Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium - Hardcover

Katz, David S.; Popkin, Richard H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809068850 ISBN 13: 9780809068852

Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub, 1999

Synopsis

Two historians explore how fringe beliefs and those who follow them have been carried through the last one thousand years and offer reasons for the strong hold apocalyptic thinking has had on people living in the New World.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

On April 19,1993, at least seventy-four people lost their lives near Waco, Texas, in the confrontation between the followers of David Koresh and the federal agents outside his compound. These groups, clearly, inhabited two different conceptual worlds. Two years later, the Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed by people who related the act to what had happened in Waco. Yet both then and now, it seemed that neither journalists nor law-enforcement experts nor the public was aware of the rich tradition of messianic, revolutionary politics behind groups like Koresh's, a history that stretches back, unbroken, to the early Middle Ages.

In this fascinating study, two historians explore that tradition, showing how the beliefs of many fringe, distressed, disenfranchised, or purely mystical Christians and Jews have been transmitted across a millennium. Professors David Katz and Richard Popkin's Messianic Revolution offers a strong and lucid explanation of why and how this apocalyptic strain found especially fertile ground in the New World, and it throws new light on the many strands of biblical interpretation, both Jewish and Christian, that are woven into this complex, fascinating history.

About the Author

David S. Katz received his B.A. from Columbia University and his D.Phil. from Oxford University. Since 1978 he has been professor of history at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of six books on the history of religious ideas and their political effects. He lives in Tel Aviv.

Richard H. Popkin is professor emeritus of philosophy at Washington University and adjunct professor of philosophy and history at UCLA. He is the author of many books, including The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza. He lives in Pacific Palisades, California.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0809068850
• ISBN 13: 9780809068852
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 303