The Apocalyptic (Wrong) Turn, Part 2

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The “Apocalypse” of John and Picking Sides

The first composition to call itself an “apocalypse” was the Book of Revelation, written by the Apostle John circa 95 A.D.¹ “And even there” says Collins, “it is not clear whether the word denotes a special class of literature or is used more generally for revelation.”² But right here at the start I believe we are misdirected. John expressly tells us that his book is a “prophecy” (Rev. 1:3; 22:7, 10, 18, 19), and is “the testimony of Jesus Christ” (Rev. 1:2), which “is the spirit of prophecy” according to Revelation 19:10. So every indication within the Book of Revelation itself is that it is a prophecy. Hence the term apokalypsis as John uses it does not refer to a special class of literature, but rather does stand generally for a revelation from Jesus Christ.

After the time of the dissemination of John’s Revelation, other writings used the term,³ though arguably in service of the genre. The decision that modern readers have to make therefore is whether to interpret Revelation as if it were self-consciously penned as a piece of “apocalyptic” literature in a continuum with a genre established in the inter-testamental period, or as a straightforward account of what John thought of as a prophecy. What goes for John’s Apocalypse also goes, for example, for the visions of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Zechariah. The decision will inevitably divide one group of interpreters off from the other.

If we take a sketch of the two sides, the “prophecy side”⁴ will declare that only the Bible is needed to decipher the writing and its message, while the “apocalyptic side” will generally see such an approach as obscurantist “biblicism” which disregards the cultural setting in which the writing was given.⁵ This thorough-going biblicist has no difficulty in laying aside the partial understandings of the ancient mindset and listening with both ears to the Bible’s own interpretation, which it provides with reassuring regularity. As one commentator of the “prophecy” school put it,

In interpreting visions, symbols and signs in apocalyptic literature, one is seldom left to his own ingenuity to discover the truth. In most instances an examination of the context or comparison with a parallel biblical passage provides the Scripture’s own interpretation of the visions and symbols employed.⁶

But that is a naïve way of looking at the literature according to the apocalypticists:

Biblical scholarship in general has suffered from a preoccupation with the referential aspects of language and with the factual information that can be extracted from a text. Such an attitude is especially detrimental to the study of poetic and mythological material, which is expressive language, articulating feelings and attitudes rather than describing reality in an objective way. The apocalyptic literature provides a rather clear example of language that is expressive rather than referential, symbolic rather than factual.⁷

Of course, Collins et al do not believe that works of apocalyptic literature are describing actual events. He views Daniel for example as ex eventu prophecy, written centuries after the protagonists were dead. Neither does he hold that books like Daniel, Ezekiel and Zechariah record genuine predictions.

From this starting point it is a foregone conclusion that Collins and those who agree with him will entertain very different opinions about the nature of apocalypses than the biblicist. The effect that presuppositions about dating, divine inspiration, predictive prophecy, and borrowing from Canaanite myths⁸ has upon one’s understanding of the genre is very profound. But many conservatives have bought into the conclusions of such scholars while trying to hold on to traditional dating. Moreover, those evangelicals who have drank most deeply from the liberal wells are the ones who end up sounding more and more like their critical mentors.

To say the least, the way many evangelicals have seized upon the conclusions of liberal scholarship without realizing the dominating influence of their working assumptions upon those conclusions, reveals an attitude which can only be described as sloppy.

For example, Collins, who is a critical scholar, writes,

It should be clear that a mythological allusion does not carry the same meaning and reference in an apocalyptic context as it did in the original myth. If the “one like the son of man” who comes on the clouds in Daniel 7 alludes to the Canaanite figure of Baal, this is not to say that he is identified as Baal, or that the full story of Baal is implied. It merely suggests that there is some analogy between this figure and the traditional conception of Baal. In the same way, the “Son of Man” passage in Mark 13:26 alludes to Daniel, but the figure in Mark does not have the same reference as it had in Daniel, and the full narrative of Daniel 7 is not implied.⁹

Of course, Jesus believed Daniel was a historical figure and plainly implied that He Himself was the Danielic Son of Man (Matt. 24:15, 27, 30; 26:64). Furthermore, He clearly viewed “the abomination of desolation” as prophetical. So much of what the leading scholars on apocalyptic write, from the Persian and/or Cumaen origin of the four-kingdom motif¹⁰, to overly ascetic fasting and meditation¹¹, to the myth-borrowing of the later prophets, is built upon a second century dating of Daniel. It comes through persistently in Collins’s work. But if we stick to just the Bible the conclusions can look very different.