Eschatology—the knowledge of “last things,” of judgment, heaven, hell and redemption—is one of the most profound elements in the religious imagination of the West. A strong influence in Jewish thinking, it has always been central to Christianity.
Charles’ book is the standard work on eschatology. Here he describes the prophetic and apocalyptic views of “the end”: life after death, Gehenna and the Messianic Kingdom, the Son of Man and resurrection. He traces the development of these ideas from their Biblical beginnings to their full flowering in the Jewish literature of the last pre-Christian centuries, and shows how they were adopted and transformed in early Christian writings. R. H. Charles, Anglican clergyman and professor at Dublin and at Oxford, was the first scholar to place the eschatological, noncanonical writings in their true historical context, to see them in the light of the political, ideological and intellectual background of the times.