I'm spamming, but this is actually quite cool

[tree_and_leaf]

... at least if you are interested in John Buchan (and if you aren't, I am pretty certain that he is more interesting than you realise)

I'm reading a book about traditions relating to Elijah and Enoch in the middle ages* (among other things, there is a tradition of E & E as two witnesses who will come back before the end of the world and by martyred by the forces of Anti-Christ. Bizarrely, this persists into the wild shores of pre-millenial dispensational eschatology, so "Left Behind" have the 'two prophets', though I cannot, off hand, remember if they are explicitly identified with E & E; I rather think not).

However, that wasn't what I wanted to observe, rather that there is a page on Muslim traditions, on which I have just made the following note:

31 Muslim trad. of Ghiser/ Khidr/ Khizrillias – ‘holiness’; can be Jesus, Mohammed or all prophets; or the companions of Elijah; or Elijah himself (cf Turkish name Khizrillias); always connection with prophecy; the word is related to the Arabic form of the name Elijah, Khidr. In one Turkish tradition (eg in 16th C poet Lamil) the Ghiser are green-clad guardians of the water of life.
32 And a few lines later Ghiser is Elijah himself.

GREENMANTLE! GREENMANTLE! JOHN BUCHAN IS MORE AWESOME THAN YOU!

* Witte, Maria Magdalena. 1987. Elias und Henoch als Exempel, typologische Figuren und apokalytische Zeugen: zu Verbindungen von Literatur u Theologie im Mittelalter. Frankfurt am Main/ Bern/ New York: Peter Lang.

Comments

[wychwood]

I'm pretty sure Left Behind calls them Moses and Elijah. Or, like, Moshe and Elihu or something like that. I could go and dig up my copy if you really care? *g*

[tree_and_leaf]

That rings a bell - but I couldn't ask you to go and look at that crap!

Huh. Odd typology. I suppose they're thinking of the Transfiguration (whereas the mediaevals were going on 'who got taken up to heaven in the body, and might thus be available to come back in the body') What I'm not yet clear about is where the two prophets/ witnesses come from.

[cheyinka]

Revelation 11:1-14 mentions two witnesses, who will prophesy for 1,260 days and not be harmed, then be killed by the beast from the abyss, and then be raised from the dead after 3 and a half days (and promptly either be assumed or ascend into heaven).

So if you're going for "witnesses sent by God", Moses and Elijah make sense, but if you're going for "have a habit of going bodily into heaven", Elijah and Enoch make sense.

The only other Christian novel about the end of the world with which I am familiar, Lord of the World, does not, that I recall, mention two witnesses, much less two witnesses who were unable to be harmed.

[kerravonsen]

GREENMANTLE! GREENMANTLE! JOHN BUCHAN IS MORE AWESOME THAN YOU!
Okay, I think I have a copy of that from Gutenberg, but I haven't read it (yet).