Precisely because apocalyptic writing ventured into two dubious areas, mystical speculation and political subversion, many ordinary Jews would have regarded it with suspicion or distaste. As with the Qumran Scrolls, we cannot assume that because we possess a first-century text everyone in the first century possessed it too. The apocalyptic writings do not automatically reveal ‘what all Jews thought’; they provide evidence for possible directions that Jewish thought could take, under certain specific circumstances.
