An Excerpt From 'The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition' by Paul J. Alexander

Related:

The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius.

John Bale’s ‘The Image of Both Churches’

Constantinople In Christian Eschatology.

University of California:

Paul Julius Alexander was born in Berlin, Germany in 1910. He earned law degrees in Hamburg in 1932 and Paris in 1934. In 1935 he moved to the United States and in 1940 earned his Ph.D. in ancient and Byzantine history from Harvard. His first teaching post was at Hobart College in 1945, and from there he moved to Brandeis University in 1954, Michigan in 1958, and then Berkeley in 1968 as professor of History and of Comparative Literature. Numerous awards included Guggenheim Fellowships in 1951 and 1965, membership in the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton in 1951 and 1970, and a Senior Fellowship of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1974. One of the world’s leading Byzantinists, he was well grounded in the classics, learned Syriac, Arabic, Old Church Slavonic and Russian, and also worked on secular biography, patristics, iconoclasm and codicology. His major work (and first book) was The Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople: Ecclesiastical Policy and Image Worship in the Byzantine Empire (Oxford, 1958); which was recognized as the standard monograph on the later iconoclastic period (815-843A.D.). He died in 1977.

University of California Press:

Throughout Christian history, apocalyptic visions of the approaching end of time have provided a persistent and enigmatic theme for history and prophecy. Apocalyptic literature played a particularly important role in the medieval world, where legends of the Antichrist, Gog and Magog, and the Last Roman Emperor were widely circulated. Although scholars have long recognized that a body of Byzantine prophetic literature served as the source for these ideas, the Byzantine textual tradition, its sources, and the way in which it was transmitted to the West have neve been thoroughly understood. For more than fifteen years prior to his death in 1977, Paul J. Alexander devoted his energies to the clarification of the Byzantine apocalyptic tradition. These studies, left uncompleted at his death, trace the development of a textual tradition that passed from Syriac through Greek to Slavonic and Latin literature. Using a combination of philological and historical detection, the author establishes the time, place, and circumstances of composition for each of the major surviving texts, identifying lost works known only through descriptions. In showing how Byzantine prophecy served as a bridge between ancient eschatological works and the medieval West, Alexander demonstrates that apocalyptic literature represents a creative source for the expression of political and religious thought in the medieval world. 

An excerpt from, “The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition” By Paul J. Alexander, University of California Press, 1985, Pg. 13:

The document to be discussed in this chapter was, as will be seen, composed far beyond the frontiers of the Byzantine Empire, in fact, on enemy territory: in Mesopotamia during the first decades of Arab domination. Still, it deserves a detailed discussion, indeed a place of honor, in this study of the Byzantine apocalyptic tradition, and this on two grounds. In the first place, it was, for reasons that will become clear in the second part of this book, translated into Greek soon after its composition, and in its Greek form it became the basis of the most important branch of the Byzantine apocalyptic tradition. The Greek translation was copied frequently and adapted to historical events as they developed. In 1897 the editor of the Greek text, the Russian philologist V. Istrin, distinguished four Greek redactions, of which the last three were based on the first, and used at least fourteen manuscripts. Actually, the number of surviving manuscripts is larger and must have been very considerable in mid-and late-Byzantine times, to judge from texts excerpted, translated, or otherwise derived from codices now lost. Indeed, an entire branch of Byzantine apocalyptic literature, the Visions of Daniel (many specimens of which will be discussed later), were in fact combinations of Pseudo-Methodian excerpts with materials of more recent origin. The many translations of the Greek texts into other languages (notably into Slavic languages and into Latin) are another measure of the popularity of the work both in the Byzantine Empire and abroad. A second reason for this discussion of the Syriac text is the effect that it had, through its Greek translation, on other branches of Byzantine apocalyptic literature, apart from the Pseudo-Methodian tradition proper. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that in the development of the Byzantine apocalyptic tradition the translation of the Syriac text of Pseudo-Methodius into Greek marked the end of the era of Antiquity, and the beginning of that of the Middle Ages. None of the apocalyptic writings written after the translation was made fails to show traces of its influence. Moreover, inasmuch as the Syriac text was informed by the spirit of a non-Classical civilization, that of Syriac Christianity, it was natural that the ideas contained in the Syriac work, as translated into Greek, contributed to the Orientalization of Byzantine apocalyptic literature. True, this Near Eastern element had not been absent from apocalyptic literature before Pseudo-Methodius’ work was translated into Greek, for the entire genre was of Near Eastern-Hebrew and Aramaic-origin. Yet one need only compare the last major apocalypse antedating the Greek Pseudo-Methodius, the Oracle of Baalbek, with this Greek text or with any later apocalypse to realize how thoroughly the genre was infused with Syriac features by the translation of Pseudo-Methodius’ Syriac text into Greek.