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Back to my possible trade book on the book of Revelation and the way it has affected not just modern conservative Christianity but also secular society (literature, film) and political policy (environmental legislation; second Amendment discussions; policy on the Middle East). In my description-to-myself of what I’m imagining the book to be, after discussing these various effects of Revelation, I start talking about Revelation itself, and how it came to be read as a blueprint for our future (a reading that seems so *natural* today, but is not how the book was read until the 19th century).
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Armageddon in the Book of Revelation
The thesis of my book is that all of these manifestations of apocalyptic thought in American discourse – religious, literary, cinematic, social, and political – ultimately stem from a particular way of reading the book of Revelation, a reading that, despite a few scattered precedents throughout history, came to the fore only at the end of the 19th century. Critical biblical scholars are unified in thinking it is based on entirely false premises.
The book of Revelation records a series of visions concerning what is “soon to take place,” given to a Christian prophet named John in exile on the Island of Patmos. The prophet is taken up to heaven itself, to the throne room of God, and there witnesses what will occur in both heaven and earth as history comes to its climax. These visions are (intentionally) mystifying, baffling, and highly symbolic, portraying divinely sanctioned catastrophes on earth — wars, famines, earthquakes, and the collapse of the entire universe — which, if taken literally, would destroy the entire world and everything on it, already a third of the way through the book (chapter 6)!
In the midst of the mind-boggling calamities, the ultimate enemy of God, called …
To see what happens next, you will need to belong to the blog. Don’t we all want to know what happens next? Why else read Revelation? Why else join the blog? Do both!
I understand why people thought the Book of the Revelation of St John was coming true in the 20s. First there was World War I and all the wars that sprung up in its wake – Eastern Europe was in constant turmoil for five years or so after the end of the war. Then there were all of the men who came home from the war – broken, disillusioned, many of them hooked on heroin, amphetamines or ridden with venereal diseases from the soldiers’ brothels. Then there was the Great Flu, an epidemic which killed more people than the war did, and preferably struck the young men who had managed to survive the war. And of course, in the wake of the war came wide-spread famines – we had bread riots in Sweden in 1917, and the Turnip Winter happened at the same time in Germany. War, Famine, Pestilence and ever-present Death? Sounds like the apocalypse to me.
I think the reason the Religious Right hasn’t picked up global warming as an apocalyptic scenario is that the question was seized by the Democrats with “An Inconvenient Truth.” It seems if one side of the aisle believes something is true, the other increasingly feels they must believe it is false.
Oh, I forgot. If you’re reading end-of-the-world novels, you should definitely look up “Good Omens” by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. It’s a parody of books and movies like “The Omen.” It is a wonderful send up of the genre, written by two genuine craftsmen at the height of their powers. Highly recommended.
thanks!
There were vague planes for a sequel called “668: The neighbour of the beast”, but unfortunately they never materialized.
Is there a book or two you would recommend on the history of the formation and rise of modern fundamentalism?
The classic is by George Marsden. Just look him up on Amazon.
In your research, have you encountered any psychologists weighing-in on the modern interpretations of Revelation?
There are a lot of them, but I don’t find them helpful, since the human psyche was very different in ancient cultures so removed from our own.
This is the first time I’ve seen the term “Anglo-English.” To what does it refer?
I suppose as opposed to American-English. As an American married to a Brit, I can attest there are significant differences.
Every day recently on the way to work in Raleigh I pass a large semi-permanent tent structure with a sign outside, “REVELATION SPEAKS PEACE!” Apparently a 7th-day Adventist enterprise, who persist even though Ellen G White clearly got her dates wrong. Fortunately I grew up Lutheran before becoming Restoration (Church of Christ/Christian Church) so I never got caught up in the end times mania. Dr. E, why do you think some fundamentalist churches got caught up in the rapture mania but not others (like the Restoration movement)?
It’s an intriguing question. And as often happens, I have no clue!
The scariest verse in the Bible is Revelation 22:20 which says, in part, “Come Lord Jesus!”
Would you sort out for us the distinction between 19th century ‘Darbyism’ and the ancient expectation of the imminent return of Jesus?
Darbyism utilized that older expectation but built it into an entire system; look up millenial dispensationalism and you’ll see what it looks like. It’s not something anyone in antiquity could have imagined, let alone subscribed to.
John Nelson Darby as “Anglo-English”? This is a new one, at least for this Brit! Possibly, Anglo-Irish?
Yup, that must be it.
What happens when you tell a fundamentalist the earlier sources state the beast’s number as 616?
They say, huh! But it doesn’t really affect any fundamentalist views: it just mean it’s a different number. (And the vast majority of mss read 666 in any event, which is probalby the original reading.
You mentioned modern fundamentalism in the second half of the 19th century. What book(s) would you recommend on the history of modern fundamentalism from that period onward?
I’d suggest the work of George Marsden for starters.
Dr. Ehrman,
Where in the New Testament is the rapture even discussed?
Thanks, Jay
The term never occurs. The closest passage to deal with the concept is 1 Thes. 4:14-18.
The modern fundamentalists’ approach to Revelation is virtually the same as their approach to Daniel. And if you’ll excuse the pun, it was a real revelation to me to learn several decades ago that Daniel wasn’t written the time of Daniel but during the Maccabean Revolt. Once these books are understood as being meant for the time they were written, rather than predicting what will happen in our own time, it’s as if the scales fall from our eyes and what once was once mysterious becomes clear. The abomination of destruction predicted by Daniel [and by Jesus acc. to Mark and Matthew] already happened in the time of Antiochus IV, and the Beast of Revelation already appeared in the person of Nero. And these books are even more interesting for providing a gateway into the minds of their writers and ancient readers as they are for letting us in on the secret of which political leader of today is the Beast.
This is more than a little reminiscent of the imbroglio over the so-called Mayan Calendar.
A text is created for a given culture–then that culture either dies out or changes to the point where nobody except a handful of experts on it can come up with even a close approximation of its original import. The text survives, but the context is lost.
Bart –
Maybe off-topic, but since you’re talking about how people “read” the Book of Revelation, with respect to the a trinitarian argument that Jesus was God incarnate, can you please comment on Revelation 1:18 where Jesus tells a very frightened John:
“Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. 18 I am the Living One; I WAS DEAD, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades.”
It seems to me that the fact can’t be dismissed that in the first sentence ever spoken by a resurrected Jesus to a living human being he specifically says that he “was dead.”
How can this possibly be true?
The Greek is very clear:
I WAS
ἐγενόμην (egenomēn)
Verb – Aorist Indicative Middle – 1st Person Singular
Strong’s Greek 1096: A prolongation and middle voice form of a primary verb; to cause to be, i.e. to become, used with great latitude.
DEAD,
νεκρὸς (nekros)
Adjective – Nominative Masculine Singular
Strong’s Greek 3498: (a) adj: dead, lifeless, subject to death, mortal, (b) noun: a dead body, a corpse. From an apparently primary nekus; dead.
This statement by Jesus himself begs the biggest question in scripture – how could Jesus, who probably 99% of Christians believe was God incarnate, ever die?
Correction: Revelation 1:18 contains the “first sentence” ever spoken from a resurrected Jesus from “heaven” to a human.
I believe that’s the point of most traditional Christian theology: Christ “died for your sins.”
Fascinating to see this outlined so clearly: Namely that this “Revelation” theology changed so much during the nineteenth century from the “Preterist’ theology that “Revelation” symbolically describes events during the first century that had already taken place. Humans have an enormous capacity to make stuff up and then believe with passion whatever they have made up and spin all data accordingly. Depressing conclusion about humans, but I guess that is the way it is….
Where, oh, where, did reason based on evidence go???
Somewhere in the stratosphere, apparently….
Ah, the Isle of Patmos. A gem in the Aegean. Where St. John the Evangelist was inspired to write the Book of Revelation.
In the mid-1950s a grade school friend and I were rebuilding old WWII multiband shortwave radio receivers as a hobby. We would listen to AM and shortwave bands at night when reception was best at our Midwest location. We could pick up the “border-blaster” radio stations located just across the Rio Grande River in Mexico. These beasts had 100,000+ watt transmitters (a lot more powerful that the 50,000 watt “Clear Channel” radio stations in the U.S., limited by the FCC).
We enjoyed listening to the fundamentalist Christian preachers who bought time on those transmitters. They were all preaching end-times sermons based on Revelation. One in particular was a hoot. He was soliciting donations from the believers in order that he and his family could visit the Isle of Patmos and retrace the footsteps of St. John, thereby reaching a deeper understanding of Revelation, or so he said. I don’t know if he received enough cash to make the trip but he was entertaining. This was my introduction to the business end of Christianity employing the high technology of that time. The Sunday collection seemed to be small time compared to the much larger expectations of these radio preachers.
Bart, do you think that many of the bizarre otherworldly visions seen in scripture could have been the result of hallucinogens?
It’s what scholars occasionally would start arguing in the 1960s! But no, I don’t think so. Not any evidence of it.
Leovigild: “This is the first time I’ve seen the term “Anglo-English.” To what does it refer?”
AJB2016: John Nelson Darby as “Anglo-English”? This is a new one, at least for this Brit! Possibly, Anglo-Irish?”
I presumed Darby was referring to himself as descended specifically from the ængli who began settling in what is now England in the 5th c CE as opposed to the Britons or other tribal groups who were already there. I watched a pretty good documentary on PBS last week that highlighted the local genetic diversity that still exits today among various villages in England. Modern genetic studies have surpising revealed that the Anglo-Saxon tribes only contributed about 10% of the genetic make-up of the English people today and the diversity of genetic make-up can still be effectively mapped geographically within England.
King Arthur’s Lost Kingdom, Season 17 Episode 5 of Secrets of the Dead. By the way, this is also why I started reading the Cambrian Annals.
Wow! Thanks.
On the other hand, Darby’s family was Irish and, ‘though born in London, he was ordained as an Anglican priest in Ireland so this was probably supposed to be Anglo-Irish!
…”efore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.
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Does this mean that jesus did not think that god will give the jews their land coz they werent producing the fruits ?
Not the land itself, but the coming kingdom of God. Gentiles would be included instead of Jews.
Being free gives fear, so our fear seeks shelter in what we fear.
Bart, I will look forward to your book on Revelations! I would hope you could write about how and when endtime preachers started mixing New World Order Conspiracy theories to explain how the beast and one world government will come about. It is a crime that children have to sit in church services and hear this kind of stuff!
Your examples are helpful. Thanks.
There is a growing fascination with crypto-currency and its supposed connection to Revelation 13:16-18 (a prophecy that foretells the END because of a New World Order and a single currency with “marks of the beast” etc). I am not interested in the prophecy – though it seems like the only thing I can read about online. How is it that Revelations – specifically the passages quoted for this particular prophecy – would be interpreted by a historical/critical approach?
Rev. 13 is all about how the Roman empire is establishing hegemony over the earth. And it’s not a good thing. My next book will be on this (as I guess you know).
I do not consider the Revelation as a history of the future at all.
If the Revelation was in fact written by a Jew, with some background in the Jewish theology (even more deep spiritual thoughts and concepts), it would not surprise me if he might have been inspired by thoughts like all those Jewish scholars and even orthodox Jews, that the basis of the Torah is based on a more mystical view encoded into their theology. Considering this, I do not particularly think of dualistic thoughts which some Jews adopted (i.e Gnosticism among others), but the more monotheistic thoughts which one might find in the old Jewish form of Kabbalistic thoughts.
If I take on those Jewish mystical “glasses” (talking about the old Jewish mysticism, the Revelation will not be very different both in language, symbols or in form as what they thought. The whole concept through the pure monetaristic thoughts would be a system where the “whole is in the part”, nothing is outside of God and never will. Their story will be a story of the soul, from the beginning, and the return the original form, source.
If I should base it on those ideas, the Revelation would have been a book of the soul, the journey of the soul through purification, from an individual level, through a collective level into the New Jerusalem. At least the correlation and similarities are for me obvious and so many Jewish orthodox claim that these thoughts were the origin of the whole Torah and the theology thereafter.
In this context also according to (The Apocalypse unsealed” by James M. Pryce, 1910) the number 666 could be linked to Gnostic and Kabbalistic thoughts of the “Lower Mind” .The 666 would be the number of man, the egoistic and destructive force of human opposed to the “spiritual man”. This force/activity is a hinderance for the ascending soul which have to be defeated. The 666 will be the highest possible achievement of the spiritual unconscious man.
The definition of “revelation” (to uncover) will for me be more accurate definition of the word at least, since such an understanding would be a story of human soul in relation to God, and its nature.
So, I do NOT AT ALL consider the Revelation as a vision of the timely/linear future. I do not believe that that was the intention with this book.
I don’t think it is predicting our future either. If it was written by a Jew, it was a Jew who believed in Jesus. Kabbala, of course, did not exist yet. 666 is usually thought to refer to Nero; search on the blog and you’ll see my discussion of it.
I have an understanding that Kabbalah were formalized, 1000 years ago, and compiled into Zohar as a foundaton of this beleif..
How it developed before the Zohar is easier for me to speculate than for you to address as an historian, which I so easily can respect.
In my world of speculation, I can consider the even orthodox Judaist believers who claim this theory/ was there from the beginning and are the basic of the Torah and even the Hebrew language. Ok, ok,,,I get it, it is understandable far beyond what a historian even want to consider, if not because it is impossible to prove.
Beside all those claims, and even beside the claims that the Zohar was actually came from the “mystic” Rabbi, Yohai in the first century CE, there seems to be “mystic” thoughts among the Jews, without even consider the claim that Kabbalah was an oral tradition at that time who were passed on orally like other stories were (also the oral Torah). When I refer to the Kabbala around Jesus and even before, I just allow to reflect on unverified claims that the tradition was there even before Jesus. In addition there were texts and mystic texts (ideas which seemed to circulate at least 1 century before and on, like Ma’aseh Breishit (“work of creatioת) and Ma’aseh Merkavah (work of the Chariot) which seems to be preoccupied with the Creation and esotoric ideas of who and what God was. I’ve considered this to be connected with the old Jewish esoteric teachings a few centuries before Jesus.
That is why I used Kabbalistic ideas at the time of Jesus and before
I don’t believe in the “perteristic” which describes the conflict between the Romans and the Jews at that time. I can’t understand that John would like to use such a language (which he heavily borrowed from the mystics mentioned above), just to encourage the faithful. If the faithful weren’t aware of the heavy mystic symbols heavily used in the text, the probably unliteral faithful wouldn’t probably understand a clue of what he meant and probably thought he had drunk too much Greek Ouzo. At least I would !
I think John tried to write a spiritual message since the symbols and language resembles the mystic language I’ve seen the Jewish mystic used (even Gnostic). That is why I think it is a messianic mystic (symbolic) text inspired by Jewish mystical texts