A History of the End of the World (16 page)

Surely the greatest of all the ironies in John’s life and work is the simple and unavoidable fact that the things he predicts in the book of Revelation did
not
come to pass quickly or, for that matter, at all. John himself would have been shocked and heartbroken to know that we are all still here to read what he wrote two thousand years ago. That is why the book of Revelation and the apocalyptic tradition in Judaism and Christian ity have been called, aptly if also poignantly, “the history of a delusion.”
¹⁶⁴
To put it another way, Revelation is the history of the end of the world and, as we shall see for ourselves, the history of a world that refused to end.

I don’t know what is happening in other parts of the world, but in this country where we live the world no longer announces its end but demonstrates it.

P
OPE
G
REGORY THE
G
REAT
(540–604)

W
hen Jerome set himself to the task of translating the Bible into Latin in the fourth century, he was forced to confront all the bafflements and contradictions of the book of Revelation. The tale that John tells, as we have seen, is hard to follow and even harder to understand. The names, colors, numbers, and images that John conjures up are freighted with secret meanings, but exactly what they are supposed to signify is mostly a matter of speculation. At certain moments, John salts his text with what can only be described as brainteasers. Now and then, John explains a few of the symbols and solves a few of the riddles, but even when he does, the answers only raise more questions: “Revelation,” concluded the frustrated Jerome, “has as many mysteries as it does words.”
¹

Some of the most famous mysteries, like the identity of the Roman emperor whose name is enciphered as the satanic number 666, are hidden in plain sight in the text. Other mysteries are to be found in questions that seem to ask themselves: John insists that the world will end soon, but he never reveals exactly when. And some mysteries are woven deeply and intricately into the theological fabric of the text itself. Where in the book of Revelation, for example, is the kind and gentle teacher whom Jesus is depicted to be in some of most exalted passages of the Gospels? “Love your enemies,” says Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, “bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which spitefully use you, and persecute you.”
²
By contrast, the author of Revelation knows only a violent and vengeful Jesus, “clad in a robe dipped in blood,” armed with a two-edged sword, mounted on a warhorse, and commanding the “armies of heaven” in a war of extermination against his enemies.
³

“From his mouth issues a sharp sword with which to smite the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron,” writes John, who seems to delight in describing the carnage that the celestial warrior-king will leave behind on the battlefield after the war between God and Satan. “Come, gather for the great supper of God,” calls an angel to the vultures in midflight, “to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men, the flesh of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great.”
⁴

Perhaps the single greatest contrast between the rival theologies of Revelation and the Gospels is found in the passages where the end-times are described. According to the vision of judgment day in a passage of the Little Apocalypse as it appears in Matthew, Jesus will welcome into the heavenly kingdom all those who gave food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, clothed the naked and sheltered the homeless, and visited the sick and the imprisoned. “Verily I say unto you,” announces Jesus in what is arguably the single most sublime and yet revolutionary line of text in all of the Christian scriptures, “inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
⁵

John, however, has nothing quite so encouraging or elevating to say to good-hearted men and women who hope to achieve salvation through acts of kindness and compassion here on earth. According to Revelation, the first souls to be saved—or “sealed,” as John puts it—will be the 144,000 men whose only apparent merit is that they “have not defiled themselves with women.”
⁶
At the time of the first resurrection and judgment, only the saints and martyrs—those who refused to worship the “beast” or receive his mark on their hands and foreheads, and those who were beheaded for professing their belief in Christ—will be raised from the dead to reign alongside Jesus during the millennium that he will spend as king on earth.

Then, after Satan is released from the bottomless pit and defeated once and for all, the rest of the dead will be resurrected and judged “by what they had done.”
⁷
John does not specify what kind of conduct in life will bring salvation after death, but the strong implication throughout the book of Revelation is that faith counts more than good works, and only the “saints” will be spared from eternal punishment. Everyone else—including not only “murderers, fornicators, sorcerers and idolators” but also “the cowardly, the faithless, and the polluted”—will spend all of eternity in “the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.”
⁸

Readers of the Christian scriptures, ancient and modern, have been troubled by the contrast between these two ways of imagining the end of the world. One modern scholar, for example, characterizes Revelation as “sub-Christian” precisely because John is so obsessed with vengeance-taking and so little concerned with the acts of care and mercy that Jesus advocates in the Gospels.
⁹
The Christian case against Revelation is memorably summed up by Martin Luther at a point in his life when he was not yet fully convinced that Revelation belonged in the Bible at all.

“My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book,” Luther writes in the preface to a German edition of the Bible that he published in 1522. “There is one sufficient reason for the small esteem in which I hold it—that Christ is neither taught in it nor recognized.”
¹⁰

Luther, as we shall see, was hardly the first or only Bible reader to view the book of Revelation with alarm and concern. At its first appearance, Revelation was nearly excluded from the Christian scriptures, and its strange and punishing text has always puzzled, agitated, threatened, and offended many Christians who were prepared to accept Revelation as Holy Writ. But it also true that Revelation ultimately seized and held the Christian imagination—and, in some ways, the Western imagination—over the next fifteen centuries. John’s little book, sweet in the mouth but bitter in the belly, may have turned out be a failure as a work of prophecy, but it remained the equivalent of a best seller in the Middle Ages and long after.

R
evelation has always been regarded by some Christian authorities as a dangerous book. Just as John seems to have intended, the text is capable of stirring up powerful emotions in its readers and hearers. Revelation is, by turns, a revenge fantasy, a parade of horribles, and something of a freak show. And the potent and intoxicating text sends some readers into their own fits of mystical ecstasy in which divine voices are heard and miraculous sights are seen. Nowadays, of course, we may be tempted to regard such phenomena as manifestations of mental illness, but the clergy of the infant Christian church were equally skeptical of ordinary men and women who claimed to be visionaries.

The earliest recorded example of religious excess inspired by the book Revelation dates back to the middle of the second century, a half century or so after the text first appeared in the Christian world. Revelation was the favorite biblical text of a man called Montanus, who appeared around 156 in the region of Asia Minor known as Phrygia, not far from the seven churches to which John addresses his letters, and announced himself to be a prophet in his own right. Among his coterie were Maximilla and Prisca, two charismatic young women who—like Montanus himself—were able to put themselves into ecstatic trance states at will and claimed to receive their own revelations directly from God, a phenomenon that came to be known as “New Prophecy.”

Like other freelance prophets who came before and after them, the Montanists were regarded as intolerably high-spirited by the clerical authorities who preferred to confine prophecy to the approved biblical texts. After all, if any man or woman was at liberty to advertise himself or herself as a prophet, the imaginations of otherwise good Christians might be set afire with odd, dangerous, and uncontrollable visions. For that reason, the church condemned the Montanists as heretics, but Montanus and his pair of prophetesses persisted in their self-appointed mission. Indeed, they insisted that the church need not be worried about a flurry of false prophets precisely because their own prophecies of the end-times were about to be fulfilled once and for all.

“After me there will be no more prophecy,” declared Maximilla, “but the End.”
¹¹

Inspired by the visions in Revelation, the Montanists convinced themselves—and sought to convince everyone else—that the end was near. They taught that good Christians should abandon the ordinary pastimes of life and prepare to meet their maker. Thus, for example, they discouraged the remarriage of widows and widowers and the bearing of children by married couples: “The biblical command, ‘increase and multiply,’ is annulled by the fact that we are living in the last age.”
¹²
And, significantly, they refused to regard the fantastic imagery of Revelation as a set of signs and symbols to be mined for hidden meanings. Rather, like countless other mystics and visionaries down through the centuries and millennia, they insisted on reading the text of Revelation as absolute and literal truth.

John, for example, describes in Revelation how he is transported “in the Spirit” to a mountaintop where an angel has promised to show him “the Bride, the wife of the Lamb.” What he sees, however, is the city of Jerusalem “coming down out of heaven,” radiant with the glory of God, its foundations fashioned out of precious stones in every color, its walls of jasper and pearl, its streets and buildings of pure gold.
¹³
John himself seems to concede that the Bride of the Lamb is merely a symbol for the celestial Jerusalem, and he suggests that the heavenly city is something that will be seen only by the resurrected saints and martyrs, and only after the world has finally been destroyed.

The Montanists, however, lived in urgent anticipation that they would soon behold the New Jerusalem in the here and now, a miraculous construction of gold and gemstone descending through the clouds and landing on the solid ground. They ignored the passages in Revelation where John’s announces that the text must be read “spiritually”—that is, as a set of allegories and symbols.
¹⁴
Rather, they were convinced that the heavenly city would come to rest in the vicinity of a town called Pepuza, a place not far from the seven cities whose churches are addressed in Revelation and conveniently located in the region of Phrygia where the Montanists originated. Like so many other readers and hearers of Revelation, starting in antiquity and continuing into our own age, they cherished the notion that John was prophesying the plain truth of things that must shortly and literally come to pass.

Anxious and gullible Christians in the backwater of Asia Minor were not the only ones to fall under the spell of Montanus and his prophetesses. The most famous convert to Montanism was Tertullian (ca. 160–ca. 220), a fiery theologian of the early church in Carthage, who was convinced that he, too, would see the same remarkable sights with his own eyes. Tertullian writes credulously of reports from soldiers stationed in the Roman province of Palestine who claimed to have seen the spires and towers of a city hovering above the horizon at dawn—surely an early sighting of the celestial Jerusalem! And Tertullian’s anticipation of the final day of judgment betrays the same longing for revenge that is so prominently featured in the book of Revelation.

“How vast a spectacle then will burst upon the eye!” enthuses Tertullian, who predicts that the Roman governors who persecuted the Christians will suffer “in fires fiercer than those with which, in the days of their pride, they raged against the followers of Christ.”
¹⁵

Nor were the Montanists the only self-styled prophets who stoked the anxiety and anticipation of the Christian populace. A prophetess at work elsewhere in Asia Minor in the second century, for example, urged the men and women of Cappadocia to abandon their homes and make their way en masse to Jerusalem to greet Jesus Christ at the Second Coming. And a visionary named Judah, following the example of Revelation by reinterpreting the book of Daniel for himself, assured his fellow Christians in Alexandria that the Antichrist was at hand—a claim that, according to revered church historian Eusebius (263–339), was taken seriously only because a wave of persecution had “unsettled the popular mind.”
¹⁶

Then, too, Prisca and Maximilla were not the first or only women in early Christian ity who believed themselves to be filled with the prophetic spirit. Indeed, the prophetess whom John calls “Jezebel” was an even earlier example of the same phenomenon. But the church authorities, like the author of Revelation himself, were especially prone to dismiss as a false prophet any self-styled seer who happened to be of the wrong gender. Against every effort of the organized church to suppress these visionary women, however, they have not been wholly erased from history, and we will meet them again and again in these pages. “What we hear of them, we hear from their sworn enemies,” feminist Bible scholar Mary T. Malone points out. “We hear enough, however, to be assured that many women, in many different parts of Christian ity, still sought access to teaching, preaching and priestly roles.”
¹⁷

Paradoxically, the fact that Montanus and other doomsayers were demonstrably wrong in their predictions did not really seem to matter to the true believers among their followers—another phenomenon that we will encounter repeatedly in the history of the end of the world. Indeed, the failure of the New Jerusalem to descend at Pepuza only gave the Montanists “a new life and form,” according to one Catholic historian, “as a kind of Christian ity of the elite, whom no other authority guided in their new life but the Holy Spirit working directly upon them.”
¹⁸
After all, if John had been singled out by God to receive the remarkable visions that are recorded in Revelation, the same divine gift might be bestowed on others who came after him—and perhaps they would succeed where he had apparently failed in discerning the divine master plan for the end of the world.

And so, precisely because some church authorities feared what might boil up out of the overstimulated imaginations of the readers and hearers of Revelation, the adversaries of New Prophecy sought to discredit the book of Revelation itself. They argued that it was not actually the work of St. John the Evangelist; rather, they attributed its authorship to a man called Cerinthus, who had been declared a heretic and a sexual outlaw because he supposedly envisioned Christ’s thousand-year reign on earth as an opportunity for the “saints” to indulge themselves in “unlimited gluttony and lechery at banquets, drinking-bouts, and wedding feasts.”
¹⁹
By denying that Revelation is a work of Holy Writ, the enemies of Montanus sought to strike an oblique blow at the charismatic but uncredentialed prophet, his little coven of amateur prophetesses, and all of their ardent followers.