Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses

Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses
Author: Martha Himmelfarb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 184
Release: 1993-08-19
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0195359658

This is a study of the ancient Jewish and Christian apocalypses involving ascent into heaven, which have received little scholarly attention in comparison to apocalypses concerned primarily with the end of the world. Recent developments like the publication of the Aramaic Enoch fragments from Qumran and interest in questions of genre in the study of the apocalypses make this a particularly appropriate time to undertake this study. Martha Himmelfarb places the apocalypses in relation to both their biblical antecedents and their context in the Greco-Roman world. Her analysis emphasizes the emergence of the understanding of heaven as temple in the Book of the Watchers, the earliest of these apocalypses, and the way in which this understanding affects the depiction of the culmination of ascent, the hero's achievement of a place among the angels, in the ascent apocalypses generally. It also considers the place of secrets of nature and primeval history in these works. Finally, it offers an interpretation of the pseudepigraphy of the apocalypses and their function.

Tours of Hell

Tours of Hell
Author: Martha Himmelfarb
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2016-11-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1512802778

From the ancient Book of the Dead to Dante's Divine Comedy, the living have attempted to describe the world of the dead. Tours of Hell focuses on one form of that attempt: the tours of hell found in Jewish and Christian apocalypses of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Himmelfarb examines seventeen texts, preserved in five languages and spanning a thousand years of human history. These include Hebrew texts and Christian texts in Greek, Latin, Ethiopic, and Coptic, such as the Apocalypse of Peter and the Apocalypse of Paul family. Muslim texts, medieval visions, and other related literatures are also discussed. Himmelfarb details the common elements of the tour tradition, including such features as a hero or heroine figure, a heavenly revealer, and descriptions of the punishments awaiting those who arrive in hell. She convincingly refutes the accepted nineteenth-century critical view of the earliest of these tours, the Apocalypse of Peter, as a Christian form of an "Orphic-Pythagorean" descent to Hades. She place the work instead on the family tree of the tour apocalypse, a genre she traces back to the third century B.C.E. Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36). Linking the Apocalypse of Peter with later Jewish tours of hell, Himmelfarb reveals significant sin-and-punishment combinations that seem to point to a common source, which she theorizes to be a lost Jewish Tour work of the late Second Temple period. Rich and fascinating texts seldom before brought to light are treated in detail in this pioneering study. A comprehensive work on the apocalyptic tradition, Tours of Hell will be of great interest to scholars and students of religion, history, ancient and medieval literature, and Dante studies.

The Jewish Apocalyptic Tradition and the Shaping of New Testament Thought

The Jewish Apocalyptic Tradition and the Shaping of New Testament Thought
Author: Benjamin E. Reynolds
Publisher: Fortress Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2017-04-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1506423426

The contemporary study of Jewish apocalypticism today recognizes the wealth and diversity of ancient traditions concerned with the “unveiling” of heavenly matters‒‒understood to involve revealed wisdom, the revealed resolution of time, and revealed cosmology‒‒in marked contrast to an earlier focus on eschatology as such. The shift in focus has had a more direct impact on the study of ancient “pseudepigraphic” literature, however, than in New Testament studies, where the narrower focus on eschatological expectation remains dominant. In this Companion, an international team of scholars draws out the implications of the newest scholarship for the variety of New Testament writings. Each entry presses the boundaries of current discussion regarding the nature of apocalypticism in application to a particular New Testament author. The cumulative effect is to reveal, as never before, early Christianity, its Christology, cosmology, and eschatology, as expressions of tendencies in Second Temple Judaism.

The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature

The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature
Author: John Joseph Collins
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks
Total Pages: 565
Release: 2014
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199856494

Apocalypticism arose in ancient Judaism in the last centuries BCE and played a crucial role in the rise of Christianity. It is not only of historical interest: there has been a growing awareness, especially since the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, of the prevalence of apocalyptic beliefs in the contemporary world. To understand these beliefs, it is necessary to appreciate their complex roots in the ancient world, and the multi-faceted character of the phenomenon of apocalypticism. The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature is a thematic and phenomenological exploration of apocalypticism in the Judaic and Christian traditions. Most of the volume is devoted to the apocalyptic literature of antiquity. Essays explore the relationship between apocalypticism and prophecy, wisdom and mysticism; the social function of apocalypticism and its role as resistance literature; apocalyptic rhetoric from both historical and postmodern perspectives; and apocalyptic theology, focusing on phenomena of determinism and dualism and exploring apocalyptic theology's role in ancient Judaism, early Christianity, and Gnosticism. The final chapters of the volume are devoted to the appropriation of apocalypticism in the modern world, reviewing the role of apocalypticism in contemporary Judaism and Christianity, and more broadly in popular culture, addressing the increasingly studied relation between apocalypticism and violence, and discussing the relationship between apocalypticism and trauma, which speaks to the underlying causes of the popularity of apocalyptic beliefs. This volume will further the understanding of a vital religious phenomenon too often dismissed as alien and irrational by secular western society.

The Heavenly Book Motif in Judeo-Christian Apocalypses 200 BCE-200 CE

The Heavenly Book Motif in Judeo-Christian Apocalypses 200 BCE-200 CE
Author: Leslie Baynes
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2012
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004207260

The first full-length analysis of the heavenly book motif in English, this study highlights a vital element of early Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature. Through multiple intertextual readings, it demonstrates that for the ancients heavenly writing had life or death consequences.

A Story of the Soul's Journey in the Nag Hammadi Library

A Story of the Soul's Journey in the Nag Hammadi Library
Author: Ulla Tervahauta
Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2015-08-19
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3647540366

Authentikos Logos (NHC VI,3), also known as Authoritative Teaching,is a little studied story of a soul's descent and ascent in the Nag Hammadi library. With her book Ulla Tervahauta fills a gap in the scholarship and provide the first monograph-length study that has this writingas its primary focus. The aim is to find a place and context for Authentikos Logos within early Christianity, but Tervahauta also adds new insight into the scholarship of the Nag Hammadi Library and study of early Christianity. Contrary to the usual discussion of the Nag Hammadi writings from the viewpoint of Gnostic studies, she argues that Authentikos Logos is best approached from the context of Christian traditions of late ancient Egypt between the third and the fifth centuries.Tervahauta discusses the story of the soul's journey in light of various Christian and Platonic writings. Also, she analyses the relationship of Authentikos Logos with the Valentinian Wisdom myth and suggests that no firm evidence connects the writing closely with Valentinian traditions. And although a Platonic mind-set can be assumed, the writing combines motifs in a unique manner. For example, the four epithets used in the writing – the "invisible soul", the "pneumatic soul", the "material soul", and the "rational soul" – are not found thus combined elsewhere. Discussion of matter (hyle) is connected with Christian scriptural allusions and the focus is on ethics and the evilness of matter. The body, on the other hand, is the soul's place of contest and progress. The Pauline term "pneumatic body" (1 Cor 15:44) is used allusively and from a Platonic perspective. With this book Ulla Tervahauta makes an important contribution to the study of early Christianity in late ancient Egypt by discussing a writing thatshows knowledge and creative combination of literary traditions that circulated in late ancient Egypt.

A Guide to Early Jewish Texts and Traditions in Christian Transmission

A Guide to Early Jewish Texts and Traditions in Christian Transmission
Author: Gabriele Boccaccini
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 559
Release: 2019-10-04
Genre: Bibles
ISBN: 0190863099

The Jewish culture of the Hellenistic and early Roman periods established a basis for all monotheistic religions, but its main sources have been preserved to a great degree through Christian transmission. This Guide is devoted to problems of preservation, reception, and transformation of Jewish texts and traditions of the Second Temple period in the many Christian milieus from the ancient world to the late medieval era. It approaches this corpus not as an artificial collection of reconstructed texts--a body of hypothetical originals--but rather from the perspective of the preserved materials, examined in their religious, social, and political contexts. It also considers the other, non-Christian, channels of the survival of early Jewish materials, including Rabbinic, Gnostic, Manichaean, and Islamic. This unique project brings together scholars from many different fields in order to map the trajectories of early Jewish texts and traditions among diverse later cultures. It also provides a comprehensive and comparative introduction to this new field of study while bridging the gap between scholars of early Judaism and of medieval Christianity.

Dark Mirrors

Dark Mirrors
Author: Andrei A. Orlov
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2011-12-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1438439539

Dark Mirrors is a wide-ranging study of two central figures in early Jewish demonology—the fallen angels Azazel and Satanael. Andrei A. Orlov explores the mediating role of these paradigmatic celestial rebels in the development of Jewish demonological traditions from Second Temple apocalypticism to later Jewish mysticism, such as that of the Hekhalot and Shi'ur Qomah materials. Throughout, Orlov makes use of Jewish pseudepigraphical materials in Slavonic that are not widely known. Orlov traces the origins of Azazel and Satanael to different and competing mythologies of evil, one to the Fall in the Garden of Eden, the other to the revolt of angels in the antediluvian period. Although Azazel and Satanael are initially representatives of rival etiologies of corruption, in later Jewish and Christian demonological lore each is able to enter the other's stories in new conceptual capacities. Dark Mirrors also examines the symmetrical patterns of early Jewish demonology that are often manifested in these fallen angels' imitation of the attributes of various heavenly beings, including principal angels and even God himself.

The Atoning Dyad: The Two Goats of Yom Kippur in the Apocalypse of Abraham

The Atoning Dyad: The Two Goats of Yom Kippur in the Apocalypse of Abraham
Author: Andrei Orlov
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2016-01-12
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004308229

The study explores the eschatological reinterpretation of the Yom Kippur ritual found in the Apocalypse of Abraham where the protagonist of the story, the patriarch Abraham, takes on the role of a celestial goat for YHWH, while the text’s antagonist, the fallen angel Azazel, is envisioned as the demonic scapegoat. The study treats the application of the two goats typology to human and otherworldly figures in its full historical and interpretive complexity through a broad variety of Jewish and Christian sources, from the patriarchical narratives of the Hebrew Bible to early Christian materials in which Yom Kippur traditions were applied to Jesus’ story.