Eschatos in Jewish, Hellenistic, and Early Christian Texts

Beschreibung

Stefano De Feo explores how ancient Jewish, Christian, and Graeco-Roman traditions used the lexeme ἔσχατος. By tracing this key Greek word across diverse sources, the author offers a fresh look at how ideas of 'the end' are shaped - or not - by the vocabulary that eventually became eponymous for eschatology.
Stefano De Feo offers the first comprehensive investigation of the Greek lexeme ἔσχατος in Jewish, Christian, and Graeco-Roman sources from the 3rd cent. BCE to the 1st cent. CE. He examines how this term functions within diverse philosophical and religious traditions and asks which uses may be described legitimately as "eschatological." The author maintains that the scholarly confusion regarding the use of the category of eschatology can be reduced significantly through a broad analysis of the lexeme ἔσχατος, the very lexeme from which the modern term "eschatology" is derived. Methodologically, the author adopts a historical-critical approach integrated with insights from modern semantics. Each occurrence of the lexeme is interpreted within its literary, argumentative, and historical context, thereby avoiding the "word-concept fallacy," the retrojection of later theological categories, and the assumption that the presence of a word necessarily signals a concept. The analysis is both diachronic and comparative: it follows the development of the lexeme across the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, Jewish apocalyptic literature, Stoic philosophical writings, Hellenistic and Roman Jewish authors, the writings of the early Christian communities, and selected pagan authors (such as, for example, Dio Chrysostom and Plutarch). By tracing the uses of ἔσχατος across several centuries and traditions, De Feo demonstrates that the "time of the end" is not reducible to a chronological endpoint but constitutes a theological and philosophical category. He thereby provides a new foundation for the interpretation of eschatological language.

Autor*in

Stefano De Feo
Born 1993; 2024 PhD; post-doctoral researcher in the SNSF project "Resonances through History. Conceptualizing the Divine in the Context of a Biographically Grounded Contemplation and Presentation of History in the Early Roman Imperial Era" (University of Bern).

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ancient semantics diachronic analysis early Christianity eschatology eschatos Hellenistic philosophy historical criticism Jewish apocalypticism lexical semantics New Testament Septuagint Stoicism Telos time of the end translation studies

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