A Reconsideration of Apocalyptic Visions

In 1974 I published a paper arguing that behind the pseudepigraphic presenta-tions of the religious experiences attributed to apocalyptic seers by the Jewish apocalypses of the Second Temple period, there lay a kernel of actual visionary activity or analogous religious experience. This was not the regnant view then. Indeed, it had long been a prevalent opinion of scholarship that pseudepigraphic apocalypses are in some sense forgeries and that they present completely fictitious narratives about their claimed authors, with no roots in reality. The actual course of historical happenings might be presented in a symbolic vision, often culminating in prediction, but the framework, the seer, and his doings or feelings (there are no women among the supposed authors) are fictional. At most, the pseudepigraphic framework may hint at the general circumstances in which the work was composed. A Baruch or Jeremiah work about the destruction of the First Temple might well have been written after the destruction of the Second, but that had to be proved on other grounds than correspondence between the fictional situation and that of the author. (Indeed, the book of Baruch was not written in the context of the destruction of the Temple, nor the Qumran Jeremiah Apocryphon.) Scholars regarded words and actions ascribed to the pseudepigraphic author as fiction. Moreover, they often maintained that pseudepigraphic apocalypses were forwarding one or another particular and partisan viewpoint, and using a literary fiction to do so.