Interesting analysis on the Book of Revelations from the New Yorker. I don’t know enough to judge this take, but I bet some readers here do. Longish excerpt below:
(New Yorker) — Revelation has every element that Michael Bay could want: dragons, seven-headed sea beasts, double-horned land beasts, huge C.G.I.-style battles involving hundreds of thousands of angels and demons, and even, in Jezebel the temptress, a part for Megan Fox.
Revelation, far from being meant as a hallucinatory prophecy, is actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time John was writing. It’s essentially a political cartoon about the crisis in the Jesus movement in the late first century, with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed and the Saviour, despite his promises, still not back. All the imagery of the rapt and the raptured and the rest that the “Left Behind” books have made a staple for fundamentalist Christians represents contemporary people and events, and was well understood in those terms by the original audience. Revelation is really like one of those old-fashioned editorial drawings where Labor is a pair of overalls and a hammer, and Capital a bag of money in a tuxedo and top hat, and Economic Justice a woman in flowing robes, with a worried look.
That sure makes more sense than cramming obscure and vague passages into the latest details of a crises in the Middle East or attributes of a dictator/madman du jure (And then conclucing only tax cuts for billionaires will save us!). At the age of 50 I’m old enough to have witnessed some half-dozen to a dozen world figures labeled the anti-christ or whatever the term is these days.
Jesus still hadn’t come back? What about the destruction of the temple?
That was the essence of the prophesy, after all, that the Son of Man would come (while some then present would still be living) and encircle Jerusalem and raize the temple, causing much wailing and gnashing of teeth. There was certainly a lot of wailing, as tens of thousands of rebels were crucified, and it happened fortyy years from the setting of the gospel story.
How could any prophesy be better fulfilled than that? There should be no more talk of a forthcoming Second Coming.
Anybody who doesn’t understand that much can’t be relied on to interpret Revelations.
The person who fulfilled the prophesy, Titus Flavius, unlike Jesus, was an actual son of God, by the way. His pop, Vespasian, was deified by the Roman senate. That is as true of a God as one can be.
LOL. The antichrist is very portable and moves around a lot. He has been thousands of people over the millennia.
According to Michele Bachmann’s church, the Wisconsin Lutherans, the antichrist is the Pope. It says exactly that on their website.
These days the antichrist is time sharing. When he isn’t being the Pope, he is Obama, the president of the USA.
These days, I would nominate Rick Santorum, the Dark Ages Pope wannabe as most likely to be the antichrist.
Revelation started me on my way out of xianity.
When I was 7 in church and bored, I decided to read it. Supposedly the bible was a magic book and Revelation was a description of the future. How cool is that to a kid, a magic book with the future all written down by a powerful Sky Fairy.
I read a few pages and decided it was gibberish. So much for the magic book.
I’ve since read Revelation a few times. It’s still gibberish. So much for the magic book.
For another look into the matter, try A History of the End of the World, Jonathan Kirsch, Harper, 2006, ISBN 978-0-7394-8131-8. The only fundie conception of Revelation not exploded by this work is the notion it was written by a misanthrope named John.
Fun fact: The term “antichrist” appears no where in the Book of Revelation. It’s actually from some of the epistles and is usually plural, referring to anyone who opposes the worship of Jesus. The individual that people often mistakenly refer to as the Antichrist is actually the Beast.
As for who the Beast might be, I think every president in my lifetime has been accused of being the Beast at one time or another.
Now that’s just silly. Megan Fox and Michael Bay aren’t on speaking terms any more.
Or it could be just an appeal to those with 12 year old adolescent minds like the Harry Potter books. Just saying ;)
I have heard the same from other textual scholars. The level of Greek literacy on display in the Gospel of John and in Revelations is not reconcilable as being by the same author.
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A shorter review in the WSJ: What Revelation Reveals
Hal Lindsey, who predicted that the world would end in 2000, is still employed by outfits like WorldNutDaily. That alone shows how stupid and deranged the people who take this stuff seriously really are.
That is consistent with the Catholic explanation of the book of Revelations that I was taught when I was younger. The form of writing was called apocalyptic writing (or something similar) that was apparently fairly common from 2nd century BC thru 2nd century AD (again, or something like that). This meant that we weren’t supposed to take it literally, but view much of the imagery as something akin to special effects.
I did read some stuff many years ago about how most of revelations was related to current xtian suffering at the time, so that concept has been around for a good while too.
I understood it as a message from the author to the other christians. Basically, whilst he was imprisoned, he would need to write in code, so that what he was saying would get to the intended recipients intact.
It contains lots of imagery pertaining to Rome, and I read it as “Don’t worry too much, this will not last forever”. Whether he was passing on gossip overheard from his guards about problems within the empire, or making general statements about Roman society, and the sustainability of the empire is another matter, but either way, it was no more a future apocalypse literal book than Pauls letters are for all people, at all times.
I grew up thinking it was literal, but wierdly, what started changing my mind was finding out about real life coded messages, and learning more about the political situation at the time
It’s the Book of Revelation, not the Book of Revelations.
I know that this is a rather nit-picky point, as I’ve heard more people refer to it as Revelations than actually get it right. I’m not sure why that is.
anathema, that’s my litmus test for genuine fundies. If they refer to it as “Revelations,” I know right away they’re not true believers.
The best thing ever to come out of the Book of Revelation is the song “John the Revelator.” Go to YouTube and listen to both Son House and Gov’t Mule sing it. The only gospel song you will ever need…..
@ #7:
The Greek of the gospel attributed to “John” is by an educated person who was by literary standards a wordsmith. Revelation’s Greek is often clumsy, sometimes inexact, and would seem to be by someone who learned Greek (imperfectly) as a second language.
I remember as a teenager in 1972 being dragged down by some Fundie friends to see Hal Lindsey hisself explain how the EEC was the Beast with Ten Horns, as the original six members (no, not the NHL) were about to be joined by the UK, Ireland, Denmark, and Norway, thus showing how accurate Revelation was.
Unfortunately, John apparently wasn’t tuned into how opposed the Norwegians were, as they voted it down, so the poor Beast was left with only nine horns.
The Beast did have ten horns after Greece joined in 1981, but only till it sprouted a couple more with Portugal and Spain’s entry in 1986.
I do remember Lindsey explaining how Gog and Magog were the Soviet Union and China, and going on to show how after the oil fields in the Middle East were destroyed they would rely on cavalry, just as predicted- he even had lists of the horse cavalry units still in the Red Army.
A spirited discussion broke out afterwards as to what the locusts who “looked like horses prepared for battle. They had what looked like gold crowns on their heads, and their faces looked like human faces” actually were.
Some claimed they represented some kind of powered armor, but the more literalist brethren scoffed at this weak-kneed revisionism, pointing to hideous biological experiments the Russkies were doing to create human-insect hybrids.
Better days!