Apocalyptic Literature

Apocalyptic Literature

Introduction

Apocalyptic genre is known as a set of expressions of literature emerged in the Hebrew and Christian culture during the Hellenistic and Roman (ages II and I centuries BC and I until mid- century) and that express themselves through complex symbols and metaphors of situation of suffering of Jewish people or the followers of Christ and hope in an intervention messianic savoir, or in the case of Christian apocalyptic the Parousia or second coming of Christ. An apocalypse is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.

Discussion

The first thing I want to say is that apocalyptic literature concentrates on times of crisis, times of great trauma, times of great stress, and times when the foundations of the faith are being shaken. Now in one sense the whole Bible deals with that. The whole Bible talks about the problems, the difficulties, and the sheer hard graft of the life of faith. However, the interesting thing is this: apocalyptic literature tends to be most popular among persecuted and harassed Christians. It tends to be unpopular among Western, middle-class Christians. And indeed many people have lost their nerve about apocalyptic literature- we feel that it is something that does not speak easily into our world. But I think the post-“9/11” world, the post-“7/7” world, the kind of threatening world we live in is making apocalyptic literature once again, as it always should have been, tremendously relevant to us.

One of the important features of apocalyptic literature is apocryphal pseudonym, i.e., the attribution to a celebrity of the past (e.g., Enoch, the twelve Patriarchs, Baruch, ...