Apocalypse of the Alien God. Dylan M. Burns

a peculiar “register,” a way of writing that strongly contrasts not just with sapiential literature but with the tone and idiom of Greek philosophy.¹⁰¹

      Altogether, the remarkable claims to authority made in apocalyptic literature, advanced by means of narrative traditions and pseudepigraphic authorship, are designed to quell any doubts a potential reader may have about the topic at hand, whatever it might be.¹⁰² Christopher Rowland remarks that this rhetoric tries to create a sense of “unmediated” or “direct” access to knowledge, but all apocalypses actually are transmitted (i.e., mediated) by an otherworldly figure.¹⁰³ What he seems to mean is that the “apocalyptic technique” is designed to assure the reader of the complete veracity of a worldview or set of propositions. While it is indeed mediated by narrative devices and characters, this worldview or conceptual set is assigned a truth value that is entirely positive, pure, and undistilled. In the context of 4 Ezra and other apocalypses that deal with historical issues, this technique is consoling. In the context of Platonic epistemology, it is an extraordinary subversion of ordinary means of accessing knowledge.

      WHAT IS A GOOD STORY?

      Plotinus charges the Sethian apocalypses with being “fictions,” πλάσματα; Porphyry uses the same word, with the sense of “forgery.” In the context of Middle Platonism, the use of frame narrative, developed characters, and supernatural mythologoumena set the Sethian apocalypses in the realm of “fictions” (πλάσματα), together with “myths.” The Platonizing treatises’ use of the genre “apocalypse” is radical, because most Platonists of the period did not compose fiction or myths: they interpreted them, usually with allegory. This method was warranted by a Platonic epistemology that interpreted images as faulty, shadowy representations of heavenly realities. The philosophical contemporaries of the authors of the Sethian texts did think stories (myths) or fiction could “be good” (i.e., contain truths), but only if they were interpreted properly—that is, under the aegis of παιδεία, following training in philosophy and cult.