The End of the Ages Has Come:
An Early Interpretation of the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus
by Dale C. Allison, Jr.

List Price: $33.00 Our Price: $16.00 Cloth - 194 pp ISBN 0-8006-0753-8 Fortress Press

Summary How does one explain the New Testament texts that seem to announces the arrival of the long-awaited Day of the Lord?  More particularly, what is the explanation for those passages in which the passion of Jesus is interpreted as belonging to the eschatological tribulation and in which his resurrection is set forth as marking the onset of the general resurrection of the dead?  According to Dale Allison, the answers to these often neglected questions can only be found by understanding what Jesus had to say about the impending eschatological transition.  For the so-called realized eschatology of the early Christian communities was first brought into existence by Jesus' words about significant eschatological events.  The expectations of the pre-easter period thus "supplied the categories with which the passion and resurrection were originally grasped." Allison takes a long, careful look at the different uses made of the notion of an eschatological tribulation in both intertestamental Judaism and the New Testament.  Of equal importance, he places the discussion of the New Testament's realized eschatology within its wider context -- the problem of promise and fulfillment in messianic movements throughout history: "The eschatological prophecies of Jesus were believed to have met their initial fulfillment in the Messiah's death and resurrection.  This had dawned the great Day of the Lord."