What Are They Saying About New Testament Apocalyptic

The final book of the Bible, Revelation prophesies the ultimate judgement of mankind in a series of allegorical visions, grisly images and numerological predictions. According to these, empires will fall, the "Beast" will be destroyed and Christ will rule a new Jerusalem. With an introduction by Will Self.

Scott Lewis begins his volume focusing on New Testament apocalyptic with Albert Schweitzer's famous 19th-century book The Quest for the Historical Jesus that concludes that both the worldview and the message of Jesus were thoroughly apocalyptic. And he brings us to the present with the heated debates generated by the historical Jesus research of the last 20 years and the rebirth of apocalyptic fervor at the beginning of the new millennium. The book focuses on five areas: 1) the attempts since Schweitzer to define the apocalypse genre and its constituent eschatology and theology 2) the debate over the question concerning the nature of Jesus' teaching and proclamation, and whether the apocalyptic statements attributed to him are genuine or products of the early church 3) the apocalyptic nature of Paul's proclamation and the central role it plays in his moral exhortation, ecclesiology, and spirituality 4) the nature of the message of the Book of Revelation and the different approaches to its interpretation 5) the application of apocalyptic theology and eschatology to the life of the church in the form of preaching, ethics, spirituality, and social justice; and 6) a concluding reflection A special concern of the book is the reappropriation of the apocalyptic tradition by the modern church in a manner that avoids the many misuses of this genre in the past. To this end, it is most important that apocalyptic theology be recognized for what it is: a theology of hope rather than a theology of fear. +

In this highly accessible discussion, Bart Ehrman examines the most recent textual and archaeological sources for the life of Jesus, along with the history of first-century Palestine, drawing a fascinating portrait of the man and his teachings. Ehrman shows us what historians have long known about the Gospels and the man who stands behind them. Through a careful evaluation of the New Testament (and other surviving sources, including the more recently discovered Gospels of Thomas and Peter), Ehrman proposes that Jesus can be best understood as an apocalyptic prophet--a man convinced that the world would end dramatically within the lifetime of his apostles and that a new kingdom would be created on earth. According to Ehrman, Jesus' belief in a coming apocalypse and his expectation of an utter reversal in the world's social organization not only underscores the radicalism of his teachings but also sheds light on both the appeal of his message to society's outcasts and the threat he posed to Jerusalem's established leadership.

A rich collection of essays exploring the meaning of 'apocalyptic' in the New Testament, by a variety of important scholars in the field.

The idea of "The Rapture" -- the return of Christ to rescue and deliver Christians off the earth -- is an extremely popular interpretation of the Bible's Book of Revelation and a jumping-off point for the best-selling "Left Behind" series of books. This interpretation, based on a psychology of fear and destruction, guides the daily acts of thousands if not millions of people worldwide. In The Rapture Exposed, Barbara Rossing argues that this script for the world's future is nothing more than a disingenuous distortion of the Bible. The truth, Rossing argues, is that Revelation offers a vision of God's healing love for the world. The Rapture Exposed reclaims Christianity from fundamentalists' destructive reading of the biblical story and back into God's beloved community.

These essays examine the intertexture of apocalyptic discourse in the New Testament: what the discourse represents, refers to, and uses of outside phenomena. Intertexture includes references in the Hebrew Bible, intertestamental and Greco-Roman texts, and social and cultural phenomena. Paperback edition is available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org).

Dr Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, is one of the world's leading scientists, working at the cutting edge of the study of DNA, the code of life. Yet he is also a man of unshakable faith in God. How does he reconcile the seemingly unreconcilable? In THE LANGUAGE OF GOD he explains his own journey from atheism to faith, and then takes the reader on a stunning tour of modern science to show that physics, chemistry and biology -- indeed, reason itself -- are not incompatible with belief. His book is essential reading for anyone who wonders about the deepest questions of all: why are we here? How did we get here? And what does life mean?

The contemporary study of Jewish apocalypticism today recognizes the wealth and diversity of ancient traditions concerned with the “unveiling” of heavenly matters‒‒understood to involve revealed wisdom, the revealed resolution of time, and revealed cosmology‒‒in marked contrast to an earlier focus on eschatology as such. The shift in focus has had a more direct impact on the study of ancient “pseudepigraphic” literature, however, than in New Testament studies, where the narrower focus on eschatological expectation remains dominant. In this Companion, an international team of scholars draws out the implications of the newest scholarship for the variety of New Testament writings. Each entry presses the boundaries of current discussion regarding the nature of apocalypticism in application to a particular New Testament author. The cumulative effect is to reveal, as never before, early Christianity, its Christology, cosmology, and eschatology, as expressions of tendencies in Second Temple Judaism.