Bibliotheca Sacra 109 (Jan. 1952):
55-62
Copyright © 1952 by
Department
of
New Testament Greek and Literature
The
In the Jewish Apocryphal
Literature
By George E. Ladd, Ph.D.
INTRODUCTION
It is important for the thoughtful
student of New Testa-
ment eschatology to possess
an accurate understanding of
Jewish eschatological expectations in New
Testament times.
There
are several reasons for this. Scholars have often
maintained that Jesus was influenced by and shared
the
views of His contemporaries. Epoch-making in modern
Biblical
criticism has been the work of Albert Schweitzer,
the famous missionary-theologian, who elaborated
the view
already espoused by Johannis
Weiss,1 that Jesus expected
the world immediately to come to an end by
apocalyptic
intrusion of God for the establishment of the
kingdom of
God
on earth.2 This conclusion was achieved by
"the thorough-
going application of Jewish eschatology to the
interpretation
of the teaching and work of Jesus."3
Schweitzer inaugurated
a new epoch in the study of Gospel eschatology,
as a survey
of criticism since his day clearly shows.4
Conservative Bible
students in
ment in liberal criticism;
but it is part of the theological
life of the world in which we live and has made a
strong
impact upon modern theological thought. It cannot be
ignored.
1Cf. Johannis
Weiss, Die Predigt
Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (Göttingen,
1892, 2 Aufl. 1900). This work has
not been translated into English.
2See Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (
pp. 249-395.
3Albert Schweitzer, Paul and His Interpreters (
4See Amos N. Wilder, Eschatology and Ethics in the Teaching of
Jesus
(Revised edition; New
York, 1950), chapter II.
(55)
56 Bibliotheca Sacra
It
is obvious that no student can criticize Schweitzer's posi-
tion without a good grasp of
Jewish eschatology.
Schweitzer's viewpoint postulates a
human Jesus, a man
of His times, who was utterly deluded by vain
apocalyptic ex-
pectations. This is why many
conservative students who ac-
cept the New Testament teaching
that Jesus was God incar-
nate have largely ignored
his position. However, the fact
remains that Jesus came to Jews of the first
century and of
necessity had to relate His teaching to their
thinking. Sound
pedagogy must begin with the thinking of those
who are taught,
and Jesus was the Master Teacher. What did the
"kingdom of
God"
mean in the ears of a first century Jew? What thoughts
were aroused in his mind by the phrase "Son of
Man"? Why
did the Jews reject the Messiah? How did Christ's
kingdom
differ from the one they expected? From our vantage
point,
we interpret these phases in the light of the full
New Testa-
ment revelation; it is
obvious that a Jew of 30 A.D. could
not do so. The appreciation of our Lord's
self-revelation and
of the response of the Jews to Him is greatly
enhanced by an
understanding of the mind of first
century Judaism, espe-
cially with reference to
eschatological and Messianic expec-
tations.
Furthermore, it must be recognized
that there is a certain
relationship between New Testament
eschatology and Jewish
eschatology. The Protestant Christian believes that
the Old
and the New Testaments were inspired by the Spirit
of God
and therefore represent the mind of God, while the
Jewish
writings produced between the two Testaments are
not
inspired but represent only human thinking. While
we share
this view, we cannot deny that there are areas in
which New
Testament
theology is very close to, if not identical with,
contemporary Jewish eschatology
where there is no ante-
cedent Old Testament teaching.
So striking is this phenome-
non, that one staunch contender for the Biblical
faith, Geer-
hardus Vos,
was led to say, "There is no escape from the
conclusion that a piece of Jewish theology has been
here by
Revelation
incorporated into the Apostle's teaching. . .
The
main structure of the Jewish Apocalyptic is embodied
in our Lord's teaching as well as in Paul's."5
This raises
questions for the serious student of the Bible
which neces-
sarily involve an
understanding of Jewish teaching. There
is need for much scholarly study on the
relationship between
New Testament and Jewish eschatology. Conservatives have
for the most part left this area of investigation
to liberal
scholars.
There is one point where this Jewish
eschatology bears
directly upon the views of conservative students,
viz., the
future aspect of the
the Epistles there is a uniform emphasis upon the
future
eschatological aspect of the kingdom;
and Revelation 20
affirms that resurrected saints are to live and
reign with
Christ
for a thousand years. The natural interpretation of
these words is that after the Second Advent of Christ
there
will be a period of a thousand years' duration
during which
Christ
and the resurrected saints will reign over this earth.
This
is, of course, the position of Bibliotheca
Sacra, and it
is the position of the writer and of the seminary
faculty of
which he is a member. It was the position of the
early
Christian church. Some premillennialists, as we are called,
have gone so far as to claim practically every one
of the
early fathers of the church for this position. This
affirms
more than the evidence allows, for many of the
fathers have
nothing to say about a millennial kingdom-either
to affirm
or deny it. They are silent on the subject, and
the argument
from silence is precarious. In former days it was
enough to
argue, as did D. T. Taylor,6 that if any
author entertained
a vivid expectation of the second coming of
Christ he must
have been ipso
facto a premillenarian, for he could not have
been a postmillenarian. This line of reasoning
assumes that
the choice is limited to the premillennial
and postmillennial
5Geerhardus Vos, The Pauline
Eschatology (published by the author,
1930) p. 28.
6Cf. D. T. Taylor, The Voice of the Church (
editions of this
book were published under the title, The
Reign of
Christ on Earth.
58 Bibliotheca Sacra
positions; but today the view known as
amillennialism7 is
a very live option and is popular in some
thoroughly conserv-
ative circles. Thus it has
been maintained8 that only a very
few of the early fathers were millennialists.
This claim is
based on the argument from silence, assuming that any
author who does not mention the millennium did not
believe
in it. It is true that only a few writers clearly
mention the
millennium; but the facts are set in a clearer
light when it
is recognized that every church father of the
first two cen-
turies who touches at all upon
the subject does so to affirm
belief in a literal millennium. There is not a single amillen-
nialist or postmillennialist in
the early history of the church,9
judging from the extant records with the
exception of Caius
of
rejected the Montanists
who taught it—until the times of
Origen (185-254 A.D.) in
430
A.D.) in
anti-millenarian position because of
exegetical or theological
presuppositions which led them to
depart from the natural
interpretation of Revelation 20.
How is this, rather uniform presence
of millenarian views
in the early church to be accounted for? It is
either the
natural and true interpretation of Revelation 20
and there-
fore the heritage of the early church from the
Apostles; or
it must be due to an erroneous interpretation
which crept
into the thinking of Christians immediately after
apostolic
times. This is what the modern exponents of the anti-mil-
7This view, as the name
indicates, maintains that there is no
millennium
at all.
8L. Berkhof,
The
Berkhof
includes as a chiliast Hermas, who makes no clear
reference to
a millennium;
but he does not mention Justin Martyr, whose clear
support of the
doctrine is one of the strongest evidences of its wide
prevalence. Cf.
A. Harnack, "Millennium," Encyclopedia Britannica
(Ninth edition), XVI,
328.
9D. H. Kromminga in The Millennium in the
Church (
1945, pp. 29-40) claims Barnabas (cir.
96-131 A.D.) for the amillennial
position; but to
the present writer, Barnabas is one of the most explicit
of the early
millenarians, and Berkhof (op. cit., p. 21)
attributes the
millennial
belief to him.
Kingdom
o f God in Jewish Apocryphal Literature 59
lenarian interpretation affirm.
". . . Chiliastic10 views were
extensively circulated in the early church through
such
Jewish
or Jewish-Christian writings as Enoch, 4 Esdras, As-
sumption of
Moses, Ascension of Isaiah, Psalms of Solomon,
Baruch, writings which neither
Jews nor Christians regarded
as canonical."11
There is no question but that some
of the Jewish writings
mentioned above reflect "chiliastic"
views. But that is not to
admit that chiliasm is an unbiblical doctrine, because it is
Jewish. To solve such a problem
one must familiarize himself
thoroughly with the Jewish views to discover what
precisely
the Jews did believe about the
their belief compares or contrasts with the Biblical
teaching.
It
has been the privilege of the present writer to have devoted
considerable attention to this
particular area of the history
of doctrine, and it is the purpose of this series
of articles to
discuss those portions of the Jewish writings
which reflect
opinions about the
There are four main sources for our
knowledge of Jewish
thought in New Testament times: the New
Testament, Jose-
phus, the talmudic literature, and the Apocrypha and Pseu-
depigrapha. Josephus has nothing
to say about the kingdom
or Messianic expectations of the Jews, and so need
not
enter into our study. The talmudic literature presents a vast
field and very specialized problems. This literature
is
tially the written deposit of
the stream of oral tradition fre-
quently referred to in the
Gospel as the "tradition of the
fathers" (cf. Mark 7:3, 5, 9 etc.). These
traditions were first
codified and fixed in written form in the second
century in
10Properly, the terms
"millennial" (or "millenarian") and "chiliastic"
are
strictly
synonymous, the former coming from Latin and the latter from
Greek, referring to the earthly reign
which is to be of a thousand
years' duration. The two
terms are often so used. However, the word
"chiliastic"
has come to be used of any view which anticipates an
earthly kingdom,
however long its duration may be. None of the books
to which
Professor Allis refers speaks of a thousand
year kingdom,
as we shall see
in later articles in this new series.
11O. T. Allis, Prophecy and the Church (
also L. Berkhof, op. cit., p. 21.
60 Bibliotheca Sacra
the Mishnah,12 but the Palestinian and
Babylonian Talmuds
which incorporate the continuation of this stream of
tradition
were not written until the fourth and sixth
centuries respec-
tively.13
There were, however, many writings
which were pro-
duced during the first two
centuries before Christ and the
first century A.D. expressing views which were held
by
Jesus' contemporaries. These have been
collected and rendered
into an English translation in the collections
usually called
the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha.14 This
is not the place
to outline the history of these collections, but a
few words
are necessary. These two terms do not designate
collections
of writings made by the Jews. To them, all
religious litera-
ture was either canonical or
noncanonical; and it would
therefore be more accurate to speak of this entire
group of
writings as the Jewish apocryphal literature.15
Some of
these books were included in the Greek translation of
the
Old
Testament used by Greek-speaking Jews in
in the first two centuries before Christ. Through
this channel,
some of them came to be cherished by the early
Christian
Church
and found their way into some editions of the Greek
Bible very early in the Christian era. Thence they passed
into the oldest Latin translations. It is quite
clear that there
was no distinctly delineated collection at this
time, for the
lists of apocryphal books found in the three oldest
extant
manuscripts of the Greek Bible vary considerably
from
each other.16 From the Old Latin version
they passed into
12English translation by H. Danby, The Mishnah (
13This mass of talmudic literature has been made
available for New
Testament students in the monumental work
of Herman L. Strack and
Paul Billerbeck,
Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und
Midrasch (München, 1922), 4 vols.
14Cf. R. H. Charles, ed., The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha
of the Old
Testament (
for all of the
quotations from these writings which follow.
15Cf. C. C. Torrey, The Apocryphal
Literature (New Haven, 1945), p. 11.
16Cf. H. B. Swete, An Introduction to the
Old Testament in Greek
(
the later editions of the Vulgate,17 and
thence into some
English editions of the Bible. It is from this
background
that the term "Apocrypha" has come to
designate the distinct
collection of books which is found, for instance,
in the
English version of the Catholic Bible. The collection, how-
ever, has no intrinsic literary, historical or
religious reason
for existing as such, apart from the history of the
Bible in
the Roman church.
The books of this type which were
not included in the
Apocrypha
came to be known as the Pseudepigrapha. This
again is an inaccurate term. Properly, a pseudepigraph is a
writing which claims an author who did not
produce it.
Enoch,
the Apocalypse of Baruch, and IV Ezra are genuine
pseudepigrapha, for it is certain that
Enoch, Baruch, and
Ezra
were not the authors of our extant books. Not all
of the so-called Pseudepigrapha
are pseudepigraphs: such
books as Jubilees, the Sibylline Oracles, Third and
Fourth
Maccabees and Pirke Aboth make no claim to pseudepigraphic
authorship. On the other hand, one book customarily
included
in the Apocrypha is a geniune
pseudepigraph, viz., IV Ezra.
All of the books included in the
Apocrypha and Pseudepig-
rapha were probably produced
between the years 200 B.C.
and 100 A.D. and provide us with one of the finest
sources
for the study of Jewish thought in New Testament
times.
A
very difficult question is the extent to which the views
reflected in these writings were current among the
Jewish
people. This is particularly difficult with reference
to
eschatological expectations, for the
ideas in this area found
in the talmudic
literature are somewhat different. It has
been held, therefore, that these apocalyptic books
represent
individual speculations, or at the most the
esoteric views of
small, closely knit groups of people. However, it is
quite
customary for scholars to take the expectations of
this
literature as rather widely known among the Jewish
people,
17Jerome, recognizing that
they were apocryphal, desired to exclude them
from his
translation of the Old Testament. He finally admitted only
two under
pressure of friends. Cf. B. F. Westcott, The Bible in the
Church (
62 Bibliotheca Sacra
and it is the writer's judgment that this is a
sound pro-
cedure.18
The procedure in the studies which
follow will be to take
up each of the books which contain expectations
about the
nature concerning the character, date, and content of
each
book, to quote as completely as possible those
portions which
reflect kingdom expectations, to indicate in
footnotes the
most important critical literature that the advanced
student
may pursue the matter further, and to conclude with
a brief
evaluation. The reader will then have before him
the primary
sources for the Jewish views on the
as we possess them.. Too often students have been
content
with second-hand opinions on such matters. There is
nothing
which can take the place of a personal acquaintance
with
the primary sources, and it is the main purpose of
the follow-
ing series to make this
acquaintance possible in a very limited
area for students who have not had the privilege of
thorough,
study of a very difficult body of literature. The
books to
be considered are as follows: Jubilees, Enoch, the
Psalms of
Solomon,
the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the As-
sumption of Moses, IV Ezra, the
Apocalypse of Baruch, the
Secrets of Enoch, and the Sibylline Oracles. These books
are arranged above roughly in chronological order.
(To be continued in the April-June Number,
1952)
18Cf. the brief but
excellent remarks of Charles in The Apocrypha and
Pseudepigrapha, Vol„ II, p. vii.
This
material is cited with gracious permission from:
www.dts.edu
Please report any errors to Ted
Hildebrandt at:
Thanks to Amy Gentile for help with
proofing.