The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Ezra is a set of visions of the end times falsely attributed to Ezra. It is a short Syriac text, about seven manuscript pages, composed sometime between the 7th and 12th centuries. It recapitulates history in the form of prophecy using obscure animal imagery. Written to console Christians living under Islamic rule, it predicts the end of such rule in the Near East. It is one of the Syriac apocalyptic texts.
The actual author of the text is anonymous. As the text lacks theological specifics, it cannot be determined to which confession the author belonged. The text itself is often seen as the work of an editor stitching together two preexisting apocalypses, but there is no scholarly agreement on the date of the final text. The Syriac text is preserved in at least sixteen manuscripts, all quite late. Additionally, there is an Arabic recension preserved in a single late manuscript. The Syriac version has been published several times and translated into English.
Title and genre The title supplied to the Apocalypse by the scribes is some variant of "the question that Ezra asked when he was in the desert with his disciple", with Ezra often qualified as "the scribe" and the disciple named as "Carpus". The full Syriac title is Shēltā d-shēl ʿĀzrā sāprā kad hwā b-madbrā w-talmideh ʿameh da-shmeh Qarpus. Modern convention is to call the work the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Ezra, the Syriac Apocalypse of Ezra or the Syriac Esdras Apocalypse. Richard Gottheil calls it the Revelation of Ezra.
The work is classified as an apocalypse because it is a revelation about the future. It is firmly rooted in this world, however, and has nothing to say about heaven or hell. 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." Michael Stone classifies it as one of the "political" Ezra apocalypses, along with the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Ezra. The scribal title does not indicate the work as an apocalypse or vision. The explicit or superscription, however, identifies the work as "the vision of Ezra the scribe". 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"). The title and the explicit are rubricated (i.e., in red ink) in the manuscript Mingana 11.
Synopsis The Apocalypse takes up only about seven pages in the manuscripts. It begins in the third person, describing how Ezra asked God to reveal what will happen in "the end times of the Ishmaelites", a Christian term for Arabs or Muslims. The text then switches to the first person as Ezra describes what he read and saw in a series of visions. 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 rest of text can be divided into two sets of visions. The visions themselves consist of "very obscure" and "bewildering" animal imagery.
First part In the first vision, a serpent with twelve horns on its head and nine smaller horns on its tail comes up from the desert to devour all of creation. An angel dressed in flames tears off its twelve horns, fulfilling the "prophecy of Moses" (Genesis ). A great horn then springs up from the tail, having two small horns of its own. An eagle from the south then devours all the horns, but a whirlwind tears off its two talons.
A viper then comes from the east, poisoning everything "up to the border of the Promise" (probably the Promised Land). 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." They are released. Ravens from the east attack the viper, which flees to Egypt with its two "chicks". At the behest of the younger chick, the lion cub sends for the leopard of the south to protect the vipers.
Second part A bull with three horns, who is the king of the ravens, is ravaging the land of the west. 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." The youngest viper will then lead an army from Tarqono (possibly Trachonitis or Thrace) to ravage Damascus while his father leads an army of the Kushites to ravage Egypt.
The lion cub will ravage the land of the ravens from Antioch to the east. A leopard leading a people like locusts out of the north meets the lion cub at the Euphrates to march on Persia. The bull meets them and the lion cub breaks off its horns. 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.
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. After this, "the four winds of heaven will be stirred up" and Earth will descend into civil war. God sends "a fearsome angel [to] take hold of the point of the destroying sword" and end the tribulation.
Then "the children of the north ... will go out from the house of Gog and Magog" to commit new atrocities. Two tribes of Ishmaelites and "those who have become sooty at the base of the mountain of the south" go up to Jerusalem and are destroyed by the archangel Michael. "At that time a year is like a month, a month like a week, a week like a day, and a day like an hour." The false messiah will then appear. He will kill Enoch and Elijah on the altar. Finally, angels will cast the Son of Perdition into Gehenna.
Interpretation 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. It does, however, contain genuine prophecy (predictions) about the future.
According to Robert Hoyland, the first part "is too terse to be sure of its meaning." Michael Stone likens it to the four empires of Daniel. 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. He identifies the animals with a sequence of Islamic dynasties. The serpent is the Umayyads, the eagle the Abbasids, the viper the Fatimids and the four kings the various Turk dynasties. The lion cub represents the Crusaders. The geography of Pseudo-Ezra, however, does not match the supposed source and is historically inaccurate. The historical Fatimids are associated with Egypt (not the east) and the Abbasids with the east (not south). Likewise, the Crusaders never took Damascus, although this may reflect an actual prediction of the author.
According to Bousset and Hoyland, the second part recounts the Roman–Sasanian War of 602–628. The bull is the Sasanian king Khosrow II, the lion cub the Roman emperor Heraclius and the leopard the latter's Turkish allies. On this view, the text is not a unity, but a compilation, with the latter part having been composed first and the first part later grafted onto it. The bull is not mentioned in the first part. The reference to him as "king of the ravens" suggests an attempt to knit together two independent texts. In the first part, the native Syriac word for "leopard" is used, but in the second part the word translated "leopard" is a Greek borrowing.
Lisbeth Fried, treating the text as a unitary composition, regards the bull as the Ishmaelites and the lion cub as the Messiah. The "seven hills" probably refers to the Seven Hills of Rome and the "great city of Constantine" is the city of Constantinople. 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.
Sources and influences The basic setting of the Apocalypse comes from 4 Ezra. The latter was "the oldest and most popular of Ezra pseudepigrapha" and its portrayal of Ezra, rather than that of the biblical Book of Ezra, is the basis for the Syriac Apocalypse. The Apocalypse draws heavily on the Book of Revelation and the Book of Daniel, but also the four canonical Gospels,See the notes to the translation at . the Book of Ezekiel, and the epistles of Romans and 2 Thessalonians. The biblical language used is that of the standard Syriac bible, the Peshitta.
The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Ezra was influenced, directly or indirectly, by the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius. 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. Three distinctive features of the Arabic Apocalypse of Peter are also present in some form in Pseudo-Ezra: a messianic lion cub, twelve kings followed by nine little kings and the rebuilding of the walls of Phoenicia. There are other less distinctive commonalities. The textual relationship between the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Ezra and the Apocalypse of Peter is unclear because the latter has not been comprehensively studied. It may be that the latter is based on the former.
Date There is no agreement among scholars on the date of the Apocalypse. 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. The earliest surviving manuscript is no earlier than the late 17th century. Between these dates, Assemani placed its composition shortly after the fall of Constantinople (1453).
In an 1887 study, 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. His proposals have not gained acceptance. 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. In 1896, Bousset, settled on a date after the First Crusade (1095–1099).
Robert Hoyland believes that it is the work of a redactor who combined two apocalypses into a single work using Revelation and Daniel to plug gaps. Like Bousset, Hoyland accepts a late date for the final redaction, situating it in the context of the Fatimid–Seljuk wars of the late 11th century or the Fatimid–Ayyubid wars of the late 12th century.: "the contest between the Fatimids and Seljuk or Mamluk Turks in the late eleventh and late twelfth centuries respectively." , when mentioning Hoyland's dating, refers to "the 12th–13th centuries". He argues that a focus on Egypt and the use of Revelation both point to a late rather than early medieval date. 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. Both Hoyland and Bousset, accept an early 7th-century date for the original apocalypse on which the second part is based.