2. Rise of the Doctrine
prophecy. This promises simply a
reign of the Messiah, in which, after
the restoration of the Jewish kingdom
and the union of all nations in the
worship of Yahweh, the happiness
of the people
shall
express itself in external circumstances of
peace and well-being (see MEasus, Messuxtsm);
hence came the externalism of later Judaism, which
did not distinguish between literal and symbolical
in the words of the prophets, and was impelled by its
position to emphasise the political aide of its hopes
But the transcendental side of these hopes was not
forgotten; the conceptions of a general judgment
and an end of this world, of the resurrection of the
dead and a future life, gradually took shape and
acquired strength. As the opposition became
obvious between the old Jewish hope of a happy
life of the just in Palestine, and the new idea of a
heavenly kingdom before which this world should
pass away, it may have been an attempt to reconcile
the two which gave rise to millenarianism. It was
not, however, even in the time of Christ, the universal feeling of the Jews. The detailed conception of
the last things is most fully worked out in II Esdrae
(vii. 28 sqq.), where appears the following order of
events: a time of final trial, the coming of the
Messiah, a war of the nations against him, ending
in their defeat, the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem, the gathering of the dispersed Israelites, a
four-hundred-year reign of the Messiah, seven days
of absolute silence, the renewal of the world, the
general resurrection, the last judgment. With
such apocalyptic teaching as this is connected the
reckoning of definite periods in the history of the
world; the calculation of six or seven thousand
years which was later so usual in the Christian Church
appears with the translators of the Pentateuch
(c. 280 s.c. according to Lagarde, Mimeilurrge»,
iv. 315, Göttingen, 1891), and in Enoch (xxxiii.).
The teaching of Christ is not millenarian. In
Mark i. 15,
indeed, he announces that the kingdom
of God is at hand; but he knows nothing of any
provisory kingdom to be founded by him, or of any
difference between his own
and
his Father's. His
coming is identical with the last judgment,
3. Christic
until which the wheat and the
and tares are to grow together. The
Pauline "resurrection of the just" in Luke
Doctrine. xiv. 14 does
not follow a preliminary
period. The renewal of the world in
Matt. xix. 28
is connected with the last judgment.
In depicting the glories of the kingdom of heaven,
he employs conceptions existing already, and leaves
his disciples in no doubt that there is an analogy
between
the highest earthly joys and the blessings
of the Messianic period (Mark x. 4o, xiii. 27;
Matt. v. 4, viii. 11, xxii. 1-14, xxv. 1-13;
Luke xiii. 29, xiv. 15-24, xxii. 18, 30).
But he made it clear to the Badducees
(Mark xii. 24-27)
that they knew neither the Scriptures nor the power of God
if they believed
that he could do nothing but repeat in the other
world the order of this; and at the Last Supper he
made the supernatural character of the future
joys plain to his disciples
(Mark xiv. 25).
That, none the lees, something of the Jewishapocalyptio
notions of the Messiah passed over into primitive
Christianity is easily explained by the fact that the
first Christians were of Jewish birth. Of Paul, it
may at least be said that by his doctrine of a limited
reign of Christ
(I Cor. xv. 25
sqq.) he gave a foothold in the Church for ohiliastic expectations. But
their main support was in the apocalyptic teaching
of John
(Rev. xx. 4
sqq.), completely misunderstood as the usage has been by many commentators
from Augustine down, and little as it yields of
positive information, even to modern critical
investigation.
