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- Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
Das E-Book Jewish and Christian Apocalypses wird angeboten von Charles River Editors und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
enoch; apocrypha; jubilees; end of the world; rapture; judgment day
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JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN APOCALYPSES
F. Crawford Burkitt
WAXKEEP PUBLISHING
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Copyright © 2015 by F. Crawford Burkitt
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
I. THE APOCALYPTIC IDEA.
II. THE BOOK OF ENOCH.
III. THE MINOR JEWISH APOCALYPSES.
IV. EARLY CHRISTIAN APOCALYPTIC WRITING.
APPENDIX I.ON THE GREEK TEXT OF ENOCH.
1. THE DESCENT OF THE ANGELS (ENOCH VI 1-6).
2. THE PROLOGUE TO ENOCH.
3. ENOCH AND THE VALLEYS OF THE DEAD (CHAP, XXII).
4. MISCELLANEOUS CONJECTURES AND NOTES TO ENOCH.
5. ON THE ASTRONOMICAL TEACHING OF ENOCH.
APPENDIX II.ON THE MARTYRDOM OF ISAIAH.
APPENDIX III.ON SOME OTHER KINDS OF APOCALYPSES.
Jewish and Christian Apocalypses
By F. Crawford Burkitt
PREFACE
THIS BOOK CONTAINS THE THREE Schweich Lectures for 1913, printed almost exactly as they were delivered last November. The only change of importance is that I have divided the third Lecture into its two constituent parts, so as to keep the specifically Christian variety of Apocalypse in a class by itself.
In the Lectures I attempted to confine myself as much as possible to what I believe to be the fundamental idea which underlies the great series of Jewish Apocalypses, viz. the idea of the imminent Judgement to Come, and further, to exhibit this Idea in connexion with what I believe to be both its true historical setting and the ultimate cause of its manifestation. That which gives the Apocalypses vitality is the great struggle between Religion and Civilization, of which the Maccabean Martyrs are the symbol. I omit the adjectives. My readers themselves, according as they view the thing, can say ‘between spiritual Religion and material ‘Civilization’ or ‘between fanatical Religion and enlightened Civilization,"—and they will judge the Apocalypses accordingly. But it seemed to me worthwhile to exhibit the Apocalypses as clearly as possible from this quite definite and particular point of view, and therefore I found it inadvisable to expand what I had said by introducing other points of view or more details into the printed form of the Lectures.
What I have added will be found in the separate Appendices. These will, I hope, explain themselves to the specialists for whom they were primarily written. They will at least serve to shew that I have not ventured to make sweeping generalisations about this department of ancient literature without making a somewhat minute study of the principal documents.
The year 1913 saw a grand edition of all the Old Testament ‘ Apocrypha ‘ and ‘ Pseudepigrapha ‘ brought out under the able and stimulating editorship of Dr, now Canon, R. H. Charles. Students of the Book of Enoch are under a deep debt of gratitude to Dr Charles, who now has edited it three times in English and once in Ethiopic. Is it not time that a literal English translation should be accessible to all ? Poor students of theology can be expected to have read Daniel, for it is in the Bible; they can be expected to have read Second Esdras, for it is at least in ‘ the Apocrypha.’ But the cheapest way of getting at the plain text of Enoch is still to try and pick up a second-hand copy of one of the reprints of Laurence’s translation, and this generally comes to about three-and-sixpence. This translation was pioneer work. It was most creditable as a first attempt, but like all such efforts, especially when made on a bad text, it is generally inadequate, often obscure, and to young students often positively misleading. On any theory of the Book of Enoch either of Dr. Charles’s translations is vastly superior. I am not thinking of the needs of teachers and professors, but of young students and ordinary clergymen. Is it impossible to hope that Dr Charles and the Clarendon Press will prepare a plain translation for us ? If not, I hope that someone else who knows Ethiopic will make one. If he does so, let me further beg him to make as few emendations as possible.—he should follow Dr Charles’ MS g almost always,—and when he feels bound to make an emendation let it be always quite clear to the reader what the transmitted text is. A text so prepared would be useful to teachers and could be bought by students, for I do not think it need cost more than a shilling.
F. C. BURK ITT
Westroad Comer, Cambridge
March, 1914
JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN APOCALYPSES.
I. THE APOCALYPTIC IDEA.
THE SUBJECT ANNOUNCED FOR THE present series of Schweich Lectures is “ Jewish and Christian Apocalypses”. It is a subject upon which much has been written of late years, especially by specialists for specialists. Besides this frankly specialist literature there has not been wanting a great measure of recognition of the importance, in a general way, of these Apocalypses and the state of mind which they reflect, for the history of Early Christianity. But the Apocalypses themselves are still unfamiliar to most people, and indeed there are a good many reasons against their becoming popular in the present day. Both as wholes and in detail they are strange and foreign to our ways of thinking and writing : they need, in fact, a great deal of what is called ‘ Introduction’ to make them comprehensible at all. Before coming, therefore, to the Apocalypses or to the circumstances that called them forth, I wish to make a few remarks on certain ideas and conceptions with which the Apocalypses are fundamentally concerned.
The Sistine Chapel is familiar to all in this travelled age. As you all know, it is the private chapel of the Popes and it was decorated by the greatest artists of the time. The Popes for whom the work was done, and the artists who did it, were all profoundly influenced by the Renaissance, by the revival of the literature, the art, the ideas of heathen Greece and Rome. Those who do not admire the Sistine Chapel as an example of Christian Art generally complain that it seems to them pagan : at least it is free from the reproach of being overmuch mediaeval. Let us consider for a moment what the scheme of decoration really is. We will not go into the Chapel as if it were a mere picture-gallery, walking about freely from point to point. We will take no looking-glasses in our hands or lie on our backs to examine the ceiling. No doubt persons attending Mass have in all ages turned their heads occasionally from side to side and looked up at the roof. Those who do so at the Sistine Chapel see on their left scenes from the Old Testament and on their right the fulfilment in the New. If they glance at the roof, they see the creation of the world and the beginnings of history as taught in Scripture and tradition. The pious worshipper will perhaps not care thus to look about him. But there is one thing which he cannot well help seeing. He cannot raise his eves to adore the consecrated Host without being confronted with the Last Judgement. Behind the Priest, behind the Altar, behind the lighted candles, behind the sacred drama of worship, the Last Judgement is always there. The only thing that stands between the Christian worshipper and Hell is the Priest and the Altar.
The symbolism of the Last Judgement, as presented in Christian Churches, is not always exactly the same as in the Sistine Chapel. At Ulm, and formerly in many English Churches, it was represented on the Chancel Arch, so that the Altar was exhibited as the one open door through which the worshipper might take refuge. But however it might be figured, it stood in the centre of conviction, both in popular belief and in the official creed. The Pope’s Chapel, for all the classical detail in the paintings, faithfully reflects the Christian scheme of things: behind everything the Last Judgement looms in the background, universal, inevitable.
The guide-books tell us that Michaelangelo’s great picture owes a great deal to Dante. I have no doubt that this is true in the sense in which the statement is made, i. e. in the arrangement of details. Nevertheless there is a sense in which Dante’s poem marks the triumph of a quite different order of ideas, which robs the idea of the Last Judgement of most of its significance. Dante goes to the Other World, he sees the dead in Paradise, in Purgatory, or in Hell. For all intents and purposes the Last Judgement has no meaning for them : they are judged already. After such and such a time or mode of probation one by one the souls in Purgatory will leave it to join the souls in Paradise, just as one by one they had arrived. The Other World is a place, which individuals enter one by one when they die ; the conception of the Last Judgement, on the other hand, makes the Other World a time, an era, which all individuals experience simultaneously, a “ Divine Event to which all Nature moves.” It is this Divine Event that is set forth by the Apocalypses. The doctrine of the Apocalypses is the doctrine of the Last Judgement.
For the study of Early Christianity it is most important to keep in mind the distinction between the doctrine of a Last Judgement and other forms of belief in retributive justice and in life beyond the grave. This is particularly the case when it comes to a question of origins. That the Powers above us are just and that evil will not go in the end unpunished has been the conviction of many races of mankind : it is not necessary to look for a historical nexus every time this belief finds expression. The same may be said of belief in the persistence of a man’s spirit or ghost. And it is an easy, though not a logically necessary step, to combine the two beliefs and to hold that the comparative happiness or misery of a man in his future life depends on his past. Systems so different as Indian and Egyptian Religion agree in this. But the notion of a future general Assize, at which all wrong will be put right, not always with special reference to individual cases, is a peculiar conception. It is certainly not universal, or even widespread, and we may therefore suppose that it required a very special train of circumstances to develop it.
One thing appears to me to be quite certain. It seems to me certain that the doctrine of a future general Assize held no place in the Graeco-Roman world, apart from the beliefs of Jews and Christians. The period between the eras of Alexander the Great and the Emperor Constantine, those six centuries during which Christianity grew up, was an age of syncretism, of the mingling of religions, a period during which European civilization was especially influenced by Oriental beliefs. It was the age of the Mystery-religions, the religions of Isis, of Mithra, of Attis. The dominant philosophies, as we are more and more coining to see, were the result of the blending of Greek thought with Oriental beliefs and teachings. Oriental Astrology was in itself a religious philosophy ; it was an attempt to formulate the influences which to a certain degree moulded the lives of all the dwellers under the roof of heaven. One school of Philosophers, the Stoics, even taught the doctrine of a future general conflagration, but this is quite a different thing from the Last Judgement. The Stoic conflagration merely started everything over again, to retread the old circle. Graeco-Roman religion, speaking generally, did not sec in History the working-out of a Divine Purpose.
I said just now that the doctrine of a Last Judgement required a very special set of circumstances for its development. It will not be a part of my aim in these Lectures to trace the growth of this doctrine among the Jews from its origins. It is commonly said to have been taken over by the Jews from Zoroastrianism, and there may be some truth in this view. But for us the more important thing is to notice that the seed fell on congenial soil, from wherever it may have originally come. What I wish specially to emphasize is the difference between Judaism and the contemporary Hellenistic. Graeco-Roman, beliefs. Let us grant for the moment that the Jewish hope was coloured by Zoroastrianism : Mithraism, in any case, was in great part ultimately derived from Persia. Why, then, was a doctrine of Last Judgement so prominent in the one religion and not in the other ?
Here we come, in a very real sense, to the heart of our subject. I believe the main peculiarities, the main differentia, of post-Alexandrian Judaism to arise directly from the actual history of the Jews, in a word, to be the result of the great struggle between Judaism and Hellenism.
It is during the two centuries and a half that extend from the Maccabean Rising to the Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, from 170 b, c. to 70 a. d., that the world in general is confronted with the Jewish Nation. Before the Captivity its history had been simply that of one among many petty nationalities of Palestine. The annals of Sargon or of Sennacherib betray no consciousness that the subjects of the King of Jerusalem were different in thought or customs from other people. After the Return the Jews had lived unnoticed in quiet. After the Destruction of Jerusalem, again, the direct political power of Judaism is gone ; the Jews become a Church, an international Society, rather than a Nation in the ordinary sense of the word. But in the interval Judaism had played a truly national part; it became during those two-and-a-half centuries a kingdom of this world, an alternative to Civilization as then understood, actually before the eves of men.
It is a curious fact that the parts of Israelite history with which most of us are familiar are concerned with the preparation of the Jews for their peculiar rôle rather than with the part they actually played in general history. The kingdom over which the princes of the House of David ruled made very little mark on the ancient world, and when the hill-fortress of Jerusalem stood in the way of the great empire of Babylonia it fell, and the kingdom of Judah fell with it. The Jewish State collapsed, and there was nothing to indicate to an outsider that any part of the social organisation would survive. As a matter of fact, as we all know, the religion of the Jews—or at least of a part of them—had undergone a strange and unique development, the result of which was that it did not die with its mother the old Jewish State. Two generations later, when there is a change of Empires, some of the heads of the Jewish communities in Babylon are still Jews, and they return to set the life in their old home going once more, and to worship the God of their fathers as aforetime.
The history of the age of Ezra is full of unsolved historical problems, but certain things are clear enough. It was no doubt a day of small things. The returned exiles aspired to play no great political part; their chief desire was to be left alone to practise their religion. Rut insignificant as they might be in numbers and immediate influence, they were now a peculiar people. They were quite conscious of the fact themselves, and made their neighbours conscious of it. They were the People: the rest of the world were Gentiles. They now possessed the Paw of God in black and white, a Law that had been given to them to keep at all costs.
From the days of Ezra begins that most characteristic product of Judaism—the Study of the Law. The community existed for the sake of the Temple and its worship, for the sake of the ritual practised at the Temple. To surround Jerusalem with a wall, and gradually to raise up a fence for the Tora, as a later age phrased it—that was a sufficient ambition. The Word of God had been already given to them, and so the race of the Prophets came to an end and that of the Scribes took its place.
The work of the Scribes was far more important than it was once thought to have been. The wise men of Israel who came after Ezra had the Law already, but it was they who brought the Prophets into the form in which we read them, and the Psalms, whatever ancient fragments they may possibly contain, were in the main their work. To the Prophets it had been given to make the Religion of Israel, but the Scribes made the Bible. It is difficult, when we think of the immense effect that the Old Testament has had, to find words high enough to describe the importance of the work of the Scribes for after generations. And yet it was secondary and derivative. The Scribes had not in themselves the direct and masterful authority that belonged to the Prophets who went before them. They were not commissioned themselves to say ‘Thus saith the Lord ‘. And so when the crisis came we find a new phenomenon. The Jew who feels himself to have a new message for his brethren shelters himself under a pseudonym. The original literature of the two centuries and a half that preceded the capture of Jerusalem is either anonymous, or it professes to be the work of some worthy of old time. It is a remarkable fact, that during the period when the Jewish Nation was actually playing a great part in the world’s history, a part which was the direct outcome of the ideas which animated the people, there are hardly any avowed Jewish writers, till we come to the commentator Philo and to the Christians. It was a literary age, and in it a great quantity of Jewish literature was produced, some of which had great influence. But almost all of it was published in the name of some ancient hero, as a vision of the future which he had received.
It is well, I think, to remind ourselves at the outset that the authorship of the Book, of Daniel is no isolated problem. Baruch, Ezra, Solomon, Moses, the Twelve Patriarchs, Noah, Enoch, Adam, —all these had Apocalypses or Testaments fathered upon them. It is difficult to know in particular cases how far the pseudonymity was an understood literary artifice and how far it was really deceptive. What
