ABSTRACT
This word is used here both as a noun and as an adjective in the restricted, technical sense, to refer broadly to the literary category. The term 'Apocalypse', or 'revelation', is the first word of the Revelation of St John, and is applied now to a series of writings from the Hellenistic Roman period which are comparable to the last book of the Bible with regard to form and content (Dan., 4 Ezra, Syr Baruch, Ethiopic Enoch and the like).1 'Apocalyptic' here means nothing more than revelation literature. All texts brought together under this collective term have, as their most important distinguishing feature, the course of historical events being revealed to and interpreted by a holy person and/or prophet chosen by God. This presupposes an understanding of history in which its course is established in advance by God and exists in Heaven before it is transformed into earthly events. During the esoteric revelation experience, the fictive visionary receives an insight into events, which from his standpoint have not yet occurred, and he records the vision and its interpretation in his writing. In this sense the Apocalypses are (from a form-critical point of view) framework genres, in which the widely divergent smaller genres that constitute them can be brought together.2
