Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (5 page)

John probably used such cryptic images because open hostility to Rome could be dangerous; he may have feared reprisal. Other prophets, too, had written in coded language to hold out visions of hope. Nearly two hundred years earlier, for example, the prophet Daniel had challenged his fellow Jews to resist the tyranny of another “evil empire”—or die trying. In 167
B.C.E.
, the foreign king Antiochus IV, a successor of Alexander the Great, called Epiphanes (literally, “god manifest”), had determined to force Jews under
his rule to give up their identity and assimilate into his empire. Living under the pressure of those times, Daniel declared that visions seen in his dreams had shown “four great beasts that came out of the sea,” often interpreted as the empires of Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome, each more terrifying than the last, the fourth one

Daniel says that after receiving this vision, “my spirit was troubled within me, and the visions in my head terrified me. … I, Daniel, was overcome and lay sick for some days. … I was dismayed by the vision, and did not understand it.”
⁷⁹

Daniel then says that he was allowed a glimpse into heaven that reassured him that God was about to intervene: “As I watched visions in the night, I saw one who looked like a human being [in Aramaic, ‘son of man’] coming with the clouds of heaven.” As this man approached God’s throne to be presented to the Ancient of Days, he

When John of Patmos read these words, he, like other followers of Jesus, apparently felt that he
did
understand what Daniel’s
mysterious vision meant: this shows God investing
Jesus
with power—and shows that Rome, though seemingly invincible, is only a monster bound for destruction. When John says that “the beast that I saw was like a leopard, its feet were like a bear’s, and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth,” he revises Daniel’s vision to picture Rome as the worst empire of all, combining the bestial qualities of its predecessors.
⁸¹
When he says that the beast’s seven heads “are seven kings,” John probably means the Roman emperors who ruled from the time of Augustus until his own time.
⁸²
While scholars disagree about precisely
which
emperors John has in mind, John gives an obvious hint: “One of [the beast’s] heads seemed to have received a death blow,” having been “wounded by the sword, and yet lived.”
⁸³

John’s contemporaries would have known that here he refers to an emperor, and some probably would have guessed the emperor Nero, who reigned from 54 to 68
C.E.
and was rumored to have been killed by his own sword, although many believed that he had survived. Nero had at first been popular among the Roman people, but stories of his arrogance and cruelty earned him the hatred of many other Romans, especially many senators. After enduring fourteen years of his rule, the senators, on June 8 of the year 68
C.E.
, declared the emperor a public enemy and sentenced him to be stripped naked, hung up with his head thrust into a huge wooden fork, and publicly beaten to death. The later court historian Suetonius says that the terrified Nero fled Rome on horseback in an undershirt and slippers, his face covered, and hid in a deserted country villa overgrown with weeds and brambles. Hearing that horsemen were approaching to bring him back to Rome, Nero resolved to kill himself. After pleading with his slaves to burn his
body so that his enemies could not cut off his head, Nero, his hands shaking, took his dagger and, with the help of his secretary, drove it into his own throat.
⁸⁴
But since few people could testify that he actually had died, rumors grew that he had escaped to the eastern provinces and someday would return to reclaim his throne.

Although John held all emperors in contempt, he apparently chose Nero—who was said to have burned Jewish followers of Jesus alive to illuminate his garden—to epitomize “the beast” that was Roman rule. To make sure that no one missed his meaning, he offered this telling clue: “This calls for wisdom: let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred sixty-six.”
⁸⁵
Historians familiar with the numerological system Jews called gematria, which assigns a numerical value to each letter and calculates the relationship between the numbers, have offered various suggestions to interpret this mysterious number. Some still debate its meaning, but many now agree that the most obvious calculations suggest that the “number of the beast” spells out Nero’s imperial name.

John’s Book of Revelation, then, vividly evokes the horror of the Jewish war against Rome. Just as the poet Marianne Moore says that poems are “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” John’s visions and monsters are meant to embody actual beings and events. John gives plenty of clues to identify the “real toads.” As we noted, his vision of a great mountain exploding
⁸⁶
reflects the eruption of Vesuvius in 79
C.E
. The dragon’s seven heads suggest the emperors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, as “the number of the beast” may allude to the hidden name of Nero.

But, one might ask, if that’s what he means, why doesn’t he just say it? Why does he cloak the actual situations and persons in such elaborate and elusive images? As we noted, this may have to do with the danger of speaking openly against Rome.
⁸⁷
But John also wants to do more than tell
what happens;
he wants to show
what such events mean
. He wants to speak to the urgent question that people have asked throughout human history, wherever they first imagined divine justice: how long will evil prevail, and when will justice be done? To speak to this question, he invokes the language of the classical prophets, who also sought to assure their people that what happens on earth is neither random nor meaningless, and that the moral complexity of the present world will be sorted out when divine justice sets everything straight and punishes evil. By shifting scenes from earth to heaven and back, John intends to show how events on earth look from God’s perspective, until the angel announces that “there shall be no more time”
⁸⁸
and time is drawn into eternity.

Because John offers his Revelation in the language of dreams and nightmares, language that is “multivalent,”
⁸⁹
countless people for thousands of years have been able to see their own conflicts, fears, and hopes reflected in his prophecies. And because he speaks from his convictions about divine justice, many readers have found reassurance in his conviction that there
is
meaning in history—even when he does not say exactly what that meaning is—and that there is hope.

John was not the only prophet at the time offering “revelations” warning of divine judgment and announcing the coming end of time. But to John’s dismay, the majority of Jews, and later Jesus’ Gentile followers as well, would continue to “follow the
beast” and to flirt with “the whore” called Babylon, that is, with Rome and its culture. Instead of sharing John’s vision of the im-minent destruction of the world and preparing for its end, many other followers of Jesus sought ways to live in that world, negotiating compromises with Rome’s absolutist government as they sought to sort out, in Jesus’ words, what “belongs to Caesar” and what “to God.” Realizing this, John decided that he had to fight on two fronts at once: not only against the Romans but also against members of God’s people who accommodated them and who, John suggests, became accomplices in evil.
⁹⁰

A
lthough most people despise you as powerless and insignificant, you are God’s beloved, the most important people on earth.
As John tells it, when Jesus first appeared he told John to deliver this message to struggling groups of his followers. For John—or, he says, Jesus—is concerned not only about future events but also about what is happening in the present. So even before telling his visions of the end, when the most powerful rulers on earth shall fall from the heights and those now oppressed shall reign victorious with Christ, he opens his Revelation with seven letters meant to transform the way Jesus’ followers see themselves right now.

Those who read John’s graphic visions into their own lives often hear Jesus addressing them directly in these warnings that John says Jesus dictated to seven “churches.” When the Black Death swept over Europe in the fourteenth century, many saw the plague as the arrival of the first horseman of the Apocalypse and prayed to be counted among God’s elect.
¹
Hundreds of years later, both Catholics and Protestants battling one another in Europe saw themselves as God’s saints contending against satanic forces, as did American Christians caught up in the nightmare of the Civil War, those on both sides—the Confederacy and the Union—seeing themselves living in the final days of wrath, fighting for God’s truth against evil.
²
Each of those turbulent events drove
many people who lived through them to see themselves living in the end-time, and to strive to live as “holy ones,” as God’s few saints remaining on earth, hoping to enter God’s kingdom. Thus in the late nineteenth century, Christians in America calling themselves by such names as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists, and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (whom outsiders call Mormons) began to proclaim Christ’s imminent return, as many of them still do, offering salvation to those who heed the message and prepare for the coming kingdom. In the twentieth century, even Adolf Hitler, encouraged by his minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, apparently read himself into John’s visions, as one divinely chosen to initiate what he proudly called the Third Reich, which suggested not only Germany’s third kingdom but also Christ’s thousand-year kingdom on earth,
³
while countless others pictured Hitler instead as the furious and diabolical “beast” who makes war on God’s people.

The great English poet William Blake wrote that he and his assumed audience “both read the Bible day and night; but you read black where I read white.”
⁴
Conflicting interpretations are not new; even Jesus’ earliest known followers—Peter, James, and Paul—apparently read Jesus’
own
message in ways that diverged and sometimes might have clashed. Scholars now realize that only sixty years after Jesus’ death, John of Patmos challenged the way others—including many of Paul’s followers—were preaching his message. Later generations toned down such disputes and placed both Paul’s teaching and John’s within what they would come to call the New Testament, which they saw as representing a single and harmonious tradition.

To whom, then, did John write, and what immediate concerns
impelled him to do so? While attacking the Roman enemies, John also challenged enemies within—certain followers of Jesus whom he accused of collaborating with Satan. As Revelation opens, John tells how each of seven small groups living in a cluster of cities on the coast of Asia Minor (again in present-day Turkey)—fruit merchants, weavers, tent makers, cooks, cobblers, slaves, and free persons—suddenly receives a summons from the “King of kings, and Lord of lords.” The divine king whose eyes burn like fire dictates letters to John, warning members of these groups that “I know your works”—and how well, or how badly, each one is prepared for the coming cosmic war. Announcing that they have no choice but to take sides before divine wrath destroys the world, John says that the “son of man” has told him to warn each group how they look to God—and what they must do to survive the coming judgment. For instead of writing down his dreams to explore his psyche, John claims that the spirit sent visions to show “what must soon take place.” But John wants to do more than
deliver
divine revelation: he wants to persuade his hearers that his visions are genuine—that they show how the world actually looks not to him but to
God
.

John writes as if his visions were unique, sent direct from heaven; and for two thousand years, many Christians have assumed that they were, since his is the only “book of revelation” in the New Testament. But John knew that he was competing with
other
prophets, and was angry that some of his hearers were also listening to them and heeding their messages. John says that “the son of man” ordered him to denounce these lying prophets and warn their followers that he is coming soon to punish—even kill—those who listen to “that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a
prophet”
⁵
and to the man he calls Balaam—John’s contemptuous names for the two competitors whose messages clash with his own.

We now know that John was one of many—Jews, Christians, and pagans—speaking in prophecy and writing books of revelation during the early centuries of the Common Era. The 1945 discoveries at Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt, where the socalled Gnostic gospels were found, also unearthed dozens of books of revelation,
⁶
many previously unknown. Before we turn to the questions of who suppressed such revelations and why only
one
such book—that of John of Patmos—came to be included in the New Testament, let’s consider what “revelation” meant to John.