BackContentsNext

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.

BackContentsNext


CCEL home page
This document is from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at
Calvin College. Last modified on 08/11/06. Contact the CCEL.
Calvin seal: My heart I offer you O Lord, promptly and sincerely