Apocalyptic Ideas

Basic to any understanding of apocalyptic ideas is a distinction between their use in the contexts of social and cosmic disruption and their use in contexts of disclosure and revelation. Both of these usages can claim some basis in the primary biblical apocalyptic text, whose opening is “The revelation (apocalypse) of Jesus Christ” (Revelation 1:1). On the one hand, on those occasions when we find words like apocalyptic or apocalypse used relating to cataclysmic events, we can see the influence here of the Book of Revelation as a whole, which is full of colorful descriptions of the disasters that overtake humanity before the coming of the millennium and the descent of the New Jerusalem from heaven to Earth. Such usage is based on the content of the Book of Revelation, which is largely (but by no means entirely) concerned with the upheavals that have to precede the new age, beliefs that were typical of much contemporary expectation about the future in both Christianity and ancient Judaism.

In the New Testament, we find ideas similar to those in the Book of Revelation in passages like Matthew 24–25, Mark 13, and Luke 21. On the other hand, we find apocalyptic used in something like its literal sense, where it means a disclosure of things that had hitherto been hidden. In such usage, it is the form of the Book of Revelation that determines the usage, as divine mysteries are unveiled, whether by vision or dream or some other extraordinary means, to a privileged seer. In the New Testament, we find ideas similar to these in Mark 1:10, Galatians 1:12 and 16, and Acts 10:11.

The apocalypse is a particular literary type found in the literature of ancient Judaism, characterized by claims to offer visions or other disclosures of divine mysteries concerning a variety of subjects. Usually, in Jewish and early Christian texts, such information is given to a biblical hero like Enoch, Abraham, Isaiah, or Ezra. There is an enormous variety of material contained in the ancient apocalypses. If we approach them as revelations of divine secrets, whose unveiling will enable readers to view their present situation from a completely different perspective, we shall best understand their distinctive character.