Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius

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The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius is a 7th-century apocalypse that shaped the eschatological imagination of Christendom throughout the Middle Ages. The work was written in Syriac in the late 7th century, in reaction to the Islamic conquest of the Near East, and is falsely attributed^{[citation needed]} to the 4th-century Church Father Methodius of Olympus. It depicts many familiar Christian eschatological themes: the rise and rule of Antichrist, the invasions of Gog and Magog, and the tribulations that precede the end of the world.

A new element, probably adopted from the Tiburtine Sibyl, was a Messiah-like Last Roman Emperor, who would be a central figure in apocalyptic literature until the end of the medieval period. It was translated into Greek soon after its composition, and thence into Latin (by the eighth century), Slavonic, Russian, Armenian, and Arabic.

Its precise date is difficult to ascertain; dates proposed by recent historians fall within the range 644 - 691 AD (Palmer 1993:225).

[edit] See also

• Tiburtine Sibyl

[edit] References

• Alexander, Paul J. "The Medieval Legend of the Last Roman Emperor and Its Messianic Origin". Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 41. (1978), pp. 1–15
• McGinn, Bernard "Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages" (NY, Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 70–76
• Hoyland, Robert G. "Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam" (Princeton: Darwin Press 1997).
• Palmer, Andrew; Sebastian Brock; and Robert Hoyland. The Seventh Century in the West-Syrian Chronicles: including two seventh-century Syriac apocalyptic texts. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 1993)
• Tolan, John V. Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (NY, Columbia University Press, 2002)