The prophecy that time will end soon is, paradoxically, one of the longest-lived convictions of Christian tradition. Jesus enters history proclaiming the proximity of God's kingdom (Mark 1.14, a gospel written perhaps c. 70 c.e. but narratively framed by the year c. 30 c.e.); and his glorious Second Coming, linked with the Kingdom's advent, is conjured in the New Testament's closing lines (‘Come, Lord Jesus!’ Revelation 22.20). As time continued not to end, various expectations accrued. Why God's delay? First, the Gospel had to be preached to all nations (Mt. 28.19–20). An anti-Christ figure need first appear (2 Thess. 2.1–16). Social and celestial catastrophes would presage these events (Mark 13 and parallels). ‘Where is the promise of his coming?’ asked some weary believers finally, in the early second century, ‘For ever since our fathers died, all things continue as they have been since the beginning of creation’ (2 Peter 3.4). That very question, said the author of this pseudonymous letter, itself indicated the arrival of ‘the last days’ (3.3). And besides, God's time was not human time: for him, one day was like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day (3.8). The Kingdom, then, was not really late; it only seemed late. Nearly nineteen centuries later, expectation of Christ's imminent second coming still burns bright: the Left Behind books, serialized fictions about the travails preceding the Kingdom, have sold over sixty-three million copies.

Wars and rumours of wars; anti-Christ and then Christ triumphant; cosmic battle between good and evil, the bodily resurrection of the saints to rise with Christ and reign in Jerusalem for a thousand years; a general resurrection and final judgement — as time continued, elaborations on eschatological events accrued. And ‘science’ took over: some sages calculated chronologies synching history's end to the age of the world. Only in the six thousandth year since the Creation (annus mundi) would the millennial reign of the saints with Christ begin. By Augustine's lifetime (354–430 c.e.), such calculations placed the Kingdom's commencement sometime between the correlating years 400 and 500 c.e. Augustine himself, in short, lived and taught in a temporal ‘hot zone’ of apocalyptic expectation.

The twelve essays assembled in the present volume (several of which are reprints of earlier publications) examine from various vantage-points the ways in which Augustine, and later traditions ascribed to him, dealt with this fact. The Introduction (1–6) carefully and clearly catalogues each author's contribution: I will not repeat these descriptions here. Some essays explore Augustine's principled anti-apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic teachings as theology (Coyle, Jungling and Wentzel, Kloos, Pollman, Teske); others, their after-lives in the medieval period (Gebarowski-Shafer, Hughes, and — from an intriguingly different point of view, offering a type of evidentiary counter-reading — Landes); others, their implied criticism of Roman pagan culture (Weibe); and still others, finally, their resonances in modern fiction and philosophy (Biebighauser, Howe, Kroeker).

No editorial final word sums up the whole, nor could one: the virtue of this scholarly florilegium is its breadth and variety. (The editors are to be commended for offering a thoughtful and generous general Bibliography, 229–39, and a focused and detailed subject index, 241–53, both of which enhance the volume's research utility.) For those hungry to know more about Augustine, about late Roman and medieval Christian theology, politics, and biblical exegesis, or about Christian millenarianism more generally, Augustine and Apocalyptic offers much food for thought.