. . . after sleeping through the last half century. You have to update him (probably a “him”) on the developments in scholarship regarding apocalypticism. What do you say? That was the mental exercise we played in Boustan’s seminar yesterday.

It was interesting to try to pin down what might be this gentleman’s perspective. We need to know what he knows before we update him. So, he’s probably working under the assumption that apocalypticism is a popular or populist movement driven by an ideology formed in crisis or persecution (often compared with other “millenarian” movements). This understanding would be set up against the established–perhaps “institutionalized”–tradition.

This understanding goes back to Max Weber’s dichotomy between the priest and the prophet. The priest is embedded within the institutionalized structures and their authority is generated by their status within those structures. The prophet is imagined to be a charismatic leader, whose authority is derived simply from the leader’s own charisma. Weber has preference for charismatic leaders as the force for change in world history. He believes the early charisma is always institutionalized if the movement continues. All that to say there is an underlying bias here: prophet = good and priest = bad.

Boustan asked if this hypothetical person would “like” apocalyptic writings. There was some disagreement in the seminar about this. I thought that the fictional 50′s scholar would not like apocalyptic writings because, in general, I believe the bias of embarrassment by apocalyptic thought (See Weiss, Schweitzer, and later, Koch) would still be more likely than a Marxist Bible scholar.

Even though the apocalyptic writings would have been conceived in the tradition of prophecy (and prophecy is a good thing viz-a-viz Weber), apocalyptic would have been a kind of corruption of that tradition.

Since the 70′s, in addition to the definitional issues, we would have to update this fictional scholar on the developments in the relation between Wisdom and Apocalypticism. That is, more and more, scholars see apocalyptic literature as learned and scribal. Jonathan Z. Smith called apocalyptic literature “Wisdom without a royal patron.” And that theme is what we’ll be talking about this quarter in our seminar.