The Legacy of Wilhelm Bousset for the Apocalypse's Textual History (original) (raw)

A Survey of the Literary Structure of the Apocalypse

African Journal of Biblical Studies, 2010

In spite of the observation that the literary structure of the Apocalypse of John I is a significant key to the interpretation of its messages, one of the most controversial aspects of the study of the book, perhaps, is its literary structure. The lack of scholarly consensus on the literary structure of the Apocalypse has grown to the point that the claim is true that almost every interpreter of the book produces a different literary structure. In fact, J. Ramsey Michaels encourages every exegete to produce his/her own detailed structure of the Apocalypse because it should become the one most useful to you, precisely because it is yours. This view implies that there would be many literary structures as there are exegetes of the book. In essence, this threatens to reduce the study of the literary structure of the Apocalypse to absurdity. In response to this threat, this paper surveys the various proposals that have been made in relation to the study of the literary structure of the Apocalypse. It also aims at ascertaining the positive contributions that each proposal has made as well as pointing out apparent weaknesses that may characterise each proposal on the literary structure of the Apocalypse of John.

Authority, Fragmentation, Dilution: Experiencing an Apocalyptic Text in Late Antiquity

Angela Kim Harkins and Harry O. Maier (eds.), Experiencing the Shepherd of Hermas (Ekstasis 10; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), 215-33.

If,a st he contributionsi nt hisv olume extensivelys how, theS hepherdi sr ipef or questions on thevarious types of experienceitreflects, it is allthe morefitting to ask: howwas thebookexperienced by itsearly Christian readers? Unsurprisingly, thereisnoshort-handanswertothisquestion, especiallysince theway we experience theb ookt oday hardly parallelsi ts success with early and late-antique Christians.I ti sd ifficult to imagine many modern readersw ho read theb ooka s an accounto fg enuine revelation;¹ at thes amet ime, virtually anyg raduate student undertakingr esearch on theS hepherdw illh aveh eard at somep oint from othere arly Christianity scholars thatt heir research questioni si nteresting,b ut thebookitself is so tedious. There is in fact along-standingmodernscholarly tradition of consideringthe book subparasaliteraryw ork, as is occasionallydocumented in introductorys ectionso fc ontributionso nt he Shepherd.² Even when the author of the book is not judgeda gainst an imaginary classical or Pauline literaryideal, acomment such as that of Carolyn Osiek,according to whom the visions in the Mandatesand Similitudes "are usuallyexplained  Although isolated, examples can be found. Fori nstance, Roelof vanD eemter addressed in 1929 the question of whether the Shepherd is an allegory or an apocalypse, and concludes that the book is intended as an apocalypse and not as al iterary fictional construct and, even though allegory is heavilye mployed, the book is not to be regarded as ap ure allegory but an account of Hermas'sv isionary experiences: "Ausd em bisher Gesagtenw ären ur folgender Schluss zu ziehen: Es liegen keine Gründe vor, an dem Selbstzeugnis des Verfassers zu zweifeln.