Revelation was not alone. Apocalyptic literature was a whole genre with rules of its own: a seer, an angel who explains what he is seeing, a tour of places the living do not visit, and a verdict at the end. These articles follow that genre outside the canon, where it went on being written for centuries.

The most substantial survivor is 2 Esdras, and its eschatology wrestles with a question Revelation avoids: why the righteous suffer at all. The eagle vision inside it is a coded description of the Roman empire, written by someone who had watched the temple burn.

The tours are more graphic. The Apocalypse of Peter is the first Christian text to describe punishments in detail, and much of what medieval hell looked like begins there. The Apocalypse of Elijah assembles antichrist prophecies that later writers borrowed without attribution.

Two texts sit at the edge of the genre and are worth the detour: the Assumption of Moses preserves a dispute between Michael and the devil over a body, quoted in the letter of Jude, and the martyrdom of Isaiah tells how a prophet was sawn in two. For the apocalypse that shaped all of them, read The Book of Revelation with its commentary.