The Apocalypse of Abraham is a a text from Palestine in the late first century or early second century. It tells a tale about Abraham, who in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is the first person to worship the one true God. In this strange text, God sends a crystalline emissary to Abraham and shows the man a vision of the future end of the world. There were many such visions of the End of Days written in this period; the New Testament’s Book of Revelation is the best known today. The weirdest part of the Apocalypse of Abraham is an enigmatic figure—part Messiah and part Antichrist—who is a great launching point for a high-level adventure.
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And a special thank-you to Kenny Bendiksen, a doctoral student of the Apocalypse of Abraham.
One of the things that makes the Apocalypse of Abraham so neat and open to interpretation is its convoluted history. The oldest copies we have today are in Old Church Slavonic, but the Apocalypse was not originally a Slavonic text. It was written in Hebrew (a few scholars think Aramaic) sometime between 70 A.D. and the middle of the second century. The author was definitely in the Jewish cultural sphere and may have been Christian; scholars disagree on the second point.
At some point, the text was translated into Greek, probably very literally. The literalness of the Greek translation preserved a great deal of the rhetorical and literary character of the original, and even many of its grammatical structures—at the cost of making the text much harder to understand. If you’re curious, I’ve got a little more on the literalness of the Greek as an addendum at the end of this post.
Because Greek was the shared language of the eastern Mediterranean, Greek copies of the Apocalypse of Abraham circulated among the literati of the region. At some point, one of these Greek copies was translated into Old Church Slavonic, at the time the liturgical language of several of the Orthodox churches of eastern and southeastern Europe. There are different proposed dates for this translation, but the most fun is the 893–927 reign of Tsar Simeon I the Great of Bulgaria. Simeon’s conquests vastly expanded the borders of Bulgaria. He wanted to make his church more important too, to make it the equal of Constantinople. To attract both scholars and scholarly credibility, he ordered vast quantities of religious texts translated from Greek (the language of Constantinople) into Slavonic.
The six surviving Slavonic manuscripts of the Apocalypse of Abraham are copies of copies of copies. The oldest is from the 1200s. They all differ from one another. Some of these differences are copying accidents, but the bigger differences sure look like intentional changes. Devout Christian copyists inserted paragraphs (perhaps even an entire chapter) to bring the text more in line with Orthodox theology.
At least one copyist in the chain was a Bogomil, and a little Bogomil theology made its way in—though we cannot be sure whether into the Greek version from which the Slavonic was translated or an early Slavonic manuscript from which the surviving six manuscripts were copied. Much of Bogomil belief is hazy to us now, but they seem to have held a belief like that of the Gnostics and the Cathars that the creator of the world is evil, but is opposed by an all-good, anti-material God. A few lines in the Apocalypse of Abraham stand out for, unlike the rest of the text, they proclaim that the God of Abraham is an evil deity.
Before I talk about the Apocalypse’s view of the end times, I want to touch first on its framing device. The Apocalypse depicts Abraham as the son of a man who made idols and worshipped them. Abraham recognized that these idols were not gods and, dissatisfied with the religion of his father, cried out in search of the true “God of gods.” God appeared to Abraham in the form of a stream of fire that burned Abraham’s idolatrous father and his house. Abraham was terrified. God had to send the angel Yahoel (also spelled Iaoel) to comfort him.
Yahoel appeared to Abraham as a sort of crystal man. His body was like sapphire, his face like peridot, and his hair like snow. His cap was like a rainbow (which you could interpret as a crystalline prism), and he carried a golden staff.
Serving as Abraham’s guide to the things God wanted him to see fell under Yahoel’s duty “to teach those who carry the song through the in the middle of man’s night.” Yahoel also ordered Abraham’s dad’s death: he had the job of opening Hell to those who worshipped dead objects. Yahoel’s other duties were considerably more cosmic. He kept the leviathans of the sea from attacking people, and could subjugate the menace of any reptile. And when cherubim—those four-faced angels from the Book of Ezekiel—wanted to attack one another, Yahoel restrained them.
On Abraham’s journey to the site of his vision, he was also accompanied by the demon Azazel, who tried to scare Abraham away from this vision quest. In his initial appearance, Azazel took the form of a spiritually unclean bird. Later he appeared as a twelve-winged dragon with hands and feet like a man’s. Yahoel taught Abraham an invocation to drive off Azazel, but since Azazel was able to continue hanging around and being spooky, the invocation didn’t seem particularly effective.
This brings us to Abraham’s vision of the apocalypse itself. The author of the Apocalypse of Abraham set the End of Days in the very days in which he was writing. But since Abraham’s vision occurred long, long ago, the author’s description of current events (like the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem) is conveyed as prophecy.
One of those current events is a figure described a lot like Jesus. When the author of the Apocalypse was writing, Christianity was a fast-growing sect coming from Judaism but spreading beyond it, and starting to look like a thing unto itself.
Chapter 29 of the Apocalypse of Abraham describes a crowd of descendants of Abraham—that is, people whom the author saw as Jewish. But the crowd had lost the faith of their forefathers. From among them emerged a man. A great many in the crowd worshipped the man. Others in the crowd insulted him, struck him, or shamed him. All this lines up with depictions of Jesus in the Gospels. The demon Azazel worshipped the man and kissed his face, which doesn’t so much. The text also includes some vague language about the Messiah, about tests sent by God, and about plagues for those who fail those tests. It’s unclear which choice (embracing or rejecting this man) God wants you to make.
Scholars have many conflicting interpretations of what the author meant by this passage. We know the Apocalypse of Abraham has been changed by motivated parties and mutilated by at least one bad translator. What portions of the vision of the insulted-and-worshipped man come from which authors, copyists, and translators is tricky to hash out.
One interpretation is that large chunks of chapter 29 were added by later Christian interpolators. They wanted more Jewish texts from the era of the early church that portrayed Jesus as Messiah, so they added imagery that matched the Gospels. That bit about Azazel kissing and worshipping the insulted-and-worshipped man might be a later addition by a Bogomil to make Jesus look bad. It might be transposed from somewhere else in the text by a copyist’s error. Or it might be a detail from an older version of the text, when this section was about somebody else, and the Christian redactors left it in accidentally.
Another interpretation is that chapter 29 is actually talking about two different people: a wicked Jesus and a separate, still-awaited Messiah. The Slavonic text presents the insulted-and-worshipped man as one person. But if you change some of the verb conjugations in the Slavonic text, you get an awkward rhetorical device to contrast the wicked false Messiah with the awaited real one. Scholars who advocate for this position argue that the delicate practice of distinguishing between the two figures by verb conjugation got lost somewhere in the janky translation process. In this interpretation, the original author can then be seen as a conservative Jewish religious leader angry at this newfangled Christianity and confident they’ll get theirs when the real Messiah comes. The awkwardness of the rhetorical device could come from the translators, the copyists, or merely the original author not exactly being Shakespeare.
There are other ways you could spin this. Chapter 29 could be the result of generations of copyists and translators adding details or making small changes to clarify what they think the point of the chapter is, and thereby producing the total mess we see today. I think the most gameable option is that the mocked-and-worshipped man is his own figure, neither Messiah nor Antichrist, but with characteristics of both.
In your fictional campaign setting, the Apocalypse of Abraham is a mangled prophecy whose meaning no one can agree on. It describes three important beings: Yahoel, Azazel, and the insulted-and-worshipped man. While the prophecy is about an important religious founder-hero (your Abraham-analogue), it’s not by him, so it never got a huge amount of attention.
Then your high-level party hears word of charismatic new religious leader. He’s particularly popular with folks descended from the relevant prophet, but who no longer follow the faith their ancestor founded. Other lapsed folks from that background absolutely despise this guy. The parallels with the enigmatic figure in the prophecy are obvious. Yet the prophecy is so mangled that you can’t tell if he’s a real Messiah or the exact opposite.
Have the party be approached by leaders in this religious community—a community to which some PCs might or might not have ties—begging them to resolve the truth of the prophecy. Promise cool rewards and favors owed for resolving this perplexing issue. It’s important that the party’s goal is to inform the religious elders, not the world. The latter would be a TTRPG adventure about being a missionary, and I can’t imagine anything more excruciating.
If the fundamental question is what the author of the prophecy intended, the party needs to develop new sources. If you could figure this out with time in the library, somebody would have cracked this mystery a thousand years ago. No, the party has to track down something wild. Maybe a crank who claims to have invented a device to look backwards in time—but space aliens made off with the flux capacitor! Maybe a single family preserved the Bogomil faith as a secret oral tradition, but is now on trial for heresy and will only share the Bogomil history of the text if the party gets them acquitted. Maybe the party gets wind of a vampire or a Daoist immortal who was in the area way back when the prophecy was written. He might have discussed it with the author back in the day—or he remembers some obsessive chronicler from the era whose scrolls got zoinked into the astral plane. Of course this witness doesn’t like company, so just reaching them will be a challenge, to say nothing to getting them to agree to talk. Introduce sources that tie into elements in the backstories of different PCs and connect to recurring NPCs (both allied and opposed).
There’s no need to decide whether the insulted-and-worshipped man is a false Messiah or a real one until the party is well into the adventure. Watch your players and figure out which option they seem more excited by. That’s the one that’s true.
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All through this search, the party is bedeviled by interference and obstacles introduced by zealots on both sides of this religious schism. Both sides are worried the religious elders will reach the wrong conclusion about whatever the PCs find and the elders will guide people away from the truth (as that side sees it), so it’s perhaps better to waylay the PCs or destroy that which the party seeks. Though the two factions have the same goal, they refuse to work together, so the PCs can play them off one another, or else find that the hard work the party did to neutralize one faction has done nothing to get rid of the other.
Along the way, the PCs can uncover that the factions opposing them have supernatural help. Regardless of whether this Messiah’s the real deal or not, Azazel won’t want the religious elders to know for sure. The party might want to enlist Yahoel’s help against Azazel. Unfortunately, Yahoel is busy. Either the cherubim are threatening civil war or the leviathans are rowdy (or both!), but until the party helps Yahoel with his business, the gemstone angel won’t have the time to counter Azazel. Even if the party helps him, Yahoel won’t tell them the truth of the prophecy. Regardless of the truth, the insulted-and-worshipped man is intended as a test for mortal members of this religion. It’s not Yahoel’s place to tell anyone the answers to the test.
Another wrinkle you can throw in is that the original text of the prophecy is not the truest one. Some of the changes introduced by translation and scribal error were actually divinely inspired, and brought the prophecy closer to its truest meaning. Determining which changes were good and which were bad requires tracking down more outlandish sources tied to the PCs’ backstories and tracking down more NPCs from earlier in the campaign.
That said, don’t linger on any of this. Keep the story moving. This whole business is intentionally over-the-top. Quickly bounce from one piece of nonsense to the next.
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Sources:
– Apocalypse of Abraham: A New Translation and Introduction by Ryszard Rubiniewicz in Charlesworth’s Old Testament Pseudepigrapha
– I also used this translation of the Apocalypse by Professor Alexander Kulik: https://www.marquette.edu/maqom/kuliktranslation.html
– Personal correspondence with Kenny Bendiksen, a doctoral student of the Apocalypse
A note on translations:
What do I mean when I say the Greek translation was amateurishly literal? Languages don’t just differ in having different words for the same things, they order and connect things differently and put different words together. For example, the Apocalypse uses a phrase that’s something like “It was heavy of a big stone.” This makes no more sense in Slavonic than it does in English. But if you do a literal, word-for-word translation of the phrase back into the Hebrew or Aramaic of the late first century, you wind up with a pretty good approximation of how you’d say “heavier than a big stone.” Or so we are assured by Professor Rubinkiewicz, anyway.
From this we can assume the scribe who first translated the Apocalypse into Greek was probably doing something like looking at each Hebrew word in turn and writing down its Greek equivalent. If the resulting sentences weren’t entirely sensical, well, nobody’s perfect. The later scribe who translated the Greek into Slavonic couldn’t always decipher the original author’s intent through the bad first translation, and so either had to make their best guess or do a word-for-word literal translation themselves.
The thorniness of the chapter 29 question can be deceptive to the casual reader. The question is so important to the whole Apocalypse of Abraham that every scholar who’s produced an English translation of the Apocalypse has had to write chapter 29 such that the figure in it can be identified by the reader. For example, in the case of the Kulik translation linked above, Kulik favors the hypothesis that chapter 29 is describing two different figures, so it’s a lot easier to read the Kulik translation that way than, say, the Rubinkiewicz translation.
(Finally, was any of this any good? I put so much time into it I can’t not publish it, but it’s a kitchen sink adventure about the difficulties of translation!)