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Early Christian Eschatology

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Early Christian Eschatology EARLY CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY __________________ A University Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University, East Bay __________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in History __________________ By John A. Del Gallego June, 2013 EARLY CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY By John A. Del Gallego Date: I I s··/t·) / /~~; Kevin Kaatz 11 Table of Contents 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 1 2. The Beginning of the End. ......................................................................................................... 13 2.1 Paul and his Epistles. ........................................................................................................... 27 2.2 The life of Jesus according to Mark. .................................................................................... 71 2.3 Matthew's version of the life of Jesus. ................................................................................. 86 2.4. The end according to Luke: now you see it, now you don't. ............................................... 92 2.5 The Gospel according to John:........................................................................................... 105 3. Hebraic response to the devastation of Jerusalem.................................................................... 119 4. The passing of an era. .............................................................................................................. 126 4.1 Out with the old, and in with the new! ............................................................................... 130 4.2 No end in sight. .................................................................................................................. 163 4.3 The more things change, the more they stay the same. ...................................................... 195 5. Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 227 iii 1 1. Introduction “We believe in one God the Father All-Sovereign...; And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God...[who] came down from the heavens,... became man, and was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures, and ascended into the heavens, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father, and cometh again with glory to judge living and dead, of whose kingdom there shall have no end.”1 Billions of Christians today profess adherence to the above Nicene Creed. It is part of the expression of their faith. It all began two thousand years ago when an itinerant preacher by the name of Paul of Tarsus started his world-changing ministry by going around the Mediterranean Sea preaching a message of a new faith. The central tenet of his religion consisted of a belief in Jesus of Nazareth who came down from heaven and was crucified to save mankind from his sins, died and was buried, but rose again from the dead and ascended into Heaven. He nevertheless will be coming back to judge all mankind, wherein the righteous will enjoy eternal life in Heaven and the wicked will suffer eternal damnation in Hell. Paul preached all of this, but with one very important exception: he never expected anyone of us to be alive today reading this thesis. He preached the Lord Jesus Christ will be coming back, soon: For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds 1 Henry Bettenson, ed., “The ‘Nicene’ Creed,” Documents of the Christian Church, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 26. 2 together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord for ever.2 (Emphasis is mine). The second coming was going to usher in the end of the world, and the end of time, to be replaced by a completely new timeless kingdom of God, and, most importantly, it was going to occur within the lifetime of Paul and his followers. The eschatological message of Paul, the man from Tarsus, was initially propagated with hardly a modification by subsequent writers; but over time the theme changed to a future, but not imminent, second coming of Jesus.3 The new message circulated among the early churches for more than two hundred years, until finally, in the year 325, the Roman Emperor Constantine called the first ecumenical council at Nicaea that codified the future undetermined eschaton (also called parousia) as orthodox belief in the above mentioned Creed.4 That official statement of a coming but date-uncertain second advent, so totally unlike Paul’s message, has stayed basically the same from then on amongst most mainline Christian churches. There were, nevertheless, other groups during the first centuries of the Christian era who clung to the idea of an imminent end of the world, like the “Johannine”5 group 2 1Thess. 4:15-17 NRSV, http://bible.oremus.org/?passage=1Thessalonians+4 (accessed May 18, 2012). 3 Paul alleged that his eschatological beliefs were not his own, but came from Jesus. The same claim was made by the evangelists, as well as others, like the author of Revelation for example. Since Jesus' message on the eschaton changed from author to author, as will be detailed in the subsequent chapters, it is important to qualify Jesus' proclamations on the last days with the name of the author. 4 See Will Durant, Caesar and Christ: A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from their beginnings to A.D. 325,(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944), 659. 5 “The Johannine community originated as a group of Jews who came to believe that Jesus was the messiah and who nonetheless continued to maintain their Jewish identity and to worship in their Jewish synagogue.” (Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) , 192). Later on they were excluded from the synagogue: “It is impossible to say how long the Jews of this community remained in their synagogue without causing a major disturbance. What does become clear from several of the stories of the Fourth Gospel is that a significant disruption eventually took place in which the Jews who believed in Jesus were excluded from 3 for example, for whom the Revelation of John was written towards the end of the first century. The world was going to end shortly in unimaginable cataclysms, according to this author. Eschatological groups like John's have continued to appear all throughout the ages, the Council of Nicaea notwithstanding. A recent example is David Koresh and the Branch Davidian sect of Waco infamy, whose many members met fiery deaths in the storming of their compound. Factions like these are typically relegated to the status of doomsday cults. This thesis is a study of Paul’s eschatological message, and how it changed over time, and, in addition, it will attempt to explain why the message changed. Early Christianity's view of the end of the world, as far as we can ascertain from the written records, started with Paul, the first Christian writer, and subsequently changed as time passed by and other authors wrote their pieces.6 The reasons for this change are varied. The church was getting to be more Gentile, and less Jewish. The ardent hope of the Israelites for a Redeemer had no place in the minds and hearts of the Greco-Roman inhabitants of the Empire. At the same time, Christianity was settling down to a more permanent stay here on earth. And the most important reason for the change was simply the fact that Jesus did not show up as promised. the synagogue.” (Ibid., 192) As more time passed by, “The synagogue ... became the enemy and took on a demonic hue in their eyes.... In the view of the Johannine Christians,... [the Jews] must have been ... alienated from the truth and could not understand it even if they heard it.... Jesus was from above, and those who recognized only the things of this earth could not perceive him.” (Ibid., 194). See also John Painter, “John and Johannine Literature,” in Early Christian Encyclopedia, eds. Everett Ferguson, Michael P. McHugh and Frederick W. Norris (New York: Taylor & Francis Group), 617, where reference is made of “Johannine Christians.” This community was the target audience of the Gospel of John, the Johannine epistles, (i.e., 1 John, 2 John and 3 John), and Revelation. For our purposes, we will not discuss 2 John and 3 John, as both did not touch on the eschaton. 6. Ehrman subscribes to the same idea of a changing message. (See Ehrman, The New Testament, 268). 4 My study is concerned with who said what on the topic of eschatology, and why they said it, and, within the first century, the reasons for the variation in the eschatological themes between Paul and the other evangelists. Somewhere around the end of the first century and the start of the second, the trend in eschatology was away from Paul’s original beliefs, and into a more general day of judgment coming at a who-knows- when date in the future. The discussion will then still be on who said what and why, but in addition, if the author still clung to the pristine message
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