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The Apocalyptic Movement: Introduction and Interpretation . By Walter Schmithals. Translated by John E. Steely. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1975. 255 pp. $8.95.

Readers of Church History will be interested in how New Testament scholar Schmithals, well known for his writings on Gnosticism and the New Testament, deals with apocalypticism and Christian origins. The book has eleven separable chapters based on lectures to non-specialists. Besides wrestling with the questions of origin and essence of apocalyptic Schmithals discusses its relation to the Old Testament, Gnosis, Iran, Judaism, and Christianity, and then closes with comments on apocalyptic literature and on the impact of apocalyptic on Western thought through the ages. This fends with a twelve-page consideration of Marxism. Schmithals' norm for apocalyptic is Jewish intertestamental pseudepigrapha, including the Ezra Apocalypse, so that even Daniel and the Revelation of John are apocalyptic more in form and origin than in content and character. He sees the essence of apocalyptic as a specific understanding of existence which takes history seriously but is absolutely pessimistic about its possibilities and thus quietly looks for the realization of God's purposes expressed in the Old Testament in a totally new age completely discontinuous with this one. This view of existence is not only the essence but also the origin of apocalyptic, although various contributions come from Parseeism and the Old Testament. By the expression "Old Testament" Schmithals means the Israelite faith, set forth in the Law and the Former Prophets, which he sees as incompatible with apocalyptic, which expels God from history and is dualistic, universalist, individualistic, and quietist. Schmithals contrasts apocalyptic's "fundamentally historical way of thinking" with Gnosis and rejects a Gnostic origin for apocalyptic, as well as vice versa. However, he underscores their common understanding of existence, of fall, of God's relation to world or history, and of man's escape from it. Thus apocalyptic is incompatible with Christianity, the eschatology of which includes a breaking in of (God's) future into our history, as Paul and Luther and John clearly understood.