Ep 272: The Apocalyptic Worldview of Ancient Judaism and Christianity with John J. Collins

In this episode I talk with Dr. John J. Collins, Holmes Professor of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation Emeritus at Yale University and the world’s leading scholar of apocalypticism and apocalyptic literature, about his brand-new book Apocalypticism as a Worldview in Ancient Judaism, out June 25, 2026 on Eerdmans. Dr. Collins discusses his career and life-long interest in apocalypticism and his role in formulating the standard definition of apocalyptic literature. He explains how ‘apocalyptic’ should only be used as an adjective and why the noun ‘apocalypticism’, denoting a worldview of related concepts, is more appropriate. When then discuss how apocalypticism works in ancient Judaism and its primary characteristics, including a view of history which offers a hope beyond ‘the end’, the use of myths and symbolism to communicate apocalyptic ideas, the cosmic scope of apocalypticism which includes a spiritual realm inhabited by spiritual beings which are sometimes at war with humanity, and the social and political crises which generate apocalypticism. We also discuss the relationship between millenarianism and apocalypticism, why early Christians transmitted apocalyptic literature, how apocalypticism manifests itself in modernity, and the impact of apocalypticism on Christian theology in today. 

Media Referenced:

Apocalypticism as a Worldview in Ancient Judaism: https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802885005/apocalypticism-as-a-worldview-in-ancient-judaism/

John J. Collins Amazon Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B00AZMCO66?ccs_id=f0f3d77f-61af-4a1c-b058-3eb29998dc25

Wikipedia Page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_J._Collins

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is the Protestant Libertarian Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and part of the Christians for Liberty Network. I really hope that you guys enjoy today's show. All right, guys, welcome to another episode of the Protestant Libertarian Podcast. My guest today is Dr. John J. Collins. Dr. Collins is the world's leading expert on apocalyptic literature, the former president of the Society of Biblical Literature, and the Holmes Professor of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation Emeritus at Yale Divinity School. He is the author of the brand new book, Apocalypticism as a Worldview in Ancient Judaism, out on June 25th through Eerdmans, where he discusses the concept of apocalyptic in Jewish antiquity. We will be discussing this book on the show today. Dr. Collins, welcome to the Protestant Libertarian Podcast. Glad to be here. I am really excited to have you today. As I was saying before the show, I came across your work, my second year of Bible college. It was your very slim commentary on Daniel with an introduction to apocalyptic literature. And I remember being like 19 and wrestling through that for the first time, but it completely transformed my worldview. You are a scholar that I have constantly brought up on the show whenever we talk about apocalyptic. So it's an honor to talk to you today. For those in my audience that don't know who you are, though, tell us about yourself, your background, and your work.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Well, I grew up in Ireland. I went to a boarding school that was run by Catholic priests by a religious order. In those days, everybody did Latin. And uh the dean of students called out, I think 12 of us from the study went out and said, You're going to do Greek. And two of us stuck with the Greek for five years. And then I joined that religious order. I left it later, but uh uh when I went along to go to the university, they asked me what would I like to do, and I said, I would like to do classics. And they said, you can do classics if you'll also do Hebrew, and then you can teach scripture, and that's how I came to be a scripture scholar. You know, I didn't have really much prior knowledge of or interest in the Hebrew Bible before that point. But then, since uh my real interest was still in classics, I gravitated towards Hellenistic Judaism, the point at which the Hebrew tradition met the Greek tradition. And now this was back in the 1960s, the Second Vatican Council was going on, and it seemed to me that what was happening then in the Catholic Church was very similar to what happened in Hellenistic Judaism, insofar as you have a very traditional view of the world coming in contact with a very sophisticated view of the world, uh, and trying to reconcile the two. And uh so that that was my what got me into that period of history. So, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

Oh, yeah, and I was just gonna say, I mean, that that kind of leads naturally to your interest in apocalyptic literature. You've been at the forefront of apocalyptic research for a for a very long time now. Uh, was that kind of what generated and motivated you to start studying apocalyptic in detail?

SPEAKER_01 3:24

Well, you know, I went to Harvard to do a PhD. And at that, when I went there, I had intended to work on the wisdom of Solomon and Hellenistic Judaism. But in my second year there, a young scholar named Paul Hansen uh joined the faculty. He had actually been appointed the year before, but he had been given a year off. And uh he taught a course, he had written his dissertation on the origins of apocalyptic literature, and he taught a course on that, which was very formative. It was also incidentally where I got to know my wife, Adela, Adela Yarbrough, as she was then. Uh but Paul, when Paul spoke about apocalyptic, he gravitated towards the early post-exilic period, what I would call late prophecy or post-exilic prophecy. And at that point, he hadn't really gotten into the non-canonical literature. He did later on. But but uh so since I was coming at it from the Hellenistic period, we tended to clash. And Paul, I must say, was very gracious about all of that, but it generated a lot of discussion. You know, I was in my second year of the PhD program, I was fighting my feet, and this was uh an opportunity to cut my teeth, so to speak. And so for my dissertation, I was looking for a Hellenistic text that would be more or less apocalyptic. And so I wrote my dissertation on the Jewish Sibyline oracles, the Sibylline oracles of uh uh of uh uh of Egyptian Judaism. Uh, but then I had also done a seminar at Harvard on the book of Daniel, in which I worked out a lot of the ideas that you know would inform a lot of my later work. And so when I finished my dissertation, the next thing I did was a book on the apocalyptic vision of the book of Daniel. And then because of that, um Bob Funk at the time was executive secretary of the SBL. He was the man really who transformed SBL. Uh when I was a student, SBL used to meet at Union Seminary in New York in the classrooms, and Bob Funk took it to a big hotel and you know ballooned the size of the organization and also started Scholars Press. And Bob also started a project on forms and genres of biblical literature. And since I had just published on Daniel, uh, I was asked to lead the workshop on apocalyptic literature. And one of the influential books at the time was a book by the German scholar Klaus Koch, which had the German title Ratlos for der Apocalyptic, uh, which should be translated roughly uh embarrassed by apocalyptic, or even clueless about apocalyptic. And he was complaining about the confusion in biblical studies that people use the word with radically different meanings, and he concluded one of his chapters by saying that they you have to begin with the literary evidence, and then he gave a kind of preliminary sketch, but he didn't work through it in detail. So what we did in that workshop was make a list of all the books that anybody typically said were apocalyptic. And in the the biblical corpus, this included things like Isaiah 24 to 27 or even the Gospel of Mark, which many people at the time would have said was apocalyptic. And what we did then was try to line those up and see just what have they in common. And doing that, we came up with our definition of the genre, which is still uh much discussed, maybe controversial, but but still very much in the discussion 50 years later, which isn't bad. So uh we came up with our definition of the genre, which maybe leads us on to your next question of what's the No, it it does.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

And this is one of the this is one of these areas of your book that I found really, really helpful because I've been using that definition for a long time when I teach this at church and uh and and and things like that. So I keep on coming back to this. But at the very beginning of your new book, Apocalypticism as a worldview, which again might take some people by surprise because I think that there are a lot of informed Christians that are used to thinking of apocalyptic as just a form of literature and that's it, but it's it's much bigger than that. You talk about the difficulty of defining apocalyptic, and this isn't just true in like narrow apocalyptic studies, but even when people talk about the apocalyptic Paul or apocalyptic language in the gospels, uh it's just it's a challenge. And so sometimes it's used as a noun, sometimes it's used as an adjective. So talk to us about the difficulty of defining and pinning down uh apocalyptic and what it means.

SPEAKER_01 8:59

So one of the first things we concluded, and which I still strongly believe, is that one should not use apocalyptic as a noun. Yeah, it's an adjective. In German, apocalyptic is a noun. Okay. In English, the noun is apocalypticism. And I like to insist on that because when one speaks of apocalyptic, it's easy to glide back and forth and be confused as to just what you're talking about. So an apocalypse is a form of literature that that you know tries to present a revelation. That's basically what the word means. Now, it's a special kind of revelation, and the special kind has, as we defined it, two axes. One of it, it's a revelation of the heavenly world, and secondly, it's a revelation of the future, of history in the future. And these are the two axes. Now, uh, I would then say that the content of an apocalypse is apocalypticism. But you can get apocalypticism without giving a direct account of the revelation, without putting it in that particular literary form. And that's where the confusion tends to come in, because uh things that we call apocalyptic are things that resemble what you find in an apocalypse. But now resemblance can be more or less, and resemblance can be very close. Think, for example, of something like the the Cumbran War Scroll, which would be very similar in content to what you get in an apocalypse. Uh or, you know, it might just have one motif from an apocalypse, and in that case it gets a little bit more dubious whether you should really call that apocalyptic. But that I think is the main source of confusion, is the different degrees of similarity. And I have argued all my career that it is good to keep the genre in mind. So it's not the case that apocalyptic is a worldview rather than a genre. What I would say is one shouldn't talk about apocalyptic at all. And but there is a genre, uh, and then there is a worldview which is broader than the genre, which can be given, uh can be expressed in different literary forms. So that's the uh the kind of setup.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

Yeah, and and I want to talk about some of the features of apocalypticism as a worldview in more detail later, but just to kind of get my audience ready for what we're gonna talk about. What are some of the characteristics of apocalypticism? Because I can even imagine for some of my audience members that maybe have never grappled with the question of apocalypticism or apocalyptic literature, apocalyptic theology before, in popular discourse, apocalyptic means the end of the world. But that's not that's not really what's going on in apocalypticism. So talk to us about apocalypticism as a worldview. What are some of the characteristics of that worldview?

SPEAKER_01 12:34

Well, you know, I still would start with the genre, because I think the genre gives you a kind of ideal type. And then uh, you know, if you bracket out the literary frame, then you're into apocalypticism. In the genre, books that I would call an apocalypse are revelations that are mediated to a human recipient by usually an angel. You know, sometimes it can be Christ, uh, it could be even God speaking directly, but it's some supernatural figure who mediates this. It's not the same thing as classical prophecy. In classical prophecy, the person got inspired and spoke oracles. Now, that this what you typically get in an apocalypse is a vision. Uh, one of the more recent ways of describing this, uh, and I think this comes from a political scientist named Allison McQueen, is to call it an imaginary. You know, it's a world that you imagine. So the apocalypse is something that directly and formally presents that revelation. Now, you can eventually have other kinds of literature that just presuppose that worldview. Okay, what is a worldview? And here I'm following uh a scholar named Lorenzo Di Tommaso, who has done very good work on this, I think. And um, you know, as Lorenzo puts it, a worldview concerns your axiomatic assumptions about time and space. Primarily. Now, the presumptions about time, and we may come back to this in a bit more detail, is that history is linear and it has an end. I would add to that the end is ever final. That what we mean by an end is a radical change. You know, that the present order of things comes to an end. Now, you don't quite get that in the Hebrew prophets. You know, Amos says the end is coming on my people Israel, and indeed it was, but that is only Israel. In the apocalyptic literature, the end is coming on everything. There is this total view of the totality. And in fact, one of the points I'm making in this book is that this is something that really only comes into play in the Hellenistic age after the conquest of Alexander. It's a tendency to view history as a whole and the cosmos as a whole. So that's the temporal axis. Now, I would add to that that at the end of history there is a judgment of the dead. And this, I would argue, is one of the most important things about apocalypticism. It's something you do not get in the Hebrew Bible before the book of Daniel. You don't get a judgment of the dead. Even Ben Sira, writing probably uh 20 years or so before the book of Daniel was written, says that whether life is for 10 or 100 or a thousand years, there's no inquiry about it in the afterlife. Now, when you start to believe that there is an inquiry about it, that changes the whole ballgame radically. So that's history. Spatially, now Rudolf Bultmann used to talk about a three-story universe. Um, actually, some of the apocalypses have as many as seven heavens, so it's a many-storied universe. But the main thing is there is a world above us and a world below us. And that again, now, I mean, to some degree, people had always assumed that. The difference now is that people can go there. Visionaries can be taken up to heaven in the present to get revelations, and people can be taken up to heaven after death, or go the other way. Or wherever you think hell is, because in some of those apocalypse, hell is actually up in one of the heavens. But the thing is that there is a world beyond the world of flesh and blood that we experience.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

Yeah, that's that's a perfect setup. So I want to dive into some of that. And obviously, I think that for um for you know a lot of a lot of my Christian audience, we're used to thinking of history in terms of an end. Um, like it's it's just gonna stop one day. But as you already alluded to, within apocalypticism, the the end of history isn't actually the end. There's something beyond that. And so apocalypticism cultivates this hope for what happens after the end. So let's dive into that a little bit more. How do we see that working itself out in apocalypticism as a worldview?

SPEAKER_01 17:55

Well, that what happens after the end, you know, there are two dimensions to it. On the one hand, uh, there is normally hope for transformation of the earth. Now, in some of the later apocalypses, that becomes much less important. But in the early apocalypses, books like Daniel and Enoch, yes, they are looking for a transformation of the earth. That is what we often call millenarianism. And that all of this terminology goes back to the book of Revelation. And it's not that the book of Revelation, you know, is the model apocalypse. In fact, in some ways, it's a little bit exceptional, but that is historically where the language came from. Now, the millennial the millennium, you know, is uh a transformed earth. In Book of Revelation, it lasts a thousand years. In an apocalypse of Fort Ezra, it's only 400 years, but it's some transformation of the earth. That part is continuous with Old Testament prophecy, and you get it in other cultures too. You know, the hope for an ideal kingdom, what you get, for example, in the book of Isaiah. But in addition to that, in the apocalypses, as I just said, you always have a judgment of the dead. And so the transformed earth isn't the end goal. The end goal is a world where people live forever, where there is no more death. That actually is something you get already in the so-called apocalypse of Isaiah, which which I wouldn't define as an apocalypse, but still um, you know, that that's that's what it was already reaching for that. And that actually also you get overtones of that in the ancient myths, but much more developed here. And typically in the early apocalypses, you know, when the good people are raised, they're taken up to heaven and they become like angels. So they're transformed. So it's transformation into a form of life where you no longer suffer and die. That I think is the bottom line hope in the apocalypse. That's also what distinguishes apocalypticism from millenarianism. There's overlap, but but this is the crucial one.

SPEAKER_00 20:37

Yeah, yeah. No, that's really helpful. And then the I think the feature of apocalyptic literature that most people are familiar with is the idea that it's it heavily relies on mythology and symbolism, right? Like the book of Revelation stands out from the rest of the New Testament canon because it relies on that myth or symbolism. Now, we'll talk about this a little bit later on the show. There are plenty of people, especially in American evangelical circles, that have tried to take that myth and symbolism and make it a literal description of events that are happening in the real world. Um, but that's not really the way that apocalyptic literature works. So talk to us within the apocalyptic worldview, the literature that it generated, what is the function of myth and symbolism in that literature?

SPEAKER_01 21:16

Well, no, mythic symbolism uh is used you know to you it is a work of imagination. So it's not literal description. If you think, for example, of the book of Daniel, uh, he sees four great beasts coming up out of the sea. And then when it comes to the interpretation, it says, four kingdoms will arise on the earth. But now, if you had started out by just saying four kingdoms will arise on the earth, you'd come away with a very different feeling. Right. Because when you describe them as beasts coming up out of the sea, uh, that you know is a way of expressing the Significance. Now you can go over the same ground in the next chapter of Daniel and use quite different imagery. And this was one of the things I discovered back when I was a student. And to some degree, there's a famous anthropologist, Lord Levi Strauss, you know, who wanted to line up different myths and discern a structure. He was a structuralist. And both in Daniel and in Revelation, you can do that. You go over the same ground using different symbolism because you're appealing to the imagination. Now, the appeal of ancient myths is that they have resonance, symbols of ancestral vitality is the way a scholar named Philip Wheelwright described them. At the time of the Iraq War, Saddam Hussein had big posters of himself riding a white horse and killing a dragon with three heads. The three heads being George Bush, Tony Blair, and whoever was head of the European Union. Now I'm sure that Saddam Hussein wasn't familiar with the ancient myths, but this was classic ancient combat myth. One of the classic myths of the ancient, or east, even to some degree, you get it in Greece, is the idea that the world is established by a battle in which a heavenly figure, and in the apocalypse of John, which Saddam Hussein surely was not reading, that this figure comes writing a white horse. But the opponent is this monster from the sea, a dragon, and seven heads in the book of Revelation. But actually you get something like that already in the Eucharitic myths of the second millennium BC. Now, that stuff stays around. Where did Saddam Hussein come up with that idea? I have really no idea, but I'm thinking that that kind of imagery must have survived in the popular imagination in the ancient Near East, even down to this day. And it surely had survived down to the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

SPEAKER_00 24:34

Yeah. No, that is really, really helpful. And that leads directly to my next question. And that is that as you said before, apocalypticism isn't concerned with just what happens down here on earth, but it presupposes kind of this cosmological stage where humans interact with spiritual beings. And I think that in the last couple of years, the Old Testament scholar Michael Heiser, he's published a lot of works that have popularized this. And while I think that he overstates his case in a lot of ways, I do appreciate the fact that he's kind of brought this back to the conversation, that this idea that the Bible does kind of, and apocalyptic literature in the Bible does presuppose this cosmic realm where there are angels and malevolent spiritual beings. And in your book, you talk about how that is an essential component of apocalypticism. So talk to us about the cosmic scope of apocalypticism.

SPEAKER_01 25:22

Well, no, as I said, one of the things that happened after Alexander the Great is that the world was unified to some degree. Now, in the conception of history, there's a scholar at Harvard who's in classics, actually, Paul Cosman, who pointed out that the Seleucids in Syria were the first kings to date things by a dynasty instead of by the individual king. Now, that, you see, is positing the unity of a long stretch of history. And you get what he calls total history. Now, you also get the total cosmos. When you get to the book of Enoch, you know, Enoch is taken on travels where half the time you're not sure where he is. Is he up in heaven or is he floating around over the earth? But, you know, he sees both many places on earth and places like the storage houses where God keeps the snow that he brings out and dumps on us from time to time. And uh, you know, the mysteries of cosmology. And you might wonder, you know, what does that have to do with anything? But it does because it is a way of imagining a much bigger world where there are other realms and where you may have other forms of life. You can see this is a kind of potential for science fiction, and some people have drawn analogies between science fiction and apocalypticism. But you know, if people nowadays want to imagine life on another planet, but to some degree that's what you get in the apocalyptic literature. They may not be going quite to another planet, but they're going to another level, another uh heaven sometimes, or whatever, but some other dimension. And that's it's that transformation, I think, that's crucial. Because, you know, one of the questions on your list is to what degree is apocalyptic literature a response to crises? And very often it is. And, you know, obviously the book of Daniel, for example, and also the book of Revelation are sparked by by crises. But the biggest crisis, the underlying crisis, isn't just a bad ruler who's here and maybe gone in a while. But it's the nature of mortality, the nature of mortal human existence. I think that ultimately is what they're trying to transcend or to get beyond.

SPEAKER_00 28:12

Yeah, and I guess I have a follow-up question to that. It's not on my list, but I've been I've been reading through Romans pretty slowly this summer and just trying to really grapple with a lot of what Paul is saying there. And it does seem like I was reading Romans 6 this morning, actually, where Paul very clearly draws a line between sin and death, and he has this assumption that, you know, through Christ's resurrection, death has been defeated, um, and therefore we can walk in new life in the present. Is that would that be an extension of an apocalyptic worldview that there's this kind of cosmic force called sin that the Messiah has conquered? Is that kind of is that kind of what you're talking about there?

SPEAKER_01 28:46

That is exactly what I'm talking about. Now, you know, the epistle to the Romans is not an apocalypse, obviously. You know, it's not an account of a revelation, but it presupposes an apocalyptic worldview, you know, where where the the world is groaning for redemption. Yeah, you know, it's looking for an end, looking for a transformation. And that's pivotal to it. Yes. Yeah. Now I do Paul, I think, you know, wasn't so terribly concerned. Paul wasn't looking for Judean independence.

SPEAKER_00 29:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:20

It wasn't a political agenda. And for all the ink that's been spilt and trying to make Paul into an anti-empire character, for Paul, the empire wasn't the problem. The problem was something much deeper.

SPEAKER_00 29:36

Yes. And I and I wanted to ask you about that next. That's the perfect segue to this next question. And you talk about like the work of Richard Horsley in your book, very famous anti-imperial New Testament Scholar. And when I was in Bible college, this was like the late 2000s. So this was the heyday of anti-imperial scholarship. And there were a lot of scholars that used your definition of apocalyptic literature in pursuit of like an anti-imperial reading of Revelation or an anti-imperial reading of Paul. And I think as the years have gone on, there have been, I think, over the last couple of years, Clint Burnett and Najeepadad have both published works on Paul and Empire that that kind of problematize and complicate that very easy anti-imperial reading of Paul. And you talk about that in your book a little bit, how apocalypticism has sometimes been brought into the conversation as if it is exclusively an anti-imperial way of looking at the world. And you say that that's a little too far. But you also talk about how apocalypticism is generated by political crises. So maybe talk about the role that, again, going back to like the tumultuous time that the Judeans had after the Alexandrian conquest and then between the Seleucids and the Seleucids and the Ptolemies, like there, there are a lot of political uh crises that are happening at the same time that we see the development of apocalypticism as a worldview. So talk to us about the role that political upheaval and social unrest play in generating apocalypticism.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

Now, you know, when we went through the uh corpus of apocalyptic literature, loosely defined, working out a genre, we saw that there were two sub-genres. There are two kinds of thing. On the one hand, you have books like the book of Daniel, which are very concerned with history, really all about history. Some sections of the book of First Enoch are like that. There's an apocalypse of weeks. So you have a cluster of them around the early second century BC, and then uh a couple more after the destruction of Jerusalem. Now, those historical apocalypses are usually in all cases, I think, directly responses to a crisis. That what brings them on, what brings what evokes the revelation is a crisis like the destruction of Jerusalem. This is something that cries out for explanation. Now, already in first Enoch you get uh the the preliminary sketch of a different kind of revelation where Enoch is taken up to the heavens and given a tour. Now, beginning after the destruction of Jerusalem, that kind of apocalypse becomes much more common. You know, after that the last of the historical apocalypse are probably written around or shortly before 100 AD. And but then actually the label apocalypse only comes into use after that, and it's used primarily for ascents through the heaven. Some of those apocalypse are not really concerned with the transformation of the earth at all. And while now sometimes they will still be stimulated by something that happened. I'm thinking of an apocalypse called Third Baruch, for example, which uh is directly a response to the destruction of Jerusalem. And it has kind of scandalized some people because at one point in the the Greek manuscripts of it, the angel says to Baruch, don't worry so much about Jerusalem. Think about the heavens. And some people just find that unacceptable. But but but that's what's there. And that that became uh like the dominant strand of apocalypticism for a thousand years. There's, you know, you get maybe one more historical Jewish apocalypse, about six or seven hundred, the apocalypse of Zerubbabel, and then when you get into the Middle Ages, you begin to get some more historical things again. But the ascent to the heavens like took over for a long time. Now, as I say, those are sometimes responses to a crisis on earth, but they're not looking for a solution on earth. Whereas the early apocalypse like Daniel or 4th Ezra or 2nd Baruch are looking for both. You know, Daniel wants the king, all the kingdoms under heaven to be given to the people of the holy ones of the most high. Well, that's an earthly Jewish kingdom, is what that entails. But it isn't actually where the book of Daniel ends up. Because the book of Daniel will end up with the resurrection and the judgment. And and the righteous will shine like the stars uh up in the heavens. And it's that transformation that's really the bottom line.

SPEAKER_00 34:59

Yeah. And you you talk about, and you you've already brought this up in the conversation, but you have a section in your book where you talk about the difference between millenarianism and apocalyptic. And while they're two different things, millenarianism is often generated from apocalypticism. And I think that ties in pretty well with what you were just talking in the book of Daniel and other uh apocalyptic literature. So talk to us about that. How does apocalypticism generate millenarianism, even though they are two kind of distinct categories?

SPEAKER_01 35:28

No, I would say millenarianism is arguably older than apocalypticism. Because it is the Hebrew prophets, if you think, for example, of Isaiah and the dream of a righteous king, you know, a shoot from the stump of Jesse, who will, you know, transform the earth, and the wolf will lie down with a lamb and all that sort of thing. That's transformation of the earth. Now, you don't in the Hebrew prophets get that lasting for a thousand years, uh, but it actually, I think the assumption was that it would last forever. And that actually is it's where apocalypticism modifies millenarianism. Because now in the apocalyptic literature, that's only a phase. Uh classic text for millenarianism and maybe for apocalypticism is the book of Revelation. And within that system, the millennium is one block of material. It's important. A thousand years is not to be scoffed at, but it's not the end. You know, at the end of that, you will have a resurrection. It's only at the end of that that Satan gets definitively cast into the lake of fire, and and then you have the resurrection and judgment, which is beyond that. So the the difference between apocalypticism and millenarianism, I think, is precisely that that they agree this world needs to be transformed. And apocalypses may vary a bit in how much emphasis they put on that. In millenarianism, that's all you're concerned with, and in apocalypticism, you're concerned with something more. Now, Richard Horsley, whom I've known for 60 years, and you know, is really an old 60s radical at heart. And I think, you know, for Horsley, it's only the transformation of the earth that matters. I would figure, I've never discussed this with him, but I would figure Horsey doesn't believe in resurrection or afterlife, and he finds it difficult to believe that anybody took that stuff seriously. And so he regards this that the talk about resurrection and afterlife in the apocalypse. Oh, that that's just the first. Yeah, nobody took that seriously. That's that's what it's about. Well, I think you can't quite dismiss it that easily, regardless of what you believe, Sarah, nowadays. And uh, you know, I know you'll want to end up by talking about how one uses this material nowadays, and this I think is one of the problems of speaking of about apocalypticism in the modern context, is that ancient apocalypticism was about transformation, and modern apocalypticism generally doesn't uh believe in that. An awful lot of what is called apocalyptic in the modern world, you know, is very secular, and no, that there is nothing beyond this world. Yeah, that's oh go ahead. Yeah, I mean, you know, take your pay, I mean, li life uh, you know, traditions change, beliefs change. And I'm not saying that we have to go back to the way they conceived of things in the Hellenistic period. We can't. You know, the worldviews change, and so the the apocalyptic worldview has in fact changed a lot from antiquity to modern times.

SPEAKER_00 39:33

Yeah, and and I do want to talk about the legacy of apocalyptic, because you you do that towards the end, or the legacy of apocalypticism, rather, because you do that towards the end of your book. And you have a really interesting chapter that talks about the question of Christians transmitting Jewish apocalypses in the ancient world. So talk to us about that because that that was very fascinating. I think that this gives us an insight maybe into early Christianity uh that we wouldn't get otherwise. So talk to us about that. What did early Christians do with Jewish apocalyptic liturgy?

SPEAKER_01 40:04

Well, you know, early Christianity was a Jewish sect, and I think you can reasonably say it was an apocalyptic sect. Because to my mind, I mean what got the movement going, well, Jesus obviously had followers in his lifetime, but there were other people acclaimed as messiahs or as prophets who came along when they were killed, that was the end of it. So what made Christianity different was the belief that Jesus was risen from the dead. And you know, there's a historical statement, I think that holds up regardless of what you believe about it, because it's beyond dispute that a lot of all the followers of Jesus in the first century believed he was risen from the dead. That is really what set them apart. Now, that in itself wasn't uh you know something that was in unacceptable in a Jewish context. That that could still be, but at the same time, it's that difficult to see why not all Jews bought into it. Because I think most Jews would have expected that a Messiah, if he was really a Messiah, would restore the kingdom of Israel. And he obviously didn't do that. So what the Christian answer to that is what you get in the book of Revelation. Well, he didn't do it the first time, but he'll come back and he'll do it right the second time. And that that's the belief that you also get this in all the synoptic gospels. This is what gives Mark a kind of apocalyptic colouring, the belief in the second coming. You know, taking the language from the book of Daniel, and the Son of Man comes writing on the clouds of heaven. Now, that idea then, you know, people dispute at what point do you talk about a parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity? It seems to me beyond any reasonable doubt that the ways did part. Whatever you put it. And I think that we're already parting in Paul. You know, and it is essentially, I think, when Paul opened this up to Gentiles and said, you don't have to become Jewish. Now, he may have thought that also Israel would find its fulfillment in this, but Israel didn't necessarily see it that way. But but then, you know, what made Christianity possible, what made it possible to continue to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, was the apocalyptic concept of history. You know, as he says in 1 Corinthians 15, if there is no resurrection of the dead, then our faith is in, then Christ is not risen. So if you don't believe, we might have thought that would be the other way around.

SPEAKER_00 43:20

Right.

SPEAKER_01 43:20

That if you believe that Christ is risen, this shows that there is a resurrection of the dead. But as Paul puts it, you know, what evidence could possibly convince you of the resurrection of the dead if you don't have a prior belief that it is possible? Finding an empty tomb won't do it. Charlie Chaplin's tomb was found empty at some point. Nobody thought he was risen from the dead. Um so you know, it's the the belief in uh in resurrection, the transformation. That's really what made Christianity possible. Now, what happens in Judaism? After the revolts against Rome, I think people turned away from this kind of literature. Now, what we know of Judaism after the revolts is mainly through the rabbinic literature. And the rabbis were people, you know, who were not focused on the radical transformation of this world. You know, as even as the apocalypse of 2nd Baruch says, we have nothing now but the Almighty and His law. And what the rabbis did basically was say, well, let's focus on the law. Leave that other stuff. Now, you know, I have no idea how many Jews, either nowadays or in the late Roman period, believed in the world to come. Obviously, some did, but it's not nearly as important in Judaism as it is in Christianity. And so Judaism turned away from that, and then it became identified with Christianity. And then if you look at the history of apocalyptic movements down through the centuries, you'd have an awful lot more of them in Christianity. You get a couple of messianic movements in medieval Judaism, and even recently with Menachem Schneerson, you get a kind of messianic movement, but that's exceptional in Judaism, whereas it's a defining characteristic of Christianity.

SPEAKER_00 45:38

Yeah, and you talk just to bring this into the modern role of my last couple of questions here, you talk about how apocalypticism in some form is still kind of alive and well today, but the two forms that apocalypticism generally takes are secular apocalypticism and fundamentalist apocalypticism. Now, like I I uh my mom bought me the Left Behind series for teens when I was like 12 or 13 years old. And so I actually read that before I read the Bible. And I remember reading the Left Behind series, going like, whoa, this is crazy. And then when I actually read the Bible, I was like, I think there might be some problems with this book series. But nevertheless, that view of apocalypticism persists. Uh and then you also talk in your book about how there's a secularized form of this. And we we we addressed that a little bit with Richard Horsley earlier. So I just want you to talk about both of those polls. How do we see fundamentalism and kind of this uh secularism both advancing uh like apocalyptic-oriented ideas?

SPEAKER_01 46:32

Now, with the fundamentalist apocalypticism, my problem is literalism. You know, I found the Left Behind series almost unreadable.

SPEAKER_00 46:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:45

You know, it it was so unimaginative, really, in many ways. And, you know, no appreciation that if you talk about something in the future like this, it's only imagination. Nobody really knows details of how it's going to come out. You can have a general idea, but it it's got to be expressed in different ways. It's the lack of literary depth that really turned me off the uh apocalyptic reading of it. The excessive literalism. There is also, you know, if you think of something like the late great planet Earth, there is this obsessive tendency to think that everything is about us. That all scripture was written for us. Funnily enough, you get this already in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The assumption that the prophets were really talking about us and our problems. Now that's just human narcissism. I think I find it very difficult to take it seriously. And I think you know, we equally they they have problems with historical inaccuracies. Uh, you will get fundamentalists insisting that Daniel wrote his prophecies in the Babylonian era, uh, regardless of how many historical problems you find in it. Now, again, that just loses credibility. Secular apocalypticism is a different matter. And I think the problem with secular uh apocalypticism is to get people to look beyond the crisis. Now, you know, the the idea of uh a coming end is, you know, in some ways all too realistic. And I'm thinking especially here of climate change, you know, the the the dangers. Uh, you know, we have uh here at Yale, we have a Peabody Museum uh that has a big display on the different periods of geological history. And you know, the human history as we know it is only comes in at the end of this. And that there's a statement up there, some well, most of the species that have ever existed are now extinct. Well, it's not then unreasonable to imagine that we'll go the way of the dinosaurs sooner or later. May not be immediately imminent, but in the nature of things, things continue to change, and when they change, some things die and pass on. Now, the the problem I think then for a secular apocalypticism, you know, it it is a positive contribution to make people aware of that. But you need to look beyond it. No, what can come after it. In the classic apocalypticism, in a way you don't need to worry about that because God will take care of it. And in fact, if a former student who wrote a dissertation, uh a second dissertation on this, uh who's evangelical, and um and she takes the attitude, you know, and we should just leave it in the hands of God. Well, no, I guess I'm uh a mod a sufficiently modern person to find that to be not quite acceptable. I think one of the things that we should have learned over the centuries is that humans need to take responsibility. You know, that to just relinquish everything and let nature or providence take its course. In a way, that's what the classic apocalypses do. History is determined, the end will come at its appointed time, and there's nothing much we can do about it. Now, I think in the modern world we probably need to try to do something about it. And that's why I would not advocate taking classical apocalypticism as a model for Christian theology. I think we can learn a lot for it, from it. But you know, that's how people thought 2,000 years ago, and it won't quite do now.

SPEAKER_00 51:24

Yeah, that leads perfectly to my last question. And actually, one of uh you have a great quote in your book. This is on page 116, and I'm gonna read the quote and then ask you about this uh as we close today. But the you you say in the book, the Hebrew prophets, and more especially the apocalyptic writers, introduced to the world the belief that radical change is possible. They may not have left us with the blueprint as to how it may be brought about, but the idea is potent. It is an idea that is needed as desperately in the early 21st century in an era where corruption and intolerance seem increasingly triumphant as it was in Judea 2,000 years ago. So I want to ask you, how should Jewish and Christian apocalypticism influence and inform us today? And then, you know, I think maybe even broader than that, how should your conception of apocalypticism inform Christian theology and really even to Christian epistemology, just the way that we think about the world in general?

SPEAKER_01 52:18

No, I think the basic way in which it should influence us is it should teach us to be dissatisfied with the status quo. The status quo is not going to last. This, I think, you know, is the flaw in ideologies that are trying to bring back the past. Trying to hold up, you know, America of the revolutionary era. Realistically, none of us would want to go back and live in the world of the revolutionary era. And least of all, women, slaves, you know, there were all sorts of problems with it. You can't put back the clock. And so I think we have to embrace that. We have to embrace the fact that we need to be looking forward, and that means we have to be prepared to upset the current status quo. And you know, the stat a lot of people are invested in the status quo. They're doing very nicely, thank you. And uh, you know, the the the system works in their favor. But in fact, I think we have to be constantly imagining ways to go beyond the status quo to make the world better. Now, I don't think the apocalyptic literature gives us much guidance on how to do that, but it certainly uh tells us that we should do that and that we need to do it.

SPEAKER_00 53:52

Yeah. Well, Dr. John Collins, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. Again, the book is called Apocalypticism is a worldview in ancient Judaism. It comes out on June 25th, 2026, uh through Eerdmans. I really appreciate you taking the time just to come on and break all this down for my audience. There, there was just so much here, and I'm excited for my audience to hear this. Before I let you go, you you do have a long and prolific career. You've written several fantastic books. Just talk to people about where they can find your work and learn more about what you do.

SPEAKER_01 54:22

Well, most of my apocalyptic-related stuff you can get from Erdman's publishers in Grand Rapids. Now, you can probably get them on Amazon too. Um, but but there, and then uh there I have another set of books published by Fortress, uh, including an introduction to the Hebrew Bible. And I have uh a book on the Dead Sea Scrolls from Princeton University Press, which is kind of a history of the reception of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And I have a book that might well be of interest to your audience on what are biblical values. And that one is published by Yale University Press. Uh, on the subject of apocalypticism, I also have an Oxford handbook of apocalyptic literature, which was published with Oxford in uh a little more than 10 years ago. Yeah, so perfect. So that's at least a sample. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:25

Perfect. Well, I'll put links to a bunch of this in the show notes. Uh, Dr. Collins, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

SPEAKER_01 55:30

It's been a pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 55:34

Thank you for listening to another episode of the Protestant Libertarian Podcast. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to me at the Protestant Libertarian at gmail.com. You can also find me on Twitter. You can follow me at the handle at Pro Liberty Pod. Again, that is at Pro Liberty Pod. And you can also visit me at the Protestant Libertarian Podcast.com. At the Protestant Libertarian Podcast.com, you can also support the Christians for Liberty Network and the Libertarian Christian Institute. Thank you guys so much for listening to this episode, and we will see you next Tuesday.