A History of the End of the World (17 page)

But something more than the antics and excesses of Montanus and Cerinthus were at stake in the campaign against the canonization of the book of Revelation. Freelance prophets, male or female, were regarded by the high clergy as a grave threat to theological law and order. Since Revelation, then as now, seems to be the “text of choice” for visionaries and ecstatics—and, indeed, since it seems to sanction their febrile dreams and bizarre visions—the text itself is often considered suspect.
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For some of the sterner Christian authorities, then, cutting Revelation out of the Bible was like cutting out a dangerous cancer.

Revelation posed another awkward problem for the early Christian church as it struggled to find a way to survive in pagan Rome. The Roman emperors in Revelation are likened to demonic beasts who have seated themselves on the throne of the Devil. The richness and splendor of the Hellenistic way of life are denounced as “abominations and impurities.”
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Any Christian who makes his or her peace with the status quo of imperial Rome is condemned for trafficking in “the deep things of Satan.”
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Precisely because John is an uncompromising culture warrior whose sworn enemy is Roman civilization itself, his writings were an embarrassment to any Christian who sought to win friends and influence people in the Roman Empire.

Elsewhere in the New Testament, in fact, the authors are much more accommodating toward Rome. An unmistakable “spin” in the Gospel account of the arrest, trial, and execution of Jesus, for example, shifts the blame from the Roman authorities in occupied Judea to the Jewish priests of the Temple at Jerusalem. Jesus himself is shown to utter the words that can be understood as an instruction to submit to Roman authority: “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
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Significantly, Jesus illustrates the point by holding up a Roman coin that bears the name and portrait of a pagan emperor—the “mark of the beast,” as John sees it. And while the famous saying of Jesus can be understood in more than one way, the apostle Paul unambiguously endorses making peace with Rome: “Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities,” writes Paul. “For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God.”
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As long as the Christians faced—or feared—persecution by the Roman authorities, of course, the book of Revelation offered consolation for their present sufferings, real or imagined, and the promise of a bloody revenge in the end-times. But the contempt for imperial Rome that suffuses the book of Revelation was rendered suddenly and wholly obsolete when Emperor Constantine (ca. 280–337) embraced Christian ity in the early fourth century. Under Constantine and his sons, the Christian church was elevated from a marginalized and criminalized sect into the favored and protected faith of the imperial family and, eventually, a kind of shadow government whose reach extended throughout the Roman Empire. Once the Roman emperor was a Christian rather than a persecutor of Christians, the condemnation of imperial Rome in the book Revelation no longer made much sense. Indeed, the Christian church now styled itself as “the Church Militant and Triumphant.”

For John, the Roman emperor is an agent of the Devil who drinks himself into a stupor on the blood of Christian martyrs. For the Christians who lived under Constantine, by contrast, the Roman emperor is God’s regent on earth: “Just as there is only one God, so there is only one emperor,” affirms Eusebius, who served as both church chronicler and court historian during Constantine’s long reign.
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John insists that Rome, which he labels as “BABYLON THE GREAT, MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND OF EARTH’S ABOMINATIONS,” will be utterly destroyed in the end-times: “Babylon is fallen, that great city,” proclaims an angel in one of his visions, “because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.”
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But Eusebius “was not troubled overmuch to distinguish Constantine’s reign from the time of the messianic kingdom,”
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and he describes the Roman empire under its first Christian emperor as nothing less than heaven on earth.

“One might have thought it a foreshadowing of Christ’s kingdom,” enthuses Eusebius, “and a dream rather than reality.”
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The stark contrast between what John predicted and what had actually come to pass in imperial Rome prompted some pious but also practical men in the Christianized empire to conclude that Revelation must be contained, or cut out of the Bible altogether. The same cognitive dissonance prompted other Christians to go to extraordinary lengths to explain away what seemed to be a collection of misbegotten and wrongheaded visions. Both the attackers and defenders of John’s little book were coming at the same awkward problem from opposite directions—the fact that Christian emperors were now sitting on what John sees as the throne of Satan.

Indeed, the single biggest problem with the book of Revelation is the plain fact that the world did
not
end. John insists that he has been shown “the things which must shortly come to pass”—and yet, as the years, decades, and centuries passed, Rome still ruled the world.
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For those Christians in late antiquity who regarded the book of Revelation as the revealed word of God, the manifest failure of its prophecies was embarrassing but undeniable.

“As history, in other words, persistently failed to end on time,” explains historian and New Testament scholar Paula Fredriksen, “the Church, of necessity, had to come to terms with its own foundational prophecy.”
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John, of course, is not the only biblical figure whose predictions of the end of the world turned out to be wrong or, at least, grossly premature. The book of Daniel, as we have seen, seems to confidently predict that the end of the world would come exactly 1,290 days after “the abomination of desolation is set up.”
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Of course, the author is maddeningly oblique in describing the event that is supposed to start the countdown clock—the “abomination of desolation” is probably a pagan image that was installed in the Temple at Jerusalem by the Syrian conquerors of Judea in the second century
B.C.E.
—and he undercuts his own credibility by stating, only one verse later, that the waiting period is actually 1,335 days. But the author assures his readers that such ambiguities and contradictions need not trouble the true believer—a credo of Bible prophecy that is invoked even today.

“None of the wicked shall understand,” the author Daniel writes, “but they that are wise shall understand.”
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Jesus, too, is depicted in the Gospels as announcing that the end is near. In fact, he quotes the book of Daniel—“Therefore when you see the ‘abomination of desolation,’ spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place (whoever reads, let him understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains”
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—and his description of the end-times is equally heart shaking but far more poignant when compared with those in Revelation. “And alas for those who are with child and for those who give suck in those days!” Jesus is shown to say in the Little Apocalypse as it appears in the Gospel of Matthew. “Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a sabbath. For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now.”
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Jesus, as we have noted, insists that at least some of his contemporaries will be eyewitnesses to the end of the world—eclipses of the sun and moon, stars falling from the sky, “famines and pestilences and earthquakes”
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—and the arrival of the Son of Man “in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.”
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His assurances, so awkward for later teachers and preachers precisely because they are so plainspoken and yet so plainly wrong, can be found in both Mark—“Truly, I say to you there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power”
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—and Matthew: “Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all these things take place.”
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Indeed, the first Christians lived with the constant and urgent expectation that they would witness the end of the world. Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians, for example, describes what has come to be called the “rapture”—that is, the sudden elevation of faithful Christians from earth to heaven upon the second coming of Jesus Christ: “For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first,” says Paul. “Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.”
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Paul’s unequivocal prediction, in fact, is contained in a letter that may have been composed as early as 49
C.E.
—“the earliest datable witness to Christian ity that we possess,” according to some scholars.
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But the New Testament also includes writings that seek to tamp down the apocalyptic expectations of early Christians. Significantly, Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians backs off from the promise that the end is near, which is one reason why it is generally regarded as having been written much later than the First Epistle and by someone other than Paul. “Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our assembling to meet him, we beg you, brethren, not to be quickly shaken in mind or excited, either by spirit or by word, or by letter purporting to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come,” Paul is made to say in the second letter. And then he adds what appears to be a reference to the end-time scenario of Revelation: “Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition.”
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Jesus himself pointedly rules out any sure knowledge of
when
the world will end. “When you hear of wars and rumors of war, do not be troubled, for such things must happen, but the end is not yet,”
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Jesus is quoted as saying in a famous passage in the Gospel of Mark. In fact, Jesus specifically warns against “false Christs and false prophets” who will seek to lead good Christians astray by claiming to know the date or details of the end-times.
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And Jesus insists that no one in heaven or on earth—not even himself!—has been granted a revelation about the date of doomsday. “If anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or, ‘Look, He is there!,’ do not believe it,” Jesus is shown to say. “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
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Of course, Jesus may have cautioned his followers against idle speculation on the date of the end of the world, but his words did nothing to stop some readers of the book of Revelation from doing exactly what he tells them not to do. Indeed, the whole effort to crack the code of Revelation has always struck some pious clerics as unseemly and even sinful: “The numerous attempts by His professed followers to attain precise knowledge seem to me to be evidence of serious disloyalty to Him, Who announced that the secrets they vainly try to fathom are reserved for God Himself,” writes H. H. Rowley.
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But such cautions have not prevented countless generations of visionaries, ranging from the prophetesses Prisca and Maximilla to the Bible-thumping televangelists and best-selling authors of our own era, from convincing themselves—and seeking to convince others—that they know when the world will end.

R
evelation is not the only ancient writing that was regarded as too hot to handle by some clerics in the early years of the Christian church. At a site in the Egyptian desert called Nag Hammadi, for example, a collection of papyrus texts—the so-called Gnostic Gospels—were buried in the sand by some fearful Christian precisely because they had been declared to be heretical by the authorities of the church. Among the forbidden texts of early Christian ity were a great many apocalyptic tracts, including one that preserves a sly parody of perhaps the single most familiar line in the book of Revelation.

“I am the first and the last,” goes a passage in
The Book of Thunder,
“I am the honored one and the scorned one, I am the whore and the holy one.”
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The fate of the Gnostic Gospels suggests what might have happened to the book of Revelation if the would-be censors had been more successful: the Gnostic Gospels remained buried and forgotten for two thousand years until archaeologists retrieved them from Nag Hammadi in the twentieth century and thereby rewrote an early chapter in the history of Christian ity. Revelation, too, was in danger of losing its place in the Christian scriptures and perhaps even disappearing from Christian tradition in the same way that Jewish apocalyptic texts like the book of Enoch were written out of rabbinical tradition.

The precarious status of the book of Revelation in the early Christian church, as it turns out, is confirmed in the writings of the church fathers. The ancient historian Eusebius frankly reports that Revelation “was considered genuine by some and spurious by others.”
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At certain moments, the controversy over Revelation was hot enough to divide members of the same family. One early and influential commentator, Gregory of Nazianzus, cites the book of Revelation in his own work, but his cousin, Amphilochius of Iconium, notes that “most call it spurious.”
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The debate over whether Revelation belonged in the Bible was framed as a question about its authorship. According to one of the litmus tests adopted the early church fathers, only a writing that was regarded as “apostolic”—that is, a writing whose author was an apostle or a disciple of Jesus—was eligible for inclusion in the New Testament. Thus, the identity of the man who calls himself “John” in the book of Revelation turned out to be crucial. If the author was John, son of Zebedee, one of the original twelve disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, then Revelation was worthy of inclusion, but if the author was “another John,” as Bishop Dionysius declared in the third century, then it was to be excluded from the Christian scriptures.
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The fact that the book of Revelation struck Dionsyius as “senseless and without reason” was almost beside the point. “[T]hose things which I do not understand I do not reject,” he explained, “but I wonder the more that I cannot comprehend.”
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