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It bears all the traces of the pseudepigraphic tendency of a period that produced the first works of the Cabala, the Seder Olam Zutta of Rabbi Joshua, and the neo-Hebraic apocalypses. The attempt to write an archaic Hebrew is marred by the presence of Rabbinical and novel terms. Reference to events or things only known to later times is combined with the pretension of an ancient chronicle.
The prophetic sermons, epistles, and apocalypses fall naturally into five great groups.
The dead will then arise, and the Messiah will proceed to judgment. It must be remarked that the picture of the end of time attributed to Jesus by the synoptics, contains many features which relate to the siege of Jerusalem. There is no doubt, however, that Jesus predicted that great terrors would precede his reappearance. These terrors were an integral part of all the Jewish apocalypses.
They are found in many other apocalypses not included in our Bible, and indicate how persistently the minds of the people turned towards the promises spoken by the prophets, and meditated on their fulfilment. The Devout were midway between the Zealots and the Apocalyptists. The songs of Zachariah and Mary and the thanksgiving of Simeon express their faith.
Underlying all the apocalypses is the eternal truth voiced by the poet: "God's in his heaven and all's right with the world." The immediate historical background of the Apocalypse is the bitter struggle between Christianity and heathenism. The contest centres about the worship of the beast, that is, Caesar.
It is possible, but not certain, that these Jews were influenced by and possibly helped to produce some parts of that curious literature known as Apocalypses, which seems in the main to have been intended to comfort the discouraged and to inspire them with enthusiasm by giving them the assurance that a better time was at hand.
He was so full of life, of power, of heaven, of glory, and of God, that his words and thoughts and teachings were pictures, revelations, inspirations, apocalypses, scenes in the eternal world, glimpses of the glory of Immanuel and Immanuel's land.
Well might the mere artist and worshipper of anthropomorphic beauty shrink appalled, and sigh for a lodge under some low Grecian heaven and in the bosom of some old myth-peopled Nature, as he trembled before the apocalypses of modern sidereal science, which has dropped its plummet to unimaginable depths through the nebulous abysses of space, shoaled with systems of worlds as the sea is with its finny droves.
How could God allow the wicked and dissolute Romans to prosper and the chosen people to be oppressed? The Hellenistic writers of Sibylline oracles and the Hebrew writers of Apocalypses, imitating the doom-songs of Isaiah and Ezekiel, announced the coming overthrow of evil and the triumph of good.
The reason for saying that this is tolerably certain is that the only alternative is that "Son of Man" really meant "Jesus," and was intended as a reference to the "Son of Man" who plays a part in some of the apocalypses, and it seems inconceivable that Jesus, who forbade his disciples to tell the public that he was the Messiah, could so openly have claimed this dignity.
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