The Antichrist Legend: a Chapter in Christian and Jewish Folk-lore
1896; Nature Portfolio; Volume: 54; Issue: 1404 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1038/054491b0
ISSN1476-4687
Autores Tópico(s)Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices
ResumoAT various intervals certain well-meaning individuals, with enthusiasm inversely proportional to their knowledge, attempt expositions of such extremely difficult texts as the Books of Daniel and Revelation, and they glibly profess to explain the Antichrist, and are impressive on the Beast. They little realise that, as Bousset says, “to understand Revelation we need a fulness of eschatological and mythological knowledge.” One has only to glance through Bousset's erudite work to be convinced that it is only by the most patient and learned research that such problems can be solved, and so we welcome Mr. Keane's translation of this valuable study, and hope (probably in vain) that the latter-day prophets will cease to yield to the temptation of giving free play to their fancy, and will investigate the historical growth of legendary beings, and thus eventually become students of folk-lore. It is evident, from the researches of Bousset and Gunkel, that Belial, the Antichrist, and the numerous other variants of Christian and pre-Christian authors, are adaptations of the ancient Babylonian Dragon myth. Mr. Keane goes a step further back, and attempts to account for the origin of this myth. He suggests that it refers to the first settlements on the low-lying plains of Chaldsea, when man had to contend against the periodicial freshets of the Euphrates and Tigris, caused by the melting of the snows of the watersheds, and against huge crocodiles which infested the estuaries. "There could be no peace or progress until the waters were quelled (confined within their banks, and diverted into irrigation canals), and until their presiding genius (the reptile or dragon, "lord of chaos") was overthrown.... Then the foremost champions engaged in these contests acquired their apotheosis in the minds of a grateful posterity, while the vanquished enemy assumed more and more the form of unearthly monsters and demons hostile to man. Such memories easily passed on from generation to generation until they acquired consistency and permanency in the written records of the cultured Babylonian peoples.'
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