What is an apocalypse?

#57: “What is an apocalypse?” by Brendon Wahlberg
When people hear the word Apocalypse, they may think of a science fiction disaster that destroys the world, like in the film series “The Terminator”. But the word also refers to a type of book that can be found in the Bible. An “apocalypse” (in Greek, apokalupsis) is a “revelation” or “disclosure” of what is hidden. The two examples of this kind of book in our Bible are “Daniel” and (of course) the final book in the New Testament, “Revelation”. But among the books written in Bible times, there are many more apocalypses than those two. I have a collection of them in one of my books, which contains 25 different Old Testament period apocalypses and apocalyptic testaments. A collection of Christian writings contains 3 more. That is enough to allow scholars to decide what each of these books has in common. It’s a real genre, in other words, and there is a list of features shared by apocalypses. Let’s learn what they are.
1. Anonymity/Pseudonymity. My collection of apocalypses is contained in a book called “The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha”. My wife once saw it and asked me why I was reading about false pigs. She’s so funny! But really it means that these books have it in common that they were written by anonymous people using a fake name. So, they may have a title which mentions a famous person, like “Apocalypse of Abraham”, or “Apocalypse of Enoch”, but they were not really written by Abraham or Enoch. No one now knows who actually wrote them.
What are the possible reasons for saying your book was written by, say, Ezra or Adam? Using a pseudonym could have lent a kind of authority to the book, which it would not otherwise have had. A famous author who was revered in tradition would make people want to read it. Plus, the things which are revealed in an apocalypse are amazing secrets of heaven, hell, and the future. These secrets would not be revealed to just anyone; isn’t it more believable that they would be told to someone like Moses or Elijah, than to Joe from Judea?
Maybe the only apocalypse that isn’t pseudonymous is the New Testament Book of Revelation. It was probably really written by someone named John, although we are not sure which John that is.
2. Good vs. Evil – guess who wins? Why were apocalypses written in the first place? Maybe they were a response to suffering. Trying to explain why there is suffering for God’s people is an important theme in the Bible. If there is a God, why do we still suffer? As time went by, biblical writers proposed various answers to this question, but when the old answers stopped making sense, new answers were needed. For example, in the Torah, it is supposed that God’s people suffer because they break their half of the Covenant. The Prophetic books also assume that the people have broken the Covenant, and that their suffering is a punishment. Thus, the Babylonian exile could be explained.
But there is also a message of hope in the Prophets that once the people return to God and mend their ways, the suffering should end. For a while, when the exile ended, that seemed to be true. But what are God’s people to think when they DO return to God and mend their ways, and despite everything, they are still dominated by foreign empires (the Persians, the Greeks, and finally the Romans)? Where is God’s justice now? Is God causing the present suffering? The answer had to be: no. Therefore there had to be evil in the world opposing God and bringing suffering to God’s people. Could the suffering be forever? No – it had to end at some point, and God had to be victorious. From this, we get the apocalyptic literary genre.
An apocalypse takes a dualistic view of the world, pitting good against evil, and God against Satan. On God’s side are the angels. Satan has his demons. On the side of evil are the forces of sin and death. The timeline of the apocalyptic view is also dualistic, revealing that now things are bad, but in the future, it will all be fixed. People suffer because for now, the world is controlled by evil forces. But one day, God will intervene in the world and defeat evil. Everything opposed to God will be destroyed at that time, and God’s people will be restored. So the genre is very black and white, good and evil, now and later: a pervasive dualism.
3. A grim outlook. Despite the future victory of God, the state of the present is rather grim in an apocalypse. And if you think things are bad now, think again. An apocalypse usually claims that things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better. People are not in control of how bad it will get. God has relinquished control of the world to evil for the present time. The suffering will only get more intense.
4. The end is near. On the other hand, despite all the suffering, the redemptive end will come soon. The triumph of God is imminent. The reader of an apocalypse had to hold on for just a little while longer. “The one who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (Revelation 22:20)
5. Weird symbolism, but an Angel explains it all. One strange feature of most apocalypses is that the revealing of hidden truths is done through visions which are hard to understand. One famous example is in Revelations 13, in which Rome and one of the Emperors are symbolized by bizarre beasts. The book does not simply say that Rome is the enemy. Perhaps that would not be cryptic enough. To this day, it is still uncertain which Emperor is symbolically meant by the “number of the beast” (Rev 13:18), although Nero and Domitian are good candidates.
The main character of the book may even get a guided tour of Heaven or Hell, and learn the deepest secrets of how the universe is set up. But the information is not typically for mortal men to know. The visions confuse both the reader and the character who is having the visions. But often the main character is accompanied by an angel who proceeds to explain everything so that we can understand it.
6. Future past. Another feature of an apocalypse was using the past to “predict the future.” Here, too, using a pseudonym made sense. If you are describing the past in order to seem like you are predicting the future, it makes sense to claim that the book was written by someone in the distant past, for whom your own past events would be future events. For example, suppose your book claims to be written by Moses. Moses first “predicts” some things that have already happened, like the Babylonian exile. But as the text goes on, Moses begins to predict things that happened very recently. These things, the reader recognizes. Finally, the book predicts things that clearly have not yet happened. Because the past events were correctly predicted, the reader may place his trust in the future predictions too.
A good example of this is found in Daniel. Daniel is supposedly written during the Babylonian exile (597 BCE), but really it was written during the time of the Maccabean revolt against Antiochus (167BCE). From the actual vantage point of his present day, Daniel “predicts” several past empires that have dominated the people of Israel since the Babylonian exile. Then he mentions recent atrocities, such as Antiochus placing a pagan statue in the Temple. When Daniel finally begins to predict what will happen to the enemies of Israel in what was then the real future, his readers would have better believed that he knew what was coming.
7. Motivational speakers. The main point of an apocalypse might have been to comfort the reader. In the face of suffering, you had to have a reason for staying true to your faith. You still had to have hope. Maybe the details of the future which are revealed in each book are less important than the call to not give up. The use of a famous pseudonym in the title might also be comforting, in the sense that the reader’s present day troubles were foreseen and predicted by famous figures from scripture. This might give a sense that history is unfolding like it should, and that everything is not out of control.
The apocalyptic genre is an important one to understand. Basically, the ideas found in Jewish apocalyptic writings gave rise to Christianity and the New Testament. Although there is only one major apocalypse found in the New Testament, the Gospels and the writings of Paul are full of apocalyptic thinking. Jesus himself had a basic message that was partly apocalyptic. Jesus and Paul both said that the end of history was coming soon, and that there would be signs and worse suffering before the end. But soon, God and the Son of Man were going to triumph completely.
We have already mentioned how the Prophets were unable to explain the continued suffering of God’s people even after it seemed like they had returned to God and repented. And we have seen that the apocalypse was a new way to explain that suffering. But what happened when the apocalyptic viewpoint was no longer a way to explain suffering? Because, if you think about it for a moment, there is a built-in flaw. An apocalypse says that in time, and soon, there will be a great change for the better. But what about when a long time passes and there is no change, or things just get worse? The end-times events in Revelation were supposed to occur soon, and now it is 2,000 years later.
I know some people simply say that the predictions have yet to come true, but that is just a way to avoid the real issue. Another approach is basically what Christianity has done. While the dualism of an apocalypse was now-later, eventually that was replaced with a new dualism: Earth-Heaven. When the predicted end to suffering does not come as time goes on (and on and on), but the basic truth remains that it must somehow still come, then we come to think it must come in Heaven. The old dualism was, in a way, horizontal, in time here on Earth, from “now” to “later”, but then it became sort of vertical, from “down here” to “up there”. Despite our suffering on Earth here and now, there will be peace and justice in the afterlife there in Heaven. This is an answer to the question of suffering that, finally, cannot be disproven in this lifetime.