Read Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation Online

Authors: Elaine Pagels

Tags: #Biblical Studies, #General, #Religion

Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (2 page)

BOOK: Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation
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John then sees four angels standing at the four corners of the earth and placing seals on the foreheads of 144,000 men, the elite troops among God’s people—twelve thousand from each of Israel’s tribes—to protect them from “the great day of the wrath of God.” Suddenly the scene returns to the heavenly throne, where John sees a star fall from heaven, a being who “opens the shaft of the bottomless pit,”
13
from which giant locusts with human faces, women’s hair streaming behind them, emerge as an army of monsters led by Abaddon, angel of the abyss.
14

In heaven, two signs now appear in the sky: a woman “clothed with the sun,”
15
hugely pregnant, writhes and cries out in labor, about to give birth to a male child—God’s messiah—while a bright red dragon with seven heads paces in front of her, waiting to devour the infant the moment it is born. The woman escapes, her child is caught up into heaven, and John is shocked to see war break out in heaven.
16
The archangel Michael and his angels are fighting the dragon and his angels, who fight back but are beaten down, get thrown out of heaven, and fall to earth. The frustrated dragon, violently enraged, storms off to make war on the woman and upon all of her children who remain on the earth.

John now sees that the dragon has called forth two huge, hideous beasts as his allies. The first, with seven heads and ten horns, rises out of the sea and receives power to “make war … on those
who keep the commandments of God and the testimony of Jesus”
17
and to dominate the whole world. His ally, the second beast, who has a mysterious name—a human name, John says, indicated by the number 666—“makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, and cause all those who would not worship the image of the beast to be killed.”
18

As cosmic war intensifies, John sees seven angels standing in heaven and watches as each, in turn, pours out upon the earth a golden bowl filled with God’s wrath. The horror intensifies as the sixth angel pours his bowl on the river Euphrates, near Babylon—and the “spirits of demons” summon all the leaders of the nations “to gather them for battle on the great day of God Almighty,”
19
preparing for the terrible battle at Armageddon, the plain at the foot of Mount Carmel in present-day Israel. As the seventh angel pours his bowl into the air, thundering bursts of lightning precede the most violent earthquake the world has ever known, and the city of Babylon falls, its people cursing God as they die in agony. Now John sees a vision of Babylon as the prophet Isaiah had pictured Israel’s ancient enemy Tyre—in the form of a great whore, brilliantly dressed, adorned with jewels, sitting on a scarlet beast with seven heads, drinking the blood of God’s people from a golden cup.
20

When the battle reaches its climax, Jesus appears as a divine warrior, mounted on a white horse as he rides forth from heaven to lead armies of angels into war:

From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God
Almighty … [and his name is] “King of kings, and Lord of lords.”
21

 

An angel shouts, announcing that God invites all vultures to come after the battle to a hideous feast, to “eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of the mighty, the flesh of the horses and their riders—flesh of all, both free and slave, small and great.”
22
The forces join in battle and Satan is thrown into a pit, the dragon chained, the beasts thrown into a lake of fire—while all human beings who had died faithful to God come back to life and reign over the earth for a thousand years. Then Jesus judges the whole world, and all who have worshipped other gods or committed murder, magic, or illicit sexual acts are thrown down to be tormented forever in a lake of fire,
23
while God’s faithful are invited to enter a new city of Jerusalem that descends from heaven and where Christ and his people reign in triumph for a thousand years.

Anyone hearing these prophecies might well wonder: What kinds of visions are these, and what kind of man was writing them? John was a Jewish prophet writing visions he claimed to have received on the island of Patmos, about seventy miles from the city of Ephesus, off the coast of Asia Minor in present-day Turkey; but we begin to understand what he wrote only when we see that his book is
wartime literature
. John probably began to write around 90
C.E.
, having likely fled from a war that had ravaged Judea, his homeland.
24
John may actually have witnessed the outbreak of war in Jerusalem in 66
C.E.
, when militant Jews, fired with religious fervor, sporadically attacked groups of Roman soldiers and stockpiled weapons to fight an all-out war against Rome’s occupation of Judea in the name of “God and our common liberty.”
After four years of desperate fighting, Rome sent sixty thousand troops to besiege Jerusalem, starve its inhabitants, and break the revolutionaries’ ferocious resistance. When Roman soldiers, led first by the future emperor Vespasian and later by his son Titus, finally defeated the Jews, they desecrated the sacred precincts of the Great Temple, burned it to the ground, and left the inner city of Jerusalem in ruins.
25

Twenty years later, the prophet John was living on Patmos, where tradition says he was forcibly sent “because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ.”
26
We might imagine him pacing restlessly along the sea by day and lying awake at night, watching the constellations as they moved across the sky.
27
Horrified by the slaughter of so many of his people by Rome, John put his own cry of anguish into the mouths of the souls he says he saw in heaven, pleading for God’s justice.

Other Jews among his contemporaries asked similar questions, but John was not a traditional Jew, since he had joined the radical sect devoted to Jesus of Nazareth. Although later Christian tradition identified him as John of Zebedee, one of Jesus’ disciples, John of Patmos belonged to the second generation of Jesus’ followers, who had heard what the early disciples reported Jesus secretly telling them: that he himself was God’s messiah, the chosen future king of Israel.
28
Many first-generation followers of Jesus had expected him to lead Israel to victory over the hated Romans and reestablish God’s kingdom in Jerusalem and eventually over the whole world. When Jesus was arrested after one of his inner circle denounced him to the leaders who presided over the Jerusalem Temple, he was brought to Pilate, the Roman governor, who ordered him beaten and crucified as the self-professed “king of the
Jews.” After that, many of his followers quit the movement, and Roman magistrates killed its outspoken leaders. Although John apparently was born some years after these events, he probably knew that the Romans had also crucified Peter, Jesus’ right-hand man, and had whipped and beheaded Paul of Tarsus. He may have heard various accounts of the violent death of Jesus’ own brother James, whom many regarded as his successor, beaten or stoned to death near the Jerusalem Temple.

But some of Jesus’ followers—and
their
followers—refused to give up. John, persuaded by their preaching, was one of those in the next generation who insisted that Jesus was still God’s appointed future king of Israel—and, indeed, of the whole world. They claimed that God had brought him back to life and that soon Jesus would return from heaven to earth and vanquish his enemies as God’s chosen ruler of the universe—“King of kings, and Lord of lords.”
29
Jews among John’s contemporaries thought Jesus’ followers were fools, of course, since Jesus had been killed sixty years before. But had someone asked his loyal followers how they could possibly believe that Jesus would return as king, John could answer that he had seen proof that the most astonishing of Jesus’ prophecies had already come true—and so he dared hope that the rest would do the same. For when Jesus announced that “the kingdom of God is coming soon,” he also privately warned his followers that before God’s kingdom would come, terrible sufferings must first take place—earthquakes, famine, and war, followed by the unthinkable: that enemy armies would surround and besiege Jerusalem and utterly destroy the Great Temple, the sacred center of Jerusalem. The Gospel of Mark says that when Jesus walked through that temple with his disciples, who were
awed by its magnificence, he said to them, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”
30
Many historians have suggested that Jesus did not actually prophesy the temple’s destruction and that his followers added this saying only after it happened; but I find it more plausible that he did speak this prophecy, as, in any case, many of his followers surely believed.
31
Jesus repeatedly warned that Judgment Day—and God’s kingdom—would come within one generation:
“There are some standing here who will not die until they see the kingdom of God having come with power. … I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.”
32

Imagine how John felt, then, when, about forty years after Jesus’ death, this shocking prophecy turned out to be true: in 70
C.E.
, Roman armies stormed Jerusalem, burned down the temple, and reduced the city center to charred rubble. When this happened, John and others loyal to Jesus were both horrified and excited, for this must mean that everything else he had prophesied would now happen. Jesus had warned that “wars and rumor of wars” would be “only the beginning of the birth pangs [of the messiah]” and told them to expect persecution, saying that “in those days there will be such suffering as has not been from the beginning of the creation until now, no, and never will be.”
33
But Jesus had added that,
after
these catastrophic events, his followers would see “the son of man coming in the clouds, with great power and glory,” to establish God’s kingdom:

When you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away before all these things have taken place.
34

 

About ten years after the end of the Jewish war, racing against time, some of his followers wrote the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke to spread Jesus’ message and warn the rest of the world before the end would come.

Although John may have fled from Judea to Asia Minor, he, like many among the second generation of believers, waited for Jesus to return and for his kingdom to “come with power.” But by the time John began to write his Revelation, nearly thirty more years had passed. Now
two
generations had come and gone—and John, along with Jesus’ other followers, must have wondered how the prophecy had failed. For when John traveled through Asia Minor, he could see evidence everywhere that the kingdom that actually had “come with power” was not God’s—it was
Rome’s.

At the great Asian port of Ephesus, John could have seen the temples, the theaters, the monumental municipal buildings, crowded with statues of pagan gods, and the central street dominated by a colossal statue of Titus, commander of the Roman forces that had burned the Jerusalem Temple. Everywhere he looked, John would have found inscriptions, statues, and temples depicting the triumphs of the Roman gods. The greatest of these was built by Titus’ brother, Domitian, the current emperor, who ruled what Romans called “the whole world,” from Britain to what is now France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, extending to Croatia and Serbia, Turkey and Greece, and then to Egypt, Africa, Syria, Israel, and as far east as Iraq. Near Ephesus, in the city of Pergamum, John would have seen what he called “Satan’s throne” but what local citizens regarded as the pride of their city—the great temple of Zeus, which stood at the top of the city, near the first temple that wealthy city leaders had built to demonstrate
their patriotism, and had dedicated to the divine emperor Augustus and to the goddess Roma.
35
And in the nearby city of Aphrodisias, John might have marveled at the huge and lavish temple, three stories high, called the Sebasteion, “temple of the holy ones.”
36

Most travelers who walked through these grand colonnades would have admired the great panels of sculptured reliefs that celebrated Roman victories over nations under imperial rule.
37
John, however, coming from the subject nation of Judea, would have been disgusted by what he saw. Many of the panels picture an armed, godlike emperor dominating a female slave—a metaphor for how Romans saw the nations they conquered. The south portico, for example, commemorates Rome’s conquest of Britain, picturing the emperor Claudius seizing an anguished female slave by the hair and raising his sword to cut her throat. The inscription tells that the slave is Britain, shamed and beaten, her breast exposed as she raises her hand in a futile attempt to ward off the death blow. A second scene depicts Nero forcing a naked female slave—in this case Armenia—to the ground. A third scene pictures the triumphant Augustus being honored among the gods by Venus, whom the Greeks called Aphrodite and whom the emperor saw as patron goddess of his predecessor, Julius Caesar. The local citizens revered her as the divine protector of the city they named for her, Aphrodisias.

What might have angered this provincial Jewish prophet even more than the degrading picture of captive nations like his own would be to see Roman triumphs displayed not simply as imperial propaganda but as
religious devotion
. John would have seen such monumental architecture as a demonic parody of God’s truth,
picturing rulers like Augustus, Nero, and Tiberius, under whose reign Jesus was crucified, as divinely ordained—by gods whom John loathed as demonic powers.

BOOK: Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation
3.99Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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