Jörg Frey: Krise und Hoffnung, Gebunden

Klappentext

The volume brings together thirty studies on the apocalypticism of ancient Judaism and the New Testament, eighteen in German and twelve in English. Six appear here for the first time or in advance of their first printing; the others appeared between 1999 and 2025 and have been revised for reprinting. The guiding thesis argues against a habit of modern theology that treats apocalypticism as an alien substrate to be detached from a Christian core or demythologized: the apocalyptic form of thought carries New Testament eschatology and cannot be separated from it. Frey takes the reverse side just as seriously, the use of the same texts to justify domination and violence down to the present.

Frey joins philological and religious-historical work on the sources, on the Enochic writings, Daniel, Fourth Ezra, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint, with the interpretation of New Testament writings and with the question of their reception history. The subject extends from Hellenistic and Roman Judaea to the province of Asia in the imperial period, from the beginnings of apocalypticism in the third century BCE to the second century CE, and, in its reception, to the rhetoric of crisis in the present.

Four fields stand out: apocalypticism as a means of coping with crisis in ancient Judaism, the Book of Revelation with its imagery and its relation to the Roman imperial cult, Jude and Second Peter as borderline cases of the canon, and the ethics of apocalyptic speech. The volume brings together work that is otherwise hard to obtain and makes a research path visible that has accompanied the reassessment of apocalypticism since the Dead Sea discoveries.