Apocalypse, Prophecy, and Pseudepigraphy

On Jewish Apocalyptic Literature

John J. Collins

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781467443838
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

A highly regarded expert on the Jewish apocalyptic tradition, JohnJ. Collins has written extensively on the subject. Nineteen of his essays written over the last fifteen years, including previously unpublished contributions, are brought together for the first time in this volume. Its thematic essays organized in five sections, Apocalypse, Prophecy, and Pseudepigraphy complements and enriches Collins's well-known book The Apocalyptic Imagination.

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Genre Apocalypse Reconsidered

In 1979 an attempt to define and outline the genre apocalypse was published in the journal Semeia, number 14.1 (The actual analysis had been completed about two years before that.) The attempt had been undertaken as part of a “Forms and Genres” project in the Society of Biblical Literature, conceived by the late Robert W. Funk. The larger project was not very cohesive. Other working groups were devoted to parables, pronouncement stories, miracle stories, and letters.2 The project was conceived in the context of New Testament studies, in the tradition of form criticism. But there was no attempt to co-ordinate the work of these groups in any way, or to impose a common understanding of genre. Each group dealt with its own material as it saw fit. In the case of the apocalypse group, the immediate context was provided not so much by New Testament form criticism as by the discussion of “apocalyptic” in Old Testament and Ancient Judaism, which had been revitalized by such scholars as Klaus Koch, Paul Hanson, and Michael Stone.3 At the time, there was less prior agreement as to what constituted an apocalypse than was the case with some of the other genres. Accordingly, our initial objective was a rather modest one: to reach agreement as to what body of texts we were talking about.

The primary focus of the project was on Jewish and Christian texts composed between 250 BCE and 250 CE, approximately. The volume on apocalypses included essays on Greco-Roman, Gnostic, rabbinic (mainly Hekaloth), and Persian material, much of which (apart from the Greco-Roman material) was arguably later.4 I think there was value in including this material, but it was not the primary focus of the analysis. The definition and typology were worked out with reference to the Jewish and Christian material,5 and we then looked for analogous material in the other areas. An analysis of the Hekaloth or of the Middle Persian literature in its own right would probably have used different categories. Our definition lent itself more readily to the accounts of otherworldly journeys in Greek and Roman literature, and the Gnostic apocalypses (with some significant qualification). For purposes of this discussion, however, I will leave aside the broader comparative aspect of the project and focus on the problems of identifying and describing the genre in ancient pre-rabbinic Judaism.

We did not engage in discussions of literary theory, in the belief that discussions of genre in the abstract were likely to be at least as intractable as the discussion of a particular genre. Nonetheless, we inevitably took positions that have also been adopted, and disputed, in literary criticism. If I were to organize another such project thirty-five years on, I would certainly try to be more explicit about the theoretical underpinnings of the approach. That would not necessarily lead to very different results, but it would, I think, be helpful to locate both our approach and some of the objections it encountered in the broader context of literary study.

Etic/Emic

It should be noted at the outset that we viewed the genre as an etic category: “It is important to note that the classification ‘apocalyptic’ or ‘apocalypse’ is a modern one. Some ancient Jewish, Christian and Gnostic works are entitled Apokalypsis in the manuscripts…. However, the title is not a reliable guide to the genre.”6 Accordingly, we took the modern usage of “apocalypse” and “apocalyptic” as our starting point and set out to make it more consistent.7 We took the self-presentation of the texts into account (we looked for any texts that might be described as revelations), but our definition was at a higher level of abstraction than the self-presentation of individual texts. A revelation might be introduced as a vision, or a dream of the night, or a “word,” or just by a verb, such as “I saw.” For our purposes, all of these counted as “revelations.” It is possible to object to such an etic approach. Crispin Fletcher-Louis finds our approach “unhelpfully circular” and lacking in historiographic objectivity.8 “The starting point for a robustly historical search for an ancient genre,” he writes, “should be the conventions, expectations and intentions of ancient authors, not the twentieth century judgments of modern scholars who may, in fact, inhabit an entirely different worldview and be guilty of their own back-projections on the ancient texts.”9 The conventions, expectations, and intentions of ancient authors are certainly a worthy subject of investigation, but there was no systematic reflection on literary genre in ancient Judaism. Such genre labels as we find are quite inconsistent. In all likelihood, the Similitudes of Enoch, despite their patent debt to Daniel, were called meshalim (or its Aramaic equivalent), like the Book of Proverbs, with which it has little in common. Moreover, genres often take time to crystallize. The word apokalypsis as a genre label becomes common only in the second century CE,10 but similar works were certainly being produced for some centuries before that. So, while I do not dispute the value of emic analysis of the self-presentation of texts, this does not invalidate the use of analytic categories, based on the commonalities we now perceive between ancient texts, whether their authors perceived them or not. I think it is very likely that the authors of later apocalypses (including the Book of Revelation) were consciously participating in a literary tradition, but some of the earlier apocalypses, such as Daniel and the Book of the Watchers, are perceived as belonging to the genre only in retrospect, because of their affinities with works that were written later.

Definition and Classification

We defined a genre as “a group of texts marked by distinctive recurring characteristics which constitute a recognizable and coherent type of writing.”11 We then proceeded to make a list of features that occur frequently in texts that are commonly regarded as apocalyptic, and formed grids to show which texts attested these features and which did not. The grid, or master paradigm, consisted on the one hand of framing elements (form) and on the other of patterned content. The narrative framework described the manner in which the revelation was allegedly received (vision, epiphany, discourse, otherworldly journey, etc.). We also noted the disposition and reaction of the recipient. Many apocalypses also have a narrative conclusion. In the content, we distinguished between a temporal axis, describing the course of history, and a spatial axis, describing otherworldly places and beings.12 The temporal axis could begin with creation or primordial events, and often divided history into periods. It invariably included eschatological predictions, sometimes including cosmic upheavals, but invariably including individual judgment after death. We also recognized paraenesis as an important component in these texts that could not be assigned to either the temporal or the spatial axis.

No text contains all the features in question, but some features appear consistently in several texts. On the basis of this analysis, we defined “apocalypse” as “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.”13 We also distinguished broadly between two types of apocalypse, one of which is characterized by an extended review of history (the “historical” type) and the other by the motif of otherworldly journey.14 We also proposed further sub-types of each of these types, largely on the basis of their eschatology (cosmic or individual).15 We also acknowledged related types and genres, which met many of the criteria, but not all.

Critiques

Carol Newsom, who has written the most intelligent and helpful critique of the project that I have seen, characterizes this approach as “one of definition and classification,” which was “characteristic of genre studies of the time.”16

Critics might differ as to the criteria for classification. R. S. Crane focused on formal or structural characteristics.17 For Wellek and Warren: “Genre should be conceived, we think, as a grouping of literary works based, theoretically, upon both outer form (specific metre or structure) and also upon inner form (attitude, tone, purpose — more crudely, subject and audience).”18 More recently, however, the whole idea of classification and definition has encountered resistance.

The resistance is of various kinds. One objection arises from acute appreciation of the individuality of every text and the fear that this individuality will be lost if a work is viewed as a member of a genre. Jacques Derrida allows that “a text cannot belong to no genre,” but would prefer to “speak of a sort of participation without belonging — a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set.”19 Newsom comments that this kind of approach “accommodates better not only the multigeneric nature of many apocalypses but also their irreducible particularity.” She notes that recent defenders of classification often do so “in a way that quite changes the nature and purposes of classification from a descriptive enterprise to that of a critical category devised by the critic for the purposes of the critic.”20 For example: “Adena Rosmarin, in The Power of Genre, argues that genre can be seen as a kind of intentional category error in which two things that are not the same are brought together ‘as if’ they were the same.”21 A similar skepticism about generic classification underlies the recent Manchester-Durham project led by Alexander Samely, which attempts to profile all ancient Jewish literature.22 Samely and his colleagues avoid specific genre labels until the end of their analysis, and focus on smaller literary features. While they do not exclude the possibility of identifying genres, they hold that “speaking in genre terms … is by necessity a selection and emphasis, and also a simplification,” and so they favor a modular approach to the study of ancient texts rather than attempt to categorize whole works.23

I would agree, and have always agreed, that classification is something devised by critics for their purposes. The objections of people ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: The Genre Apocalypse Reconsidered
• I. Apocalypse and Prophecy
• II. Variations on a Genre
• III. Themes in Jewish Apocalyptic Literature
• IV. Pseudepigraphy
• V. Ethics and Politics
• Bibliography
• Index of Modern Authors
• Index of Ancient Sources