A Reconsideration of Apocalyptic Visions

Extract

In 1974 I published a paper arguing that behind the pseudepigraphic presenta-tions of the religious experiences attributed to apocalyptic seers by the Jewish apocalypses of the Second Temple period, there lay a kernel of actual visionary activity or analogous religious experience.Michael E. Stone, “Apocalyptic, Vision, or Hallucination?” Milla Wa Milla 14 (1974) 47–56; repr. in Selected Studies in Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha with Special Reference to the Armenian Tradition (SVTP 9; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991) 419–28. This was not the regnant view then. Indeed, it had long been a prevalent opinion of scholarship that pseudepigraphic apocalypses are in some sense forgeries and that they present completely fictitious narratives about their claimed authors, with no roots in reality. The actual course of historical happenings might be presented in a symbolic vision, often culminating in prediction, but the framework, the seer, and his doings or feelings (there are no women among the supposed authors) are fictional. At most, the pseudepigraphic framework may hint at the general circumstances in which the work was composed. A Baruch or Jeremiah work about the destruction of the First Temple might well have been written after the destruction of the Second, but that had to be proved on other grounds than correspondence between the fictional situation and that of the author. (Indeed, the book of Baruch was not written in the context of the destruction of the Temple, nor the Qumran Jeremiah Apocryphon.) Scholars regarded words and actions ascribed to the pseudepigraphic author as fiction.In fact, this is an oversimplification. 4 Ezra was written after the destruction, but despite the overall temporal congruity, the framework is not a full one-for-one equivalence. Though the temporal framework can be shown, on various grounds, to be roughly accurate, we hesitate to say the book was written in Rome because the author says he was writing in Babylon; see 4 Ezra3:1 and Michael E. Stone, Fourth Ezra: A Commentary on the Book of Fourth Ezra (Hermeneia; Min-neapolis: Augsburg-Fortress, 1990) 10. Moreover, they often maintained that pseudepigraphic apocalypses were forwarding one or another particular and partisan viewpoint, and using a literary fiction to do so.