Word Finder - apocalypses

definition

A revelation.

example

The early development of Perl 6 was punctuated by a series of apocalypses by Larry Wall.

definition

The unveiling of events prophesied in the Revelation; the second coming and the end of life on Earth; global destruction.

definition

The Book of Revelation.

definition

A disaster; a cataclysmic event.

Accepting the Jewish apocalypses as sacred books of venerable antiquity, they read them eagerly, and transferred their contents bodily to Christianity.

To this literature belong essentially the apocalypses which were published in fast succession from Daniel onwards.

Another prolific source of apocryphal gospels, acts and apocalypses was Gnosticism.

Its object, like other Jewish apocalypses, was to encourage faith under persecution; its burden is not a call to repentance but a promise of deliverance.

See Tischendorf, Apocalypses Apocryphae, pp. 24-33.

See Tischendorf, Apocalypses Apocr.

And this holds true in no less a degree of most of the Jewish apocalypses.

All the Jewish apocalypses are pseudonymous, and all the Christian with the exception of the Shepherd of Hermas.

In Jewish apocalypses especially, the imagination ran riot on the rank, classes and names of angels; and such works as the various books of Enoch and Deut.

Later Jewish and Christian speculation followed on the lines of the angelology of the earlier apocalypses; and angels play an important part in Gnostic systems and in the Jewish Midrashim and the Kabbala.

In it some genuine sayings of Christ appear to have been worked up along with matter taken from Jewish Apocalypses and in accordance with an Apocalyptic model.

Growth of a Theology.-Let us now turn to the Apocalypses of Baruch and of Ezra (both about 70 A.D.).

It would carry us too far to consider in this place the details of the Jewish conception of the Messiah and the Messianic times as they appear in the later apocalypses or in Talmudic theology.

Superficially the language of apocalypses differs from that of rabbinic decisions, and where the seer takes a comprehensive view of the ages the rabbi legislates for particular cases.

Later Jewish and Christian writers of Apocalypses saw in Nero the tyrant of the end of time.

This idea has its original source in the apocalypses of Iran, for these are based upon the conflict between Ahura-Mazda (Auramazda, Ormazd) and Angro-Mainyush (Ahriman) and its consummation at the end of the world.

One of the most interesting apocalypses is the Jewish History of Daniel, handed down in Persian.3 This whole type of prophecy reached the West above all through the Pseudo-Methodius, which was soon translated into Latin.

Many of these conclusions were arrived at independently by a French scholar, De Faye (Les Apocalypses juives, 1892, pp. 25-28, 76-103, 192-204).

The oldest and for the most part Jewish portion of this literature is preserved to us in Greek, Armenian, Latin and Slavonic. (i.) The Greek Ooryr7vcs r€pi 'ASaµ rcai Eras (published under the misleading title 'AlroicaXvi/ics Mwvo ws in Tischendorf's Apocalypses Apocryphae, 1866) deals with the Fall and the death of Adam and Eve.

All this was quite in the vein of later Judaism, and so at length the unfulfilled predictions of the prophets served as the raw material for the elaborate eschatology of the apocalypses (see Apocalyptic Literature).

It is cited without acknowledgment in the Book of Adam and Eve, the Apocalypses of Moses and Paul, the Sibylline Oracles, the Ascension of Isaiah, the Epistle of Barnabas, and referred to by Origen and Irenaeus (see Charles, The Book of the Secrets of Enoch, 1895, pp. xvii-xxiv).