Introduction: The Problem of a Suppressed Legacy

We twenty-first-century Christians find ourselves in a strange place in relationship to our apocalyptic biblical inheritance. In many of our churches, apocalyptic literature, especially the Revelation to John, is treated with benign neglect, yet its images continue to fascinate us, as witness the tremendous success of novels like the Left Behind series. This is especially true from my perspective as a Roman Catholic: the book of Revelation remains liturgically peripheral in my tradition (with the exception of December 12—the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, when Revelation 12 is a focal reading—and, on occasion, during the Lenten season). Yet Roman Catholics, like most twenty-first-century Christians, remain remarkably vulnerable to conjuring apocalyptic scenarios, under the right circumstances.

Meanwhile, over the last several decades, a great deal of ink has been spilled by scholars attempting to specify matters like the genre, form, and content of those ancient texts that qualify as “apocalyptic” and thus have contributed to this legacy. As one might expect, the book of Revelation has been the most obvious focal point in those conversations. Indeed, according to the most learned biblical specialists, this is the only writing in the New Testament that meets the scholarly criteria regarding the form of the genre apocalypse. I, for one, am in total agreement with this assessment, but I remain unsatisfied with the emphases of the scholarly conversation because something tells me, deep in my soul, that there is more to our Christian apocalyptic legacy than is addressed by such formal considerations.

In this essay, I would like to suggest an alternative point of entry, other than the Revelation to John, for discussing our apocalyptic inheritance. I would like initially to consider the Synoptic Gospels, not, however, as we usually read them, conflated together, as if they are telling roughly the same story; that keeps us from seeing something important—that from the very beginning, Christians have struggled with the troubling legacy of a genuinely apocalyptic vision. The Gospel tradition has embedded within it, specifically within the Gospel of Mark, what functions as a genuinely apocalyptic text. By examining how Matthew and Luke altered that text, we see how early Christians negotiated the first apocalyptic legacy in their tradition by altering its eschatological moorings. More precisely, Matthew and Luke demonstrate how a Christian apocalyptic moment was turned into an ecclesiastical movement with the alteration to a less imminent expectation of the Parousia of Jesus Christ.

To start with, this less obvious biblical apocalyptic moment serves several purposes. (1) It prevents us from isolating the book of Revelation as if it were the only example of an apocalyptic worldview in the Christian canon, and from sequestering it in the category of prophetically anomalous literature, rendering it so much easier to ignore. (2) It demonstrates that Matthew and Luke believed they needed to domesticate the apocalyptic agenda of the Gospel of Mark in the wake of the delayed return of Jesus Christ. And (3) it challenges us to bring to consciousness, in a cultural-psychoanalytic sense, the way other scriptural sources, in addition to Revelation, are embedded in our psyches and contribute to our perduring fascination with apocalyptic solutions, prompting us to “act out” apocalyptically under the right circumstances.