Eschatology and Apocalypticism

This book argues that hope is the indispensable precondition of religious practice and secular politics. Against dogmatic complacency and despairing resignation, David Newheiser argues that hope sustains commitments that remain vulnerable to disappointment. Since the discipline of hope is shared by believers and unbelievers alike, its persistence indicates that faith has a future in a secular age.

Drawing on premodern theology and postmodern theory, Newheiser shows that atheism and Christianity have more in common than they often acknowledge. Writing in a clear and engaging style, he develops a new reading of deconstruction and negative theology, arguing that (despite their differences) they share a self-critical hope. By retrieving texts and traditions that are rarely read together, this book offers a major intervention in debates over the place of religion in public life.

Rowan Williams' attempt to speak for the common good and rein in the extremes of liberal individualism is at the core of his Hegelian co-ordination of ecclesiology and political theology. His is a managerial approach which co-ordinates his Anglican ecclesiology with a Hegelian political theology. Behind the approach of Rowan Williams lies a common liberal Anglican tradition of absorbing large tracts of Hegel's work to forge a political theology that is wedded to a liberal establishment ideology of managing not only the established Church of England and the global Anglican provinces, but also alternately co-opting and marginalising other more orthodox Christian theologies and churches. This paper aims to show how Williams' political thinking was secular from his first publication on politics, a paper on Welsh devolution based on an address given in 1979. This secular approach is rooted in a theological approach that advocates divine retreat from the world. I then analyse critically Williams' reading of Hegel in the three papers he wrote in the 1990s as he climbed the Anglican episcopal ladder. Reading Hegel enables Williams to theologise his secular post-Kantian political theory. I argue that Williams strives to read Hegel in a non-esoteric style, evading the hints towards Hegel's esoteric and pagan roots found in Gillian Rose and Andrew Shanks, to whom he is indebted for his reading of Hegel. Subsequently I show how all this has been incorporated into a managerial approach to types of theology, with an apophatic method peculiar to Williams being employed to manage more kataphatic and orthodox types. The doctrines of eschatology and creation constitute the outer poles of this method. This was the framework for Williams' discussion of the Islamic community in England and modern Palestine in his 2008 speech 'Islam in English Law'. The twin focus on England and Palestine, and on the definitions of religious community appropriated from J. N. Figgis and Gillian Rose, may account for the ambivalence towards the idea of the use of violence by the community in the speech.

After the evacuation of the Gush Katif settlement and intensifying with the 2008-2009 Israeli War on Gaza, the border town of Sderot and its surrounding landscape became, for American Christian Zionists, a pilgrimage landscape and therefore a sacred space as it was performed as an event site portending the apocalypse. Christian Zionists interpreted the war and the landscape it took place on as a mise-en-scène of hope: the hollowing out of Gaza in anticipation of Christ’s return. Christian Zionists read the future as history. To explain this, I employ Philip K. Dick’s conceptualization of ‘orthogonal time’. Time and space merge as always already existing prophetic kairos time manifests itself in prophetic space. Watching Operation Cast Lead from pilgrimage landscapes overlooking the Gaza Strip, I conducted a yearlong ethnography before/during/after the 2008/09 war on Gaza with American Christian Zionists. They justified the war through colonial imaginings of terra nullius in three ways: 1) by denying that Palestinians exist as a legitimate national identity; 2) by denying the Palestinians’ ability to reason; and 3) prophetic inevitability. Gaza is therefore interpreted as God’s land and the demise of Gazans—present and future—is not only anticipated and preempted, but will have (already) happened.

This article uses discourse analysis to explore the intersection of spiritual warfare demonology and Christian nationalism among Trump-supporting neo-charismatic evangelicals. Analysing public materials produced during and after the 2016 US presidential campaign, it demonstrates how demonologies operate discursively to categorise, comprehend, and contest understandings of American identity and destiny. Situating spiritual warfare demonology in relation to narratives of ‘post-truth politics’ as the destabilisation of neoliberal consensus reality, the article explores how charismatic evangelicals position Trump’s election as a divine assault on a demoniac status quo, epitomised in the conspiratorial figure of the ‘Deep State.’ Examining demonologies of the ‘state’ and ‘border’ as joint arenas of epistemic and societal contestation, the article shows how spiritual warfare discourses seek to (re)define sociocultural notions of truth and falsity and thereby (de)legitimise specific gendered, sexualised, and racialised forms of being and belonging.

This essay is an attempt to re-examine the difficult questions that pertain to the origins of apocalyptic literature and to the rise of Jewish sectarianism. Since the publication of O. Plöger's Theokratie und Eschatologie and P. Hanson's The Dawn of Apocalyptic, the search for proto-apocalyptic origins in early post-exilic period sectarian conflict has generated a fair amount of debate and controversy. The most cogent and sustained response to Hanson's and Plöger's theories, S. Cook's Prophecy & Apocalypticism (1995), came nearly twenty years after Hanson's work and attempted to purge the influence of "deprivation theory" from the field of biblical studies, and, more broadly, social anthropology. Despite the fact that Cook's work represents some definite theoretical advances in the field, several aspects of this ongoing discussion warrant critical re-investigation. One must question whether, despite the frenzy to discredit older theories, several aspects of the older studies can (or should) be rescued. Toward this end, the present essay makes a fresh study of some central lines of thought in these works, especially as they relate to the issue of sectarianism and the sociological framework used for drawing exegetical conclusions. Our goal here will not be to explicate all the nuances of early post-exilic sectarianism, nor to posit a new theory for the origins of the proto-apocalyptic material per se, but rather to explore the very difficult question of a possible interrelationship between emerging sectarian phenomena and the material in Isa 56–66. In particular, we shall review one prominent theory of the symbolic—in our case, textual—expression of sectarian groups, that of the anthropologist Mary Douglas, and then apply this model to a series of enigmatic and highly debated texts in Trito-Isaiah in order to show the continued viability of the "sectarian" interpretation of these passages.

The uncertainties and scale of the Covid-19 pandemic has mobilised global anxieties and insecurities, and many cultural groups have conjuncturally embedded conspiracy theories within millennial and apocalyptic thought to explain and find meaning in the pandemic. The apocalypse lends itself well to conspiratorial thinking because conceptually it is flexible enough to reflect any crisis. To this end, the global development of Covid-19 conspiracism is what the authors term 'contagious conspiracism' which is defined as viral global cultural conspiracism. The paper explores how millennialist responses to Covid-19 in various media outlets transcend academic categories of analysis and cultural boundaries between, say, religious and secular, far-right and radical left. First explored is how the crisis became embedded in established (mainly American) contemporary millennial beliefs and prophecies through selected far-right, evangelical and radical left narratives. Second, it is shown how these theories have been 'improvised' to include 5G and also travelled to Europe and taken on local significance in Belfast and Berlin. Third, the authors illustrate the shared ingredients, motivations, and semiotics across apocalyptic conspiratorial Covid-19 narratives, all of which resonate with concerns about power, specifically emergent surveillance technologies, governmental abuse of power, and neoliberal capital, with divergent truths about who is blame from 5G/vaccine theories to corporate technocapitalism. The paper concludes that these shared discourses across apocalyptic and conspiratorial Covid-19 narratives mean many of us are conspiracists and/or conspiracy theorists at some level and is therefore both revealing of the similarities and has the potential to create democratic constituencies.

In this paper I explore the metaphor of the strata of the earth as ‘great stone book of nature’, and the Anthropocene epoch as its latest chapter. Debates about the geological status of the Anthropocene focus on the identification of stratigraphic ‘signals’ that might be being laid down for the geologist-to-come, but I suggest that marking the base of the Anthropocene layer is not a merely technical task but one which is entangled with questions about the human — about the Anthropos of the Anthropocene. Who would be the ‘onomatophore’ of the Anthropocene, would carry the name of Anthropos? I consider a number of ways of characterising the geological force of the Anthropocene – Homo faber, Homo consumens and Homo gubernans. But I then situate this dispersal of the Anthropos into ‘syntypes’ against the background of a more general dispersal of ‘man’ that is occasioned when human meets geology. I do this by bringing into dialogue two works: Foucault’s Order of Things, and Derrida’s Of Grammatology, focusing on their passages about the end of ‘man’ and the end of ‘the book’ respectively. I suggest the becoming geological of the human in the Anthropocene is both the end of the great stone book of nature and the Aufhebung of ‘man’ —both his apotheosis and his eclipse.

ʿAbdallāh ibn Sabaʾ is a figure generally regarded as Islam's first heretic by Sunnī scholars and also vilified by Shīʿī scholars. In this article an anonymous, esoteric work known as Umm al-Kitāb is examined as it contains an exceptional narrative that adopts a strikingly sympathetic approach to Ibn Sabaʾ. It is also argued that the work's unique take on the Ibn Sabaʾ legend sheds considerable light on the date and elusive provenance of this early Shīʿī text.

The chapter thirty-four is one of the most interesting and important sections of the Iranian Bundahišn. It describes the eschatological events that will occur at the end of the Zoroastrian cosmic era such as the resurrection of the body and the final judgment. This article provides a critical edition of the text in Middle Persian (MP) based on the codex TD1 accompanied by an annotated translation including a commentary on the most relevant mythological and religious issues.

The predominant image of the crown is among the most baffling features of several, difficult Gnostic apocalypses, recensions of which we know to have been controversial in the school of the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus (ca. 263 C.E.). In these “Sethian” apocalypses, recovered from Nag Hammadi (Upper Egypt) in 1945, crowns adorn heavenly beings, and are donned by seers during their celestial voyages. It is clear they are significant in this literature, but scholarship has yet to answer how, and why. First, while these crowns are relatively common in the “Sethian Gnostic” literature, they are notably absent from the Hellenic philosophical tradition which also informs the apocalypses in Plotinus’ school. The abundance of crown-imagery, however, in contemporary Jewish and Christian apocalypses thus serves as evidence of a Judeo-Christian background for this “Platonizing” Sethian literature, even if it is replete with Neoplatonic jargon instead of references to Jesus of Nazareth. Secondly, the crowns seem to indicate a state of glorification and deification derivative of ancient Jewish tradition concerning the possibility of recovering the primordial glory of humanity, often phrased as becoming an angel. Thirdly, Plotinus’ Christian Gnostic opponents may have seen these crowns differently — as indicative of the glory of martyrdom, reminding us that this early confrontation between Hellenic and Christian Gnostic philosophers followed on the heels of the Decian and Valerianic persecutions.

If the Apocalypse was a dream vision emanating from the ancient Near East, why not interpret it via a dream book also emanating from the ancient Near East? Such was the contention of the theologian Joseph Mede in 1632, and the dream book he nominated was that attributed to "an Arab" known as Achmet, first published in Greek in 1600. For Mede, Achmet removed all ambiguity and difficulty from the act of exegesis -- leaving aside problems that seem fairly obvious to us -- to such a degree that Mede claimed his explanations of the Apocalypse did not depend on "interpretation" at all but were purely "literal." The value of such a claim in a time of confessional strife can't be overstressed. This was a poor man's Orientalism, however. Mede's inspiration probably came from the hieroglyphic studies of previous generations of Italians, which centered on the manual of Horapollo; meanwhile, his nominal peers included Christian Hebraists such as Johann Drusius. His mission, briefly put, was to simplify his text rather than to add meanings and dimensions. Simultaneously, he insisted that its every word possessed theological significance. Perhaps because of Achmet's oriental allure, Mede's views held a firm position in English theology for well over a century and even convinced a reader as iconoclastic as Isaac Newton.

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Different religions have strikingly different views of history; but the emergence of modern technology offers promises of salvation that can draw equally on Christian views of time in the US and Hindu views of time in India. For centuries, Christian theologians incorporated technological progress into their linear vision of history, which will end with an eschatological conflict and the rise of the New Jerusalem. In the US today, techno-enthusiasts have adopted the claim that we are fast approaching the end of the world as we know it, though the salvation they expect no longer references Christianity. A 'Singularity' will occur, they say, leading to the transformation of biological life into an eternal new world of machine intelligence. In India, however, history is cyclical and the end of the world has long been expected to be a return to the first age. Although presently mired in the misery of the kali yuga, we should anticipate an end to this period and a return to the glorious satya yuga. Based upon popular Indian understandings of science and technology, we should expect that both will be crucial to this process. Interviews and observations made in the US and in India reveal how technological progress is now the critical component in cultural expectations about the end of the world and the emergence of a new world to come.

El artículo examina, desde la perspectiva de la historia intelectual, el análisis del proceso de laicidad en el siglo xix iberoamericano, y su lectura en clave escatológica desde algunos sectores de la intelectualidad católica. El texto argumenta que este pensamiento escatológico debe ser estudiado más allá de sus dimensiones teológicas, sino también como una forma particular de leer apocalípticamente los cambios sociales y culturales que la modernidad política implicó para la religión y su lugar en el espacio público en el siglo xix.

The Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement has grown rapidly in the past two years. In popular media, XR has sometimes been described using religious terminology. XR has been compared to an eco-cult, a spiritual and cultural movement, and described as holding apocalyptic views. Despite XR lacking the distinctive religiosity of new testament and early (pre-150ACE) Christianity, the movement resonates with the early Christian experience in several ways. (1) A characterization of events within the world as apocalyptic. (2) Both feel vulnerable to the apocalypse in specific ways, though each responds differently. (3) Both experience the apocalypse as a community and develop community strategies in response to the apocalypse. The paper sketches certain features of new testament Christianity and compares some of these to XR. The main difference between the two movements is that XR makes decisions to actively become vulnerable, whereas new testament Christianity was more often passively vulnerable. Elements of new testament Christianity provide a context for understanding XR as a response to an apocalypse.

This article examines how ancient and medieval Christians invoked ideas about ‘hermaphrodites’ to work out fundamental questions about who we are as humans. What was the original or ideal state of humanity? Was the division of sex into male and female an inherent part of human nature? Certain Christian theologians, beginning in antiquity, claimed that Adam – the first human, according to the biblical book of Genesis – was an ‘androgyne’ or ‘hermaphrodite,’ that is, a combination of male and female sex. Similarly, some medieval theologians speculated that all post-resurrection bodies were androgynous. In conversations about both the creation and the resurrection, questions about sexual difference thus surfaced repeatedly, revealing key assumptions about the sexed body and its place in the narrative of Christian history. This article suggests that such debates were key to ancient and medieval efforts to determine which sexes were legitimate sexes, and therefore which lives were redeemably human.

Focusing on two modernist thinkers, Vasily Rozanov (1856 – 1919) and Ernst Bloch (1885 – 1976), the article examines the ontological and existential implications of their eschatological thinking and its concept of nonlinear time, which negates the future when thinking of what is ahead. Both writers, as discussed in the article, treat life and matter as open and dynamic in their potentiality, filled with hope for transcendence of death and perishing without transcending the material, which in turn redefines our thinking of nature and the social world. These two thinkers, though radically different in terms of their political commitments, as the article demonstrates, meet in the space of Fyodor Dostoevsky's prose, which was an important reference point for their respective eschatological projects.

This essay intervenes in current ecocritical debates about the relationship between fiction and environmental risk by analyzing the limits of risk theory in the deep time of the Anthropocene. Although contemporary ecocriticism argues that we must move from apocalyptic depictions of risk to realistic ones, this essay examines fictions of nuclear waste commissioned by the Department of Energy to show that a risk-based realism is used to maintain the status quo of settler colonialism. It then turns to a countermodeling of the futures of nuclear waste by Leslie Marmon Silko in Almanac of the Dead (1991), where uranium’s longue durée future, impossible to imagine from a human perspective, recasts the present as a space in which the unlikely, implausible, and unrealistic saturate the everyday. For Silko, the apocalyptic futurelessness that nuclear waste seeds into our present is a vital formal resource for unsettling colonial realism in the contemporary United States.

This article was awarded the Don D. Walker Prize in Western Literature, and received an honorable mention for the 1921 Prize in American Literature.

[Duke University Press generously grants journal article authors “the right to post the Author’s own versions (but not the Publisher’s versions) on the Author’s personal website, in the Author’s university repository, and in other open access repositories (noncommercial, and must not directly compete with Duke University Press), with copyright and source information provided along with a link to the published version as soon as it is available.” This article appears in American Literature 89.4 (December 2017): 761-789. Provided here is the author’s final version submitted to American Literature before final copyedits, and it is not intended for citation. Please see the published version at https://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-abstract/89/4/761/132823/Impossible-Futures-Fictions-of-Risk-in-the-Longue?redirectedFrom=fulltext .]

This article offers a study and critical edition of a group of passages (here called the “Schism Extracts”) that were compiled from the apocalyptic prophecies of Hildegard of Bingen and heavily annotated in response to the Great Western Schism (1378–1417). The article argues that the Extracts were created by someone with ties to the University of Paris to illuminate a French perspective on the Schism and that they circulated primarily within a Parisian milieu—both among masters at the university and among members of religious houses in and around Paris. The article outlines the main contents and themes of the Extracts and the manuscript contexts in which they are found, including five prophecy collections. While one prophecy collection is known to have been compiled by the Parisian master Simon du Bosc, it is here argued that three of the other collections were produced by Pierre d'Ailly or someone within his circle of associates. Many of the prophetic writings selected for these collections thematically concern the eschatological and reformist role of France and a future holy angelic pope (the pastor angelicus). These include the writings of John of Rupescissa, and parallels between the Extracts and John's reading of Hildegard suggest that the compiler of the text was well-versed in John's apocalyptic thought.

This paper investigates how Byzantine apocalypses convey the concept of time to their audience. For this study, I have chosen a threefold approach: First, I sketch the chronology of the end times, which consists of various presumed dates for the Last Judgement and of a sequence of expected events that were anticipated to take place beforehand. Second, I discuss the typological structure of apocalyptic time, which underlies much of the prophetic accounts, as is shown by a few selected examples. Third, I reflect upon the speed of apocalyptic time by arguing for the significance of fluctuations in the narrative speed and by discussing the apocalyptic phenomenon known as the shortening of days. When seen together, these three approaches help reconstruct a rather detailed picture of how the Byzantines conceptualized and articulated apocalyptic time.

Since the turn of the millennium, theologians and secular scholars of religion have increasingly begun exploring the relationship between transhumanism and religion. However, analyses of anti-transhumanist apocalypticisms are still rare, and those that exist are situated mainly among broader explorations of religious and secular bioconservatism. This article addresses this lack of specificity by drawing analyses of transhumanism and religion into dialogue with explorations of contemporary demonology through a close study of the beliefs of the evangelical conspiracist Thomas Horn and the anti-transhumanist milieu around him. Exploring the milieu's multifaceted demonology of the secular world in light of genealogies of religion and secularity, the article situates Horn's demonology as one attempt to negotiate these genealogies, using what Sean McCloud terms a “‘supernatural’ hermeneutics of suspicion” that sees spiritual forces as the structural base of reality. It argues that, while fringe, milieus like Horn's illuminate broader cultural tensions and genealogical relations surrounding the place of religion in a secular(izing) world.

Carlow University, 3333 5th Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. email: dfrayergriggs@gmail.com.According to the prevailing interpretation of 1 Cor 3.15, the phrase διὰ πυρός must be taken in the local sense, and the fire of vv. 13 and 15 plays no soteriological function. This article contests this reading, arguing that Paul's probable allusion to Mal 3 and his reference to the testing function of fire may imply refining as well. More importantly, it demonstrates that whereas the phrase διὰ πυρός is indeterminate and may take either the local or the instrumental sense, nearly every other instance of the construction σῴζω + διά + genitive in the relevant Greek literature has an instrumental sense.

For Christians, coping with a crisis requires a proper expectation of the end of the world. This article will discuss the experience of Thessalonians' persecuted community, who receive solace and orientation from Saint Paul's eschatological teaching. I will focus on Aquinas' and Heidegger's reading of Saint Paul's letters to the Thessalonians. Their interpretation reveals two opposite ways of waiting for the end of the world, which pertain to two different modes of human rationality: (1) the calculative reasoning of those who claim to know when the end will happen, and (2) the lucidity and sobriety of the true believers, who accept that nobody can know the day of the second coming of Christ and thus we have to continually prepare and be ready for it. Which way is the most suited to handle a crisis like the current pandemic? The calculative reason is necessary for fields like medicine, which are crucial in defeating the pandemic. However, when dealing with a crisis that brings us unexpected and unknown circumstances, we also need the virtuous, sober, and awakened attitude promoted by Saint Paul in his letters and highlighted by Aquinas and Heidegger.

This article contributes to the understanding of the role of religion in the public and political controversies about homosexuality in Africa. As a case study it investigates the heated public debate in Zambia following a February 2012 visit by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who emphasised the need for the country to recognise the human rights of homosexuals. The focus is on a particular Christian discourse in this debate, in which the international pressure to recognise gay rights is considered a sign of the end times, and Ban Ki-moon, the UN and other international organisations are associated with the Antichrist and the Devil. Here, the debate about homosexuality becomes eschatologically enchanted through millennialist thought. Building on discussions about public religion and religion and politics in Africa, this article avoids popular explanations in terms of fundamentalist religion and African homophobia, but rather highlights the political significance of this discourse in a postcolonial African context.

Popular science publications in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) reveal a striking merger between apocalyptic religious thought and scientific research. Three major elements characterize early Jewish and Christian apocalypticism: alienation within the world, desire for the establishment of a heavenly new world, and the transformation of human beings so that they may live in that world in purified bodies. In Apocalyptic AI, these characteristics are attributed scientific authority. Apocalyptic AI advocates, frustrated by the limitations of bodily life, look forward to a virtual world inhabited by intelligent machines and human beings who have left their bodies. Having downloaded their consciousnesses into machines, human beings will possess enhanced mental abilities and, through their infinite replicability, immortality.

This article examines expectation, optimism, and future-oriented affective postures in financial markets in conversation with theological debates about hope, fanaticism, and enthusiasm. I identify a tendency in economic discourse to valorize calculative and calm rationality over against emotive enthusiasm in market behavior. In recalling the theological debates over passions and interests that proved influential at the inception of capitalism, I argue that the denigration of exuberance in economics bears genealogical links to theological condemnation of the fanatic and enthusiast in early modernity. Retrieving this theological precursor provides an analytical lens for considering the ongoing traction of the language of rationality in economics.

In this article we develop an analysis of No lifes, those whose horizon of sense has decided to anchor mostly in their virtual lives. These digital hermits, as they are classified by some, beyond the simplifying perspective of addicts of the digital universes, often prove to be practitioners of convictions, whose diversity of profiles testifies to the complexity of the paths and the axiological choices. Like new trajectories of conversion, these recluses of the 21st century appear as a contemporary, virtual, way of digital eschatology. After returning to the reasons that motivate players to withdraw from the world and take refuge in digital universes, we will show how an analogy with hermits is heuristically fertile.

Dans cet article, nous développons une analyse des No life, ceux dont l’horizon de sens a décidé de s’ancrer majoritairement dans leurs vies virtuelles. Ces ermites du digital, comme ils sont qualifiés par certains, au-delà des perspectives simplificatrices d’addicts des univers numériques, s’avèrent être bien souvent des pratiquants de convictions, dont la diversité des profils témoigne de la complexité des parcours et des choix axiologiques. Telle de nouvelles trajectoires de conversion, ces reclus du 21ème siècle apparaissent comme une voie contemporaine, virtuelle, d’une eschatologie numérique. Après être revenu sur les raisons qui motivent les joueurs à se retirer du monde et se réfugier dans des univers numériques, nous montrerons en quoi une analogie avec les ermites est heuristiquement féconde.

The life and intellectual career of the Japanese ideologue, author and revolutionary Kita Terujiro (Ikki) was, and is still, debated by scholars of modern Japanese history. While some define him a socialist and others as a fascist, many historians tend to agree that he shifted from socialism to fascism in the middle of his career, around 1916, when he was writing his second book,  Unofficial History of the Chinese Revolution. This article argues that, while Kita’s thought certainly contained fascist and socialist elements, its connecting thread was in fact Utopian and eschatological, and that Kita should be seen as a spiritual visionary rather than as a conventional socialist or fascist. Furthermore, Kita had indeed undergone a significant change while writing
Unofficial History of the Chinese Revolution, but this change was not ideological, but rather epistemological. In other words, a transition in Kita’s understanding of how valid knowledge should be obtained shifted his ideology from a relatively peaceful to a violent, revolutionary direction. This shift had a significant impact on his famous plan for the reorganization of  Japan and, therefore, on Japanese radical groups, primarily in the army, which endorsed his plan during the 1930s.

The 2008 SBL meeting in Boston included a panel review session on James R. Royse's book, Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri (NTTSD 36; Leiden: Brill, 2007). A number of the reviews of this important work are presented here, along with Royse's response. The papers were produced as oral presentations and have been kept in their original shape, except for some straightforward corrections.

This article argues for a reading of Lk. 17.22 as antanaclasis, which is a form of rhetorical wordplay in which the same (or a similar) term is repeated, but in two different senses. According to this reading, Jesus introduces his discourse to the disciples (vv. 22-37) with the prediction that in the coming days they will desire to 'see' (as in witness) one of the days of the Son of Man but they will not 'see' (as in comprehend) these days when they occur among them so long as they fail to understand that suffering is primary to the Son of Man's identity. Such a reading coheres with the larger Lukan theme of the blindness of the disciples to the necessity of Jesus' passion. Such a reading also requires a rethinking of the assumption that the subject of Jesus' discourse in 17.22-37 is the parousia.

This paper examines Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie with the aim of shedding light on its messianic-eschatological approach. Firstly, I take into account the formal structure of history through a reference to Aristotle's grasp of κίνησις and its principles. I then try to connect this structure to the complex epochal movement of Universal History, as it emerges from Heidegger's works in the '30s. Lastly, I deal with the concept of the last-God's realm in order to stress the messianic dimension of Heidegger's projects for the new humankind known as the Futurians.

Speculation about what ancient Maya texts have to say about 2012 is becoming a global phenomenon in popular culture. This speculation, largely apocalyptic, is more often based on acquaintance with historical Western interpretations than on familiarity with the texts themselves and their cultural contexts. This paper approaches the 2012 phenomenon through close readings of Maya texts and images considered within the contexts of historical and contemporary Maya culture and Western scholarship. It focuses on images of mythological events depicted on two Late Classic Maya vessels: the 'Vase of the Seven Gods' (Kerr no. 2796) and the 'Vase of the Eleven Gods' (Kerr no. 7750). These images are interpreted as representing deities, gathered in 'cosmogonic conclave', preparing to re-create the world with their sacrifices at the last completion of a great cycle and the beginning of a new 5,125-year 13-Bak tun Maya 'Long Count'. The rites of passage are presided over by an enigmatic Venus-warrior/sacrificer deity previously known only as God L. God L's principal name and nature had remained undeciphered and his identity obscure until the author's researches resulted in the decipherment and 'reading' presented here. This study offers an explication of why God L, whom the author has demonstrated is the Maya god of tobacco among his many aspects, takes the senior role in presiding over these 13-Bak tun completion rituals and why it is reasonable to hypothesize that the same entities would be back for the fulfillment of the present cycle in 2012.

In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida argues that the category of hauntology should replace the canonical understanding of ontology. By invoking the trope of the ghost, hauntology helps to demonstrate how there still lingers in the absence of a thing, a spectral element that is more real than its corporeal counterpart. Thus, the ontological category of time is replaced by deconstruction with an anticipatory temporality abstracted from the transcultural messianisms of planet Earth, which is called messianicity. By framing this analysis through the epochal deployment of what Derrida coins as globalatinisation, I will argue that the concept of messianicity can be applied to a specific mode of subjective production, subjectivation, to help demonstrate the failings of not only the event of revelation (Offenbarung), but also, by pushing towards its paroxysm in an hauntological spirit, the so-called originarity of revealability (Offenbarkeit) – its still entanglement in the politics of light. Going beyond Derrida here, what this amounts to is a certain ‘hauntology of revealability’ whereby the arrivant, the First, is accepted under the umbrella of the messianic pledge of faith just to have itself doubled by a darker power that has never had to haunt itself into its eschatological or teleological throne.

The two central themes in the films of Michael Haneke, the fragmentation and brutality of interpersonal and societal relations and the notion of cinematic reality as an illusory construction, reach an apex in his 2003 film Le temps du Loup/Time of the Wolf. That is to say, the post-apocalyptic breakdown of civilisation represented in the film forcibly confronts the viewer with a social critique of a global magnitude that encompasses anxieties engendered by millennial capitalism in a post-9/11 world while conterminously withholding spectatorial desire and pleasure traditionally found in (post) apocalyptic cinematic narratives.
Haneke’s use of “cinematic unpleasure” as a device for critiquing social formations and more pertinently the spectator’s relationship toward cinematic spectacle has been explored in other films such as Funny Games (1997) and Caché/Hidden (2005). Indeed, it has been cited as a reason for criticising Haneke as a cinematic sadist who situates a more active viewer who is complicit in the consumption and proliferation of extreme psychological and physical depictions of violence. Although this form of combative cinema has its limits in providing an ethics of response to viewing violent imagery, especially when shown through the very same device of cinematic violence, little has been mentioned of how Haneke’s withholding of generic expectations and spectacle can forward a critical viewing position that engages with dominant Hollywood representations.
Therefore, the article will develop the notion of “cinematic unpleasure” by engaging with Catherine Wheatley’s recent study on Haneke that looks at the notion of reflexivity as a more incisive approach to examine the positioning of an ethical and active spectator. Incorporating similar themes found in his other films along with other post-millennium apocalyptic movies will supply a point of entry as to whether Haneke’s refusal to accede to dominant aesthetic representations of the (cinematic) apocalypse enables a distanciation between viewer and traumatic spectacle that can lead to an ethical and active spectator?

At a Marian apparition site in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, New York, Catholic pilgrims use photography to document miraculous phenomena, produce signs of the supernatural, and create sacred images. As an emergent folk religious practice, "miraculous photography" constitutes a creative, technological innovation on traditional Catholic beliefs about miraculous images. This essay explores the meaning of miraculous photography for believers, discusses the compatibility of photographic image-making with previous miraculous image traditions, and examines the appeal of photography as a means of affirming the reality of the supernatural through the creation of tangible, sacred proofs.

This article examines a number of cinematic, literary and journalistic texts in the context of what film maker Tom Tykwer calls the "aesthetic memory" of September 11. In particular it explores the way these narratives relate to deeply embedded Western cultural myths of the apocalyptic. The apocalyptic language of American Christian fundamentalism and the heroic narratives of Hollywood film are explored as twin influences on a powerful civil religion dubbed by Jewett and Lawrence (ABSTRACT: This article examines a number of cinematic, literary and journalistic texts in the context of what film maker Tom Tykwer calls the "aesthetic memory" of September 11. In particular it explores the way these narratives relate to deeply embedded Western cultural myths of the apocalyptic. The apocalyptic language of American Christian fundamentalism and the heroic narratives of Hollywood film are explored as twin influences on a powerful civil religion dubbed by Jewett and Lawrence (

Jairus Victor Grove contends that we live in a world made by war. In Savage Ecology he offers an ecological theory of geopolitics that argues that contemporary global crises are better understood when considered within the larger history of international politics. Infusing international relations with the theoretical interventions of fields ranging from new materialism to political theory, Grove shows how political violence is the principal force behind climate change, mass extinction, slavery, genocide, extractive capitalism, and other catastrophes. Grove analyzes a variety of subjects—from improvised explosive devices and drones to artificial intelligence and brain science—to outline how geopolitics is the violent pursuit of a way of living that comes at the expense of others. Pointing out that much of the damage being done to the earth and its inhabitants stems from colonialism, Grove suggests that the Anthropocene may be better described by the term Eurocene. The key to changing the planet's trajectory, Grove proposes, begins by acknowledging both the earth-shaping force of geopolitical violence and the demands apocalypses make for fashioning new ways of living.

This paper examines the use of the language of the eternal damnation as applied by Gregory, bishop of Tours, writing in the 6 th century in Merovingian Gaul. Instead of trying to elucidate the bishop's views of hell in the light of what late antique Christian authors prior to him had written on that subject, this paper takes the writings of Gregory as a point of departure. Various types of people (who are regrouped around their religious creeds) which Gregory explicitly sees as damned are examined and the possible causes behind the application of the language of hell are adduced. The instances where Gregory chooses to refrain from the use of the language of damnation are given equal attention and the political limits of the application of the threat of hell are explored through the example of the Merovingian king Chilperic.

This article examines the cultural background informing the overarching narrative of the Legend of Zelda series, focusing on the references to Japanese religious traditions associated with the characters Ganondorf, Demise, and Calamity Ganon. The destruction enacted by these antagonists is not entirely negative; rather, it is a part of the cycle of rebirth that is necessary for the renewal of Hyrule both within the series mythology and in the context of the player's delight in the postapocalyptic and preindustrial green spaces that characterize the games in the Zelda franchise. A close reading of the original Japanese-language script of Breath of the Wild (2017), Skyward Sword (2011), and The Wind Waker (2002) reveals that the various permutations of Ganon add cultural depth to the games, thus endowing the conflicts underlying their stories with a greater sense of literary complexity.

- The World of Angels -Leviathan, Dragons, and the Antichrist Demonic Parodies and the Hero from across the The Double Mirror Exodus and Gospel The Metaphor of Kingship  King, Priest, and Prophet The Question of Primogeniture ,Genesis: In the Beginning ,Genesis: Creating the Sexes; Exodus: A Revolutionary Heritage . Law: Ordering a Society
Above The Page #s are not present for the Abstract but below are -
152 16. Law and Revolution; Wisdom: The Proverb 162 17. Wisdom: Playing before God; Ecclesiastes: Vanity of Vanities 172
18. Job: A Test 181
19. Job and the Question of Tragedy 191
Contents vii
20. Job and Restored Humanity 202
21. The Language of Proclamation: Style and Rhythm in the Bible; The Gospel: Rewriting the Commandments 212
22. Revelation: Removing the Veil 222
23. Revelation: After the Ego Disappears 232
24. The Language of Love 244
Maps 251
Note on the Illustrations 255
Notes 261
The Bible and Further Readings 267
FOUR AGES: THE CLASSICAL MYTHS 271
Foreword 273
Introduction 275
I. In The Beginning 279
The Creation 279
viii Contents
The Golden Age 280
War in Heaven 281
The Reign of Zeus 284
Prometheus 287
Pandora's Box 289
Deucalion's Flood 290
Phaëthon 293
II. Spring and Winter 296
Demeter and Persephone 296 Adonis 301 Hyacinthus 302 Narcissus 302 Orpheus 303
III. Loves of the Gods and Metamorphoses 306
Loves of Zeus: Callisto, Io 306
Contents ix
Pan and Syrinx 308
Apollo and Daphne 308
Clytie 309
Endymion 309
Arachne 310
Procne and Philomela 310
Midas' Touch 312
Ceyx and Alcyone 313
Nisus and Scylla 314
Philemon and Baucis 315
IV. The Heroes 317
Perseus 317
The Labours of Heracles 320
Jason and the Golden Fleece 326
Bellerophon and Pegasus 338
x Contents
Theseus 340
V. The Royal House of Thebes 348
The Children of Agenor 348
Zeus and Semele 349
Ino and Athamas 350
Pentheus 350
Actaeon 351
Oedipus 352
VI. The Tale of Troy 355
The Apple of Discord 355
The War 358
The Fall of the City 363
The Returns 366
The Return ofMenelaus 366 The Return of Agamemnon 369 The Return of Aeneas 371 The Return of Odysseus 373
Contents xi
Index of Classical Mythology 455
VIL Cupid and Psyche 388
VIII. Conclusion: The Passing and Afterlife of the Gods 395
Family Trees 404
Mythology-History Chart 406
Maps 408
Sources of Quotations 412
Note on the Illustrations 415
Note on Classical Names 416
Notes 418
Suggestions for Further Reading 433
Biblical Indexes 437

So the narrative unity of the Bible, which is there in spite of the miscellaneous nature of its content, was something that I stressed. And that concern for narrative seems to me to be distinctive of the Bible among other sacred books. In the Koran, for example, the revelations of Mohammed were gathered up after his death and arranged in order of length, which suggests that revelation in the Koran pays no attention to
Symbolism in the Bible 9
narrative continuity—that's not what it is interested in. But the fact that the Bible is interested in it seems to be significant for the study of literature and for many other reasons. The second way in which the Bible is unified is through a number of recurring images: mountain, sheep, river, hill, pasture, bride, bread, wine, and so on. They echo and re-echo all through the Bible and are repeated in so many ways as to suggest that they have a thematic importance: that they are actually building up some kind of interconnected unity. The present course is really based on this conception of the unity of the narrative of the Bible and the unity formed by its recurrent imagery. The only form of the Bible that I can deal with is the Christian Bible, with its Old and New Testaments, however polemical those names may sound. In the first place, it's the only version of the Bible I know anything about, and in the second place it is the one that has been decisive for Western culture through the Middle Ages and Renaissance to our own time. The Old Testament was of course written in Hebrew, except for a few passages in the later language Aramaic, which replaced Hebrew as a spoken language and was probably the language spoken by Jesus and his disciples. In Hebrew, only the consonants are written down, so that all the vowels are editorial. Therefore, the establishing of the text of the Hebrew Bible took quite a long while, and was still going on in New Testament times. Some centuries before that, it had been translated into Greek for the benefit of Jews living in the city of Alexandria in Egypt. The number of translators was traditionally seventy, and so the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament has been called the Septuagint, usually abbreviated LXX. The Hebrew text in the form in which we have it was established later—it's called the Masoretic, the scholarly or traditional text established by rabbis and scholars working mainly around the environs of Lake Tiberius in Galilee. So the Septuagint is in many respects older than the Hebrew text that we have, and sometimes preserves more primitive readings. The New Testament was written in Greek by writers whose native language probably was not Greek. The kind of Greek they wrote was called koine, the popular Greek which was distributed all through the Near Eastern countries as a kind of common language. The writers of the New Testament may have been familiar to differing degrees with the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, but when they quoted from the Old Testament they tended to use the Septuagint. And that is the
10 Symbolism in the Bible
beginning of a principle which is rather important for the history of Christianity. In any sacred book, there is enough concentration in the writing, and enough attention paid to it by those who accept it as sacred, for the linguistic characteristics of the original language to be of great importance. Any Jewish interpretation or commentary on the Hebrew Old Testament inevitably takes great care to study the linguistic nuances of the Hebrew original, and similarly with the Koran, which is so bound up with the linguistic characteristics of Arabic that in practice the Arabic language has had to go everywhere that the Islamic religion has gone. In

In the 1970s and 1980s, Northrop Frye and Jay Macpherson co-taught at the University of Toronto's Victoria College a very influential course on the history of Western mythology in which Frye focused on the Biblical myths and Macpherson on the Classical. Biblical and Classical Myths attempts to recreate the remarkable synergy of that course, combining Frye's lectures (published only very recently in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye) and Macpherson's popular 1962 textbook, Four Ages: The Classical Myths. Frye's lectures on the Bible, which make up the first half of the book, expound on a wide variety of topics related to Biblical imagery and narrative. In the second half of the book, Macpherson recounts the major Classical myths, exploring their interconnections and their sur vival in later European traditions. By complementing the Biblical tradition with the Classical, this vol ume provides a comprehensive introduction to Western mythology. Engaging and accessible, Biblical and Classical Myths represents a unique achievement in scholarship and is an essential volume for students and others interested in literature and cultural studies.
Some Pseudepigrapha  and other Ancient Works +
Other Syriac and English , Arabic , Greek works listed below I myself can obtain if you message me !
Table of Contents
1. The Life of Adam and Eve (Apocalypse of Moses) (Arabic)
2. The Testament of Adam (Syriac and Arabic)
3. The Cave of Treasures (Syriac and Arabic)
4. The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan (Arabic)
5. ​The Book of Adam (Codex Nazaraeus; Mandean Fragment) (Syriac)
6. Life of Abel, by Symmachus (Syriac)
7. Syriac Book of Seth (Syriac)
8. 1 Enoch (Syriac)
9. Apocalypse of Enoch (Syriac)
10. Tractate of Shem (Syriac)
11. The Testament of Abraham (On the Death of Abraham) (Arabic)
12. History of Melchizedek (Syriac and Arabic)
13. Joseph and Asenath (Recension Two) (Syriac)
14. History of Joseph (Syriac)
15. History of Joseph, Son of Jacob [Version A] (Arabic)
16. History of Joseph, Son of Jacob [Version B] (Arabic)
17. History of Joseph (Arabic)
18. Dormition of Joseph, the Son of Jacob (Arabic)
19. Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs (Syriac)
20. The Names of the Wives of the Patriarchs (Syriac)
21. The Conversation of Moses with God (Syriac and Arabic)
22. The Book of Jubilees (Syriac)
23. The Life of Moses (Arabic)
24. Instruction of David to Solomon (Arabic)
25. The Palace of Solomon (Arabic)
26. Questions of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon (Syriac)
27. Testament of Solomon to Rehoboam his son (Arabic)
28. The Final Counsel of Solomon (Arabic)
29. The Death of Solomon (Arabic)
30. Aphikia (2 Recensions) (Arabic)

In his last book René Girard depicts apocalypse as disclosure of mimetic violence that is world-ending. He claims that in times of violent pandemic we are not called to fight for this world, but follow Christ in his withdrawal from the world. However, such an assertion creates serious theoretical and practical issues for the effort to heal interhuman relations from the virus of mimetic hostility. I argue for the importance of restoring a foundational distinction between passionate love and acquisitive mimetic desire from the forgotten regions of Girard's oeuvre. With Max Scheler's interpretation of Stendhal's concept of l'amour passion, I explore in each thinker a fundamental insight about possibilities of transforming violent contagion through empathy and loving commitment to the world. I conclude that respective "passive" and "active" approaches to the contagion of mimetic rivalry and violence are necessary and equally valuable.