This meant that ‘apocalyptic’ could be seen as far closer to Gnosticism than was really warranted by the evidence (see below); that it could be uprooted from its context as part of Israel’s national expectation; and that it could thus function as a history-of-religions explanation for (say) Pauline theology, in a way which allowed quite a bit of the previous theory, that of derivation from Gnosticism, to remain in place.18 That is why, no doubt, an insistence on the ‘imminent expectation’ of the end of the space-time world plays a vital and non-negotiable part in some such readings of the New
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