Introduction
John Ashton
Chris Rowland is a man of many parts. This fact alone is sufficient to justify what might otherwise seem the strange decision to dedicate a second Festschrift to him only a couple of years after two close friends had put together an admir able collection of essays to celebrate his Christian radicalism and his eager pro motion of the relatively new discipline of Reception History.1 It is tempting to say that in that book it was the man who was honoured, in the present volume the scholar; but Chris would be the first to reject, and reject vehemently, such a facile disjunction. Nonetheless, as one contributor after another acknowledges and emphasizes, what is especially celebrated here is the towering and pio neering scholarly achievement of the author of The Open Heaven and of the New Testament section in the (much less well-known) Mystery of God.2 I have another, more personal, reason for instigating the assemblage of this Festschrift. One bright June afternoon in 1996 I attended a session of Chris Rowland’s New Testament Seminar, the last of the academic year, and for me the last I would attend as a Lecturer in the Oxford Faculty of Theology; for hav ing reached, that very day, the age of sixty-five, I was on the point of retirement. As soon as the seminar was over, Chris puzzled me by inviting me to a party. What better birthday gift than the presentation, at that party, of a Festschrift in my honour that Chris, assisted by other friends and colleagues, had cobbled together without my having the slightest suspicion of his intentions? And what better thank-you could I devise than to do the same for him, years later, on the occasion of his own retirement? Needless to add, this volume is also a thank you for many years of uninterrupted friendship. It might be thought that the first duty of a Festschrift editor is to summarize, however briefly, the scholarly achievements of the honorand. But a number of contributors to this volume have made that unnecessary, especially Robert Morgan, another of Chris’s colleagues in Oxford, and Christopher Morray- Jones, one of his earliest doctoral students, who subsequently collaborated with him in The Mystery of God. It would be hard to think of a better com mentary upon the central insights of The Open Heaven than the first section
1 Radical Christian Voices and Practice, edited by Z. Bennett and D.B. Gowler (Oxford University Press, 2012). 2 With C.R.A. Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God. Early Jewish mysticism and the New Testament (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi 10.1163/9789004272040_��2 2 ashton of Morray-Jones’s essay, “The Opening of Heaven in the Book of Job.” At the start of this essay, whose title echoes that of Chris’s own great work, Morray- Jones borrows his citation of Job’s declaration to God: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you” (Job 42:5).3 “Rowland’s work,” he concludes, “indicates strongly that there may well be an apocalyptic (or at least, quasi-apocalyptic) dimension to the drama of Job”;4 an observation expanded upon in the remainder of the essay. The next two essays have a broader scope. John Barton argues that besides the particularist ethics one might expect in texts emanating from groups at odds with society in general, many apocalypses advance a common ethics that is presented almost as a “natural law.” Where the apocalyptists tend to differ from most of the Old Testament is in their much more pessimistic view of human nature, and of its capacity for good. Philip Alexander, in his “Taxonomy” of Jewish Messianism, investigates what he calls “the theological deep-structure of Messianism,” and in doing so draws a number of useful distinctions that help to dispel some surprisingly widespread illusions. Although he concentrates largely upon what he calls Historical Messianism, he also deals with Mystical Messianism, for which the primary locus of redemption is the unseen world, where “the fundamental flaw that has to be mended is the structure of the cosmos, or even in the Godhead itself, not in the ordering of society.” The contributors to this volume were asked to write on any topic somehow connected with Jewish or Christian apocalyptic. By a happy chance no fewer than twelve (over half) have chosen to discuss writings which, with one excep tion ( Jubilees) were composed in first century of the Common Era, a century that saw both the birth of Christianity and the transformation into a strong new religion of a Judaism which, although already anchored in the Law, had up to that time revolved around the feasts and sacrifices of the Jerusalem temple. This new Judaism retained the feasts (but not the sacrifices) of the temple, and came to focus even more strongly than before upon the study and practice of the Law.
3 Open Heaven, 206. Rowland also sees this verse to be the key to Willliam Blake’s interpre tation of Job Blake and the Bible, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale, 2010) 72; See too Morray-Jones, below, p. 10. 4 A different dimension from the one manifest in the divine speeches in Job 28 and 38, used in a number of apocalypses, as Michael Stone observes in his justly celebrated essay, “Lists of the Revealed Things in Apocalyptic Literature”: F.M. Cross, W.E. Lemke, and P.D. Miller, Jr., eds., Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976) 430–435.