is of Jewish or Christian origin, though it was certainly in use among Egyptian Christians. In this work the prophet Zephaniah follows the path of the soul of a dead person through the other world. As in some of the Graeco-Roman descents to Hades (Bauckham 1998: 23–6), he apparently falls into a cataleptic trance, which enables his soul to take leave of his body and be conducted by an angel through the experiences of a soul after death, but then to return to his body and recount what he has seen. The angel protects Zephaniah from the angels of punishment who seize the souls of the wicked after death, and conducts him first to Hades, where his sins and righteous deeds are assessed and he is vindicated as righteous, and then to paradise, where he meets the patriarchs. From paradise he is able to look down into the abyss where the wicked are punished and see the various punishments endured by various categories of sinners. He also sees how the righteous in paradise, also looking down on the suffering of the wicked, pray for God’s mercy for them. In this text it is not clear whether this intercession for the damned in hell has any effect. The same motif of prayer for mercy for the damned, either by the righteous in paradise or by the seer when he views the punishments, is found in many of the visits to hell in the Christian apocalypses. Sometimes it is merely rebuffed; sometimes it wins some kind of concession from God, such as the Sabbath or Sunday rest of the damned, a day’s respite each week from the pains of hell. These apocalypses, along with a desire to see justice done and a strategy of evoking repentance by those who might otherwise go to hell, also give voice to a compassionate impulse in the face of the terrifying pictures of hell that they paint (Bauckham 1998: 132–48).
The longest and most influential of the apocalypses that deal exclusively with the fate of the dead is the Apocalypse of Paul, written around the end of the fourth century (Piovanelli 1993, 2007), which will be discussed in detail. Its popularity, in a variety of later forms, for many centuries and in most of the diverse Christian traditions, was due to the fact that it gives so detailed a picture of the afterlife. It was a subject about which people naturally wanted to know and the Apocalypse of Paul, apparently on good authority, offered an unrivalled wealth of information. Surprisingly, the original Greek form of the work has not survived, doubtless because in Greek-speaking churches it was supplanted by the Greek Apocalypse of the Virgin, which fulfilled the same function. In the other churches of the east—Coptic, Syriac, Armenian—the Apocalypse of Paul was well known, in somewhat fluid textual forms, while in Ethiopia the Ethiopic Apocalypse of the Virgin is nothing but a version of the Apocalypse of Paul, with the protagonist changed (Bauckham 1998: 338–40). But it was in the Latin West that the Apocalypse of Paul had its greatest success, not only in a Latin version close to its putative Greek original, but also transmuted into a whole series of abbreviated and otherwise adapted later redactions in Latin, and translated into European vernaculars. Medieval Western conceptions of the fate of the dead, paradise, and hell, came more from the Apocalypse of Paul than from any other source. It exerted influence over a long series of medieval western visions of paradise and hell, which were ascribed not to biblical figures but to persons of the medieval period (e.g. the visions of Wetti, Tnugdale [Tundale], Adamnán, the Monk of Evesham, Thurkhill, and St Patrick’s Purgatory) (for some of these, see Gardiner 1989). These medieval visions are, in effect, a new genre of revelations of the fate of the dead in the other world, gradually incorporating the developing notion of purgatory. Finally and climactically, Dante’s Divine Comedy, indebted to the Apocalypse of Paul, is an astonishingly new and creative form of apocalypse of this type.
As already mentioned, the Greek Apocalypse of the Virgin (Bauckham 1998: 333–8), a work of uncertain date, supplanted the Apocalypse of Paul in Greek-speaking Christianity. It was inspired by the Apocalypse of Paul, but it focused exclusively on the punishments in hell. The same is true of Redaction IV of the Apocalypse of Paul, the most popular of the medieval Latin redactions. But the Greek Apocalypse of the Virgin, along with its lengthy account of the various punishments awaiting those guilty of the corresponding sins, also features the Virgin’s compassion for the damned. Joined by Michael and various saints, she prays for mercy for them, and obtains a respite for them of fifty days each year. It may have been a belief that her intercession would be even more efficacious than Paul’s that enabled her apocalypse to overtake his in popularity. A quite different Apocalypse of the Virgin (also distinct from the Syriac and Ethiopic apocalypses of the Virgin already mentioned) is found in that form of the extensive literature about the dormition of the Virgin that is known as the Obsequies of the Virgin Mary (Bauckham 1998: 340–6). There is a literary relationship between this apocalypse and the Apocalypse of Paul, but it is not clear which work is dependent on the other. It may well be that this Apocalypse of the Virgin was one of the sources of the Apocalypse of Paul, in which case it would date from the fourth century.
Another apocalypse of this type was ascribed to Ezra. It survives in two later forms: the Greek Apocalypse of Ezra (Charlesworth 1983: 561–79) and the Latin Vision of Ezra (Bauckham 2013). Although the original was written in Greek, it is the Latin Vision that preserves the content of the work more faithfully, whereas the Greek Apocalypse has drastically rearranged the material. In the Latin Vision, Ezra, described as a prophet, is conducted by angels on a tour of hell and paradise. His response to seeing each of the different punishments to which the wicked are subjected is in most cases to pray to God to have mercy on them. The abode of the righteous is much more briefly described. Then, taken up to the seventh heaven, he pleads the cause of sinners, not only asking God to spare them the punishments of hell, but also arguing with God about whether the damnation of sinners accords with God’s righteousness and mercy. This part of the work especially is inspired by 4 Ezra (chs 5–8) and accounts for the choice of Ezra as the seer of this apocalypse. But whereas in 4 Ezra Ezra’s pleas for mercy for sinners and his debate with the angel about theodicy elicit no positive response from God, in the Latin Vision of Ezra Ezra eventually secures a considerable respite from punishment for the damned: thirty-six hours each week. God makes this concession when Ezra offers his own life in exchange for the wicked. At this point the model is not the Ezra of 4 Ezra but Moses (Exod. 32.30–2).
If the Greek work underlying the Latin Vision of Ezra was Christian, it probably dates from the second half of the fourth century, but a good case can be made for regarding it as a non-Christian Jewish work written at any time from the second to the fourth century (Bauckham 2013: 505–10). It probably influenced the Greek Apocalypse of the Virgin, since only the Virgin Mary in that apocalypse prays for the damned as consistently and persistently as Ezra does in the Latin Vision of Ezra, and she is the only other apocalyptic seer who, like Ezra, offers to suffer instead of them. In its Latin version this apocalypse influenced some of the medieval visions, though it was not as influential as the Apocalypse of Paul.
The Coptic Gnostic Apocalypse of Paul (not to be confused with the Coptic version of the Apocalypse of Paul discussed already), one of the texts in the Nag Hammadi library (Hennecke-Schneemelcher 1992: 695–700), belongs to the tradition of revelations of the places of the dead, but the form has been adapted to express a specifically gnostic theology. Here Paul ascends in vision through the heavens, following the path of a soul after death as it is brought by angels up to the fourth heaven, where it is tried and condemned. In the seventh heaven, where the throne of God is usually located, Paul sees an old man on a throne. This is the Jewish god, the creator of the world, portrayed here as the gnostic figure of the demiurge. The demiurge is not able to prevent Paul ascending higher to ‘the place from which I have come’. In the cosmology of the Jewish and Christian apocalypses, the seventh is the highest heaven, but here Paul has come from and returns to a higher heaven, transcendent over the realms of the inferior god of the Jews. In the eighth heaven he greets the twelve apostles, in the ninth heaven those who evidently rank above the twelve in spiritual nature, and finally, in the tenth heaven, ‘I greeted my fellow-spirits’.
To the rule that Christian apocalypses of this type are overwhelmingly concerned with the fate of the dead, we should note one signal exception: the Coptic Mysteries of John (Court 2000: 132–63). This is a tour of the seven heavens in which, as in Jewish apocalypses such as 2 Enoch and 3 Baruch, all kinds of cosmological secrets are revealed, from meteorology to creation and the fall. Its sources and origins are obscure.
What is probably another work in a specifically Coptic tradition of apocalyptic writings is an Enoch Apocryphon that is preserved only in a very fragmentary state (Pearson 1972). What is revealed to Enoch in this case is the three ‘invisible names’ of the Trinity. Later the Sibyl, here described as Enoch’s sister, communicates eschatological revelations to him, with a focus on the last judgement. This work has been dated to the fifth century.
Most apocalypses include questions put by the seer and answers given by the heavenly agent of revelation. Often the questions are about the meaning of the visions the seer sees and form an integral part of the genre of revelatory vision already in the Old Testament (e.g. Zech. 1–7). This common feature of apocalypses was presumably the basis for the emergence of a subgenre in which all revelations of mysteries are given by the heavenly agent in response to questions posed by the seer. The most striking result of this development is a type of apocalypse in which the initiative in revelation lies entirely with the human seer, not with God. God does not choose to reveal what he knows people need to know; rather he (or Christ or an angel) satisfies human curiosity. The assumption seems to be that any question about divine or cosmic mysteries will be answered if it is put by a sufficiently favoured person. The subject matter of this type of apocalypse varies greatly, mostly overlapping the subject matter of the other two types.
The Questions of Bartholomew (Hennecke-Schneemelcher 1991: 539–53; Kaestli and Cherix 1993) is sometimes classified with apocryphal gospels, partly because of its content and partly because it has been supposed to have some connexion with a lost Gospel of Bartholomew, but generically it is an apocalypse of this type, dating perhaps from the late fourth or early fifth century (Kaestli and Cherix 1993: 94). Like 4 Ezra and the gnostic books of revelation, but unlike most of the Christian apocalypses, the Questions of Bartholomew presents itself as an esoteric work, to be divulged only to those who are worthy. It looks like a compendium of revelations on subjects the author found had not been been adequately treated in existing apocalyptic literature or gospels. Bartholomew, represented as the apostle who has the courage to ask the risen Jesus about these subjects when the other apostles hesitate to do so, asks about such matters as Jesus’ descent to Hades and which sins are the most grievous. He also asks the Virgin Mary about her experience of the conception of Jesus. But the largest part of the work is taken up by an appearance of Beliar or Satan, whom Bartholomew asks to see and who answers questions about himself and volunteers an account of his fall from heaven.
Also belonging to this type of apocalypse is a Greek apocryphal Apocalypse of John, now variously known as the Second Apocalypse of John (Court 2000: 23–65) or the First Apocryphal Apocalypse of John (Kaestli 2005), dating probably from the fifth or sixth century. This work is presented as a revelation of the contents of a book, sealed with seven seals, that is evidently a kind of supplement to the sealed scroll in the book of Revelation (Rev. 5.1–7). The contents of the scroll are divulged in the answers Christ gives to a long series of questions John puts to him about the events of the last days, the resurrection, and the last judgement. A prominent feature of the work is the abundance of scriptural quotations that are cited as referring to the eschatological information given in Christ’s answers. Early apocalypses hardly ever quote scripture, but later apocalypses in both the Jewish and the Christian traditions frequently do, perhaps from a sense that, despite their bold claim to be direct revelation, their contents might not be taken seriously without scriptural backing. Presumably following the precedent of this earliest apocryphal Apocalypse of John, later Greek apocalypses attributed to John also take the form of questions and answers, though in the case of the work Court calls the Third Apocalypse of John it is John himself who answers the questions put to him by James the Lord’s brother (Court 2000: 104–31). There is also an Apocalypse of John that consists of questions put by John and answers given him by Abraham (Kaestli 2005: 989). Finally, quite closely related to the First Apocryphal Apocalypse of John, there is a Bogomil and Cathar work, extant in Latin as the Book of John or Interrogatio Iohannis (i.e. Questions of John) (James 1924: 187–93).
The Questions of Ezra (Charlesworth 1983: 591–9; Stone 2006) is extant in Armenian and consists of a series of questions about the fate of the dead put by Ezra and answered by an angel. Like the Latin Vision of Ezra, the work is inspired by 4 Ezra and reflects, though in greatly attenuated form, Ezra’s debate with the angel in that work. Whether the Armenian is a translation of a Greek or Latin original is unknown, though the work’s formal resemblance to other examples of the apocalyptic subgenre of Questions may point in that direction.
Some of the apocalypses we have discussed (the Apocalypse of Peter, the Testament of Our Lord, the Questions of Bartholomew) are revelations given by Jesus Christ to his disciples in the context of conversations with them after his resurrection. This was a natural choice of setting for writers who wished to supplement the teaching of Jesus in the gospels with further revelations made by him on eschatological or other topics. Another work that uses the same setting for this purpose is the Epistle of the Apostles, although it is usually associated with apocryphal gospels rather than apocalypses. We should bear in mind that distinctions between genres are not rigid. Other such revelations in a post-resurrection setting are found among the works conventionally known as ‘gnostic’. The Nag Hammadi codices, in addition to the Coptic Gnostic Apocalypse of Paul, which we have discussed, contain two works entitled Apocalypse of James and one entitled Apocalypse of Peter. The two apocalypses attributed to James report secret revelations given by Jesus to his brother James in dialogues after the resurrection. They are indistinguishable in genre from the work, also among the Nag Hammadi texts, known as the Apocryphon of James, except that the latter concludes with a visionary ascent to the heavens. Other post-resurrection dialogues are the Book of Thomas, the Sophia of Jesus Christ, the Dialogue of the Saviour, the Letter of Peter to Philip, and (in part) the Gospel of Mary. The gnostic Apocalypse of Peter has the same kind of setting, but unusually takes the form of Jesus’ interpretation of three visions that Peter reports. All these works could be called apocalypses, though they are prominent among the works popularly known as ‘the Gnostic Gospels’. Though gnostics did not invent the post-resurrection revelation dialogue, it was a form that various gnostic groups adopted as especially suitable for their purpose of claiming esoteric revelations that the exalted Christ made secretly to his disciples, different from the public teaching that he gave before his death.
The works I place in this category take the form of prophetic oracles spoken by a prophet, represented as the direct speech of God, and following Old Testament models of prophetic speech. Two of the texts from Qumran Cave 4 (the Jeremiah Apocryphon and Pseudo-Ezekiel) are Jewish examples of this kind of work attributed to a prophet from the Israelite past.
Two such early Christian works have survived by being attached to the Latin version of the Jewish apocalypse known as 4 Ezra. These three texts combined achieved a quasi-canonical status in the medieval West and became part of the English Apocrypha under the name of 2 Esdras. The Christian work that constitutes chapters 1–2 of 2 Esdras is now known as 5 Ezra, while chapters 15–16 are known as 6 Ezra. In 5 Ezra the prophet ‘Ezra the son of Chusi’ denounces the people of Israel and predicts their supersession by a new people of God. 6 Ezra prophesies judgement on specific nations as part of the approaching eschatological woes, while calling sinners to repentance and the elect to perseverance. As an attempt to write something close to the style of biblical prophecy, 6 Ezra is more successful than any other such attempt known to me. Both works seem to date from the second or third centuries. 5 Ezra influenced medieval Latin liturgies, and is the source of the still popular prayer for the dead, ‘Let light perpetual shine upon them’ (2.35). (On 5 and 6 Ezra, see Bergren 1990, 1998, 2013a, 2013b.)
The Coptic Apocalypse of Elijah (Charlesworth 1983: 721–53; Frankfurter 1993) is neither an apocalypse (according to my definition), nor a pre-Christian Jewish work (as used to be argued). It begins with an introduction modelled on Ezekiel: ‘The word of the Lord came to me, saying, “Son of man, say to this people …”’ (cf. Ezek. 33.1). After introductory oracles that include exhortations to fast, the main part of the work is a prophetic narrative predicting a succession of king’s reigns and that of the Antichrist before the coming of Christ, very much in the manner of Christian apocalypses of the historical-eschatological type. Frankfurter’s study discerns indebtedness to native Egyptian prophetic traditions as well as to the Jewish and Christian apocalypses, and contextualizes the work in Christian circles in third-century Egypt.
The Sibyls were legendary female prophets, well known in the Graeco-Roman world, to whom were ascribed books of oracles written in Greek hexameter verse. The most famous collection of Sibylline oracles was kept in the Temple of Jupiter in Rome. But already in the third century BCE, Jewish writers had adopted the traditional form and used it largely as a vehicle for reviews of world history, oracles of judgement against the nations, and prophecies of the eschatological events, while exhortations against idolatry and immoral practices accompanied the predictions, presumably for the benefit of non-Jewish readers who would suppose they derived from one of the prestigious Sibyls of antiquity. The content of these Jewish Sibyllines resembles that of those apocalypses that reveal the historical and eschatological future (type 2), but the literary genre and style are distinct.
Christian writers adopted the same practice. These Jewish and Christian books of Sibylline oracles in Greek have come down to us largely in two collections made by Christian editors, the first containing books 1–8, the second containing books numbered 9–14 (of which books 9 and 10 merely repeat material from the first collection). (For translations and introductions to all books except 9 and 10, see Charlesworth 1983: 318–472; for books 1–2, see Lightfoot 2007.) Books 3–5 and 11–14 are Jewish, with only minor Christian embellishments, whereas books 1–2, 6–8 are Christian, probably all written in the second and third centuries. It should be noted that borrowings from earlier Sibylline books are not uncommon in the later books, and so there may be some borrowing from no longer extant Jewish Sibylline oracles in the Christian books. But such borrowing is less than has been postulated by some scholars (especially those who have not noticed the extensive borrowing from the Apocalypse of Peter in book 2).
The most distinctive feature of these Christian Sibyllines, by comparison with the Jewish tradition that they in many respects continue, is their detailed summaries of the Gospel story of Jesus, couched in the form of prophecies by the Sibyl (1.324–82; 6.1–28 [the entirety of book 6]; 7.64–70; 8.251–336; cf. also 8.456–79). The authors evidently expected to find among the Sibyl’s prophecies what they found in the Old Testament prophets—predictions of the events of the first coming of Christ—and were able to write more explicit prophecies of this kind than the prophets of Israel provided.
The Sibyl to whom most of these books of oracles seem to be attributed was adopted into the biblical history by being identified as a daughter-in-law of Noah (3.827; 1.288) as well as being the Sibyl called the Erythrean by pagans (3.814). This gave her prophecies the prestige of great antiquity, while also making it plausible that she recognized the one true God and was truly inspired by him. The Sibylline oracles (of both Jewish and Christian origin) were highly esteemed by many Christian writers in the early centuries. They had apologetic value as a witness to Christian teaching from outside the Christian scriptures and from a source already known and highly regarded among pagans. In the Latin West, the work of Lactantius, who quoted Sibylline Oracles extensively in Latin translation, helped to boost their prestige, and the prophecies of the Tiburtine Sibyl were frequently revised in Latin versions throughout the medieval period (Holdenried 2006). A work called the Prophetia Sibyllae Magae seems to be an original composition in Latin from the early medieval period (Hennecke-Schneemelcher 1965: 741–5).
The Ascension of Isaiah is the oldest Christian apocryphal work attributed to an Old Testament figure and it may be the oldest Christian apocryphal apocalypse (dated at the end of the first century by Bauckham 1998: 381–90; in the first half of the second century by most other scholars). For much of the twentieth century, study of it as an early Christian work was impeded by attempts to excavate pre-Christian Jewish sources within it (still reflected in Charlesworth 1985: 143–76; Hennecke-Schneemelcher 1992: 603–20), an attempt that has now been universally abandoned. Chapters 1–5 make use of a Jewish tradition about the martyrdom of Isaiah, but there is no reason to suppose that a non-Christian Jewish work has been incorporated in those chapters, still less to entitle it or them ‘The Martyrdom of Isaiah’ (a title that is nowhere found in antiquity). In ancient usage, the title Ascension of Isaiah always refers to all eleven chapters, although chapters 6–11 did circulate as a separate work known as the Vision of Isaiah in Latin and Old Slavonic versions. The Ascension of Isaiah certainly consists of two distinctive parts, but recent scholarship agrees that they are both of Christian origin and are at least closely connected. Enrico Norelli, who has contributed most to recent study of this work, argues that chapters 6–11 were written first and that another author then added chapters 1–5 to them (Norelli 1994, 1995). I have argued, on the contrary, that the two parts were designed as complementary parts of a single work, and compared them to the two parts of the book of Daniel (narratives in chapters 1–6, visions in chapters 7–12), which the author of the Ascension of Isaiah probably took as a generic model for his work (Bauckham 1998). The resemblance to Daniel and to other apocalypses that combine a substantial narrative section with visionary revelations (Book of Watchers [1 Enoch 1–36], Apocalypse of Abraham) also makes it clear that the Ascension of Isaiah really is an apocalypse, though it is an unusual one that cannot be assigned exclusively either to type 1 or to type 2 in the classification used in my discussion.
Chapters 1–5 tell the story of Isaiah’s persecution and martyrdom at the hands of king Manasseh, but they also contain a report of a prophetic vision Isaiah had seen during the reign of Hezekiah (3:13–4:22). A longer and complementary account of the same vision is the main content of chapters 6–11, within a narrative framework set in the reign of Hezekiah. The first account of the vision begins with the coming to earth of ‘the Beloved’ (a title for Christ distinctive of this work), summarizes the earthly history of Jesus, and goes on to describe the corruption of the church and other events of the last days up to the end. In the second account, Isaiah ascends through the heavens to the seventh heaven, from which perspective he is given a prophetic vision of the future descent of the Beloved through the heavens to earth, his earthly history and his re-ascent through the heavens to enthronement beside God in the seventh. While both accounts of the vision tell the story of Jesus, the first operates on a mainly temporal axis, the second on a mainly spatial (cosmological) axis.
I have argued (Bauckham 2015) that the principal purpose of the author was to create a cosmological reading of the Gospel story. For this purpose he has adopted a particular version of the seven heavens cosmology. In a sharply dualistic picture of the cosmos, the heavens (inhabited solely by angels occupied with the praise of God) are characterized by glory, which increases as one ascends upwards to the Great Glory (God) in the seventh. The realm below is in darkness, dominated by the powers of evil who inhabit the firmament. In order to bring the saints up to glory in the seventh heaven, the Beloved must descend to earth and, further, to Hades, all the while keeping his identity secret so that it may not be known to the evil powers. So in each heaven he adopts the form of the angels in that heaven, in decreasing degrees of glory, and then on earth he takes human form. Only after his resurrection does he resume his glorious form and ascend in this form back to the seventh heaven. To create this version of the Gospel story the author has developed hints in cosmological passages in the Pauline literature (Phil. 2.6–11; 1 Cor. 2.6–7; 2 Cor. 3.18; Eph. 1.20–1, 2.6, 6.12). The resulting vision of the hidden descent and glorious ascent of Christ was remarkably influential in the Christian literature of the second century (Bauckham 2015).
The attribution of this revelation of the cosmological dimension of the Gospel story to the prophet Isaiah was highly appropriate, for it was especially in the prophecies of Isaiah that early Christians found the events of the Gospel story foreshadowed in considerable detail. But according to the Ascension of Isaiah, these things were told ‘in the book which I prophesied openly’ only ‘in parables’ (4.20). In the later vision recounted in the Ascension of Isaiah they were much more clearly revealed.
Originally written in Greek, the Apocalypse of Peter is now known only in an Ethiopic translation, which reliably represents the content of the ancient apocalypse, though unfortunately, in the only two known manuscripts, the text is often corrupt in details. Of the original Greek, we have only two small fragments and a few quotations in patristic authors. These confirm the general reliability of the Ethiopic version, while also showing that the Greek text in a codex from Akhmim that is usually known as the Apocalypse of Peter (Kraus and Nicklas 2004: 101–20) is actually a considerably rewritten version of material from that apocalypse and may actually have formed part of a quite different work. (For translations of the Ethiopic version, see Buchholz 1988; Hennecke-Schneemelcher 1992: 620–38; Marrassini and Bauckham 1997; for the Greek fragments, with English translations, see Kraus and Nicklas 2004: 121–8; for the patristic quotations, see Kraus and Nicklas 2004: 89–99.)
The apocalypse takes the form of a revelation by Jesus Christ to his disciples after his resurrection. In fact, it represents itself as the last such revelation before the ascension of Jesus to heaven, which the disciples witness at the end of the work. At the beginning of the work, Jesus and his disciples are seated on the Mount of Olives, and they ask him what will be the sign of his coming, as in Matt. 24.3. The first part of Jesus’ response echoes other parts of Matthew 24. The purpose of the work is to supplement the eschatological revelations that Jesus makes in the Gospel of Matthew with a much fuller account, especially of the judgement and the respective destinies of the wicked and the elect. Jesus prophesies the coming of a false Messiah and the many martyrs who die at his hands, the resurrection of the dead, the cosmic conflagration, his own coming as judge, and the river of fire through which all must pass. There is an extensive description of the punishments in hell, each inflicted for a specific kind of sin. After this revelation of judgement, the scene changes: Jesus takes the disciples to ‘the holy mountains’, where they are granted a vision of the heavenly paradise that is the destiny of the elect after the judgement, and from which Jesus ascends to heaven.
Much of the material derives from Jewish apocalyptic tradition, although specific sources cannot now be identified. The account of the twenty-one punishments in hell is probably the earliest example of what Himmelfarb called ‘tours of hell’ (Himmelfarb 1983), with the exception of a fragment of the lost Apocalypse of Elijah (Stone and Strugnell 1979: 14–26). In most of these ‘tours’ the seer is actually taken to see the punishments that the wicked are already suffering, immediately after death, but the Apocalypse of Peter has adapted this subgenre in order to describe the future fate of the wicked after the last judgement. About half of the punishments are ‘measure-for-measure’ punishments, in which the punishment is designed to correspond to the sin (e.g. adulterers are hung up by their genitals, female infanticides are gnawed by animals produced from their milk), while some others are other-worldly versions of punishments practised in this world. There is considerable emphasis on the strictly retributive justice of the punishments, which the damned themselves acknowledge (Bauckham 1998: 205–32). But, in an interesting example of the motif of compassion for the damned that often appears in such apocalypses, the Apocalypse of Peter claims that, at the time of the judgement, the elect will be able to pray for any sinners they wish to save from hell and their prayers will be granted. The idea may derive from the tradition that Christian martyrs prayed for the forgiveness of their persecutors. This possibility of mercy for the damned, at the request of the saints at the time of the last judgement, occurs in a few other texts dependent on the Apocalypse of Peter (e.g. Coptic Ap. El. 5.27–9) (Bauckham 1998: 142–8), but was refuted by Augustine (Civ. Dei 21.18, 24) (Bauckham 1998: 149–59).
I have argued that the Apocalypse of Peter is a Palestinian Jewish–Christian writing from the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–5 CE), partly on the basis of identifying the false Messiah of chapter 2 as Bar Kokhba, though there are a variety of other ways in which the apocalypse fits well into such a context (Bauckham 1998: 176–94; cf. also Buchholz 1988). In that case it is a rare instance of a surviving text from Palestinian Jewish–Christian circles in the period after the New Testament writings. Some other scholars, however, have challenged the identification of Bar Kokhba, without necessarily denying a Palestinian origin for the work (especially Tigchelaar 2003).
The Apocalypse of Peter was popular in the early centuries of the church (evidence in Jakab 2003), no doubt because its accounts of the judgement and especially of hell and paradise were so much fuller than anything to be found in other available Christian literature, but it seems later to have fallen out of favour, partly because the even more extensive visions of the other world to be found in the Apocalypse of Paul were preferred, and perhaps also because of its expectation of the salvation of some of the damned after the last judgement.
In the absence of the Greek original, the long Latin version (translation: Hennecke-Schneemelcher 1992: 712–48) best represents the original apocalypse and will be discussed here. (For later versions and descendants of the Apocalypse of Paul, see under ‘Apocalypses: Type 2’.) The work has a prologue that narrates the miraculous discovery of the apocalypse in the house in Tarsus in which Paul had lived. This discovery is said to have occurred in the year 388, during the reign of the emperor Theodosius I. It is plainly a literary device designed to account for the appearance of a writing by the apostle Paul that had not previously been known. Although it has been argued that the original form of the apocalypse was older than this prologue, it seems more probable that the prologue is original and that the work dates from the end of the fourth century (Piovanelli 1993, 2007). It seems to reflect a monastic setting of origin. It is indebted to the apocalypses of Peter and Zephaniah, perhaps to the Latin Vision of Ezra, and probably also to unidentifiable Jewish apocalyptic sources. It is something of a compendium of materials about the afterlife drawn from various sources, but it combines these materials in a fairly coherent vision of the fate of the dead.
It purports to report the vision to which Paul refers in 2 Cor. 12.1–5, which is quoted at the outset of the work. In accordance with that text, Paul ascends to the third heaven, where he sees what happens to souls when they depart from the body at death. He sees the souls of the wicked and the righteous taken into the custody of different categories of angels who take them before God for judgement and then to their places of punishment or reward. Again in accordance with 2 Cor. 12.1–5, Paul is taken to paradise, but is forbidden to disclose the other things revealed to him there. Only his meeting with Enoch and Elijah there is mentioned. It is evidently not the place of the righteous dead in general. Then he is taken down to the edge of the earth, where he sees ‘the land of promise’, the place in which the millennial kingdom of Christ and the saints will be located. The description of the place he next visits, the city of Christ, where the righteous dead live now, is reminiscent of both the New Jerusalem of Revelation and the garden of Eden. Specific categories of the dead have their own parts of the city.
Paul now travels to the place of the punishment of the wicked, also located at the edge of the earth. (This is a survival of the old cosmology found in the Book of Watchers [1 Enoch 1–36], where the places of the dead are to be seen around the edges of the earth, but the Apocalypse of Paul combines this old Jewish notion with the old Greek notion of a great river called Ocean that encircles the earth: Copeland 2007.) Like other seers, Paul observes a large variety of punishments, each related to a particular sort of sin. Unlike the Apocalypse of Peter (where sins related to a situation of persecution and martyrdom are prominent) and the Latin Vision of Ezra (which features sins related to the law of Moses), the Apocalypse of Paul gives prominence to ecclesiastical sins, i.e. committed in or after church worship or committed by ecclesiastics (bishops, priests, other clergy), revealing its post-Constantinian Christian context. Like other seers who visit hell, Paul is moved to join Michael and the wicked dead themselves in imploring God’s mercy, with the result that God grants them relief from punishment for twenty-four hours each week.
A very significant feature of this apocalypse is that, not only is it exclusively concerned with the fate of the dead, but it is almost exclusively concerned with the state of the dead in the present, prior to the last judgement. The parousia is barely mentioned except in connexion with the millennial kingdom. We might think that Christians influenced by it would have no interest in a future beyond their individual fates at death, but this was not the case, as we can tell from other influential apocalypses, such as the Apocalypse of Thomas.
As already indicated above (‘Apocalypses Type 1’), in its shorter recension, which is probably its original form, the Apocalypse of Thomas consists largely of an account of the last eight days of the history of this world. The speaker introduces himself as ‘the Son of God’, addressing Thomas and announcing that he will reveal ‘the signs which shall come to pass at the end of the world’. The accounts of the signs of the seven days have a consistent literary shape: on each day there is first of all a loud noise (e.g. ‘a great voice in heaven’), then a visible sign in the heavens, and finally the reaction of the earth’s inhabitants (e.g. fear). The signs are not only portents that herald the end of the world; they mark the progressive disintegration of the cosmos, which is finally, on the eighth day, consumed by the eternal fire that surrounds paradise. In distinction from the expectation in some apocalyptic traditions that the end will see a renewal of the heavens and the earth, here there is no doubt that the world itself will be destroyed and the elect will be taken from it to live eternally in heaven with God and Christ and the angels. The seven days of the ‘signs’ presumably correspond to the seven days of creation in Genesis 1.1–2.4, though the correspondence is compromised by the fact that only on the eighth day, at the time of the parousia, is the cosmos finally destroyed. The creative voice of God at the beginning of each of the six days of creation in Genesis is, on these last days of de-creation, replaced by unidentified and incoherent cosmic voices; the appearance of the creatures on each day of creation is replaced by an instance of disintegration on each of the last days; the formulaic ‘God saw that is was good’ is replaced by the fearful and foreboding reactions of humans; and the concluding formula in Genesis, ‘The evening and the morning were the nth day,’ is replaced by the formula, ‘These are the signs of the nth day.’ The whole scheme may reflect 4 Ezra 7.30–1, where the world reverts for a period of seven days to the primordial chaos before creation, from which the new, incorruptible world then arises. Implicitly, this new creation, together with the resurrection of the dead, occurs on the eighth day, as it does explicitly in Barn. 15.8 (Stone 1990: 217). The scheme in the Apocalypse of Thomas differs in filling the seven days with a sequence of signs and in envisaging, not a new creation, but the ascent of the elect, in their now risen and transformed bodies, to God’s own dwelling in the highest heaven.
The short recension of the Apocalypse of Thomas cannot be later than the middle of the fifth century, but could be considerably earlier. Since there is no trace of a Greek recension and it seems never to have been known outside the Latin West (where it was translated into Old Irish and Old English), it was likely composed in Latin, which probably gives it a terminus post quem in the late second century, when Christian literature in Latin first appeared. The concept of ‘signs’ of the end is found in the gospels (Luke 21.11, 25; cf. Matt. 24.3; Mark 13.4) and in Jewish apocalypses such as 4 Ezra (5.1–12, 620–4). There are several medieval Jewish apocalypses devoted to describing the ‘ten signs’ that will precede the end (Reeves 2005: 106–32), but they are not assigned to single and successive days and they do not concern the destruction of the cosmos. Closer to the design of the Apocalypse of Thomas is a work known as the Fifteen Signs before the Judgement, which is extant in Latin, Hebrew (translated from Latin), and Armenian (Stone 1981). The fifteen signs take place on fifteen days and they do relate to cosmic destruction. The heaven and the earth are finally consumed with fire on the fourteenth day and the new heaven and the new earth appear on the fifteenth. Heist (1952) argued for a medieval Irish origin for this text and identified the Apocalypse of Thomas as one of its sources, but detailed resemblances are few, and it is possible that the Fifteen Signs is a much older text. Its fifteen signs represent two weeks of cosmic disintegration, compared with the single week in the Apocalypse of Thomas, followed by a day of new creation, which is more like the implied eighth day in 4 Ezra than the eighth day in the Apocalypse of Thomas. The latter is a fuller and more sophisticated development of the same basic concept.
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Faerber, R. (2005). ‘L’Apocalypse de Thomas’, in P. Geoltrain and J.-D. Kaestli (eds), Écrits Apocryphes Chrétiens (Paris: Gallimard), II.1019–43. (This includes a French translation of the complete text of the longer recension, whereas Elliott translates only a truncated form of the text. In the light of this complete text of the longer recension, Faerber, correctly, rearranges the order of the text of the short recension.)