A History of the End of the World (18 page)

One illuminating example of how canonization worked in the early Christian world—and how it might have worked in the case of Revelation—can be seen in the fate of a work called
The Shepherd of Hermas.
Like Revelation, it is a strange text with prophetic and apocalyptic passages, featuring a celestial visitor who bestows upon a human being the power to read and understand a book of divine secrets. It was probably composed sometime after 90
C.E.
, which means that
The Shepherd of Hermas
may have been roughly contemporaneous with Revelation. And, again as with Revelation, its author is believed to have been a Jewish convert to Christian ity. Unlike Revelation, however, it is purely Christian, full of references to church, clergy, Christian rites and rituals, and other elements that are largely or wholly absent from Revelation.

Yet Revelation was ultimately welcomed into the Christian canon, and
The Shepherd of Hermas
was excluded for the simple reason that its author was self-evidently
not
an apostle or a disciple of Jesus Christ. Rather, it was plainly a work of recent authorship by a man who identifies himself as a resident of Rome.
⁵¹
The book was a favorite among Christian communities of the second century, but popularity did not matter when it came to canonization.
The Shepherd of Hermas
was excluded from the earliest surviving document that defines the Christian canon—the so-called Muratorian Canon of the late second century—with the simple and sufficient explanation that it was written “in our own times.”
⁵²

As late as the fourth century, the list makers were still divided on the question of whether Revelation ought to be included in Christian scripture. Athanasius (ca. 293–373), bishop of Alexandria and a fiery crusader against Christian heresies of all kinds, includes Revelation in his own catalog of the books of the New Testament, but it is omitted from the lists composed and endorsed by Cyril of Jerusalem (ca. 315–ca. 386) and, by a certain irony, the Council of Laodicea, one of the seven cities to which the author of Revelation addresses himself. Indeed, the book of Revelation was especially suspect in the eastern realm of Christian ity, and it is notably absent from the biblical citations that appear in the writings of church fathers residing in such important eastern cities as Antioch and Constantinople.

In fact, Revelation did not make the first cut in the early version of the Bible as it was known and used in eastern Christian ity. The Eastern Syrian Church rejected the book of Revelation, and it does not appear at all in the earliest Syriac translation of the Christian scriptures. As late as the ninth century, Revelation was still flagged as a “disputed” book in Byzantine church writings, and it was wholly omitted from a Byzantine list of Christian texts that were embraced as canonical. Not until the tenth century did Revelation begin to appear routinely in Greek manuscripts of the New Testament throughout Christendom.
⁵³

Revelation may have had a slow and uncertain start in the very place where it was composed, but the western reaches of the Roman Empire were considerably more receptive. The New Testament as it was known and used in the West always included Revelation, and the text turned out to be especially influential in Germany, France, and England. Indeed, as we shall see, Revelation always seems to move ever westward, across Europe and all the way to America—a fact with fateful consequences for its function in our own age.

Even after Revelation finally secured its place in the Christian scriptures, the book continued to carry a certain bad odor. The bizarre imagery and the blood-shaking carnage favored by John were always off-putting to more-restrained Christian preachers and teachers. Not a word in the whole of Revelation offers any moral instruction about how to live a decent and righteous life
hic et nunc—
here and now. And the higher clergy were always concerned that some new Prisca or Maximilla would be encouraged by what she read in Revelation to start spouting her own visions and prophecies. The book of Revelation was tolerated, but it was also kept at a safe distance by some church authorities.

As one measure of its marginal status in early Christian ity, for example, fewer than two hundred manuscripts of Revelation in its original Greek text—compared with more than two thousand manuscripts of the Gospels—survive from antiquity. “These totals,” reports Protestant Bible scholar and theologian Ernest Cadman Colwell, “accurately represent the relative prestige of these volumes in Eastern Christendom down through the Middle Ages.” Another sign of the same phenomenon can be discerned in one ancient biblical commentary whose author freely rendered passages from Revelation in conversational Greek but left the other books of the New Testament untranslated from the more formal Greek of the original text because, unlike Revelation, “they were too sacred!”
⁵⁴

Even as late as the Reformation, when the conflict between Protestants and Catholics was often a matter of life or death, a few theologians on both sides of the struggle agreed on one thing: the book of Revelation was a dangerous text that required cautious handling. “Some gold is purer and better than other,” goes a dismissive comment about Revelation by Renaissance theologian Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536) in a biblical treatise published in the early sixteenth century. “In sacred things also one thing is more sacred than another.”
⁵⁵
And Martin Luther, the Roman Catholic monk who set the Protestant Reformation into motion, was no less skeptical and far less oblique: he confessed his own inclination to wholly exclude the book of Revelation from the Bible on the grounds that it is “neither apostolic nor prophetic.”
⁵⁶

The front line in the battle over Revelation has always been drawn between the authority of the church and the ragtag army of unruly Bible readers who insist on coming to their own conclusions about its veiled inner meanings. That is why, as we shall see, Revelation has
always
been the “text of choice” for religious eccentrics who see their own time as the end-time, ranging from Montanus in the second century to David Koresh in the twentieth century, and countless others in between.

“There has never been a book provoking more delirium, foolishness, and irrational movements, as if this book contained the possibility of a temptation actually demonic,” complains French political scientist and Protestant theologian Jacques Ellul, whose words apply with equal force to the Montanists and the religious fanatics of the third millennium. “Too often the Apocalypse excites our curiosity, unbridles our imagination, arouses our appetite for mystery, and finally hides from us the central truth which ought to be revealed.”
⁵⁷

At the same time, Revelation turned out to be so crucial to Christian theology that it simply could not be ignored. “Revelation is not a nice book, nor in any conventional sense is it morally edifying,” observes historian and Bible scholar Donald Harman Akenson in his revolutionary rereading of Jewish and Christian scripture,
Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds.
Yet he describes the inclusion of Revelation in the Christian canon as “an architectural master stroke” precisely because Revelation fundamentally reorients the rest of Christian scripture. “The book forces one to read the entire text of the ‘New Testament’ as an apocalypse,” Akenson explains, “which starts with the birth of Jesus and ends with Christ’s kingdom in eternity.”
⁵⁸

By the fourth century, however, the church authorities decided to do something about the fact that the book of Revelation continued to work its powerful and provocative magic on the hearts and minds of the most excitable men and women among the laity. So they came up with a simple and convenient rule to govern the reading of Revelation. A good Christian, they taught, must not commit the error of reading Revelation “carnally”—that is, taking John’s visions of the end-times literally. Instead, the book of Revelation must be read “spiritually”; that is, Revelation must be understood as an allegory rather than a plain depiction of what will actually happen when the world comes to an end.

The rule represents an earnest effort to defuse the ticking time bomb that sputters away in the text of Revelation. The full weight of church authority and, eventually, the terrible threat of the Inquisition were brought to bear in enforcing the rule on the laity, but never with complete success. Ironically, the willful and unruly Christians who insisted on reading Revelation “carnally” were defying not only the dogma of the Roman Catholic Church but also the clear instructions of the author himself.

At a certain crucial moment in the book of Revelation, John describes a vision of what will take place in an unnamed city in the end-times. The “Gentiles”—a term used in the Hebrew Bible for non-Jews—will “tread the holy city underfoot” for a period of forty-two months, John is told by an angel. Then two anonymous “witnesses” will be given the power to prophesy for a period of exactly 1,260 days. As soon as the two witnesses are finished with their prophecies, “the beast that ascends from the bottomless pit will make war upon them and conquer them and kill them.” Their bodies will lay unburied in the streets for three and a half days, and then they will be resurrected and called to heaven by a divine voice.
⁵⁹

“At that hour there was a great earthquake, and a tenth of the city fell,” writes John, describing the divine catastrophe that he has glimpsed in his visions. “Seven thousand people were killed in the earthquake, and the rest were terrified and gave glory to the God of heaven.”
⁶⁰

John never actually identifies the place that he sees in his vision, referring only to “the great city, which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt.” Some translators render the word
spiritually
as
allegorically
because, in fact, John is signaling his readers and hearers that both of these place names are purely symbolic. And he reveals the intended meaning of the symbolic names by describing the “great city” as the place where “our Lord was crucified.” To put it plainly, when the author of Revelation says “Sodom” and “Egypt,” he means Jerusalem—that is, the earthly city under the occupation of pagan Rome—but he says it allegorically rather than literally.
⁶¹

It’s hardly the most celebrated line of text in the book of Revelation, but it is arguably among the most illuminating ones. Here, as elsewhere in the book of Revelation, John makes it clear that the names, numbers, colors, and images in his visions are ciphers that must be decoded to yield their actual meanings. Montanus may have expected to see the celestial Jerusalem float down through the clouds above Pepuza and bestir the Phrygian dust when it came to rest on solid ground—but only because he failed to heed John’s warning to read the book of Revelation “spiritually.”

Indeed, John himself is given a short course in the interpretation of dreams and visions by his own heavenly mentors. At first glance, for example, John is astounded and bewildered by the sight of the seven-headed beast on which the Whore of Babylon rides. “Why marvel?” says an angel. “I will tell you the mystery of the woman and of the beast that carries her.” And it turns out that the seven heads of the beast are merely symbols that are meant to represent, among other things, seven earthly kings.
⁶²
And Jesus himself explains the “mystery” of the seven stars and the seven golden lamp stands that John sees in his very first vision: they are merely symbols for the seven earthly churches that John is called upon to address.
⁶³

Still, John knows how to work a crowd, and he surely means to manipulate the fears and longings of his audience with scenes of sexual excess, violent persecution of Christians by pagan authorities, and equally violent revenge by God against their persecutors. And the early church fathers saw for themselves how the potent words and images of Revelation were capable of moving some men and women to dreams and visions of their own. When they cautioned good Christians to engage in a “spiritual” rather than a “carnal” reading of Revelation, they were struggling to make it safe for human consumption—and thus began the long, ardent, but failed enterprise that one scholar calls the “taming” of the apocalyptic tradition.
⁶⁴

R
eading a sacred text as an artful allegory rather than the plain truth was an ancient and honorable notion in the Greco-Roman world, and it was embraced by both Jewish and Christian scholars and theologians, including Philo of Alexandria in Jewish tradition and Origen and Jerome in Christian tradition. Thus, for example, the Bible literalists who projected themselves into the passages in Revelation where the saints and martyrs are shown to reign alongside Jesus Christ in the millennial kingdom—“They think they are to be kings and princes,” complains Origen, “like those earthly monarchs who now exist”—were condemned for “refusing the labor of thinking.”
⁶⁵

But the “spiritual” approach to scripture was given its most complete and commanding expression by a forgotten figure called Tyconius, a late-fourth-century Christian cleric whose writings are now mostly lost but whose teachings cast a long shadow over the book of Revelation. Tyconius taught that the terrible and glorious images and incidents in Revelation—the demonic monsters, the celestial warriors, the final battle between God and Satan, and the thousand-year reign of Jesus—must be understood as symbolic expressions of an ongoing struggle between good and evil rather than a literal account of things to come. For Tyconius, the Whore of Babylon and the Bride of the Lamb were nothing more than convenient glyphs for distinguishing between ordinary human beings whose lives were godly or satanic.

Tyconius himself has been mostly written out of Christian tradition because he was a so-called Donatist, a member of the schismatic faction within the early church that refused to accept the authority of bishops whom they regarded as having been too quick to compromise with the pagan magistrates during the periods of persecution under imperial Rome. The Donatists condemned any Christian who complied with an order to turn over his Bible for burning as a
traditor—
the Latin word that originally meant “one who hands over” but soon acquired the meaning that is associated with its English equivalent, “traitor.” In that sense, the Donatists and the author of Revelation were kindred spirits: both were Christian radicals who ruled out any compromise with pagan Rome and detested above all any fellow Christian who collaborated with the Roman authorities.