Sibylline Oracles.—Of the books which have come down to us the main part is Jewish, and was written at various dates, iii. 97-829, iv.-v. are decidedly of Jewish authorship, and probably xi.-xii., xiv. and parts of i.-ii. The oldest portions are in iii., and belong to the 2nd century B.C.
III. New Testament Apocalyptic
When we pass from Jewish literature to that of the New Testament, we enter into a new and larger atmosphere at once recalling and transcending what had been best in the prophetic periods of the past. Again the heavens had opened and the divine teaching come to mankind, no longer merely in books bearing the names of ancient patriarchs, but on the lips of living men, who had taken courage to appear in person as God’s messengers before His people. But though Christianity was in spirit the descendant of ancient Jewish prophecy, it was no less truly the child of that Judaism which had expressed its highest aspirations and ideals in pseudepigraphic and apocalyptic literature. Hence we shall not be surprised to find that the two tendencies are fully represented in primitive Christianity, and, still more strange as it may appear, that New Testament apocalyptic found a more ready hearing amid the stress and storm of the 1st century than the prophetic side of Christianity, and that the type of the forerunner on the side of its declared asceticism appealed more readily to primitive Christianity than that of Him who came “eating and drinking,” declaring both worlds good and both God’s.
Early Christianity had thus naturally a special fondness for this class of literature. It was Christianity that preserved Jewish apocalyptic, when it was abandoned by Judaism as it sank into Rabbinism, and gave it a Christian character either by a forcible exegesis or by a systematic process of interpolation. Moreover, it cultivated this form of literature and made it the vehicle of its own ideas. Though apocalyptic served its purpose in the opening centuries of the Christian era, it must be confessed that in many of its aspects its office is transitory, as they belong not to the essence of Christian thought. When once it had taught men that the next world was God’s world, though it did so at the cost of relinquishing the present to Satan, it had achieved its real task, and the time had come for it to quit the stage of history, when Christianity appeared as the heir of this true spiritual achievement. But Christianity was no less assuredly the heir of ancient prophecy, and thus as spiritual representative of what was true in prophecy and apocalyptic; its essential teaching was as that of its Founder that both worlds were of God and that both should be made God’s.
(i.) Canonical:—
Apocalypse in Mark xiii. (Matthew xxiv., Luke xxi.).
2 Thessalonians ii.
Revelation.
(ii.) Extra-Canonical:—
Apocalypse of Peter.