It should now be quite apparent that, from Zoroastrianism down through the rigid but somewhat unorthodox Judaism of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the coming of the messiah was expected to be the end of history, the culmination of the struggle between good and evil (however that was defined), and the final renovation of the world. All things would be made perfect and perhaps a new moral order might be established for eternity. It was, in short, always an... Read more
No doubt much of the fascination that surrounds the religious group that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls has to do with the fact that they were roughly contemporaneous with Jesus of Nazareth. What is more, a cursory reading of the Scrolls reveals much of the same vocabulary that would come to define Christianity. Here is talk of God’s atonement for the sins of humanity, of the war between light and darkness, the redemption and future glory offered to those... Read more
It is no secret that Judea at the time of Christ was a hotbed of messianic expectation. The Roman occupation, alongside the fact that now two dynasties of non-Davidic descent had sat upon the throne of the kingdom, had created a perfect atmosphere for apocalyptic thinking. But just because the coming of the messiah was being eagerly awaited by so many, this did not mean that everybody was in agreement about the form the destined savior would take. There... Read more
By now, we have an understanding of the basic contours of the messiah idea in the Old Testament. What was established in the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah recurs throughout the other writings of the prophets. Ezekiel speaks of the physical transformation of the land of Israel, “I shall make a covenant with them to ensure peace and prosperity; I shall rid the land of wild beasts, and people will live on the open pastures and sleep in the... Read more
We find Isaiah’s template repeated throughout the Jewish scriptures. Jeremiah may be one of the more dower figures of Biblical history, with the harangues he aimed at his decadent countrymen lending his name to a whole genre of recriminatory speeches, the jeremiad, but one finds more than doom and gloom in the Book of Jeremiah’s pages. For Chapter 30 opens onto a long prophecy of the coming messianic age. It begins with God promising that “[t]he time is coming when... Read more
Now that we have located the possible origin of the messianic idea in Zoroastrianism, it is only proper to turn to the religious tradition that actually formulated the concept as Jesus and His disciples would have understood it. The beginnings of the messianic framework that would someday scaffold Christianity can be found in ancient Judaism, specifically the Judaism of the Second Temple period, when the religion developed a finely-tuned apocalyptic sense. It was during this time that the messianic ideal... Read more
I had thought, after the previous entry, to leave Zoroastrianism behind, but then I came across this article by Martha Henriques at BBC Future on the nature of time and the reasons for its existence. This got me thinking about time in an apocalyptic sense, and I realized I could not move on from Zoroastrianism without considering one of the most obscure and controversial chapters of its existence, one in which the question of time was paramount. So, this week,... Read more
To properly understand Christianity as an eschatological faith, it behooves us to understand the deep apocalyptic roots of the ideas which define it. Central to the Christian religion is the age-old concept of the messiah, the divinely-appointed savior who will redeem God’s chosen people in the final days. As noted last week, all the major world religions have at some point hit upon the idea of something like a messiah. The idea of a single world-transforming hero appears to hold... Read more
All of the world’s major religions are, to an extent, eschatological. Because one of the primary functions of religion is to provide a comprehensive and understandable explanation of the world, both the beginning and the end of all things—or, at the very least, the beginning and end of the current order of things—must be accounted for. As Frank Kermode observes in his 1967 classic The Sense of an Ending, ““Men, like poets, rush ‘into the middest,’ in medias res, when... Read more
Well, this is not how I expected to start off the first “real” entry in this column but, with my column launching just in time for today, it seems like the right choice. Today, I am going to talk a little about the man who is perhaps the most colorful and extraordinary character in American history: the Emperor Norton. On September 17th, 1859, bankrupt immigrant businessman Joshua Abraham Norton entered the offices of the Daily Evening Bulletin and asked that... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In