Apocalypse of Pseudo-Ezra
[1] The full Syriac title is Shēltā d-shēl ʿĀzrā sāprā kad hwā b-madbrā w-talmideh ʿameh da-shmeh Qarpus.
[8] It may be classified with the Syriac historical apocalypses that were popular in the first century of Islam, the purpose of which was to "console Christians who had become the subjects of a new empire and religion.
[11] The fuller form of the explicit in Syriac reads Ḥezwā da-ḥzā ʿĀzrā sāprā ʿal malkutā d-Ishmaʿlāyē ("the vision of Ezra the Scribe which he saw concerning the kingdom of the Ishmaelites").
[2] It begins in the third person, describing how Ezra asked God to reveal what will happen in "the end times of the Ishmaelites",[1] a Christian term for Arabs or Muslims.
[4] He first describes to his disciple Carpus (Qarpos) how he had a vision in which an angel in the form of a young man in white handed him a scroll containing the answer to his question.
There is an earthquake and a voice from heaven calls for the release of "those four kings who are bound on the great river Euphrates, those who are prepared to destroy one out of three people."
He will make war on the lion cub "and much blood will be shed between the two mighty men" before the bull contends with "the seven hills and the great city of Constantine."
A leopard leading a people like locusts out of the north meets the lion cub at the Euphrates to march on Persia.
The ravens flee and their land is utterly destroyed "until they fall and die, without diseases or illnesses, from the fear that rules over them."
The lion cub then subjects the Promised Land to tribute, builds a wall around Phoenicia, destroys Damascus, enters Jerusalem in triumph and returns to his royal city.
[21] There follows a lull of three and a half weeks before a "mighty man will come out of the south with a great nation" to reign in peace over the Promised Land for three years and seven months.
God sends "a fearsome angel [to] take hold of the point of the destroying sword" and end the tribulation.
[23] The text is usually treated as mostly vaticinium ex eventu (prophecy after the fact), with scholars seeking to identify the specifics of the visions with historical events that came before.
[26] Wilhelm Bousset offers a scheme based on the Arabic Apocalypse of Peter, which he thought represented a version of the source text for the first part.
The bull is the Sasanian king Khosrow II, the lion cub the Roman emperor Heraclius and the leopard the latter's Turkish allies.
[29] Lisbeth Fried, treating the text as a unitary composition, regards the bull as the Ishmaelites and the lion cub as the Messiah.
Those lands which submitted to the Arabs in the 7th century, from Egypt to the Euphrates, are set for destruction, with the cities of Damascus and Antioch singled out.
Pseudo-Methodian materials include the probable Last Roman Emperor motif and the influence of legends about Alexander the Great on the understanding of Gog and Magog.
[14] The first modern scholar to take note of it, Giuseppe Simone Assemani (1687–1768), identified it as pseudonymous because it refers to Constantinople, a name that only came into usage after AD 324.
[25][24] In an 1887 study, Ludwig Iselin [pl] proposed that the Apocalypse is a Christian revision of an originally Jewish work that drew on an Aramaic source also used by the author of the biblical Revelation.
[36] In 1894, Jean-Baptiste Chabot argued that the Apocalypse is an original Christian composition of the 7th or 8th century, written in response to the rise of Islam.
[25] Revelation is not accepted as canonical in the Syriac churches and was not part of the original Peshitta, but it was included in the Harklean version and would have been available by the late 7th century.
"[8] Sergey Minov expresses "little doubt" that it dates from "the very beginning of the Muslim era, perhaps in the early eighth century.
[47] Internal evidence has been held to suggest a Melkite or Miaphysite provenance, depending on whether the portrayal of the lion cub (i.e., the Roman emperor) is taken as positive or negative.
MS 12 in the library of the Chaldean Catholic Archeparchy of Kirkuk is Vosté 9 (=Haddad 15), copied near Alqosh in April 1791 by Abdisho bar Iaunan.
They are numbered 38–42: There is an Arabic recension of the Apocalypse in which the visions are ascribed to Daniel, who relays them to his disciple, Ezra.
[71] Later that year, Friedrich Baethgen published an edition and German translation of the Apocalypse based on the manuscript Sachau 101.
[74] For her master's thesis at Abilene Christian University, Laura Estes produced a critical edition of the Syriac text and an English translation based on five manuscripts (Mingana 11, BL 25875, Sachau 131, UTS 23, BnF 326).
