Christianity began with the announcement that time was about to end. Paul expected to see God’s Kingdom established by the Risen and Returning Christ in his own lifetime, and he proclaims this good news from his earliest surviving letter (1 Thes 1:10) to his last (Rom 13:11). Even generations after Jesus’ lifetime, evangelists continued to repeat a prophecy of Jesus given to his own generation in the Gospel of Mark: ‘‘There are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Kingdom of God come with power’’ (Mk 9:1; cf. Mt 16:28, Lk 21:32). Justin in the mid-second century, Irenaeus in the early third, Lactantius in the early fourth, Hesychius in the early fifth: these writers, each situated within the orthodox stemma, all asserted their conviction that Christ would return soon to establish his father's Kingdom. Much of the social and doctrinal development of ancient Christianity can be understood as ways of coping with history's persistent failure to end on time (Fredriksen 1991b).
Whence this constant conviction in the face of such unimpeachable and repeated disconfirmation? We see here the effects of the continuing combination of postbiblical apocalyptic Jewish traditions about God's final intervention in history, of the traumatic experience of persecution (which reinforced the idea that the End was at hand), and of the appeal to both learned and unlearned methods of decoding the Bible and figuring out what time it was on God’s clock.
Post-biblical Jewish apocalyptic prophecy provided the material for much of Jesus’ own teachings (Sanders 1985). Jewish apocalyptic hope, amplifying themes already in biblical prophecy, affirmed inter alia the belief that God would redeem his people, raise the dead, vindicate the righteous, turn gentiles to himself, and gather humanity together in Jerusalem. In light of Jesus’ death, and then the belief that he had been raised, the earliest community added to these themes the expectation of Jesus’ imminent return or Parousia, which would itself accomplish the founding of the Kingdom (1 Thes; 1 Cor 15; Rom 11, 15; Mk 13). The stirrings of persecution, whether as simple rejection, social harassment, or actual executions, reinforced the new community’s sense of beleaguered righteousness and certain, ultimate vindication. Towards the end of the first century, John of Patmos contributed a further refinement: that the martyrs (‘‘those who had been beheaded for their testimony to Jesus and for the word of God’’) would rise bodily at Christ’s Second Coming to reign with him for a thousand years on earth, before a second, general resurrection to judgment (Rv 20:1-6). John concluded his vision speaking for Christ: ‘‘Surely I am coming soon’’ (22:20).
This last formulation touches on the formal definition of millenarianism: the belief in the terrestrial, thousand-year reign of the saints. In the course of the second century, this idea became virtually definitive of proto-orthodox eschatologies. This was so, in part, because these developed against those other forms of Christianity (such as Valentinus’ and Marcion’s) that asserted that Christ himself had only ‘‘appeared in the form of man’’ and in the ‘‘likeness’’ of flesh (cf. Phil 2:5) without having actually had a fleshly body. Redemption, as these other Christians conceived it, was neither terrestrial nor historical. ‘‘Time’’ would not end; the saved Christian would pass, as had the Risen Christ, from the lower material cosmos to the upper plerOma, the realm of light and spirit, to the Father. Flesh, time, the earthly Jerusalem: all these ideas, said these Christians, showed the unhappy influence of carnal, Jewish thought, and a carnal reading of Jewish texts, on Christ’s message of redemption.
By contrast, millenarianism cohered effortlessly with the points of principle in proto-orthodox doctrine. Its emphasis on bodily resurrection and historical redemption, and its focus on Jerusalem in particular, resonated with these churches’ affirmation of Christ’s incarnation, his bodily resurrection, and the physical resurrection of believers. Millenarianism was also stimulated by the experience of persecution. The linkage between the suffering of the righteous and their impending vindication - a tradition taken directly from Judaism (e. g., Dn 7:21; 12:2-13; 2 Mc 6:12-7:38) - supported the hope that the brute fact of persecution itself signaled the imminent return of Christ, who would punish the wicked and reward the faithful. More generally, the prophetic and evangelical lists of pre-apocalyptic disasters - plagues, famine, earthquakes, flood, or drought - studied and decoded, could be and were continuously found to fit the times. Indeed, since gentile Christians were often accused of bringing on such disasters because of their refusal to honor the gods, disaster and persecution might often coincide.
This link between keen millenarian expectation and pagan persecution gave early Christian apocalyptic writings a decidedly political slant (Fredriksen 1991b: 152-7). John of Patmos, around the turn of the first century ce, unforgettably described his vision of the great Whore of Babylon who fornicated with the kings of the earth, drank the blood of the saints, and sat on seven hills - a clear reference to Rome (Rv 17:1-6, 9). Irenaeus, a century later, decoded the Fourth Beast of Daniel 7 and the Beast from the Sea of Revelation 13 as ‘‘the empire that is currently reigning’’ (imperium quod nunc regnat). The name encoded in the apocalyptic number 666 (Rv 13:18) was LATINUS. The ‘‘lawless one’’ prophesied in 2 Thessalonians 2:3-7, claimed Irenaeus, was the emperor (AH 5.26.1, 30.3). A century later still, Victor-inus of Pettau awaited ‘‘the destruction of Babylon, that is, the city of Rome’’ (ruina Babylonis, id est civitatis Romanae) (On the Book of the Apocalypse 8.2, 9.4).
A vivid expectation of the end tends to be enormously destabilizing. Many Christians of various denominations during the course of the second century - the period coinciding with the onset of serious persecutions - saw visions, uttered apocalyptic prophecies, and acted on their convictions by deserting their fields, and even their towns, to greet the Second Coming. With the conversion of (one denomination of) Christianity to a form of imperial religion, the anti-Roman tenor of orthodoxy’s earlier apocalyptic writings relaxed. For those other Christian communities now persecuted by the imperial church, the earlier correspondence of persecution and millenarian hope remained: ‘‘beneath the purple and scarlet robes of the apocalyptic whore... [they] could still recognize Rome’’ (R. A. Markus 1970: 55).
Some learned churchmen gained some purchase on millenarian enthusiasms by devising elaborate calculations establishing the age of the world. The End could not come and Christ would not return, so went the argument, until 6,000 years of Creation were accomplished. These calculations, based on creative readings of biblical numbers and symbols, have been revised continually from antiquity on into the present (Landes 1988). But apocalyptic convictions themselves remained unchanged. Stimulated formerly by civic or imperial aggression, they could later, in the post-Constantinian period, be agitated by signs of imperial decline. Thus, after 410, when Rome fell to Gothic invaders, Augustine reported a surge in millenarian expectation: ‘‘Behold, from Adam all the years have passed,’’ Augustine exclaimed, quoting these people, ‘‘and behold, the 6,000 years since Creation are complete, and now comes the Day of Judgment!’’ (Serm. 113.8). Christian apocalypticism, the most mythological ancient belief, and the one so readily vulnerable to unambiguous empirical disconfirmation, has paradoxically remained one of the most characteristic convictions of Western Christian culture.
World History
