I have a friend who is reading through the whole Bible in forty days for Lent. At such a pace, he says, you can tend to miss a great deal, but you also see things in the text you would never have seen otherwise. Here’s a question he sent me just the other day:
“Why do you think apocalyptic literature makes up so much of the biblical canon? Every time I read it, I feel lost.”
Let’s get technical for a second. By “apocalyptic literature,” my friend is speaking of a genre of Jewish/Christian texts, which depict a revelatory experience communicated through other-worldly interpreters to a human recipient, usually by means of highly symbolic language. And yes, such texts can be very hard to understand. Yet, if my friend had asked a bible scholar the question he asked me, the answer probably would have been something like, “Well, technically, there isn’t that much apocalyptic literature in our Bible, since Revelation and the second half of the Book of Daniel are the only two biblical texts which officially fit the genre. The vast majority of officially ‘apocalyptic literature’ comes from Jewish texts from the Second Temple period such as 1 Enoch, 2 and 3 Baruch, 4 Ezra, and the Book of Jubilees.”
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