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Paulogia
What Kind of World Makes So Many Messiahs? (feat Dr John J Collins)
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Jesus didn’t emerge from a vacuum. In first-century Judea, apocalyptic preachers, messianic expectations, resurrection beliefs, and end-times movements were already everywhere. Yale scholar John J. Collins explains the forgotten world that shaped Jesus—and why understanding that world may radically change how you think about Christianity’s origins.
(originally posted May 4, 2026)
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Apocalypse is apocalypse. A little more Apocalyptic. I think the word we're looking for is apocalypse. Apocalypse.
SPEAKER_04Apocalypse.
SPEAKER_06Apocalypse.
SPEAKER_04Well that protects you and your family against any sort of apocalyptic disaster. Good luck with the apocalypse.
SPEAKER_01I mean I could sleep through the apocalypse.
SPEAKER_07When I present the minimal witnesses hypothesis, a proposed naturalistic explanation for the origins of Christianity without a resurrection, I often flesh it out with a series of twelve mundane events that I suspect led us to the religion we have today. The first is this.
SPEAKER_04So what I would say is that there were many Jews in the first century, both before and after 70, who were hoping for the end of time or the end of days or the coming of a Messiah, that sort of thing. I don't know what percentage we should speak of. But if you want to say many people, then I'm certainly going to go along with that. All right. Jesus isn't the only person out there who's hoping that God will intervene in dramatic and apocalyptic ways. Sure. That's well documented.
SPEAKER_07Excellent. And I will admit, in the early years of my skepticism of Christianity, this apocalyptic prophet phrase became easy to adopt because so many smart people on both sides of the debate went along with it.
SPEAKER_06Since Albert Schweitzer 100 years ago, for consensus has been the best way to understand Jesus is an apocalyptic prophet who had a bad weekend in Jerusalem, who thought that uh the Son of Man was going to come, turn everything upside down, the rich would be poor, the poor would be rich, Romans would be driven out, and the 12 disciples would rule the new kingdom. Uh we've had Bart Ehrman and Dell Allison, and both of them came to the same conclusion that indeed he, Jesus, is best understood as an apocalyptic prophet. And Monty Python went along with it.
SPEAKER_00There shall in that time be rumors of things going astray, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are.
SPEAKER_07But when I got to my current writing project, where I had to back up this apocalyptic preacher claim, I realized that I personally didn't know in detail what that meant. Did you know that the word apocalypse does not even mean the end of the world? In fact, part of the argument that Jesus is an apocalyptic prophet is that modern people like me have no idea what it is. So we therefore can't be anachronistically projecting that onto Jesus. Like we might be if we said that Jesus is a capitalist or a socialist or a feminist or any is. Well, it turns out it is impossible to do a deep dive into Jewish apocalypticism without quickly getting reference to Dr. John J. Collins. He is a Holmes professor emeritus of Old Testament criticism and interpretation at Yale Divinity School, and one of the most influential interpreters of the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism alive today. And for some reason, he is here with me on YouTube today. Okay, the reason is that he has an upcoming 20th lecture course called Judaism Before Jesus, starting May 14th, covering the five centuries that shaped the world Jesus was born into, which is exactly up my alley and just what I need, but we will talk about that later. Welcome, Dr. Collins. And my apologies in advance that I'll be exposing you to some people who disagree with you.
SPEAKER_02That's fine.
SPEAKER_03If somebody doesn't disagree, if nobody disagrees with what you're saying, you're not saying anything.
SPEAKER_07That's an excellent point. That's an excellent point. It's so exciting to have you here. I've been waiting for this for quite a long time. I come from an evangelical background, and for decades I was well versed in the Bible, but basically took it as everything from the table of contents to the whole thing was inspired and should never be questioned. And that very simplistic meaning of it. It was only a few years ago that I started taking this all seriously. And when I finally got into this Bible scholarship a few years back, I just heard Bart Ehrman and Albert Schweitzer and everyone in the hundred years between telling me that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. And I said, okay, Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. Cool. I don't know what that is, though. I had no idea what that meant. And so I discovered you in around 2024. And so I read books like The Apocalyptic Ops, Imagination, Apocalypticism and Dead Sea Scrolls, the and even got your Oxford handbook of apocalyptic literature. Now I went through all that and I read them, and I've been waiting two years to finally ask you this. What is the definition of Jewish apocalypticism? I still don't know. I still have no idea in a way that is someone who doesn't have any background in any of this. What's the simple definition of Jewish apocalypticism?
SPEAKER_02I have actually one more book coming out this summer for Meredith. Okay. Apocalypticism as a worldview in ancient Judaism. And apocalypticism, and I don't like to use apocalyptic as a noun.
SPEAKER_07Okay.
SPEAKER_02But apocalypticism is a worldview. Now, as another scholar that you may have come across in this connection, Lorenzo Di Tomaso, has written a good deal on the aspect of a worldview, and he talks about the axiomatic presuppositions that one has about time and space. Now, so the apocalyptic worldview as it emerges in ancient Judaism was partly the worldview of the time, but with a few distinctive tweaks in it. No. In terms of time, is basically linear. Now when I say it's linear, this does not preclude that there may be cycles in it, that some there may be loops in history, but nonetheless you're going forward. No, this becomes much stronger in the Hellenistic period than it had been anywhere earlier than that, I think. The view of time as a whole and what Paul Cosman at Harvard calls total history. The idea that you can grasp all of history as a continuous unit. The apocalyptic tweak on that is that it will come to an end. And it will come to an end because of a divine judgment. When that divine judgment comes, it will not only bring an end to life on earth as we know it, but it will also bring about the resurrection of the dead, in which so that people will continue to live and be judged and rewarded or punished in a world that lasts forever. Which brings us to the second part of this worldview, and that is the axiomatic assumptions about space.
SPEAKER_05Oh.
SPEAKER_02And now, you know, Rudolf Bultmann, whom you probably read at some point in your youth, talked about the three-story universe. Basically right. Now, the three-story universe actually was common throughout antiquity.
SPEAKER_07What changes in the Hellenistic period is And And just to make sure that I have this correct, so the pretty universe is basically we're at the middle level, and below us are bad things, and above us are good things. Is that roughly?
SPEAKER_02That's basically right. Above us are the heavens, and those are basically good people up there. And then the people, the agents who come up from below are trouble.
SPEAKER_07Okay, so I didn't mean to just interrupt, but I want to make sure I had it right.
SPEAKER_02You have parallels to all of that elsewhere in the Hellenistic world. What's new in the apocalyptic literature is the degree to which you can move between those levels. So several apocalyptic texts describe people who are taken up to heaven and then have a view. Because just as with regard to history, you can now grasp history as a whole, equally you can grasp the cosmos as a whole. You can speak of the world. This is why it becomes possible to speak of the end of the world. You know, and I should add there, the end is never an absolute end. There's always something that comes after, the end of the world, and that's really the important stuff. The most important thing about what comes after the end of the world as we know it is the judgment of the dead. And I think this is something that you didn't have in the Hebrew Bible, except in the book of Daniel at the very end. And it wasn't a big thing in much of the ancient world, much of the ancient Near East. No. If you actually believe in a judgment of the dead and eternal life, it makes all the difference in the world. I think a lot of people nowadays maybe give it a nod and say they believe in it, but don't really. You know, we'd be surprised as hell if something like that happened. So to speak. So to speak. But if you did really take it seriously, it would change everything. And this is one of the big things, though, that this is a nod to the course I'll be doing later in the summer. One of the big things that happens in Second Temple Judaism is the rise of the apocalyptic worldview. Now, without that, you would not have had Christianity. Whether one regards this as a good thing for it or not, it's a good thing. But you couldn't have had Christianity without it. But it isn't peculiar to Christianity and it didn't originate in Christianity.
SPEAKER_07Indeed.
SPEAKER_02That answer your question.
SPEAKER_07Oh, I want to make sure, so I'm going to repeat back to you to see if I have this as a working definition. Jewish apocalypticism is a worldview that one day the world will end and end with a final judgment. Is that elevator?
SPEAKER_02Put into that with a linear view of history.
SPEAKER_07With a linear view of history. All right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Statistically, again, we won't quibble over the details here.
SPEAKER_07No, but that's probably helpful for me because I deal a lot with evangelicals like myself who just this is a very foreign concept. Now, thinking backing a little bit on what you were you were introducing there, at one point Judaism was primarily about the line of David going to be living forever, right? That that was that was what it was. Then the Babylonian exile happened around 586 BC and basically threw that out the window. So if I'm correct, you posit that in each subsequent conquering nation changed and influenced Judaism. Can you give me a brief history of who those conquerors were? And am I correct in thinking that you think they were influenced? And if so, how do we know that they did that? Okay.
SPEAKER_02The first, we we leave the Assyrians out of it. But the Assyrian contribution to the story is they wiped out the northern kingdom of Israel. And in spite of all the legends about the lost tribes, they killed them off. Gone. Now, the Babylonians, and in many ways, came close to wiping Judah off the map. Now, but in this case, the Judean communities in Babylon lived on and would come back in history afterwards. But the main impact of the Babylonians was to destroy the traditional way of life. Destroy the kingship, destroy the traditional way of life. Now, the Persians come along and they say, let people go back to their own country, let them worship their own gods, let them observe their traditional values. Now, of course, as everybody appreciates in this moment in history, Iranians were the great champions of human rights, right? I'm speaking a little facetiously here. The Shah, in his day, proclaimed the edict of Cyrus, or there's a Cyrus cylinder that allowed captured people to go back to their homelands as the original manifestation of human rights. Well, not quite. It was an enlightened policy. Give him some credit for that. And by and large, the Persians let them be. Now, the other big thing that happens under the Persians is that, according to the Bible, at least, a man named Ezra went to the king and said, We have our own traditional law given to us by Moses. And the king said, Oh, that's very interesting. Why don't you go back and get people to observe that? Now I think the idea comes from Ezra, but he needs royal permission. And he goes back to Jerusalem and pulls this law, scroll of the law out of the bag and holds it up and says, This is the law of Moses. And again, taking the Bible at face value here, everybody says, What? Where did this come out of? We didn't know we were supposed to do these things. Now, I don't think everybody started doing these things then right away, but everybody said, Okay, this is our way of life. And what they do is they observe a few key things that become ethnic markers. They circumcise their sons, they observe the Passover, they have certain dietary customs. At least if you follow Ezra and people like him, you're not going to marry foreign women. Not everybody stuck with that one so well, but but still. At the same time, there was an acknowledgement, we this is our traditional way of life. Okay, the Persians get knocked off by Alexander the Great. And for a hundred years in Jerusalem, they were under the Ptolemies of Egypt. And the main thing the Ptolemies did was collect taxes. But we don't hear of anything, any big disruptions. But then comes come the Syrians. And the Syrians got into trouble with Rome. And that put their gave them certain financial crises. And they had to step up their taxes. And they began to meddle more. And one of the ways they meddled was by replacing the high priest in Jerusalem. Put somebody in. This kind of thing still happens in certain quarters. You don't the person who was doing the job isn't on board with your program. Yank him out and he's gone. And this is what happened to the high priest in Jerusalem. But then when Antiochus, the Epiphanes, was campaigning in Egypt, fighting broke out in Jerusalem between two rival claimants to the priesthood, and he thought they were in revolt. And so he comes back to Jerusalem and says, You may no longer observe your ancestral laws. Now, what that means in effect is you are no longer recognized as a distinct people. Now, this is something that every colonial power does at some point or other. It's to try to erase the identity of the group that they're regarding as troublesome. And so in the case of Judea, this backfired spectacularly. Because it's from that point forward that you suddenly get a great concern. Now, maybe not shared by everybody, but shared by a lot of people, to observe the law in all its detail. And it's from this time on you begin to find stepp pools for ritual bathing all over the country. You begin to find evidence that they were keeping kosher. In the literary text, you find discussions of the fine points of the law. Have you come across the text from the Dead Sea Scrolls called 4QMMT?
SPEAKER_03It's not ringing a bell.
SPEAKER_02It's explaining apparently written by a sectarian leader to the high priest, and explaining why we had to separate from the rest of the people. And most of it is about fine points of the law. And my favorite of those is the purity of liquid streams. If you pour water from one glass into another, and the second one is dirty, does the impurity travel upstream so that the first one now is impure as well?
SPEAKER_03Wow.
SPEAKER_02Now this was a level of detail to which I had never been exposed before I found before I read the scrolls. That's one extreme of it. But then in other places, like in Egypt, they don't fuss about that kind of thing at all, and they tend to give allegorical explanations of the law. But from the time of the Maccabees forward, pretty much everybody talks about the law. And it becomes clear that you can't really be Jewish anymore without saying you observe the law in some way or other. That was not the case before the Maccabean Revolt.
SPEAKER_01I want you to think about the nature of the Jewish religion and the culture in which the Jewish people would have actually borrowed this idea from the pagans around them, really. So you think that in borrowing this, after you've got an entire Old Testament history in which Jews are being warned by Yahweh not to borrow anything from the cultures around them, not to borrow the women who believe in those gods as wives, not to borrow the idols of those. You really think that in that culture, Jewish writers would have embraced an idea about the Messiah that they borrowed from a pagan group. I think that's a bit of a stretch.
SPEAKER_02But the Zoroastrians also had a great interest in purity. And what was there some influence there? We're not so sure. The showcase example is in the Dead Sea Scrolls. They talk about how when God created humanity, he created two spirits for them to walk in, one of light and one of darkness. That's coming straight out of Zoroastrianism. The idea that there are two opposing spirits of light and darkness, and that in the end there will be a big showdown between them. Because the Persians also had their own apocalypticism. And it's possible that's really where the Jews got the ideas of apocalypticism from the Persians. But the problem is most of our Persian sources are very late. And so it becomes very difficult to document anything like that.
SPEAKER_07Okay, so we should maybe provisionally think that might have been that way, but we don't necessarily know.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. But at least there are some ideas like that come from the Persians. Okay. Actually, the idea of the devil probably comes from the Persians, I think. You know, and again, nothing is ever borrowed unless you have something to hang it on in your own tradition. Sure. But the idea of one prince of evil opposed to the good God, I think that very probably comes from the Persians.
SPEAKER_07You mentioned the book of Daniel. It's my understanding that Daniel may well have been the most popular book around the time in the first century when Jesus was, at least according to Josephus, it was very popular.
SPEAKER_02Too bad it still isn't. Commentary on it.
SPEAKER_07Now, Paul just tell us that this was written by a real historical figure named Daniel, that all the chapters were written exactly at the same time in the 6th century BC, and that they provided accurate prophecies of future events. Do your views differ on that? Uh and and why are you and why are you right?
SPEAKER_02Not even all evangelicals hold to that anymore. Because first of all, there are glaring problems. Take, for example, the story of Nebuchadnezzar being turned into a beast. No. Nobody else noticed that? No record of that anywhere else. A figure shows up named Darius the Mead. Now we know of Darius the Persian. Don't know of any Darius the Mead from any other source. Belshazzar appears as king. There was a Belshazzar actually, but he was never actually king. Now that's maybe a relatively minor point, but there are enough historical problems like that. Not to mention stories like people being thrown into a lion's den or into a fairy furnace and walking out on scathing. It becomes pretty clear this is not factual history.
SPEAKER_04Oh no, what we gotta do, the king likes Daniel more than me and you. Oh no, what we gotta do, we gotta get him out of here.
SPEAKER_02There's a lot of good literature that isn't factual history. Sure. And it's only if one brings the assumption to it that it becomes a problem. So the problem lies in our assumption, not in the book of Daniel itself, on that one.
SPEAKER_07So when do you think it was written and do you think it was written all at once?
SPEAKER_02Oh the uh one of the oddities of the book is that some chapters in our are in Aramaic and others are in Hebrew. And the Aramaic ones seem to be older than the Hebrew. But the Hebrew ones are quite dateable because they refer to the crisis with Antiochus Epiphanes. And it gives you in chapter 11, it gives you a detailed prediction, but prediction after the fact, of all the history of the Hellenistic period. And you can get your annotated Bible and check them off, and they get everything right down until the very end, when it has the king, who is pretty clearly to be identified as Antiochus Epiphanes. They have him then invade the holy land and die between the sea and the holy mountain. And that didn't happen. And we figure that the book of Daniel was written in 164, before the news of the death, the king's death became known in Jerusalem. There was a philosopher in antiquity named Porphyry who figured that out already. This isn't a new insight, but now one of the recent publications. On the Book of Daniel is a commentary by two evangelical scholars, John Walton, quite well known evangelical scholar from Chicago and a young woman with him. But they accept the Maccabean date.
SPEAKER_03Oh wow.
SPEAKER_02Okay. Now, he has quite an interesting way of dealing with it because you say with all those problems in the first chapters of the book, like the Madness of Nebuchadnezzar Lesser, he comes at this from how things are remembered, memory. There's a lot to be said for that, so long as you recognize that memory is not a reliable medium.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_07So shifting gears a little bit, working my way towards Jesus, so a lot of Christian apologists put forth that there was a strict universality about what first century Judaism thought about things like specifically messianic expectation and resurrection of the dead. In your studies, do you find that all Jews at the time had the same opinions about those two topics, or was there a variety of views about messianic expectations?
SPEAKER_02Not only do I find that they didn't all have the same views, but even Josephus, writing in the first century of the common era, tells you that they didn't all have the same views. The Pharisees believed in resurrection, the Sadducees didn't. And this is why begin the Roman period that Judaism kind of split into various sects, denominations, if you like, who had quite distinct ideas in some things. Now, there's some things in common, but I think the proliferation of Christian churches after the Reformation would be a fair analogy. There are certain things that we all have in common, and then there are other things that people would fade to the death over.
SPEAKER_07So it wasn't universally just that the Messiah was necessarily going to be a military leader.
SPEAKER_02There were other varieties of Okay, if we're talking about the Messiah. No, first of all, I think when they came back from Babylon, they thought at first that they could restore Zerubbabel as king, and it didn't work out. We're not too sure why. Very interesting passage in the book of Zechariah, where somebody is told to make crowns and then put it on the head of the high priest. And say to him, This is the man whose name is Branch, which is something you said to the king. So in other words, it looks like Cerubabel got erased out of that. Now, we have no good evidence, I think, of any kind of messianic expectation between about 500 and 200. Make that 150. Wow, okay. Maybe make it 100. Do I hear 90? Now, there are prophetic texts that may belong in there somewhere, but there wasn't much, if any. Now, what revives it is that when the descendants of the Maccabees, the Hasmonean, come to power, they proclaimed themselves kings, and they were not from the line of David. This offended the Pharisees and the Essenes. And so they pray to God to raise up somebody from the line of David. That and then when the Romans come in and dislodge the Hasmoneans, they also want a king who's going to come in and displace the Romans. So when you get reference to the Messiah without further qualification, you're looking for a warrior king. You're looking for somebody who will smash heads, kill the bad guys, drive out the enemy, and restore a native kingship. That is, I think, the standard job description for a messiah. There are a couple of minor messianic roles. One of them is the messianic priest, which we get at Qumran. And one that I at least believe in, and I think it's it's right, that there is expectation of a messianic prophet, of somebody, you know, who will come to announce that the kingdom is coming, and will also be a figure somewhat like Elijah, who will do things like raise the dead. And now we don't have a lot of evidence for that, but there's one very interesting text in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And it looks to me like this is the job Jesus was applying for. Yeah. Much more than the kingly job or the warrior job. Because he surely was not applying to be the dead smashing messiah. But then, you know, when Jesus is killed and his followers believe that he's raised from the dead, then you get the hope that he will come back. And then you get another kind of messiah. Now, in the book of Daniel, you read of one run like a son of man coming on the clouds of heaven, and it's all very enigmatic. I think this is probably referring to the archangel Michael. But it is deliberately vague. They don't come out and say that. And by the first century, that figure was usually taken to be a messiah. And this is another kind of messiah, a heavenly messiah. And that becomes very important then for Christianity. Because his followers seem to think, seemed to have expected that he would drive out the Romans and restore the kingdom of Israel. And that didn't pan out. And then plan B is he'd come back and do it right the next time. And so what you get in the book of Revelation, for example, is a kind of combination between the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven and the warrior judge who is going to kill his enemies. You know, with the breadth of his slips he will slay the wicked.
SPEAKER_07So back to the first point of my minimal witnesses hypothesis. I posit that Jesus was preaching an apocalyptic message to people for whom apocalyptic messages were just in the air. And Jesus was saying things that would have been natural for his audience to hear. In other words, it wasn't revolutionary, unique at the time, in the way we may think. Is that a reasonable hypothesis?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think so. I think so. But now, Jesus, I would say, and I'm not going to do much with Jesus in this course. Inevitably, he will come up.
SPEAKER_03Sure.
SPEAKER_02Because he was a figure of Second Temple Judaism. He is, he can reasonably, I think, be called an apocalyptic prophet, but he's the most peculiar one. You don't get any other apocalyptic texts that give you parables. Well, you will get things like the Sermon on the Mount. The parables are probably the most distinctive thing in the Gospels over against the apocalyptic side. Because the parables by and large are very much concerned with the here and now. Right. How we live. Now, the apocalyptic texts were actually concerned about the here and now too, but they were much more overshadowed because you're trying to approach the here and now being very much aware of this judgment that's coming.
SPEAKER_07So you have this upcoming course, which looks amazing, called Judaism Before Jesus. What are we going to learn in this one?
SPEAKER_02You can get actually a fair sample of it in the topics we've talked about. Okay. Because the big things that happen are the law, how the law comes to be acknowledged, and then how it comes to be eventually observed in more detail, that the rise of apocalypticism is another huge one. We didn't get to talk about the Jews in the diaspora.
SPEAKER_07No.
SPEAKER_02That's also very interesting and also very consequential for Christianity, because what the Jews in the diaspora did was translate the Bible into Greek and then try to correlate Jewish tradition with Greek culture. That was going to be enormously important in the long run. So that those are some of the big things that the formation of the Bible will presumably come up in there somewhere. But you know, that the formation of the Torah, even they were still messing with it into the first century BC. There were still editing, making editorial changes in it. And then there was a fuzzy edge to the canon, which led is the reason why we have different canons in the different churches.
SPEAKER_03We learn all about the book of Enoch, because that's always very cool. Indeed. The book of Enoch is a biggie. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a biggie. Nice.
SPEAKER_07And uh and I understand that if people sign up that they're gonna get a copy of your new book.
SPEAKER_03So I say, yeah. So that's a great idea.
SPEAKER_02So at least a couple of copies will get out there.
SPEAKER_07Very good. This is a 20-lecture course from my Yale University professor. So it's an amazing learning opportunity most of us would never normally get, offer the price of a college textbook. Alternately, the course is included for members of the Biblical Studies Academy. And you can get a free trial of that to try out the community in the classes to find out why it is such a great resource. Sign up today at tinyurl.com slash before Jesus. That's tinyurl.com slash the letter B, the number four, Jesus. Before Jesus. And if you use that link, you'll be helping the mission of this channel, which I greatly appreciate. All right. Well, that is the edge of our time, and I don't want to go over and wreck everyone's schedule.
SPEAKER_02So this is actually one of the uh parallels here with apocalypticism. You do come up against the edge of time.
SPEAKER_07Exactly right. You never know when it's gonna happen, and the consequences are dire.
SPEAKER_03And there's always something after it.
SPEAKER_07That's true. This has been a great pleasure. I thank you so much for having a chat with me.
SPEAKER_02Thank you. I enjoyed it.
SPEAKER_07And to paraphrase John's wise words, there's always another video after the video. And you can tap on the thumbnail on screen now to see more of this former Christian, taking a look at the claims of Christians. Until next time. Later.