Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (3 page)

Historians have often assumed that reverence for emperors as gods or heroes was a matter of political expedience, not piety. But Oxford historian Simon Price has brilliantly shown that the matter looked very different to the Asian citizens who built the Sebasteion.
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The distinction between
religion
and
politics
would have made no sense to them—or, for that matter, to most of their contemporaries. Revering the ruler was less a matter of worshipping a human being than of showing respect for the gods who had placed him there, and so shaped the destiny of nations. The citizens of Asia Minor who commissioned the Sebasteion and funded the annual festivals, sacrifices, and athletic games to honor the emperors chose to interpret their submission to Roman rule not as defeat but as
submission to the will of the gods.
Offering such honors to the Roman emperor and his gods could not only ingratiate them to their rulers but could also ease the harsh reality of subjugation to Rome, and lend it meaning.

The historian Steven Friesen has shown that a political crisis, ignited by Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44
B.C.E.
, impelled leading citizens in the Roman province of Asia to fund the lavish outpouring of imperial temples that John saw in their cities—construction they hoped would win favor with Caesar’s successor. For after the emperor’s own senators stabbed him to death in the Senate chamber, his death plunged Rome into a leadership crisis. As three rivals fought to succeed him, leading citizens in the province of Asia backed Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Within a few years, however, the Asian leaders discovered that they had sided
with the losers. With Antony’s defeat, members of Asia’s ruling councils quickly sought to placate the winner, Octavian, later called Augustus, by funding in his honor extravagant temples, statues, and religious festivals to demonstrate their newfound loyalty to him—and to Rome and its gods.

Although the story of Antony and Cleopatra often sounds like melodrama, the consequences of their failed war against Octavian helps account for the imperial display that John of Patmos probably encountered in Asia Minor. After Caesar’s assassination, his designated heir, the brilliant, rich, and ruthless eighteen-year-old Octavian, took his place. At first Octavian agreed to rule jointly with Mark Antony and Marcus Lepidus, both experienced senior consuls. But when tensions erupted among them, Octavian broke off the alliance, took command of Lepidus’ army, and forced him into lifetime exile. Antony, sensing danger, resolved to seize control of the empire before Octavian could take it from him.

To gather support in the Senate, Antony retreated to the eastern provinces of the empire—to Egypt, where he met Cleopatra, whom he had seen on a previous trip about ten years earlier, when she was fourteen and already precocious, fiercely intelligent, and stunningly attractive. Now she presided as queen, and, although formally married to her younger brother, she had previously been the lover of Julius Caesar, to whom she bore a son. After meeting Antony, she allied herself with him and became his consort—and, as his biographer Plutarch later wrote, the love of his life.
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In 32
B.C.E.
, while still married to Octavian’s older sister, Octavia, Antony lived openly with Cleopatra in Ephesus as they courted allies to fight his brotherin law. Plutarch tells how shouting, enthusiastic crowds hailed Antony as the living embodiment
of the god Dionysus and cheered Cleopatra, who often dressed as the New Isis, in honor of her patron goddess. The two held court for several years. Cleopatra bore him two children while they gained the support of many Asian leaders, including the king of Parthia and the king of Judea, and even three hundred Roman senators who traveled to Ephesus to pledge support against Octavian.

Octavian, meanwhile, ordered his sister to leave the house she had shared with Antony and divorce him. When she refused, pleading with him to not declare war on her husband, Octavian ironically complied by ordering the Senate to declare war on Cleopatra. When war came, Octavian destroyed Antony’s navy of five hundred warships at Actium and routed his hundred thousand soldiers and twelve thousand cavalry. Antony was shocked to see hundreds of his ships on fire, and even more horrified to see Cleopatra’s navy suddenly turn and join Octavian’s fleet. After escaping to a fort where Cleopatra was hiding with a few of her slaves, Antony chose suicide rather than allow Octavian to capture, torture, and kill him. To Octavian’s dismay, Cleopatra, too, eluded his grasp, having poisoned herself rather than be brought back to Rome in chains as a trophy in his triumphal parade.

Octavian’s victory caused an enormous crisis for Antony’s allies, who now had to deal with their enemy as their ruler, one who had mercilessly killed those who opposed him in Rome. When the Roman Senate voted him the honorific title Augustus (“revered one” or “majestic one”), the Asian leaders who had sworn loyalty to Mark Antony now demonstrated their loyalty by offering the new emperor unprecedented honors. Shortly after his victory, the provincial council of Asia humbly petitioned him for
permission to honor him as the “divine” Augustus, along with the goddess Roma, and to build a magnificent temple in Pergamum dedicated to the imperial family and to its gods—the first of its kind in Asia. During the decades of the first century
C.E.
, leading citizens of other Asian cities would devote huge amounts of city taxes to vie with one another for the honor—and the advantages—of crowding their cities with statues, arches, and colossal statues dedicated to Rome, its rulers, and its gods.

When John arrived in Ephesus around 90
C.E.
, apparently having spent some time traveling and preaching in Asia Minor, he might have seen a small army of expert stoneworkers constructing the colossal statues, each about a hundred feet high, of emperor Vespasian and his sons, Titus and Domitian, and building the most spectacular temple in the entire city to honor as
divi
(“divine”) the very rulers who had devastated Jerusalem and destroyed the Great Temple of God. Longing for vengeance, John recalled Israel’s sacred scriptures: hadn’t King David himself declared that “the gods of the nations are demons”?
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And hadn’t the prophets—most recently, Jesus—announced that God would soon come to judge the world? Why would God allow these demonic forces and their arrogant human agents to overrun the world with apparent impunity?

What John did in the Book of Revelation, among other things, was create
anti-Roman propaganda
that drew its imagery from Israel’s prophetic traditions—above all, the writings of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. To understand what he was doing, let’s take a closer look at what he wrote. We don’t know what brought John to the island of Patmos, near Ephesus, but he claims that while he was there, visions came to him—perhaps induced by
prayer and fasting
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—when “I heard behind me a loud voice, like a trumpet,” saying, “what you see, write in a book.” John says that when he turned to see who was speaking to him, he saw Jesus in the form that the prophet Daniel claimed to have seen the Son of Man more than two hundred years earlier—his hair “white as snow, like white wool,” his eyes blazing like flames, face “shining like the sun in full strength. When I saw him,” John wrote, “I fell at his feet as though dead.”
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Next, John hears Jesus declare that God’s kingdom is, indeed, coming soon—and promise those who endure that “I will keep you from the hour of trial that is coming upon the whole world.”
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John tells how moments later, having ascended “in the spirit” into the heavens, he was allowed to glimpse the glorious throne of God, the One on the throne radiating light, set among seven flaming torches, much as John had read in Ezekiel’s prophecy:

Hearing peals of thunder, John sees lightning flash from the throne, surrounded by worshippers and thousands of angels and flanked by four unearthly creatures studded with multiple eyes, one with a lion’s face, the others with the faces of a bull, an eagle, and a man. John adds:

This sacred scroll reveals God’s divine plan—“what must take place after this.” Hearing that “no one in heaven, or on earth, or under the earth, was able to open the scroll, or look into it,” John says, “I began to weep bitterly.” But one of God’s servants reassures him: “Do not weep. Behold, the lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.”
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Taking heart, John expects to see the conquering messiah, the king called the Lion of Judah, standing before God’s throne, and is astounded to see instead a
lamb
—and, stranger still, “a lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God.” To his surprise, this supernatural creature takes the scroll and a divine voice pronounces him worthy to open it, “because you were slaughtered, and ransomed God’s holy ones from every tribe, language, people, and nation.” Thus John hears that this strange figure epitomizes the paradox embodied in Jesus of Nazareth,
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whose closest followers had recognized—and publicly acclaimed—him as God’s appointed king, their messiah. But instead of riding triumphant into Jerusalem for his coronation, as they had hoped, Jesus was slaughtered on the eve of Passover, like a sacrificial lamb.
⁴⁸
“Then,” says John,

Now John begins to see heavenly secrets unfold to show the coming end of time. What he sees next—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—reveals events that have already begun to play themselves out on earth. As we noted, the first horseman signifies war, perhaps indicating the wars that had shattered the empire for decades, reaching new intensity in the year 68
C.E.
, when four emperors, in turn, were crowned and assassinated.
⁵⁰
The second horseman, mounted on a bright red horse, “was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people would slaughter one another.” Hearing that the third horseman carries tokens that signify hugely inflated prices for bread and cooking oil, John’s contemporaries might recognize that inflation, too, was escalating throughout the empire. Finally John sees a fourth horseman, Death, mounted on a pale green horse, bringing death by plague, famine, and wild animals. Horrifying signs follow: “the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to earth, as the fig tree drops its fruits when shaken by a storm,” until “the rulers of the earth, and the great men, the generals, the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slaves and free,” hide in caves, seeking shelter among rocks on the mountains, “for the great day of [God’s] wrath has come, and who is able to stand?”
⁵¹

Yet John sees that
some
will be able to stand, since God sends four angels to protect the sea, earth, and trees and then to protect certain people. An angel explains to John that “we have marked the slaves of God with a seal on their foreheads,” first 144,000
men—twelve thousand from each of the twelve tribes of Israel—and, following them, a “great multitude, that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,” shouting and singing praise to God. These people, who “have come out of the great ordeal … [and] have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb,” now stand before God’s throne, waiting to enter Paradise, where Jesus “will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
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John now begins to understand why God has delayed the coming judgment: because the end-time events have begun, God wants to protect his “holy ones” from harm. Only after angels seal his people, then, is the lamb allowed to open the seventh seal of the scroll to reveal—and, apparently, to initiate—“what must take place after this.” After a suspenseful silence in heaven, John sees seven angels, each sounding a trumpet to signal a series of coming catastrophes:
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“When the first angel blew his trumpet, hail and fire, mixed with blood” rained down upon the earth, setting a third of the earth on fire. At the second trumpet blast, John says, “something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea,” polluting it so that “a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed.”
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Here John may have had in mind what had happened about ten years before, on August 23 of the year 79
C.E.
, when Mount Vesuvius, in southern Italy, erupted with a great explosion that shook the earth and filled the air with a deafening roar. As dense clouds of black smoke rose and sheets of flame shot up from the crater, molten lava rained down, killing thousands of people as they fled in terror—burned to death or choked by smoke and
falling ashes. Some who watched from afar said that smoke and ashes darkened the sky for more than three days and could be seen as far away as Rome, borne by the wind to Africa, Egypt, and Syria. On the morning of August 27, as the sky began to lighten, what survivors saw was an enormous field of ashes, the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii completely buried, along with thousands of corpses, animal and human. Witnesses said that the mountain still smoked, and seismic aftershocks shook the earth again and again. Not far from Pompeii lay the famous cave of the Sibyl of Cumae, which, soon afterward, issued an oracle that circulated throughout the Roman world. In the language of oracular tradition, the Sibyl warned that God was about to unleash his wrath on the world, causing earthquakes and raining fire and ashes from the sky—probably referring to Vesuvius. Like John, the oracle’s anonymous author recognized these shocking events as signs of the coming end.