Visions of the End: Early Jewish and Christian Apocalypticism

An Online Class via Paths in Biblical Studies This Fall

I’m finally resurfacing after a grueling school year in which I taught five courses each semester (including two I took over during the semester after another faculty member got sick and couldn’t finish). Somehow, I’ll be teaching even more in the fall, as I’m now on the hook for seven classes. Given that, the summer so far has mostly been aimed at getting prepared for that while also (finally!) trying to finalize my audiobooks (looks like both will be available by the end of the summer) and getting my Romans commentary off the ground.

The bit that’s relevant for readers of this Substack is that one of those seven classes (and the class that has occupied the last month or so of my prep time) is an online class available to all: Visions of the End: Early Jewish and Christian Apocalypticism, offered through Paths in Biblical Studies (my affiliate link).

This course will have 28 50-minute sessions with a Q&A after each and will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays starting on August 13. Those who enroll in the class get lifetime access to the lectures, so live attendance is not necessary, though it would be rather difficult to participate in the Q&A without it.

Here’s the formal description we put together:

Say “apocalypse” today and people picture the planet in flames. But that is not what early Jews meant. They expected something closer to a cosmic renewal: the end of one age of wickedness and the beginning of a renewed creation, guided by the justice of God.

This was not a fringe idea or a single doomsday script. Across the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and a whole library of early Jewish literature, the end was imagined in strikingly different ways. Diverse messiahs, the return of the lost tribes, the resurrection of the dead, and the fate of the nations all hung in the balance.

Yet beneath the diversity ran a single story: from Eden, through Abraham’s covenant, toward a promised resolution. It was out of these specific expectations that the Jesus movement, and eventually Christianity, was born. This course traces how the end was envisioned, and why those visions still shape how the West imagines the future.

The full details about the course are available at the link above, but I’ve designed the course to build on the foundation of Genesis and the Torah, establishing the basic “grammar” that underlies Jewish and Christian eschatology (end-times expectations) and then working through more specific examples of how that grammar is then applied in Daniel, 1 Enoch, Jubilees, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament Gospels, and Revelation.

I’ve been working hard on this class, and I hope to see at least some of you there. If you do choose to join the course, please use my affiliate link! Early Bird pricing runs through the rest of the month of July, and then prices increase.

Even if you don’t join that course, I’ve finally got a few things that should be finalized enough to post here within the next few days, including recordings of the full panel on C. S. Lewis and the Bible I was part of back in November, which I expect to be substance of the next post.