• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2301 0

few Jews were millenarians, while the majority wanted to be good citizens of the Roman order. Both Judaism and Christianity needed to understand why God had not yet intervened to save the righteous and punish the sinners. In both traditions, the delay of the apocalypse meant a turn to immortality of the soul and an interim “waiting period” in which the souls were punished and rewarded in heaven before the end. For Christianity, being a heavily missionary movement, it also meant developing more articulate reasons for becoming Christian even if the end were not coming tomorrow.

This literature is vast so we will need to seek all the help we can. We will have to adopt a selective, topical approach. Richard Bauckham, who has analyzed many heavenly journey texts, developed his description of the genre of the “tour of hell.” Some of his conclusions are so important as to be best presented by direct quotation:

(1) Cosmic tours, like those in 1 Enoch, displayed from an early date an interest in the fate of the dead, among other cosmic secrets. With the emergence of belief in the punishment of the wicked after death, a tour of the punishments in hell was included in such apocalypses. The Apocalypse of Elijah was evidently an example of this development. It may even have been the earliest.

2)Within the genre of tours of the seven heavens, there may have been apocalypses which included a tour of hell located (as in 2 Enoch) within one of the heavens, but no such apocalypse has survived. Instead, we have apocalypses in which an ascent through the seven heavens is followed by a visits (sic!) to paradise and hell: 3 Baruch (Slavonic) and Gedulat Moshe. (Since this pattern is also followed in the apocalypse in the Syriac Transitus Mariae, where hell, as in 2 Enoch, is only reserved for the wicked in the future, the pattern probably predated its use in apocalypses which included a tour of hell.)

3)Some cosmic tour apocalypses developed a particularly strong emphasis on the fate of the dead. Thus the Gedulat Moshe, while retaining a tour of the seven heavens with cosmological and angelological concerns independent of the fate of the dead, gives most space to the visits to hell and paradise, while even within the tour of the heavens Moses encounters the angel of death in the sixth heaven. The transition is then not great to apocalypses exclusively concerned with the fate of the dead, such as the Apocalypse of Zephaniah and the Apocalypse of Paul, which while they range quite widely over the heavens and the underworld and even the extremities of the earth, are interested only in matters concerned with the fate of the dead. In fact, the Apocalypse of Paul may well have developed from basically the same pattern as that of 3 Baruch and the Gedulat Moshe: ascent through the heavens, visit to paradise, visit to hell…. With the belief that the souls of the dead are first taken up to the throne of God for judgment before being taken to paradise or hell (ApPaul 14-18), this pattern became the way the seer could follow the path of souls after death and observe their fate.8

Bauckham looks at a series of later works, which we are not going to study in detail, because he has so aptly summed up their import. Even after Bauckham’s detailed study, some interesting larger questions yet remain: Why, for instance, does the tradition ramify in the direction of postmortem judgment? Why do stories of the horrors of hell increase as time goes on? Answers to these questions must be somewhat general and speculative. But there is a certain, inescapable logic, which can be identified by meditating on Bauckham’s observations.

One might begin with the observation that the purpose of these angelically guided tours of hell is basically to confirm the moral nature of the universe, in contrast to the obvious and undeserved rewards that too many sinners and oppressors receive on earth. If the end is not just around the corner, if the end has not arrived in centuries, then it is no longer enough to think that God will punish the sinners at the end and reward the righteous