Calling Time: Religion and Change at the Turn of the Millennium 9781474281157, 9781474293341, 9781474281164

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Calling Time

Religious Studies: Bloomsbury Academic Collections

This set contains six facsimiles from our imprints T&T Clark, The Athlone Press, Sheffield Academic Press and Continuum and focuses on comparing the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The volumes in this collection compare the different religions based on their prophets, their teachings and cultural influence, but also in how they face the challenge of an increasingly secular world. They are concerned with the similarities between the religions they discuss rather than their differences, hence supporting the view that religions should not be pitted against each other but instead be understood as faiths favouring understanding and togetherness. The collection is available both in e-book and print versions. Titles in Religious Studies are available in the following subsets: Religions of the World Comparative Religion Christianity and Society Religion, Sexuality and Gender Other titles available in Comparative Religion include: Muhammad and Jesus: A Comparison of the Prophets and Their Teachings by William E. Phipps Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue edited by Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn The Privilege of Man: A Theme in Judaism, Islam and Christianity by Kenneth Cragg Theology in Global Context: Essays in Honor of Robert Cummings Neville edited by Amos Yong and Peter G. Heltzel Turning Points in Religious Studies: Essays in Honour of Geoffrey Parrinder edited by Ursula King

Calling Time Religion and Change at the Turn of the Millennium

Edited by Martyn Percy

Religious Studies: Comparative Religion BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC COLLECTIONS

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in 2000 by Sheffield Academic Press This edition published by Bloomsbury Academic 2016 © Bloomsbury Academic 2016 Martyn Percy has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of material reproduced in this volume. If any copyright holder has not been properly acknowledged, please contact the publisher who will be happy to rectify the omission in future editions. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-8115-7 ePDF: 978-1-4742-8116-4 Set: 978-1-4742-9214-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Series: Bloomsbury Academic Collections, ISSN 2051-0012

Printed and bound in Great Britain

CALLING TIME

Lincoln Studies in Religion & Society, 2

CALLING TIME RELIGION A N D CHANGE AT THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM

edited by

Martyn Percy

E

Sheffield Academic

Press

Copyright © 2000 Sheffield Academic Press Published by Sheffield Academic Press Ltd Mansion House 19 Kingfield Road Sheffield, SI 1 9AS England

Printed on acid-free paper in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1-84127-063-6

Table of Contents

Foreword Preface List of Contributors

7 11 13

PART ONE: RELIGION AND TIME PHILIP R. DAVIES Jubilee: A Biblical Perspective DARRELL D. HANNAH The Angelic Restrainer of 2 Thessalonians 2.6-7 DAVID HERBERT Muslims and Time: Islam, Globalization and Social Change at the Turn of the Millennium JAMES H. GRAYSON Is There an East Asian Millennium? East Asian Conceptions of Time MICHAEL SADGROVE A Threshold of Fear and of Hope: Religion, Society and the Dawn of the Millennium WILLIAM K. KAY Pre-Millennial Tensions: What Pentecostal Ministers Look forward to

16 28

46

61

74

93

DAMIAN T H O M P S O N

Are you Suffering from PMT? The Impact of Millennial Time

114

PART T W O : RELIGION A N D C H A N G E RICHARD LANDES

Owls and Roosters: Y2K and Millennium's End

128

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CALLING T I M E

A N D R E W BRADSTOCK

'Behold, I make all things new': History, Politics and the Challenge of the Millennium KENNETH N. MEDHURST Christianity and the Future of Europe DAVID JENKINS Transforming Establishment: The Opportunity of a Millennium? VERNON WHITE The Future of Theology SYLVIA COLLINS Spirituality and Youth

156 169

189 205 221

MARTYN PERCY

The Sacred Canopy: Time and Religion at the Greenwich Millennium Dome

Afterword Index of Names

238

258 264

Foreword Millennium between Free Will and Pre-ordained Time: On the Nature of Social Transformation Richard Landes

There are, as far as I can make out, two basic stances when it comes to millennial moments. On the one hand, we find the roosters, crowing that the dawn breaks, beckoning us to awake for the great day, trying to rouse us from the slumber that keeps us prisoners in the cave of 'normal time', preparing us for the great moment. They are the apocalyptic prophets and messiahs, spreading the good news about an imminent and glorious, if perhaps painful, collective transformation. On the other hand, we find the owls, guardians of order, responsible for keeping us on an even keel, cool heads who assure us that the apocalyptic moment, if it is to come, is yet far away. 'It is the middle of the night', they hoot, 'the foxes are out, the master sleeps, and if you wake up the barnyard out of season, you will only do damage'. Every owl would have us believe that the roosters are Chicken Littles; and every rooster would have us believe that the owls are ostriches. Millennial moments—that is, times when the roosters enter into public discourse and even, on occasion, take power—occur rarely, episodically. They need not be related to a specific date. The 1960s, for example, saw a good example of a millennial wave of enthusiasm, which had already faded by the early 1970s; it anticipated the 'dawning of the age of Aquarius' without being focused on a specific chronology. On the other hand, at the approach of chronological millennial dates (e.g. 1000, 2000, 6000, 7000, according to various eras) millennial expectations tend to proliferate, and large numbers of people become drawn towards a wide variety of millennial discourses.

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At the approach of a great date like 2000, therefore, we have our ample share of both roosters and owls. It is, after all, the first global millennium, the first to occur within a world of global communication and global culture. It is also one in which the threat of God's intervention (no longer taken seriously, at least by the intellectual elites) has been replaced by the possibility of humanly induced catastrophe. Add to that the Y2K dilemma, which threatens the very global culture just coming into existence, and you have an interesting recipe for millennial activities of all kinds, all over the world. The owls tell us it will be a dud, a year like any other, nothing more than the hype of a bunch of charlatans and knaves trying to sell people on superstitious nonsense. And the roosters, predict everything from a global catastrophe induced by anything from Y2K (1-1-00) to planetary alignments (5-5-00), to a glorious evolutionary leap that will bring a Utopian millennium of global peace and abundance. Normally scholars, and especially historians, side with the owls. Not only are we trained to be owls, focused on the long-range, carefully documented elements of our culture, but, as denizens of the past's future, we know what the people we study did not know—how things turned out. We know that every rooster who has announced the imminence of the day of the Lord, or of the kingdom of heaven on earth, has been wrong. It is a curious and pregnant element of millennialism that every one of its apocalyptic prophets, anyone who believed that it would happen in their day, has been wrong. If anyone should not fall for the boy who cried wolf, it is those who maintain the cultural memory of past failures. But such approaches fall prey to what we might call the retrospective perfect, where we fail to understand the depth and appeal of roosters because we know from our privileged position in their future, how things 'turned out'. The key to good millennial scholarship is to understand three things: 1.

2.

To everyone in their own time, the future is unknown. Therefore millennial rhetoric, with its messages of social justice and personal and collective empowerment, holds great power over the minds of contemporaries. Wrong does not mean inconsequential. Millennialists always confront disappointment because they have such high expectations; they can accomplish extraordinary things and still feel like failures.

Landes FOREWORD 3.

9

All past manifestations of millennialism are the product of the human imagination. Since God has not yet 'delivered' the messianic age, whatever millennial beliefs have 'accomplished' stems not from divine agency but from human inspiration.

From such a perspective, one can argue (among other things), that the modern world, with its egalitarian social ideals, its technological prowess in transforming our world into one of ease and abundance, is the unintended consequencme of failed, but not inconsequential millennial movements. With each failure of God to deliver (the promised Messiah, the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem, the transformation of human's souls), Western hopefuls reformulated the millennial vision so that the role of the tarrying divinity shrank, and the role of an activist humanity increased. Thus, with century upon century of ever more active millennial efforts expressing themselves in social and technological engineering, we have the secular millennial movements of modernity: radical democracy, communism, Nazism. In a sense, the United Nations, in its ideal, is a secular articulation of the classic mmillennial hymn from the biblical prophets: '[The nations] shall beat their swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, neither will they study war anymore' (Mic. 4.1-4; Isa. 2.2-4). Unrealistic, undoubtedly, but not inconsequential. Our current problem with millennialism, however, is not so much the one of detecting its muffled presence in a documentation written in the retrospective perfect. Any generation, and especially one that stands on the cusp of a chronological millennium, has to grapple with millennial intensity, with the enthusiasm—religious and secular—to which it gives birth. And here we find a deeply paradoxical and intimate relationship between peace and violence, between fear and hope, between catastrophe and a New Age, between Armageddon and Jubilee. How can a group that starts with a radical commitment to peace and social justice become a raging totalitarian monster (Communism)? How can a group that starts in revolutionary violence become a proponent of a worldwide peace (Bahai)? What, in the inevitable response to disappointment that every apocalyptic millennialist must endure, provokes the responses of violent destruction or social creativity? In the answers to these questions we may find the ways to tap the powerful wellsprings of millennial passion and enthusiasm without destroying ourselves.

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Of all the paradoxes of millennialism, the most curious concerns the difference between what one might call the rooster schools of determinism and free will. The former tends to view the advent of a great date as a certain moment when, willy-nilly, the end comes, and all we can do is prepare for this overwhelming expression of God's awesome might. For them, a date like 2000 has cosmic properties ipso facto, and events will unfold no matter what we do. Owls view such predictions as so much silly superstition and love to point out the long, disappointing track-record of prophets misreading our past. If we just keep our heads cool, and our discourse chaste, they argue, nothing will happen. The other school of roosters, however, that embracing free will, argues that a millennial date like 2000 is what we make of it; that, given the possibility of a wide range of embittered roosters (e.g. the suicidal rampage at Columbine School), the Millennium represents at once great dangers and also great opportunities, that it represents not a pre-ordained outcome, but one that depends on us. For them, the millennium is a call to pick up our noses from the grindstone of 'normal time' of 'years like any other' and think in interesting and creative ways about the last thousand years and the directions we wish to take for the next thousand. For them, the best way to handle the dangers of millennial enthusiasm is not to duck and hope things pass relatively smoothly, but to take advantage of the opportunities. For such roosters, the owls' position is not so much one of 'reason' and caution as one of timidity and a failure of imagination. As the great English millennial poet William Blake put it: 'Prudence is a rich ugly old maid, courted by incapacity'. Only the passage of time will tell, and what it will tell us is not who was right but which view predominated, where.

Preface

'How did you spend the Millennium?' is already a question that nearly everyone will have had to face. Like the death of J.F. Kennedy, or the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, there are particular moments in the past that fix us in history, and apparently demand that we remember who and where we were at that moment. The end of a century has invariably been such a moment, and is characteristically an opportunity to take stock of life, situations and society. In 1990, the full flowering of modernity had led to extraordinarily optimistic views of the next hundred years. Novel, life-enhancing inventions were almost a daily occurrence. Transport and utilities (electricity, clean water) were transforming everyday life. The British Empire (Queen Victoria ruled one fifth of the world's population in 1900), the idea of exporting 'civilization' to the world, and Christian Missionary endeavour, were all at their height . It seemed that there was nothing that humanity could not achieve to make the world a better place. Of course, it took the grim, sober reality of two major world wars and numerous other conflicts and disasters to puncture this modernist optimism. The twentieth century is perhaps the best warning of all against what C.S. Lewis dubbed 'the snobbery of chronology'—the idea that because we live after our ancestors, we must also know better than them. At the turn of a new century and of a new millennium, verdicts like this are hard to come by—humanity is, by nature, more cautious. This collection of essays is devoted to the subject of time and change in relation to religion, and in particular, Christianity. Each author has reflected upon a subject, situation or question where the future is decidedly uncertain, and will need to be addressed in the years ahead. The first part of the book looks at religious constructions

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MANAGING THE CHURCH?

of time, which naturally raise questions about the relationship between religion and globalization. The second half of the book looks at religion and change, and focuses on key areas such as Europe, Church-State relations or youth. Two of the essays—by Damian Thompson and Richard Landes— are deliberate and conscious pre-millennial reflections of the meaning of the Millennium, written from what is now the other side of the century. They explore the associated fears and hopes the moment evoked. Would there be an apocalypse? What about the Millennium Bug? Or Doomsday cults? Will everything cease to work—aircraft falling from the sky, banks collapsing, or catastrophic social meltdown? Such fears were paralleled in the year 1000, and records show that they rippled on well into the months and years ahead. It is perhaps already tempting to look back to 1 January AD 2000, and breathe a sigh of relief that so few of the pre-millennial nightmares have come to pass. But a degree of caution would be wise. The world will be seeing in the Millennium—and living it out—for a good few years to come. History is now, as T.S. Eliot says; religion, time and change are here to stay. Martin Percy Epiphany 2000

Contributors

Dr Andrew Bradstock, Winchester College, University of Southampton Dr Sylvia Collins, Department of Sociology, Kingston University Professor Philip Davies, Department of Biblical Studies, University of Sheffield Dr James Grayston, School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield Dr Darrell D. Hannah, Westhill, University of Birmingham Dr David Herbert, Open University, Cambridge Rt Revd Dr David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham, 1984-94 Dr William Kay, University of Wales, Carmarthen Professor Richard Landes, Millennium Studies Center, Boston University Professor Ken Medhurst, Lincoln Theological Institute, University of Sheffield Canon Dr Martyn Percy, Director, Lincoln Theological Institute, University of Sheffield Very Revd Michael Sadgrove, Sheffield Cathedral Damian Thompson, London School of Economics Canon Vernon White, Department of Theology, University of Nottingham

PART ONE: RELIGION AND TIME

Jubilee: A Biblical Perspective Philip R. Davies

The Millennium is, of course, in the strictest sense a Christian celebration. But its roots lie in our culture's Jewish heritage. While the observance of religious festivals is a universal phenomenon, one of the common denominators of all religions, the concept of sacred time we have almost certainly taken, and transformed, from institutions of ancient Judaism and from the Old Testament that Christianity has inherited as part of its Scripture. To such a concept of time the jubilee has made a decisive contribution. Time and Creation The Old Testament (and the Hebrew Bible) begins with an account of the creation of the world. What is not often noticed is that time itself is part of that creation. The sun and the moon were, according to most ancient religions, deities in themselves; for the monotheistic writer of Genesis 1 they were severely demoted into great lights to regulate the day and night respectively. But they were not created until the fourth day. Time itself was, in fact, instigated by the creation of light on Day One: light's alternation with darkness provides the basic metronomic tick of time. Likewise, as God rests on the seventh day of creation, he creates the week as a second unit of time. The sabbath, and thus the week, are not merely features of Jewish observance, but, as we now reckon the rotation and the orbit of the earth to be, a law embedded in the nature of the universe. And the sabbath is not only rest time. It is also holy time. So holy will it become for many Jews and Christians that observing it will be more work than the weekday labours!

Davies JUBILEE: A BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVE

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Creation, as understood by Judaism, imposed a pattern of sevens upon the alternation of day and night. Time was measured by weeks. The reason for the number of seven is not important: it was almost certainly derived from the lunar cycle, which provided another unit of time, the month, with its regular 'new moon' festival. (The moon also provided that other sacred biblical number, 12.) But the incommensurability of solar and lunar cycles is an awkward feature of the world created by a perfect god, and one that the writer of Genesis 1 wisely decided to gloss over. Twelve lunar months do not make a solar year. The sun and moon, which were created by the same divinity to rule time, are in conflict. This conflict could, of course, be resolved by ignoring one or the other: thus the Muslim year is a total of 12 lunar months; the Christian calendar ignores the moon, having months as twelfths of the solar year and independent of lunar cycles. Or one could resort to artificial adjustment, such as adding an extra month every few years (as the Jewish calendar does). Thanks to Jewish pseudepigraphical writings, and now to the Dead Sea Scrolls, we know that this conflict of sun and moon was of enormous, even crucial importance to some Jewish communities in the third to first centuries BC. For the various contributors to what is now known as 1 Enoch, the book of Jubilees, and many of the Dead Sea Scrolls, those who observed lunar months and a year based on these (354 days) were failing to observe the holy times prescribed by God and were thus not fulfilling his law and were doomed to punishment. For their critics, who claimed to be the true Israel, it was the sun that had to rule time, and a year of 364 days, divided into 12 30-day months with four additional quarter days was followed.1 For these followers of a solar calendar, the observance of the sabbath was of the utmost importance, and the advantage of their reckoning was that 364 is divisible by 7: hence the year and the sabbatical cycle could be harmonized: every sabbath fell on the same date every year, and thus could not conflict with other feast days when the rules for its observance might be compromised. The book ofJubilees (late second to early first century BC), which fiercely advocates such a 1. On the evidence of sun worship and worship ofYahweh as a solar deity, see J. Glen Taylor, Yahweh and the Sun: Biblical and Archaeological Evidence for Sun Worship in Ancient Israel (JSOTSup, 111; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991). According to Josephus, the Essenes offered prayers to the sun every morning 'as if beseeching it to rise'(War 2.128).

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calendar, is able to date the events of the lives of all the patriarchs from creation to Sinai such that all observe the sabbath laws by, for example, not making journeys on these days.2 But Jubilees takes the sabbatical principle much further, employing a device much favoured in apocalyptic writing of the period: the division of history into sabbatical units—jubilees'. The Jubilee as a Social Welfare Institution The origins of the jubilee probably lie in the Utopian legislation of Deuteronomy and Leviticus and seek to provide, on the basis of a theological rationale, a social mechanism for redressing economic inequality. To what extent these provisions depended upon, or reflected, existing practices in Israel or elsewhere does not really matter.3 In both of these Pentateuchal books we get an extension of the sabbath principle from the seventh day to the seventh year, the 'sabbatical year': The Lord spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying, 'Speak to the people of Israel and say to them: When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a sabbath for the Lord. Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard, and gather in the yield, but in the seventh year, there shall be a sabbath of complete rest for the land, a sabbath for the Lord (Lev. 25.1-4).

Exodus 23.10-11 also refers briefly to a sabbatical year, in which nothing is to be harvested, but the land given 'rest' and the poor and the animals left to enjoy whatever grows. The sabbatical year is also mentioned in Deuteronomy 15. But here each seventh year is for 'remission of debts'. Money lent is written off, and Hebrew (but not foreign!) slaves are set free. The problems connected with a seven-year cycle of debt remission are obvious, and it remains disputed whether or not Deuteronomy means to recommend a uniform seven-year cycle or a seven-year period for slave service or 2. Logically, the new year in this calendar commenced not on Sunday, the first day when the light was separated from the darkness, but on Wednesday, when the sun was created. 3. On Mesopotamian antecedents see J. Lewy, 'The Biblical Institution of deror in the Light of Akkadian Documents', Eretz Israel 5 (1958), pp. 21-31; R. Westbrook, 'Jubilee Laws', Israel Law Review 6 (1971), pp. 209-26.

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debt (as 15.19 implies, conceding that a slave will have worked for six years). But nothing about resting land in a fallow year. So Leviticus (with Exodus) and Deuteronomy express different principles by their sabbatical years. For Deuteronomy it is the restoration of debts, for Leviticus a fallow year, when crops are not to be sown: a sabbath for the soil as well as for the labourer. Leviticus does have a place for the release of debts—but not every seven years! Instead, this practice is assigned to what may be an invention of this writer—the jubilee, the sabbath of sabbath of sabbaths. In Leviticus 25, therefore, we find the following: You shall count off seven sabbatical years, seven times seven years, so that the period of seven sabbatical years comes to forty-nine years. Then you shall have the trumpet sound; on the tenth day of the seventh month, the day of atonement, you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all your land. And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout all the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee (Hebrew: yovel) for you (Lev. 25.8-10).

Literally a yovel is a ram's horn, blown as a signal (see, e.g., Joshua 6, where it is used to bring down the walls of Jericho). Its noise may still be preserved in the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation: apheseds semasia, 'sign of liberation'. But the English translators were unable to find a native English word to represent this usage of the Hebrew yovel. (The Latin word jubilate, 'rejoice', is unconnected. Jubilees are not etymologically moments of jubilation!) So the word 'jubilee' (KJV: j'ubile') has emerged. On the first day of each New Year a trumpet (presumably made of a ram's horn) was to be blown (Lev. 23.23-24) to mark its inauguration. But the jubilee year, which is every fiftieth year, is announced not on the first day of the tenth month but on the Day ofAtonement (ten days into the first month). Why should this be so? There is an answer, in which lie the seeds of the later development of the jubilee ideal. For Leviticus 23, the Day of Atonement is above all a sabbath, on which therefore, the people are commanded to do no work. But it is also the most holy day of the year, on which a sacrifice was performed by the high priest, on behalf of the whole people, and it is this cultic act that above all came to characterize the tenth of Tishri (there is a full account in Leviticus 16). It is through this rite that Israel is 'cleansed from all its sins' (Lev. 16.30). The writer of Leviticus must have intended a connection between

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this atonement of sins and Deuteronomy's remission of debts in the sabbatical year. For this is why the year of jubilee is proclaimed on that day. The removal of the debts of individual Israelites to each other in the jubilee is linked to the annual removal of Israel's debts to its god every year on the most holy day. The interchangeability of sin and debt is clear, as in the variant versions of the Lord's Prayer: Mt. 6.12: 'forgive us our debts' (aphes hemin ta opheilemata hemori) and Lk. 11.4: 'forgive us our sins' (aphes hemin tas hamartias hemon). The apparently social legislation of the release of debts in the Jubilee symbolizes for the writer of Leviticus the divine release of the sins committed by every human. It is, therefore, already more than a piece of purely social legislation; appropriately for Leviticus and its high concern for land and priesthood, the two have been brought together and highlighted in the jubilee.4 The Jubilee at the End of Time So far, the concept of time we have encountered in the biblical Law books is cyclical. The jubilee, like the sabbatical year, the year, the week, the day, comes round at a regular interval, recapitulating all those same stages in time that have gone before, expressing the regularity of the temporal cosmos, its underlying stability and order. The world was created good, as the so-called 'Priestly account of creation' (Gen. 1) has it, and every so often the unpleasant or the evil are ritually or legally removed, and goodness returns. No more slavery of fellow Israelites, no more debt, no stain of sin left. One is tempted to add: no history, either, for if history is defined as that which can be represented by a narrative, with a beginning and an end and a meaning between the two, this way of thinking is not historical. One is reminded rather of the famous poem in Eccl. 3.1-8: 'A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up.. .a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace'. Equally, a time to incur debt, and a time to release; a time to sin, a time to be forgiven. Time, through its regular rituals, heals. 4. The question of the date of Leviticus (and its parts) is highly disputed. Undoubtedly it contains reflections on the exile, and the entire work may belong to the Persian period; however, several scholars would place substantial portions in the monarchic period, e.g., J. Milgrom (Leviticus 1-16 [AB, 3; New York: Doubleday, 1991]).

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Leviticus 26 introduces another important symbolic interpretation of sabbatical rest for the land in explaining the exile in Babylonia: it is not so much a punishment for the people as a mechanism for compensating for an accumulated dereliction of care: Then the land shall enjoy its sabbatical years as long as it lies desolate, while you are in the land of your enemies; then the land shall rest, and enjoy its sabbatical years (Lev. 26.34).

The end of Chronicles, in reporting on the carrying off of the exiles, underlines this interpretation: to fulfil the word of the Lord by the mouth ofJeremiah, until the land had made up for its sabbaths. All the time it lay desolate, it kept sabbath, to fulfil seventy years (2 Chron. 36.21).

This interpretation of the exile in these Priestly writings thus links it to a theology of Sabbath, and although the period of 70 years of exile that the book of Jeremiah mentions (25.11-12; 29.10) is probably a stereotypical length of time (cf. Isa. 23.15-17), such a number is, of course, amenable to sabbatical arithmetic. Nonetheless, the cyclical concept of history remains essentially the same here as in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. According to both Leviticus and Chronicles, the exile does come to an end and history goes on: the restoration of people to the land takes place. The exile is an extreme measure of adjustment, but it is really compensating for a lack of proper duty in the preceding period. Once the land has 'worked off its sabbaths, the status quo can be resumed, at least in respect of Israel's legitimate occupation. While there are those scholars who argue that Chronicles has an eschatological perspective, it has to be said that such a perspective, if present, is well disguised. The same is true of Leviticus, whose very prose has the air of changeless order about it. Leviticus sings in harmony with Genesis 1: the world is good, and humans can cause it damage, but the structure through sacrifice, holiness and atonement, can be sustained through the ministrations of the priesthood. Of course, those who found themselves in Judah in the Persian period did not all consider a full restoration to have taken place: where were the ten tribes that once had been? And all the land once given to the chosen people? Hence, against this affirmative stream of the essential reparability of the world and the land began to run a counter

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stream. Under the Persians, Judah was a tiny province of a large satrapy, a few hundred square miles of highland repopulated and run by immigrants who gloried in the Persian-financed temple. Perhaps a dwelling on the monarchic past, a search for an explanation for the intervening exile—or perhaps ideas borrowed from Zoroastrianism about the long epochs of the world—something provoked a historical sense of the linear movement of time. Whether the Jews invented history or borrowed it from Babylon or Greece (an ever-recurrent debate), the writings of the Persian and the succeeding Hellenistic period offer us views of history as a line plotted across time. This line could be commenced either at creation or just after exile; but it ended in a future point that was, typically, not far ahead. Where the story of history was claimed to be revealed by the gods, as it usually was, it can be called 'apocalyptic'. And in these writings, these panoramas of history, past and future, the jubilee undergoes a major transformation. In Daniel, for instance, the multiples of seven are taken yet one stage further. Daniel 9 takes the prophecy of 70 years in Jeremiah, which we have already seen exploited in Leviticus and Chronicles, and interprets it as 70 weeks of years, 'sabbatizing' the figure and thus opening up a historical span of 490 years from the rebuilding of the city after the end of exile to the rise of Michael, the final deliverer of the chosen people. Likewise in the 'Apocalypse of Weeks', now found within 1 Enoch 92-105. Here history from creation to the end falls into ten weeks, which, if 'week' is to be taken literally, is far too short a period. Yet 490 or 500 seems to be the standard length of time for such world histories. So it is in our third example, an incompletely preserved midrash from Qumran Cave 11, which centres on the role of Melchizedek (11Q Melch). Because of the fragmentary nature of the manuscript, all we have by way of indication of the span of world history is: 'And this will [take place] in the first week of the jubilee that follows the ni[ne] jubilees. The Day [of Atonem]ent is the end of the tenth jubilee' (line 7). But this is enough: ten jubilees gives us a 500-year era, the same period as in Daniel and (probably) 1 Enoch. But this Qumran text does not merely use jubilees as a measurement of time. It also ties the ending of history to the theology of jubilee, debt-release and remission of sin. The first preserved biblical

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text cited in the fragment is Lev. 25.13, I n this year of jubilee [you shall return each to his own property]...' and it then cites Deuteronomy's law for the sabbatical year about the cancellation of debts. It then moves to the release of God in the last days, inferring a final Day of Atonement on which will be announced the final jubilee to end all jubilees, to end history. And it finds a hint of this in Isa. 61.1-2: The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, for the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings to the meek; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour.

Readers of the New Testament will be familiar with the quotation of this text in Lk. 4.18-19, where Jesus announces its fulfilment. With the aid of 11Q Melch, we can now see that this text was already seen in some circles at least as a messianic passage. Now, its reference to 'anointing' points to a messiah (lit., 'anointed one'), and while Luke wishes the reader to think of Jesus' anointing by the Spirit that he has narrated just before (3.22), the writer of the Melchizedek midrash infers that the one to announce the final jubilee must be one anointed into the priesthood, indeed, must be a high priest, the eschatological high priest. This is Melchizedek, the king and high priest whom Abraham meets in Gen. 14.18-20, and to whose order the writer of the letter to the Hebrews assigns Jesus. But in the Qumran text Melchizedek is no archetype, but the Messiah, worthy even of the title 'God'. In many, if not most, forms of ancient Judaism, it is important not to confuse monotheism, with monarchic theism (God was not the only divinity, just the only divine monarch). For the final salvation of the righteous, the final dissolution of all their sins, can only be achieved by a high priest on the Day of Atonement, and the culmination of history will be that final Day that ushers in the final jubilee. The connection between the high priests and the jubilee may not have originated with this midrash, however. Already in Daniel 9 we encounter two high priests, in weeks 1 and 6 (called 'anointed', or 'messiah'), while in the Testament of Levi 17 the 70 weeks (sc. of years) that follow the exile are divided into ten jubilees, each one characterized by a different high priesthood. This may seem no more than a natural prejudice in the Testament of the Priestly patriarch,

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Levi, but a connection with the Melchizedek tradition is possible. However, the date of the testaments in their Greek form (a slightly related Aramaic work was found at Qumran) is hard to specify: the work has been edited at points by Christians and the identity of the final priest might be intended as Jesus. To return to the Melchizedek midrash, which appropriately dates from close to the turn of the era, two millennia ago, we find the eschatological transformation of the jubilee fully accomplished. No longer is the fiftieth year a regular part of that cyclic restoration of life, but every jubilee is an anticipation of the culmination of a linear history. The social meaning of this institution, its affirmation that all Israel's wealth and property really belong to God, and so must be periodically restored (an example of that principle of'wealth redistribution' to which socialist governments were once wedded) has now been overlaid with a quite different meaning: the final vindication of the elect righteous and the final vegeance of God over the wicked, for the 'year of God's favour' will also be a year of his vengeance as 'Melchizedek will carry out the vengeance of God's judgments'. Favour for some does imply disfavour for others. It was, after all, only Hebrew slaves that Deuteronomy wished to be freed in their seventh year. The eschatologizing of the jubilee did not, however, submerge the social legislation. Just as sabbath observance assumed a very high importance in the late Second Temple period, so did the sabbatical year. The first book of Maccabees comments in passing that there was no food stored at the time of the siege ofJerusalem 'because it was the seventh year; those who had found safety in Judah from the Gentiles had eaten the last of the provisions' (6.53). There is also a famous edict (Heb., prozbul) issued by Hillel providing a means of circumventing one undesirable side-effect of the sabbatical year rule: the lack of any credit facilities in the closing years of the cycle. This difficulty has long drawn suspicion upon the sabbatical practice itself as unworkable; but there is enough evidence that it was, at least in late Second Temple times, practised. The Biblical Heritage of the Modern Milllennium This review of the history of the biblical jubilee has illustrated some perceptions that can be briefly applied to the Millennium that is

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currently being celebrated. One of these relates to a cyclical versus a linear concept of time, and another relates to the belief that there are no winners without losers. For in any remission of debts the lenders suffer. In the cyclical view of the jubilee of Leviticus, God does not expect society to be run differently from the way it is run. Debt will accumulate, work must be done. But just as the sabbath brings rest from labour, so the jubilee, the sabbath of sabbath of sabbaths also brings rest. But it also brings relief from at least a measure of economic inequalities. It is, if you will, a kind of regular economic servicing. The Day of Atonement ceremony, likewise, is an annual cleaning of the individual and corporate slate. O n this understanding, the world was indeed, as Genesis 1 has it, made good. A millennium would be no more significant than any other fiftieth year—saving arithmetically perhaps, though the seventh or tenth jubilee would likely have been more significant to the ancient Judaeans. Many who feel the significance of the year 2000, and w h o think it an opportunity or a pretext to achieve something, will see it as one of those periodic moments, arithmetically significant. Indeed,-to many it is just a Super N e w Year, the time for resolutions, for reviewing the era just gone and planning, or pledging, to improve the coming era. For many of us, this is what the Millennium start will mean. We do not regard it as marking a segment in the process of world history. We know that the story will go on much as before, and that the only changes will be those that we choose to make. History has no plot other than that which we choose to act out. For others of us, the Millennium is the beginning of the future, or, perhaps more significantly, the ending of the past, to which our present will shortly belong. It can be—it will be—a kind of atonement, as if the three zeros have the power to wipe the slate of time. T h e clock can be restarted: a new race begins. The year 2000 for these people is not the eschaton, but it is a rupture in linear time. But this perspective is not really reflected in any biblical understanding of the jubilee. Unlike the third perspective: for some people, the Millennium is truly 'millenarian'. Just as the writers of the ancient Jewish scriptures were wedded to time measures in multiples of sevens, so are their modern counterparts wedded to the thousand. Time, not just human time but divine time, is measured in millennia, and, the first having

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produced nothing, the second will. It is written in God's plan. His jubilee is near, and it will bring rapturous delight (literal and figurative) to his chosen ones, just as it will bring destruction to his enemies. If you will, Hebrew slaves will be redeemed, but not others. The meek and the poor will inherit the earth as their debts, human and divine, are paid off. For those disappointed that God did not punish sinful (mostly gay) humanity enough through Aids, the new hope is that the Y2K computer bug is his punishment on a wider constituency and that this bug will usher in Armageddon. Among those who will be flocking to Jerusalem to see the Messiah come are many who will be expecting not only the vindication of the righteous but the annihilation of the wicked—including, in this case, the Jews! For the Bible, God is in control of time. He created days, months and years, and separated the holy from the profane. And he also controls history. But one purpose of religion is to wrest this control from the unseen and unknowable. This can be done by theology, which imprisons the divine within logic, or constrains by prayer and ritual, which attempt to control the divine emotions and reactions. Not least of all, humans can try to force the supposedly timeless God into time. The history of the biblical jubilee could well be seen as a move in the direction of human control of the divine. It begins with divine law regulating the distance between wealth and poverty, insisting on rest as not only a right but a demand, something built into the process of creation and most definitely to be observed under pain of sanction. It then moves, in a fateful apocalyptic step towards not a hope but a calculation of divine time, the end when God must act and things must get better. Like humans, he has to observe the diary, and when on the page marked 'tenth jubilee' (or January 2000) he has already written 'Release' (or 'Armageddon'). The Millennium can, paradoxically, be seen both as a psychological liberation from the old and also as a captivity to the power of arithmetical calendrical time. The temptation to bind their God to this calendar has overcome some Christians, as it overcame some biblical writers. The alternative is to abandon any allegiance to a world calendar, enjoy the turning of the clock to a fresh row of zeros, and, after a pause for rest, get back to the human task of keeping the world serviced.

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FURTHER READING Fager, Jeffrey A., Land Tenure and the Biblical Jubilee: Uncovering Hebrew Ethics through the Sociology ofKnowledge (JSOTSup, 155; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993). Lemche, Niels Peter, 'The Manumission of Slaves—the Fallow Year—the Sabbatical Year—the Jobel Year', VT26 (1976), pp. 38-59. North, Robert, Sociology of the BiblicalJubilee (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1954). Westbrook, Raymond, 'Jubilee Laws', Israel Law Review 6 (1971), pp. 209-26. Wright, Christopher J.H., 'Jubilee, year of, in D.N. Freedman (ed.), ABD, III (New York: Doubleday, 1992), pp. 1025-30.

The Angelic Restrainer of 2 Thessalonians 2.6-7 Darrell D. Hannah

The earliest Christians were convinced that they lived in a time in which the promises of God were finding their fulfilment; the ancient prophecies were at last becoming reality all around them. Luke, author of the book of Acts, for example, places these words in the mouth of the apostle Paul, as he preaches in a Jewish synagogue in Antioch of Pisidia: 'And we proclaim to you that the promise made to the fathers, God has fulfilled among us, their children, by raising Jesus [from the dead]' (Acts 13.32-33). That the prophecies were at last being fulfilled implied that the end of the present age would soon come about and that the next age, the 'age to come', was soon to begin or, in some sense, had already begun. Thus, Paul himself, in his first letter to the Christian community in Corinth could write: 'These things [i.e. the events in the Exodus and the wilderness wandering] happened as an example to them [i.e. ancient Israel], but were written for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come' (1 Cor. 10.11). Similarly, the unknown author of the epistle to the Hebrews begins his treatise by contrasting the previous times, in which God spoke through prophets, with his own, 'these last days', in which God has spoken through a son (Heb. 1.1-2). What stands out in all three of the above examples is both the debt that emerging Christianity owed to Judaism, its Scriptures and expectations, and the sense that something had now happened that distinguished the new community from its parent. The times had changed; the old rules no longer applied; God had acted and now, many things if not everything, must be different. This new thing that had happened, this event that revealed that the ages had turned was, of course, the career, death and, most importantly, resurrection of Jesus

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of Nazareth. However, coupled with this conviction that the times had changed and that the ages had turned was a complimentary belief that 'the end was not yet'. Throughout the New Testament we encounter a compelling, almost aggressive, expectation of imminent events of cosmic significance. One New Testament passage that highlights many of these themes is the central chapter of the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians. Early Christianity's debt to Jewish ideas, symbols and traditions, especially as they appear in Jewish apocalyptic texts, are here writ large. The fervent expectation of 'the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him' (v. 1) breathes throughout the whole chapter, to say nothing of the rest of the epistle (cf. 1.5-10). And, finally, the conviction that the central event had already occurred in Jesus Christ is the all-controlling assumption from which the author proceeds (cf. 2.13-14). This article focuses on one of this chapter's most tantalizing puzzles, an exegetical conundrum that has baffled readers for centuries: The identity of the mysterious figure who restrains or prevents the arrival of the eschatological opponent of the people of God. The particular solution offered here, if nothing else, emphasizes the coincident nature of 2 Thessalonians and indeed of all the New Testament documents. The epistle was a product of the first century of our era. It belongs to the thought-world of that time and cannot be correctly understood if removed from that context. As we approach the turn of the millennium, there will be those who will be strongly tempted to read the pages of the New Testament as if they were a crystal ball or the Christian equivalent of Nostradamus. All such attempts must be resisted—not because the New Testament documents are irrelevant for contemporary Christians; rather, precisely because they belong irrevocably to a particular historical context, their relevance is analogous to relevance of the incarnate one himself The Problem In a 1980 article, Helmut Koester expressed the opinion that 'the identity o f 6 icare/cov, the Restrainer who delays the appearance of the Man of Lawlessness in the second chapter of 2 Thessalonians, 'will probably never be solved'.1 Such a statement is not new in the history 1.

H. Koester, 'From Paul's Eschatology to the Apocalyptic Schema of

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of exegesis; one can find a similar remark in St Augustine's The City of God, which dates from the first decades of the fifth century AD.2 One suspects that Koester and Augustine merely give voice to a frustration shared by many interpreters. Frustrations notwithstanding, the proposed solutions as to the identity of this mysterious figure are legion. He has been thought by some to have been a historical person, by others a mythical or supernatural figure. Some would see him as an obedient agent of God. Others view 6 KaT£%cov as essentially neutral, at least in his role as Restrainer, and thus an unwitting agent of the deity. It has been suggested, and that more than once, that the Restrainer is an evil figure, and therefore an unwilling instrument of the divine in the events leading up to the eschaton. Some have questioned whether 'the restrainer' is the best rendering of 6 KcrcE%cov, suggesting instead 'the Hostile Power', 'the Occupying Force' or something similar. One recent interpreter has even proposed that the author of 2 Thessalonians was being intentionally enigmatic and actively sought to mislead his readers. Given this scholarly morass, to say nothing of warnings of the puzzle's ultimate unsolvability from a scholar with the influence of Koester or from a theologian of the stature of Augustine, it may seem, in the very least, foolhardy to attempt once again what has been attempted many times. Nonetheless, I would like in this paper to propose a solution or, more precisely, a variant to a solution offered by others as to this mysterious figure's identity. I hope to show that my theory, while not strictly demonstrable, has the two strengths of: (1) taking very seriously the thought world of apocalyptic eschatology which has clearly influenced our author; and (2) locating the origin of the otherwise opaque 6 Kax8X(OV m a t e x t known to have been authoritative for the author of 2 Thessalonians. I will also offer some explanation for that author's opaque language. Before setting out my proposal, I will begin by briefly summarizing the more significant of the previous attempts at identifying 'the Restrainer' and by offering some of the exegetical assumptions with which I approach the passage as a whole. 2 Thessalonians', in R.F. Collins (ed.), The Thessalonians Correspondence (BETL, 87; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990), I, pp. 441-58, 457. Cf. the similar conclusion of J. Schmid, 'Der Antichrist und die hemmende Macht', Theologische Quartalschrifi 129 (1949), pp. 323-43. 2. Augustine, De Civ. Dei 20.19.

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Proposed Solutions The earliest explicit3 interpretation of the Restrainer is that of Tertullian and Hippolytus.4 They both held that Paul was speaking about the Roman state, whose continued existence prevented the arrival of the Antichrist. Further, both saw in 'the apostasy' mentioned in v. 3 a prophecy of the dissolution of the Roman Empire into ten separate kingdoms; a deduction based upon the ten toes of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Daniel 2, the ten horns of the fourth beast of Daniel 7, and the ten horns of the beast from the sea in Revelation 13. For Hippolytus, after this dissolution the Antichrist, a Jew from the tribe of Dan, would rise to power. In the latter two points Tertullian and Hippolytus were preceded by Irenaeus.5 He also concluded from the prophecies of Daniel 2 and 7 and Revelation 13 that just before the end the Roman state would be divided into ten kingdoms, and he believed that the Antichrist would be a Danite Jew.6 Interestingly, Irenaeus never states that the continued existence of the Roman Empire detained the arrival of the Man of Lawlessness, even though he explicitly cites 2 Thessalonians 2 in his discussion of the Antichrist.7 3. Justin Martyr alludes to 2 Thess. 2.6-7 in Dial. 110 but gives no interpretation of 6 KCXT8XCDV. It is possible that he alludes to the passage again in 1 Apol. 45, but this is far from clear. If there is an allusion to 2 Thess. 2 in this latter passage, then it appears that Justin identifies 6 Kcrc8%cov with God. For modern defenders of this view, see below. 4. De Cam. Res. 24; Apol. 30-32. There is general agreement that Tertullian wrote Apologeticum in AD 197. Cf, e.g., J. Quasten, Patrology (Utrecht: Spectrum, 1950), II, p. 255; T.R. Gover, Tertullian. Apologia. De Spectaculis (LCL; London: Heinemann, 1931), p. xix; and T.D. Barnes, Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), I, pp. 30-56, esp. p. 55. Tertullian's treatise on resurrection is clearly a later work. Barnes dates it to 206/7 (Tertullian, p. 55). Cf. also J. Danielou, The Origins of Latin Christianity (Trans. D. Smith and J.A. Baker; London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1977), p. 395; Comm Dan. 4.21; cf. also De Antichristo 19-25. According to Quasten (Patrology 2.170-71) Hippolytus composed his commentary on Daniel around the year 204 and his treatise on the Antichrist in about 200. 5. Adv. Haer. 5.25-30. 6. Cf. C.E. Hill, 'Antichrist from the Tribe of Dan' JTS 46 (1995), pp. 99117. 7. Adv. Haer. 5.25.1-2.

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This political interpretation of 6 KCCTEXCOV, then, must have originated no later than the third quarter of the second century and may very well be earlier, for it found defenders in both North Africa and Rome at the end of that century. It was not, however, universally accepted, for Irenaeus, arguably the greatest exegete of the day, passes over it in silence. Nonetheless, it appears to have become the standard understanding among the Fathers. St John Chrysostom8preferred it above the two or three other possibilities he mentions in his sermon on this passage, and it also was known to St Augustine.9 In more recent times it has found defenders in F.F. Bruce, Otto Betz, and, most recently, E.J. Richard.10 Any viable interpretation of 6 Kcrc£%cov (2.7) must also give some explanation of TO Kcrc8%ov (2.6). Both are participles, the former is masculine and is best rendered as 'he who restrains' or 'the Restrained, while the latter is neuter and should be rendered' that which restrains', or the like. For nearly all of the adherents of the political interpretation, the neuter participle refers to the authority of the Roman Empire, while the corresponding masculine participle alludes to the embodiment of that authority in the person of the emperor. This political interpretation, however, has with good reason been dismissed by the majority of modern commentators. There is nothing in the text itself to suggest that the author of 2 Thessalonians understood 'the Restrained as a political entity. As most commentators recognize, the author is heavily indebted to the thought world of apocalyptic eschatology. Now, while apocalyptic seers often employed symbols to write about political realities, such as we find in Revelation 13 and 17 or 4 Ezra 12, the enigmatic terms 'the Restrained and 'that which restrains' do not fit this pattern. The terms are enigmatic and obscure, not symbolic. One need only recall the reference to 'seven hills' in Rev. 17.9, which clearly points to Rome, or the eagle of 4 Ezra 12, which again must stand for Rome, to see how strikingly different are the allusive phrases 6 KCCIS/COV and TO KaTE%ov. More importantly, the blasphemous activity of the Man of Lawlessness, whose coming is 8. Horn. 2 Thess. 4. 9. De Civ. Dei 20.19. 10. F.F. Bruce, 1 & 2 Thessalonians (WBC, 45; Waco, TX: Word Books, 1982), pp. 171-72, 176-77, 187-88; O. Betz, 'Der Katechon', NTS 9 (1962-63), pp. 27691, esp. 284-88; EJ. Richard, First and Second Thessalonians (SP, 11; Collegeville, M N : Michael Glazier, 1995), pp. 340-54.

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hindered by the Restrainer, is clearly modelled on the Emperor Gaius's attempt to set up a statue of himself in the Jerusalem temple. Whenever we date 2 Thessalonians, this event was relatively recent history. It is highly unlikely that a Jewish or Jewish-Christian author could have parodied the Emperor Gaius in his portrayal of the Lawless One and still have held the Roman Emperor to have been this Lawless One's opponent and restrainer. Oscar Cullmann11 and Johannes Munck12 argued that the neuter participle, the restraining force or power, was the preaching of the gospel and that the masculine participle, the restraining person, referred to Paul himself. This has been dismissed by nearly all interpreters on the grounds that if this was Paul's (or a pseudepigrapher's) meaning there is no reason to have written so obscurely. In addition, this interpretation presents Paul, or the Paulinist, asserting that the apostle would 'be removed' before the parousia, which is inconsistent with 1 Thess. 4.13-18. This is certainly a difficulty if Paul was the author of 2 Thessalonians, but it becomes an intolerable contradiction if the epistle is held to be pseudepigraphic. For it is generally recognized by those who argue against authenticity that the author of 2 Thessalonians knew and extensively used 1 Thessalonians.13 The Pseudepigrapher, if he existed, was too careful of a reader of 1 Thessalonians to have made this kind of blunder.14 August Strobel,15on the basis of Hab. 2.316 and its interpretation at Qumran (Habbakkuk Pesher 7.5-14) and in the New Testament (Heb. 10.35-39; 2 Pet. 3.8-9), has suggested that the restraining power is God's eschatological plan and that the Restrainer is God himself. 11. O. Cullmann, 'Le caractere eschatologique du devoir missionnaire et de la conscience apostolique de saint Paul: Etude sur le Kax8%ov£cov de 2 Thessa. 2:67', RHPR 16 (1936), pp. 210-45. 12. J. Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind (trans. F. Clarke; London: SCM Press, 1959), pp. 36-42. 13. E.g. M.J.J. Menken, 2 Thessalonians (NTR; London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 36-40; and Richard, Thessalonians, pp. 20-25. 14. For the proposal that 2 Thessalonians was intended by the pseudepigrapher as a replacement for 1 Thessalonians, see below. 15. A. Strobel, Untersuchungen zum eschatologischen Verzogerungsproblem, auf Grund der spatjudisch-urchristlichen Geschichte von Habahuh 2,2ff (NovTSup, 2; Leiden: EJ. Brill, 1961), pp. 98-116. 16. 'For still the vision awaits its time; it hastens to the end—it will not lie. If it seem slow, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay'.

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While this takes seriously the apocalyptic world-view of author and, at least as far as the neuter participle is concerned, has much to commend it, Strobel has nevertheless convinced very few. First, Hab. 2.3 is never cited or alluded to in 2 Thessalonians and there is no evidence that it influenced the author. More importantly, v. 7b ('only until the Restrainer, who is now at work, is removed'; jiovov 6 Kaxexcov dpxi eax; £K jieGOi) yevrixai) constitutes an insurmountable difficulty for Strobel; in no sense can God be said to be removed from the scene! This same objection also applies to Roger D. Aus, 17 who similarly argues, although on the basis of a different Old Testament parallel, that God's plan and person correspond to TO Kax£%ov and 6 KCtxexcov, respectively. What unites all the proposed solutions considered thus far is the positive or, in the case of the political interpretation, the neutral conception of the Restrainer. Some, however, would see this elusive figure as evil—either Satan himself or an eschatological agent of Satan. For this approach to work Kax£X£iv, the verbal root of the two participles under consideration, must be rendered not in the sense of 'to restrain', 'tocheck', 'to prevent' or 'to hinder', but rather 'to possess', 'to occupy', 'to overpower', 'to hold down', 'to oppress'. Ernest Best, who typifies this solution, offers this rather literal rendering of w . 6-7: And now you are aware of the hostile occupying power so that the man of rebellion will be revealed at his proper time. For the mystery which is rebellion is already at work; only until the hostile power at present in occupation is out of the way. And then the Rebel will be revealed.

This general approach which understands 6 KCXXEXCOV as an evil power is defended by James E. Frame,19 by Charles A. Wanamaker,20 and, in a somewhat idiosyncratic form, by Charles H. Giblin.21 Kaxe%£iv can 17. R.D. Aus, 'God's Plan and God's Power: Isaiah 66 and the Restraining Factors of 2 Thess 2:6-77' JBL 96 (1977), pp. 537-53. 18. E. Best, A Commentary on the First and Second Epistles to the Thessalonians (BNTC; London: A & C. Black, 1972), pp. 301-302. 19. J.E. Frame, The Epistles of Paul to the Thessalonians (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1912), pp. 258-65. 20. C.A Wanamaker, The Epistles to the Thessalonians: A Commentary on the Greek Text (NIGTC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), pp. 252-57. 21. C.H. Giblin, The Threat to Faith: An Exegetical and Theological Re-examination of 2 Thessalonians 2 (AB, 31; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1967), pp. 167-

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certainly be translated by 'to possess', 'to occupy', 'to overpower', 'to oppress' and so on. Indeed, such a rendering does not require the supplement of an object in v. 7 as is the case if we render Kax8%8iv with 'to restrain', 'to hinder', 'to prevent', and so on. Thus taking 6 KCIT£%COV in a negative sense as 'a hostile occupying power' can be said to be the best grammatical solution, but only, I would contend, in violence to the context. Why, if the 6 KOCTEXCOV is a hostile or evil power, must he be removed for the Man of Lawlessness to appear? As Menken has stated, 'the evidence of the text itself suggest(s) that the restraining power or person is on God's side'.22 This probably explains why no ancient Greek interpreter known to us ever understood the two K(XT8%8iv participles in this passage in the sense of'to possess', 'to occupy', 'to overpower', 'to oppress', and so on, but rather uniformly understood the participles in the sense of'to restrain', 'to check', 'to hinder'.23 This is especially significant as the Greek Fathers and exegetes do not all agree as to the identity of the Restrainer. Finally, the idea that God, either directly or indirectly through an agent, restrains or checks an eschatological figure or event so that the latter only appears at the predetermined time belongs to the world of apocalyptic imagery and is well attested in apocalyptic texts. Many examples could be cited, but three will suffice. The first two are from the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch, or 2 Baruch. In 51.11 God tells Baruch of his 'armies of angels, who are now kept back by my word lest they should reveal themselves, and are now restrained by my command, so that they may keep their places until the moment of their advent comes'. Similarly, at 12.4 Baruch while addressing the Babylonians (for whom read 'the Romans') declares: 'For without doubt in its own 242; idem, '2 Thessaionians 2 Re-read as Pseudepigraphal: A Revised Reaffirmation of The Threat to Faith', in Collins (ed.), The Thessaionians Correspondence, pp. 459-69. Giblin renders 6 Kccxexcov as 'the Seizer' and relates it to ecstatic prophetic activity. He then posits a false prophet in the Thessalonian community which the author was writing to combat. This has been rightly criticized as making the parousia of Christ dependent upon the events of one community when the author of 2 Thessaionians clearly held it to be a cosmic event with universal significance. Cf. e.g. Menken, 2 Thessaionians, p. I l l ; Wanamaker, 1 &2 Thessaionians, p. 252. 22. Menken, 2 Thessaionians, p. 111. 23. Cf. Hippolytus, Comm Dan. 21.3-4; John Chrysostom, Horn. 2 Thess. 4; Theodore of Mopsuestia, Comm. 2 Thess. 2; Basil of Caesarea, Pro. de Iudieo Dei 2; and perhaps Justin Martyr, 1 Apol. 45.

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good time, the divine wrath will awake against you which is now restrained by patience, as if by reins'.24 While this apocalypse is preserved in its entirety only in Syriac and we cannot be sure of the Greek that lay behind either of these two passages, there is reason to believe the original Greek root was KaxE%8iv. First, the Syriac word for 'restrained' in both these passages is the same used in the Peshitta of 2 Thess. 2.6-7. More importantly, a small papyrus fragment in Greek containing a portion of the latter text, 2 Bar. 12 A is extant. There is a lacuna at the critical point and the verb corresponding to the Syriac for 'restrained' is missing. Nonetheless, Kaxe%£Tai fits and was supplied by the first and all subsequent editors.25 While the Greek verb that lay behind the Syriac of these two examples from 2 Baruch cannot be known with certainty, there is no such difficulty with my third example. In the Greek Apocalypse of Ezra God says to Ezra: 'My chosen prophet, no human shall know that Great Day and the manifestation which restrains (xfiv KaT8%o\)aav) the judgment of the world' (3.3). Thus, 'to restrain' not only makes the most sense in the context of 2 Thessalonians 2, the use of Kaiexeiv to denote the restraining of a person or event so that their arrival coincides with the divine plan finds ample support in apocalyptic texts. If 6 KaxexGw *s best rendered by 'the Restrained or something similar, and if it is best to view the phrase as referring to a positive figure, and if God himself is very unlikely, then an agent of God—that is an angel—seems the only other real option. As this is the solution which I favour and to which I am, in this article, proposing a modification I will, momentarily, offer a full defence of it. For now it is sufficient to note that it is supported by many interpreters, including Martin Dibelius,26 P. Miiller,27 Glenn S. Holland,28 Lars Hart24. The translation of L.C. Brockington in H.F.D. Sparks (ed.), The Apocryphal Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 835-95. 25. B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt (eds.), The Oxyrhynchus Papyri (London: Egypt Exploration Fund, 1903), III, pp. 3-7; P. Bogaert, Apocalypse de Baruch (SC, 144-145; 2 vols.; Paris: Cerf, 1969), I, pp. 40-43; and A.-M. Denis, Fragmenta Pseudepigraphorum quae Supersunt Graece (Leiden: EJ. Brill, 1970), pp. 118-19. 26. M. Dibelius, An die Thessalonicher I-IL An die Philipper ( H N T , 11; Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1937), pp. 46-51. 27. P. Miiller, Anfange der Paulusschule: Dargestellt am zweiten Thessalonicherbrief und am Kolosserbrief(ATANT, 74; Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1988), pp. 50-51. 28. G.S. Holland, The Tradition that You Received from Us: 2 Thessalonians in the Pauline Tradition (HUT, 24; Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1988), pp. 110-13.

Hannah

T H E ANGELIC RESTRAINER

37

man,29 Maarten J.J. Menken,30 and, tentatively, Markus N.A. Bockmuehl.31 Indeed, the angelic option probably remains the most popular solution at the present time. There remains one other proposed solution which must be discussed. L.J. Lietaert Peerbolte has recently suggested that the vagueness with which the author mentions 6 KaT8%cov and TO Kcrc£%ov are essential to his pseudepigraphic programme. The author, either correcting 'a kind of eschatological hypertension among his intended readers' or attempting to 'protect Paul against criticism of his eschatological views', offered 2 Thessalonians as a replacement for 1 Thessalonians.32 In so doing the author added the obscure references to the Restrainer and the restraining force to create the 'literary fiction of common knowledge shared by Paul and his readers' in Thessalonica (cf. 2.5).33 This supposedly would add to the impression of the epistle's authenticity. It seems to me, however, to accomplish just the opposite. The Christian movement during the first century was not large in numbers,34 and its various communities, especially within Pauline Christianity, were in frequent contact with each other.35 The enigmatic reference to the Restrainer figure would surely have prompted requests of the Thessalonian Christians for an explanation, which, in turn, would expose the forgery. A pseudepigrapher in attempting to hide his identity through obscurity would naturally invite the very attention he was attempting to avoid. Lietaert Peerbolt's ingenious suggestion is simply too ingenious. 29. L. Hartman, 'The Eschatology of 2 Thessalonians as included in a Communication', in Collins (ed.), The Thessalonian Correspondence, pp. 470-85. 30. Menken, 2 Thessalonians, pp. 112-13. 31. Revelation and Mystery in Ancient Judaism and Pauline Christianity (WUNT, 2/36; Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1990), pp. 195-96. 32. L.J. Lietaert Peerbolte, T h e KATEXON/KATEXQN of 2 Thess. 2:6-7, NovT (1997), pp. 138-50. Cf. also idem, The Antecedents ofAntichrist: A Traditio-Historical Study of the Earliest Christian Views on Eschatological Opponents (JSJSup, 49; EJ. Brill, 1996), pp. 63-89. 33. Lietaert Peerbolte, 'KATEXON/KATEXQN', p. 149. 34. See R. Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 3-27. 35. Cf. e.g. 1 Thess. 1.9-10; 1 Cor. 16.5-9, 12, 19-20; Phil. 2.25-30; Col. 4.16. The last is significant even if Colossians is pseudepigraphical. For it would then demonstrate that the Pauline churches remained in contact with each other even after Paul's death.

38

CALLING TIME

Exegetical Assumptions Before I turn to my specific proposal, it will be necessary to briefly summarize some of the exegetical assumptions with which I approach this text. Throughout my article I have left open the question of authenticity. This has been intentional. While the tendency today seems to be in the direction of pseudonymity, the issue can hardly be said to be settled. More importantly, I believe my proposal will prove equally valid whether or not 2 Thessalonians is regarded as an. authentic letter of the apostle or as the work of a later Paulinist. Of a much more substantive nature is the question of the false teaching the author was addressing. This is set out in 2.1-2: I ask you brothers, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered before him that you not be quickly shaken in your thinking nor troubled, neither by a prophetic oracle nor by a message or letters supposedly from us to the effect that the day of the Lord has already arrived.

The crux here is the meaning of verb eveoTryicev. Interpreters generally fall into two camps: those who translate 8V£axr|K8v with 'is imminent' ('the day of the Lord is imminent') and those, as I, who render it 'has already come' ('the day of the Lord has already come') or the like. While both renderings are technically possible it is not clear how belief in the immanence of the day of the Lord could be construed as a difficulty. It certainly would not have been considered a false teaching in first-century Christianity. Indeed, the author seems equally convinced that the Lord's return is near. In 1.4-8 he appeals to it in an attempt to encourage the readers to stand firm in the midst of persecution. Thus, the rendering 'the day of the Lord has already come' is to be preferred. Furthermore, we know that at a somewhat later time a similar idea—namely, that the resurrection had already taken place, perhaps secretly—was taught in some Christian circles and opposed by Pauline Christianity (2 Tim. 2.17-18). Finally, those who prefer 'the day of the Lord is imminent' tend to distinguish the day of the Lord from Christ's parousia, regarding the 'day of the Lord' as the beginning of the process which will culminate in the 'second coming'.36 This is unnecessarily complex and understands the phrase 'the day of the Lord' in a way unparalleled elsewhere in the New 36. So Richard, First and Second Thessalonians, pp. 343-44.

Hannah THE ANGELIC RESTRAINER

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Testament.37 I conclude that the author wrote to correct the notion that Christ had already come, an idea not unlike that opposed in 2 Tim.2.17-18.38 The Angelic Restrainer That the author of 2 Thessalonians had drunk deep from the well of apocalyptic eschatology is universally admitted. It is supported by the many parallels both in thought and language with Jewish and early Christian apocalypses. The most obvious example is the 'Man of Lawlessness'. The concept of the eschatological opponent of the people of God, who is an embodiment of evil, ultimately goes back to the portrait of Antiochus Epiphanes in the book of Daniel and is found in such diverse apocalyptic texts as 4 Ezra (5.6-7), 2 Baruch (39.7-40.4), the book of Revelation (esp. chs. 13 and 17), the Ascension of Isaiah (4.2-18), the Sibylline Oracles and in the most probable understanding of the fragmentary 4Q285. As the eschatological opponent in many of these texts, the Man of Lawlessness authenticates himself by means of miraculous signs and wonders (w. 9-10).39 Further, the blasphemous claim of deity attributed to the Man of Lawlessness in v. 4 is paralleled in, among others, Daniel, Revelation, the Ascension of Isaiah, and the Sibylline Oracles. There appears to have been a exegetical tradition in ancient Judaism and early Christianity which found references to the eschatological opponent or Antichrist in the king of Babylon described in Isaiah 14 and the king of Tyre in Ezekiel 28, both of whom are portrayed as claiming to be divine. The author of 2 Thessalonians is an early contributor to this tradition, but bases the Man of Lawlessness directly on the figure of Antiochus Epiphanes as he is represented in the book of Daniel.40 37. Cf. the discussion in Bruce, 1 &2 Thessalonians, pp. 165-66. 38. Cf. Menken, 2 Thessalonians, pp. 98-101. 39. Cf. e.g. Mk 13.22 (Mt. 24.24); Rev. 13.13-14, 19.20; Asc. Isa. 4.5,10. 40. However, in fact things are substantially more complex. Daniel's portrait of Antiochus Epiphanes is clearly interpreted by the author in the light of Gaius Caligula's attempt to install a statue of himself as an incarnation of Zeus in the Jerusalem temple. See Josephus's account in War 2.184-85. One should also recall the depiction of Pompey's entry into the Holy of Holies in Pss. Sol. 17.11-15. Although it cannot be demonstrated here, it appears likely that the author has combined the Danielic Antiochus Epiphanes with Pompey and Caligula in the light of Isa. 14.13-14 and Ezek. 28.2.

40

CALLING TIME

As alluded to earlier, the author shares the widespread assumption found in the many apocalyptic texts that God's control of history is complete; events will unfold only according to the predetermined plan. Thus, the Lawless One cannot appear until the time decreed by God (v. 6). Similarly, the conception of the Messiah annihilating his enemies with only his spoken word (v. 8) is attested in many apocalypses. So, for example, in 1 En. 62.2 the Son of Man 'slays sinners with the word of his mouth', and in 4 Ezra 13.10 the man from the Sea destroys the multitude of warriors with a stream of fire which issues from his mouth, and in Revelation 19 the returning Christ kills the armies of the beast and the false prophet with the sword which proceeds from his mouth.41 One could also point to the use of TO jLi\)axf]piov (v. 7) and anoKaXvuxcx) (w. 3, 6, 8) as indicative of apocalyptic thought.42 Given this preponderance of apocalyptic images and concepts, it follows that apocalypses might be the most useful sources for help in interpreting and identifying the Restrainer. It has been pointed out by Dibelius, Menken and others that the image of an angel restraining an evil person, either Satan or one of his underlings, is comparatively common in apocalyptic literature. In Rev. 20.2 an unnamed angel binds (e5r|aev) Satan for a thousand years, while in 1 En. 10.4, 11-12 Raphael and Michael are commanded to bind (5fjaov) Azazel and Semjaza, the two leaders of the fallen Watchers, until the day of their judgment. One could also mention 1 En. 18.12-19.2 and 21.1-6 where fallen angels and rogue stars are bound and placed in confinement to await the final judgment. In addition, the Similitudes of Enoch describes the great chains which the four archangels will employ against Azazel and his hosts on the day ofjudgment (1 En. 54.4-6). In Rev. 7.1 four angels hold in check the four winds so that they cannot harm the land or sea, but they are commanded to hold the winds only until the servants of God are sealed on their foreheads. Other non-eschatological 41. This conception ultimately derives from Isa. 11.4. Isa. 11.1-6 was often interpreted messianically in Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity. Other significant examples of the Messiah slaying his enemies with his mouth include 4QpIsa a (4Q161); lQSb (lQ28b) 5.24-25; 4Q285 frag. 5; Pss. Sol 17.24, 35; Asc. Isa. 4.18. Cf. also Rev. 1.16; 11.6. 42. For TO |ivoTT|piov...Tri