The New Jerusalem: The history of a Biblicalimage in Late Antique Christianity (ca. 150–600)

The New Jerusalem (NJ) is an image that emerged within the Hebrew Scriptures, developed in the intertestamental period, and was expanded upon to dramatic effect in the Apocalypse and elsewhere in the New Testament. In the time since, it has become a persistent and powerful religious, political, literary, and artistic topos within the Western cultural heritage. At its heart, the image of the NJ and its cognates (e.g. the heavenly Jerusalem) has represented, often with eschatological overtones, a union of the human and the divine and the peaceful co-existence of all creation in a state of perfection.

As powerful as the image has become, its development in the centuries immediately following the New Testament era has received scant scholarly attention. To date, no complete, in-depth analysis of the NJ as represented in late antique Christian literature exists. As a consequence, the formative history of this potent metaphor as it was absorbed into the Christian tradition remains obscure and misunderstood.

My research will fill this lacuna by offering an original, synthetic study of the reception and development of an influential biblical image in the roughly 500 years following the writing of the New Testament. I will do this by presenting the major interpretations and uses of the NJ, highlighting contrasting accents within the church as to its meaning, and articulating the broad consensus that emerged in the Latin and Greek Apocalypse commentaries of the sixth and early seventh centuries.