Apocalypse Now?

The Apocalypse of John was accepted into the New Testament canon as a book of universal hope. But how did its prophetic comforting message of hope evolve into a book of cosmological terror and doomsday scenarios letting apocalypse understand as climax of catastrophe? The contributions of the volume arised from a jointly organized interdisciplinary seminar of the classical philologist Thomas Paulsen and the New Testament scholar Stefan Alkier. They discuss the reduction of the Apocalypse of John down to a book of catastrophe from Dante Alighieri to Martin Luther up to Terry Pratchett and the video game Darksiders. This reveals how much the history of the reception shape and sometimes even distort the perception of this fascinating book of a cosmological theology.