Why include a book so hostile to the Roman Empire when Christians were actively recruiting Roman citizens, soldiers, politicians into the movement by then ?
The standard answer is that Revelation was in house literature…for hardcore xtians only…
Sooo, if its in house lit – why was it include it in the canon for all the world to be told what a monster the Roman Empire was ?
When your still trying to convert the Roman Empire…
Doesn’t make any sense to me…
My only guess is that the Empire was already so nervous about its failing strength, cracking at the seams, enemies at the gates…and Christianity had grown so strong – many Romans had become disenchanted with the Status Quo…
that Athanasius and his allies sensed that weakness – and just said F it. F it. Its going in.
Opinions Welcome I am Here To Learn !
My take on it, and I’ve never heard anything that supports it, is that Revelation was originally a special book for John the Baptist’s teachings and also prophesies for today. John was a diviner and a prophet. The reason I know that John was a diviner is because his descendants are the Mandaeans, who claim to be the original Nazoreans or Nazarites of the first century. It is spelled Nazarene in the Bible, or Nazareth. They know that John was a diviner. They are hostile to Jesus, claiming that he is a thief, a liar and that Jesus stole the teachings.
Oh, I know that scholars have suggested other Johns such as of Patmos, or one of the disciples, or St. John, but no one knows who this John is. I believe that John’s teachings were changed so that no hint of divination information was left. It was all supposed to be from God, you see.
I believe in the beginning, faithful Roman Christians wanted a special book dedicated to John to preserve his teachings. I even think I saw an old Bible that said Revelations by John the Divine, and I take it have originally translated as John the Diviner. But maybe my mind is playing tricks on me. I hope not, but it was so long ago.
So you ask, why is John so hostile. Why, because, John was hostile to the Romans when he was alive. He gave fiery speeches against the Romans. After all, they killed him, and it didn’t happen that he became targeted and killed all of a sudden. Antagonisms from the Romans, the Sanhedrin, the Pharisees, were ongoing before his death. James McGrath of Patheos (you’ll find Patheos on the internet), has translated some of John’s talks from Arabic into English. But then, how is it possible to have dialogues from John the Baptist? The answer is, they were written in the name of John, by his descendants the Mandaeans. Reading them is a bit of a shock because we are so used to modern English. We are prepared to think John is going to sound like Jesus because they were cousins. Then you read John the Baptist in Arabic and there is nothing familiar.
Steve Clark said
Why include a book so hostile to the Roman Empire when Christians were actively recruiting Roman citizens, soldiers, politicians into the movement by then ?The standard answer is that Revelation was in house literature…for hardcore xtians only…
You nailed it. Revelation is hardcore scriptural porn. Not in the Song of Solomon sense, but in the graphical apocalyptic sense. As Ehrman has said, the New Testament was a codex, not a scroll. It was always a book in book form, and the last pages could be accessed directly without scrolling through the scroll. If you had such a book, you’d want something at the very end to go to first (as everyone seems to do!).
Some comments on the above
The books that would eventually be included in the New Testament, about which there was much debate, did not start out as part of a single codex. They were individual books (scrolls or codices, does not really matter). Revelation would not have started out as the end of a book. In fact there was much argument about whether it belonged at all lasting as late as the 4th century. Over a thousand years later Luther still expressed misgivings about it. This may be why it became the last book in the 4th century canon.
I agree that Revelation is for Christians. But then my opinion is that the entirety of the New Testament was directed toward those who were already Christians. The ‘recruiting tool’ theory does not wash with me. Each work is all about solving problems in the evolution of Christianity that arose over time or were introduced by prior works. But that is getting off topic.
I see Revelation as a last gasp attempt to revive belief in Jesus coming back any day now. This was implicit in Paul’s writings. Mark addressed the overlong delay by linking the beginning of the end of days to the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Matthew and Luke go along with this, but with big time disclaimers, although their works are really about different subjects. John gives up on it entirely, making no mention of the subject at all. It is just too late to be credible. Always clever Luke does a neat arabesque around it in the beginning of Acts. But John of Patmos – whoever he was – writing late in the 1st century, builds an elaborately dramatic ‘scare your pants off’ story incorporating every scrap of canonical and non-canonical literature that was or could be made into an end of days reference. This was woven into veiled allusions to late 1st century current events presented as prophecies. And it was all going to go down very soon. “Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near.”
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
1 Guest(s)