TheologyU hosts Christian academics and authors to talk about their work in a way that anyone can understand.

Today’s guest is Dr. John Collins, Holmes Professor of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation at Yale Divinity School. He’s from Ireland and did his Phd at Harvard. Since then, his career as a Bible scholar has been prolific. He’s general editor of the extremely famous Anchor Bible Series and has served as president of the Society of Biblical Literature, the foremost and largest collection of Bible scholars in the world. He’s written about many different things in more than 25 books and many more academic articles. His latest book is the subject of our conversation today, a book called Apocalypticism as a Worldview in Ancient Judaism. Often, when we think of the word apocalypse, we think of the book of Revelation and the end of the world. Apocalypses in movies and pop culture are always a kind of climactic ending. But for Collins, this is a distortion of a much more ancient worldview, one which envision history as composed of various ages. An apocalypse to ancient Jews was never the end of history but was rather defined by the world which followed a certain apocalyptic ending just as much as the event itself. Apocalyptic literature is a genre or category of ancient writing which reflect on the end of the world as we know it and what might come next. Authors often used dramatic imagery and symbols. The book of Daniel includes a few chapters of apocalyptic literature, but most of this material from ancient Judaism doesn’t appear in modern Christian bibles. The most prominent example is the book of Enoch, which we talk about in some detail in this episode. Dr. Collins definitely won’t tell you when the world is going to end or how, but he can definitely help you understand where this literature comes from and how to think about it.