Eschatological Imagery and Earthly Circumstance
Ancient eschatological texts are, as literary remains, undecoded hieroglyphs and enigmas unless we are able to recreate the world of experience of which they are only ambiguous tokens. Modern study of biblical eschatology is constantly confronted with problems as to the proper interpretation of the...
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| Format: | Electronic/Print Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
[1959]
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| In: |
New Testament studies
Year: 1959, Volume: 5, Issue: 4, Pages: 229-245 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | Ancient eschatological texts are, as literary remains, undecoded hieroglyphs and enigmas unless we are able to recreate the world of experience of which they are only ambiguous tokens. Modern study of biblical eschatology is constantly confronted with problems as to the proper interpretation of the cosmic and transcendental language. Depending on the context such questions arise as the following: Did the writer mean his words to be taken literally—including the references to immediate fulfilment? Are they to be read as ‘Oriental poetry’, or as ‘poetic heightening’, or as an ‘accommodation to language?’ Are we to take the figurative discourse as a ‘clothing’ of otherwise incommunicable revelation or vision? Is the cosmic language supposed to refer to ‘spiritual’, that is, super-mundane realities; or to such realities seen as paralleling earthly phenomena; or is it rather an imaginative version of the earthly phenomena themselves? At what points are we to recognize more or less transparent historization of older myth and symbol? Does the eschatological imagery of Deutero-Isaiah represent merely a poetic idealization of a mundane New Age while that of the late apocalypses denotes the absolute end of all created existence? Does this later dualistic eschatology signify in fact the end of the world and a sheerly miraculous future state, or does it teach by hyperbole the transformation of the world? |
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| ISSN: | 0028-6885 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: New Testament studies
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0028688500006524 |