Joseph A. Marchal,’s chapter examines the unexpected value of two ancient apocalyptic perspectives for rearranging queer approaches to temporality, affect, history, and the bible. Carolyn Dinshaw’s imaginative conceptualization of a “touch across time” provides a frame for staging this anachronistic juxtaposition between the first and twentieth century. Thus, after surveying key insights from queer theorists of temporality like Elizabeth Freeman, Lee Edelman, and José Esteban Muñoz, this chapter turns to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, an exchange stuffed with alternative futures of the past. While Paul insists upon one apocalyptic vision of “not yet,” his letter indicates that the Corinthian women prophets lived and moved out of an alternative, if overlapping apocalyptic vision in their “already.” Both ancient parties engage in contingent varieties of temporal drag and of a critique of reproductive futurity, but the prophetic females are proceeding at a different velocity. Their prayer, prophecy, and withdrawal from social expectations around sex, marriage, and children register significant changes in a relatively short period of time. Greater attention to these changes provides a prophetic sort of apocalyptic praxis, long marginalized and dismissed, yet potentially resonating, if not exactly corresponding, to other more recent orientations to temporality, activism, and urgency in a time like now.
