I move on now to discuss Revelation’s view of ruling the world.  If at the end of time God destroys everyone other than his followers, whom will they rule?  I begin by picking up my final question in the last post. ****************************** Where does the book of Revelation stand on the morality of domination?  There is really not much doubt.  When the catastrophes have run their course, Christ’s followers are granted world dominion. To understand what that might mean for John of Patmos we have to consider one of the stranger anomalies of his narrative.  After the wrath of God has been satisfied: what remains of the population of earth?  At the last judgment in ch. 20 everyone whose name does not appear in the “book of life” – that is, anyone who is not a follower of Jesus – is sent to the second death in “the lake of fire” (20:11-15). Doesn’t “everyone” mean everyone?   John stresses that it does: after earth’s entire non-Christian population is cast into the fiery lake, so too are [...]

I've been presenting a lecture I gave to a regional meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature recently on the violence of the book of Revelation.  In my previous post I talked about a passage that strikes me as excessively ugly, which discusses Jesus' treatment of the prophetess Jezebel (a Christian leader/teacher) from the church of Thyatira.   At this point in my lecture I move on from detailing aspects of the violence of the text to considering its significance. ****************************** Most of Revelation, of course, is not about what will happen to Christians that John considers wayward, but to those outside the church who suffer incomprehensible catastrophes and are eventually tossed alive into a lake of burning sulfur. But why would it have to be this way, even if God is just and decides to avenge his persecuted or even martyred followers and to wipe out the masses of the ungodly?  Couldn’t he simply give them a simultaneous and fatal coronary?  Or just disintegrate them with a cosmic ray gun?  Not for John.  The wrath [...]

One argument used to support the idea that the controlling image of Christ in the narrative is the lamb who was slain is that this is how he is introduced in his very first appearance in the book.  Anything that follows must therefore be read in light of this introductory image.  The problem is that this claim is simply not true.  Christ first appears not in chapter 5 as the sacrificial lamb but in chapter 1 as “one like a Son of Man,” (1:13) that is, as the cosmic judge of the earth referred to in Daniel 7, who destroys God's enemies and their rule.  In this opening vision Christ is dressed in a white robe and gold sash, just as the mighty angels who will later pour out the bowls of God’s wrath (15:6).  But he is far mightier than these earth-destroyers.  His hair is white, not to show that he is old and decrepit but to reveal that he is the One who has ruled from eternity past (see Daniel 7:9), the “alpha [...]

In my previous post I started giving the lecture I gave recently to a group of professional biblical scholars about how my views of Revelation have changed.  After thinking that the book predicted our future (I gave up on that one forty years ago!) I began to think that the book was a positive message for true followers.  In this reading – which I held for many, many years -- the point of the book is that God is sovereign, just, and loving toward his faithful, and in the end truth will prevail.  Above all, Revelation is a book of hope.   I no longer see it that way and am a bit surprised I did for so many years.  The book of Revelation is not principally about hope, let alone the love of God.  Words for hope -- ελπις / ελπιζω – occur some 80 times in the New Testament, but not once in this book.  And God himself is never said to love his followers in this book and they are never referred [...]

Have you ever wondered why fundamentalists are adamant Zionists?  (Did you know they were and historically always have been?)  It seems to outsiders a bizarre mystery: you love Israel but you hate Jews?  Well, OK, you say you love Jews, but how exactly do you show it?  By supporting Israel, I guess.  But Israel is a nation and the Jews are individual people, most of whom have nothing to do with the state of Israel, at least directly.  And even if you do love individual Jews, let’s be realistic here: you think that even though God is in favor of Israel, all the Jews will be going straight to hell.  What’s that all about? Many fundamentalists, of course, believe that Jews in the end will be saved.  But not while remaining faithful Jews.  They will convert to become followers of Jesus.  So they will be saved as Christians, not as Jews.  Those who don’t convert, even the heroes of modern-day Israel, well… sorry.. If God is opposed to non-Christian Jews, why is he pro-non-Christian Israel?  [...]

In this thread I have been discussing the importance of putting the book of Revelation in its own historical context instead of transplanting its (bizarre) symbols and message into the 21st century, as if the author was trying to communicate not with the churches that he actually names as the recipients of his book (in Asia Minor at the end of the first century) but with us (in America in the twenty-first).  Instead of modern interpretations (666 is Saddam Hussein!  The Whore of Babylon is the Roman Catholic Church!), surely it is better to interpret the book in light of what the author and his audience would have themselves understood. That can be illustrated many times over from the book; for this post I would like to do so by returning to one of the key images that I have posted about several times before.  Apologies if this is old news for you from a relatively recent post, but to make my point about the book of Revelation as a whole, this is the most relevant and [...]

I have been arguing that if we want to understand the book of Revelation, we need to situate it in its own historical context in the Roman Empire of the first century rather than assume it is talking about our own world in the twenty-first.  Very few people read it that way, of course (or are interested in reading it that way).   It's far more intriguing to think the author was predicting what would happen in our own future.  It's ALL COMING TRUE!  God has REVEALED IT TO US!  We can NOW SEE THE SIGNS OF THE END! But, alas, like every other book of the Bible, Revelation was written to address an ancient audience in a different context, and its bizarre symbols need to be read with their own context front and center in mind.   Here is how I sometimes try to illustrate the problem. (Parts of this are taken from my book The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings; Oxford University Press; 7th ed.) ****************************** One of the most [...]