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In this volume, T.C. Schmidt offers a new perspective on the formation of the New Testament by examining it simply as a Greco-Roman 'testament', a legal document of great authority in the ancient world. His work considers previously unexamined parallels between Greco-Roman juristic standards and the authorization of Christianity's holy texts. Recapitulating how Greco-Roman testaments were created and certified, he argues that the book of Revelation possessed many testamentary characteristics that were crucial for lending validity to the New Testament. Even so, Schmidt shows how Revelation fell out of favor amongst most Eastern Christian communities for over a thousand years until commentators rehabilitated its status and reintegrated it into the New Testament. Schmidt uncovers why so many Eastern churches neglected Revelation during this period, and then draws from Greco-Roman legal practice to describe how Eastern commentators successfully argued for Revelation's inclusion in the New Testaments of their Churches.
This chapter begins with how Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, brought the early traditions into a cohesive narrative whole by incorporating the abomination of desolation, the little horn, the fourth beast and the fourth king, the Man of Sin, the Son of Perdition, and the beasts that arose from the earth and the sea into the Antichrist figure. It then explores the development of the Irenaean story through Hippolytus of Rome, Tertullian, Lactantius, and Pseudo-Hippolytus. It analyses the various components of the story as they were developing over the third and fourth centuries, including the notion of double Antichrists, the role of Nero as the Antichrist, the Antichrist as Satan incarnate, and physical depictions of the Antichrist as a monstrous being in various Greek, Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopian, and Latin texts.
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