Anti-Imperial Subtexts in Paul 325 veracity. They understood the statement as a reference to Daniel’s prophecy (this is, of course, explicit in Matthew), which they believed had yet to be fulfilled. According to Luke, whose handling of the material is quite different from that of Matthew and Mark (Luke 21,20-21), this would happen when armies surrounded Jerusalem. Writing when he did, either immediately before or in the aftermath of the fall of Jerusalem, there can be no question that Luke understood these armies to be Vespasian’s legions. c. Eusebius relates in his account of the fall of Jerusalem that “the people of the church in Jerusalem had been commanded by a revelation, vouchsafed to approved men there before the war, to leave the city and to dwell in a certain town of Perea called Pella” (Hist. eccl. 3.5.3). While it cannot be definitively proven that the revelation he mentions is identical with the synoptic logion, Eusebius’ account does, at the very least, presuppose the presence of an authoritative tradition in the Jerusalem church on the basis of which a directive to leave the city would have been taken seriously. This brief look at the Wirkungsgeschichte of three prophetic traditions from the book of Daniel shows how profound their influence was on the eschatological conceptions of Jews in the late Second Temple period. This should remind us that the contemporaries of Jesus and Paul did not cut a new eschatological narrative out of whole cloth. One was already firmly in place, and it should not be confused with the often apolitical eschatological conceptions of modern Western Christianity. First-century Jews believed they were living during the time of Daniel’s fourth kingdom, which they identified with Rome. They eagerly awaited the end of Rome’s hegemony and its replacement by God’s eternal kingdom and were convinced that the time allotted by God for Daniel’s fourth kingdom was drawing to its conclusion. The followers of Jesus cherished a prophetic logion they believed to be from him, warning them to beware of a future manifestation of the “abomination of desolation”, understood as the desecration of the Temple, and they observed Rome’s encroachment on Jerusalem with wary eyes accordingly. III. Evidence of Danielic Eschatological Concepts in Paul All of this is, of course, generally known. Various Third-Questers have raised our awareness of the Jewish apocalyptic flavor of late Second Temple eschatological concepts, and many long-held tenets of