ABSTRACT
A central early Christian conviction was that this promised future transformation had already begun; the final act in the drama had commenced, announced and inaugurated by the ministry and especially the resurrection of Jesus. On the contrary, the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament, contains a range of prophetic visions of the imminent or distant future, visions which influence and inform the New Testament depictions, as people have already seen in the discussions of Jesus and Paul above. The book of Isaiah has been enormously influential upon Christian theology, from the earliest days. Another important and influential aspect of the future visions of the book of Isaiah is the motif of the new heavens and the new earth. The Christian Bible opens with the creation accounts of the book of Genesis and closes with the book of Revelation and its vision of the New Jerusalem descending from heaven to earth.
