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Early Christian Chiliasm, Jewish Messianism, and the Idea of the Holy Land

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Robert L. Wilken
Robert L. Wilken
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
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Extract

For most Christians Jerusalem is a heavenly city of solace and peace, a safe haven after the trials of life in this world. “Jerusalem whose towers touch the skies, I yearn to come to you. Your shining streets have drawn my longing eyes, my life long journey through …” It is a symbol of the soul's yearning to find rest in God. “Jerusalem my happy home, when shall I come to thee, when shall my sorrows have an end, thy joys when shall I see?” Yet Jerusalem is also an actual city set on a hill on the edge of a desert, a city where Christians live and have lived for centuries but whose population today is largely Muslim and Jewish. At one time, in the years prior to the Muslim invasion of Palestine in the seventh century, it was the chief city in a land ruled by Christians. More than five hundred churches and monasteries marked the landscape and thousands of monks inhabited the caves of the Judaean desert. Jerusalem's eloquent bishops and learned priests wielded power in the great capital of the Byzantine world, Constantinople on the Bosporus.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 79 , Issue 1-3: Christians Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Krister Stendahl on His Sixty-fifth Birthday , July 1986 , pp. 298 - 307
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1986

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References

1 On the early history of pilgrimage to Palestine see Hunt, E. D., Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire: AD 312–460 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982).Google Scholar For early Christian pilgrimage in general see Kötting, Bernhard, Peregrinatio Religiosa (Forschungen zur Volkskunde 33–35; Münster, 1950).Google Scholar On early Christian attitudes toward “holy space,” see Finney, Paul Corby, “Topos Hieros und christlicher Sakralbau in vorkonstantinischer Überlieferung,” Boreas (Münstersche Beiträge zur Archäologie 7; Münster, 1984) 193–226.Google Scholar

2 For a brief survey of early Christian chiliasm, see Walter Bauer, “Chiliasmus,” RAC 2 1073–78.

3 On the importance of the land of Israel and Jerusalem in Jewish messianic hopes, see Tobit 14, Jesus ben Sira 51, Psalm of Solomon 17, 4 Ezra 5:23–30; 9–10. For a survey of Jewish Messianism see Klausner, Joseph, The Messianic Idea in Israel (New York: Macmillan, 1955)Google Scholar, and Schürer, Emil, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (ed. Vermes, G., Millar, F., Black, M.; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1979) 2. 492–554.Google Scholar

4 I once saw part of this text (“they shall build houses and inhabit them, they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruits.… They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat”) painted on the side of a hut built by Jews in the Gaza Strip shortly before that territory was returned to the Egyptians in 1982.

5 Adv. haer. 5.35, passim. Irenaeus also cites Gen 13:13, 14, 17; 15:13; Matt 5:3; Isa 31:9; 32:1; 54:11–14; 65:18. The same texts used by Justin and Irenaeus from Ezekiel and Isaiah were used by Jews and judaizing Christians in the fourth century as a basis for the expectation that the Jews would return to the land of Israel. See Wilken, Robert L., “The Restoration of Israel in Biblical Prophecy: Christian and Jewish Responses in the Early Byzantine Period,” in Neusner, Jacob and Frerichs, Ernest S., To See Ourselves as Others See Us: Christians, Jews, and Others in Late Antiquity (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985) 443–71.Google Scholar

6 De prin 2.11.1. Origen calls chiliasts “men who believe in Christ” but who understand the Scriptures “in a Jewish fashion.”

7 That Origen had contact with Jewish thinkers and was familiar with Jewish interpretation of the Scriptures is now a consensus among scholars. See Lange, N. R. M. de, Origen and the Jews: Studies in Jewish-Christian Relations in Third Century Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

8 Cant. Rab. 1.5.3. See also Midr. Tan, Hosafa le-Debarim (Buber 4) and Exod. Rab. 23.10. On Rabbi Yoḥanan and Origen, see Kimelman, Reuven, “Rabbi Yochanan and Origen on the Song of Songs: A Third Century Jewish-Christian Disputation,” HTR 23 (1980) esp. 585–88.Google Scholar Also Halperin, David, “Origen, Ezekiel's Merkabah, and the Ascension of Moses,” CH 59 (1980) 261–75.Google Scholar

9 Comm. in Cant. 2.3. Cf. also the prologue, paragraph 4.

10 There is some dispute as to the origin of the term “Jerusalem above” and its place in discussions between Jews and Christians. For a brief summary, see the comments of Kimelman (“Rabbi Yochanan and Origen,” 587) and Davies, W. D., The Gospel and the Land (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) 151–52. Origen's discussion of the holy land tends to support Kimelman's conclusions. It is the Christians, not the Jews, who seem defensive.Google Scholar

11 Silver, Abba H., A History of Messianic Speculation in Israel (Boston: Beacon, 1959) 13.Google Scholar Cf. Scholem, Gershom, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1971) 1.Google Scholar

12 Schürer, History of the Jewish People, 1. 545–46.

13 See m. Pesaḥim 10.6 and the prayer Shemoneh Esreh, nos. 14–17.

14 Cited in Klausner, Messianic Idea, 395.

15 That Origen uses the term “holy land” and Jerome “land of promise” does not seem significant. “Holy land” is not a biblical term. There the word is Eretz Israel or simply Ha-Aretz. Holy Land does occur in the LXX as a translation of “holy ground” (e.g., in Zech 2:16; Exod 3:5) and in Wis 12:3 and 2 Maccabees 1. Other than these occurrences it is documented only in Christian authors, and it is the Christians who gave it currency, albeit to dispute its meaning. For the Jew the qualifier “holy” was redundant, as it was in the beatitudes “Blessed are the meek for they shall possess the land” (Matt 5:5). Aretz was quite sufficient as the following passage from the Mishnah indicates: “Any Mitzvah that does not depend on the land may be observed whether in the land or outside of it; and any Mitzvah that depends on the land may not be observed except in the land” (m. Kidd. 1.9–10). On the idea of the “land of Israel” see Davies, Gospel and the Land, and his more recent work, The Territorial Dimension of Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982)Google Scholar; on “holy land” see Wilken, Robert L., “Heiliges Land,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1985) s.v.Google Scholar

16 Jerome Ep. 129.1–3 to Dardanus. The sentiment expressed here is the same as that in 1 Mace 15:33 on the Jewish right to the land as an inheritance.

17 Cyril of Scythopolis, Life ofSabas 57 (ed. Schwartz, 153).