This article develops Marshall Hodgson’s initial observations concerning the affinities between the theologies of Paul of Tarsus and the Nizari Ismaili declaration of the qiyāma, or resurrection, of 1164. In both theologies we find potent expressions of apocalypticism. I examine various features of this apocalypticism, including how divine disclosures reorganized sacred history, temporality and soteriology. I also pay particular attention to the hermeneutical mechanisms involved in the reconstruction of religious authority. In both situations, we see how apocalypticism accorded a new and lasting genealogy to followers of these divine disclosures while locating the salvific figure as the epicenter of an existence that exclusively spans this world and the next.
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