Apocalypse Now: The State of Apocalyptic Studies Near the End of the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century

摘要

Apocalyptic studies flourished in the 1970s and early 1980s. This interest probably had something to do with the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and their effects, but I won't go into that issue today. In 1970, Klaus Koch's book Ratlos vor der Apokalyptik was published in Germany. In 1972 it appeared in English under a title more friendly to scholars: The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic. The subtitle, however, preserved the edginess of the original: A Polemical Work on a Neglected Area of Biblical Studies and Its Damaging Effects on Theology and Philosophy.1 My favorite chapter is the one entitled “The Agonized Attempt to Save Jesus from Apocalyptic.” The main title of the English version, as well as the title of the chapter I just mentioned, unfortunately converted a respectable German noun into the substantive use of an adjective with a vague referent