Christ has appeared from heaven in the guise of a warrior, and
vanquished the antichristian world-power, the wisdom of the
world and the devil, those who have remained steadfast in the
time of the last catastrophe, and have given up their lives for
their faith, shall be raised up, and shall reign with Christ on this
earth as a royal priesthood for one thousand years. At the end
of this time Satan is to be let loose again for a short season; he
will prepare a new onslaught, but God will miraculously destroy
him and his hosts. Then will follow the general resurrection
of the dead, the last judgment, and the creation of new heavens
and a new earth. That all believers will have a share in the first
resurrection and in the Messianic kingdom is an idea of which
the author of Revelation knows nothing. The earthly kingdom
of Christ is reserved for those who have endured the most terrible
tribulation, who have withstood the supreme effort of the world-power—that
is, for those who are actually members of the church
of the last days. The Jewish expectation is thus considerably
curtailed, as it is also shorn of its sensual attractions. “Blessed
and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection; on such the
second death hath no power; but they shall be priests of God and
of Christ, and shall reign with Him a thousand years.” Other
ancient Christian authors were not so cautious. Accepting the
Jewish apocalypses as sacred books of venerable antiquity, they
read them eagerly, and transferred their contents bodily to
Christianity. Nay more, the Gentile Christians took possession
of them, and just in proportion as they were neglected by the
Jews—who, after the war of Bar-Cochba, became indifferent to
the Messianic hope and hardened themselves once more in
devotion to the law—they were naturalized in the Christian communities.
The result was that these books became “Christian”
documents; it is entirely to Christian, not to Jewish, tradition
that we owe their preservation. The Jewish expectations are
adopted for example, by Papias, by the writer of the epistle of
Barnabas, and by Justin. Papias actually confounds expressions
of Jesus with verses from the Apocalypse of Baruch, referring
to the amazing fertility of the days of the Messianic kingdom
(Papias in Iren. v. 33). Barnabas (Ep. 15) gives us the Jewish
theory (from Gen. i. and Ps. xc. 4) that the present condition of
the world is to last six thousand years from the creation, that at
the beginning of the Sabbath (the seventh millennium) the Son
of God appears, to put an end to the time of “the unjust one,”
to judge the ungodly and renew the earth. But he does not
indulge, like Papias, in sensuous descriptions of this seventh
millennium; to Barnabas it is a time of rest, of sinlessness, and of
a holy peace. It is not the end, however; it is followed by an
eighth day of eternal duration—“the beginning of another
world.” So that in the view of Barnabas the Messianic reign
still belongs to οὗτος ὁ αἰών. Justin (Dial. 80) speaks of
chiliasm as a necessary part of complete orthodoxy, although he
knows Christians who do not accept it. He believes, with the
Jews, in a restoration and extension of the city of Jerusalem; he
assumes that this city will be the seat of the Messianic kingdom,
and he takes it as a matter of course that there all believers
(here he is at one with Barnabas) along with patriarchs and
prophets will enjoy perfect felicity for one thousand years. That
a philosopher like Justin, with a bias towards an Hellenic construction
of the Christian religion, should nevertheless have
accepted its chiliastic elements is the strongest proof that
these enthusiastic expectations were inseparably bound up with
the Christian faith down to the middle of the 2nd century. And
another proof is found in the fact that even a speculative Jewish
Christian like Cerinthus not only did not renounce the chiliastic
hope, but pictured the future kingdom of Christ as a kingdom
of sensual pleasures, of eating and drinking and marriage
festivities (Euseb. H. E. iii. 28, vii. 25).
After the middle of the 2nd century these expectations were gradually thrust into the background. They would never have died out, however, had not circumstances altered, and a new mental attitude been taken up. The spirit of philosophical and theological speculation and of ethical reflection, which began to spread through the churches, did not know what to make of the old hopes of the future. To a new generation they seemed paltry, earthly and fantastic, and far-seeing men had good reason to regard them as a source of political danger. But more than this, these wild dreams about the glorious kingdom of Christ began to disturb the organization which the churches had seen fit to introduce. In the interests of self-preservation against the world, the state and the heretics, the Christian communities had formed themselves into compact societies with a definite creed and constitution, and they felt that their existence was threatened by the white heat of religious subjectivity. So early as the year 170, a church party in Asia Minor—the so-called Alogi—rejected the whole body of apocalyptic writings and denounced the book of Revelation as a book of fables. All the more powerful was the reaction. In the so-called Montanistic controversy (c. 160–220) one of the principal issues involved was the continuance of the chiliastic expectations in the churches. The Montanists of Asia Minor defended them in their integrity, with one slight modification: they announced that Pepuza, the city of Montanus, would be the site of the New Jerusalem and the millennial kingdom. After the Montanistic controversy chiliastic views were more and more discredited in the Greek Church; they were, in fact, stigmatized as “Jewish” and consequently “heretical.” It was the Alexandrian theology that superseded them; that is to say, Neo-Platonic mysticism triumphed over the early Christian hope of the future, first among the “cultured,” and then, when the theology of the “cultured” had taken the faith of the “uncultured” under its protection, amongst the latter also. About the year 260 an Egyptian bishop, Nepos, in a treatise called ἔλεγχος ἀλληγοριστῶν, endeavoured to overthrow the Origenistic theology and vindicate chiliasm by exegetical methods. Several congregations took his part; but ultimately Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, succeeded in healing the schism and asserting the allegorical interpretation of the prophets as the only legitimate exegesis. During this controversy Dionysius became convinced that the victory of mystical theology over “Jewish” chiliasm would never be secure so long as the book of Revelation passed for an apostolic writing and kept its place among the homologoumena of the canon. He accordingly raised the question of its apostolic origin; and by reviving old difficulties, with ingenious arguments of his own, he carried his point. At the time of Eusebius the Greek Church was saturated with prejudice against the book and with doubts as to its canonicity. In the course of the 4th century it was removed from the Greek canon, and thus the troublesome foundation on which chiliasm might have continued to build was got rid of. The attempts of Methodius of Tyre at the beginning of the 4th century and Apollinarius of Laodicea about 360 to defend chiliasm and assail the theology of Origen had no result. For many centuries the Greek Church kept Revelation out of its canon, and consequently chiliasm remained in its grave. It was considered a sufficient safeguard against the spiritualizing eschatology of Origen and his school to have rescued the main doctrines of the creed and the regula fidei (the visible advent of Christ; eternal misery and hell-fire for the wicked). Anything beyond this was held to be Jewish. It was only the chronologists and historians of the church who, following Julius Africanus, made use of apocalyptic numbers in their calculations, while court theologians like Eusebius entertained the imperial table with discussions as to whether the dining-hall of the emperor—the second David and Solomon, the beloved of God—might not be the New Jerusalem of John’s Apocalypse. Eusebius was not the first who dabbled in such speculations. Dionysius of Alexandria had already referred a Messianic prediction of the Old Testament to the emperor Gallienus. But mysticism and political servility between them gave the deathblow to chiliasm in the Greek Church. It never again obtained a footing there; for, although, late in the middle ages, the book of Revelation—by what means we cannot tell—did recover its authority, the Church was by that time so hopelessly trammelled by a magical cultus as to be incapable of fresh developments. In the Semitic churches of the East (the Syrian, Arabian and Ethiopian), and in that of Armenia, the apocalyptic literature was preserved much longer than in the Greek Church. They were very conservative of ancient traditions in general, and hence
