Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (6 page)

John calls the two prophets he denounces
liars,
but his fellow believers probably would have seen him, like them, as traveling prophets who came to speak during worship. How could those listening to such prophets know whom to believe—which visions are genuine and which are false? When Israel’s prophets had faced such questions hundreds of years earlier, they often lent credence to their prophecies by telling exactly
where
and
when
a vision had come to them. The prophet Isaiah, for example, wrote that a vision came to him “in the year that King Uzziah died”—742
B.C.E.
While he was standing before the altar in the Great Temple in Jerusalem,

Ezekiel, too, opens his prophecies telling exactly where he was, and when, on the day “the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God”: he was in Babylon (now Iraq) next to the river Chebar, “in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month,”
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that is, in 593
B.C.E
. Although by that time Babylonian soldiers had demolished the Jerusalem Temple, where, 150 years earlier, Isaiah said he had “seen the Lord,” Ezekiel said that
his
vision reassured him that the Lord was still reigning in heaven, since he needed no earthly throne, not even the temple itself. Instead, Ezekiel said, he had seen the Lord enthroned upon a moving chariot of fire, borne on wheels throughout the universe by four winged creatures, with eyes all over their bodies:

Cautioning that words can only approximate what he has seen, and aware that Moses had warned that no one could see God and
live,
¹⁰
the prophet carefully qualifies what he says he saw (“
something like
a throne, in
appearance like
sapphire; and seated above
the likeness of
a throne was
something that seemed like
a human form”). Hesitating to describe the Divine One, he offers only images of brilliant light.
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Fire, sapphire, rainbows, lightning—Ezekiel invokes all of these to suggest “the Lord’s
glory
”—in visions have inspired many others to imagine ascending toward the divine throne and wonder what they might see, were they able to approach the “palaces” that housed that throne and enter into God’s presence.
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When John of Patmos said that he, too, saw “the heavens opened” and was “in the spirit,” he wrote visions infused with images drawn from his prophetic predecessors. Like Isaiah and Ezekiel before him, John tells where he was, and on what day, when he first received a vision: “I was on the island called Patmos … in the spirit, on the Lord’s day.”
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John says that shortly after he was invited to ascend into the heavens, he saw flashes of lightning, dazzling jewels and crystal, rainbows and fire, and heard terrifying bursts of thunder:

Like Ezekiel, John says he saw four winged beings around the throne, which Isaiah, too, said he had seen there, singing God’s praise in words like those Isaiah had heard: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God almighty, who was, and is, and is to come!”
¹⁴

John of Patmos would have agreed that Jesus of Nazareth, too, received visions, like the stunning vision that Mark’s gospel says Jesus saw as he emerged from the Jordan River, dripping with water, after John baptized him. As Mark tells it, at that moment Jesus “saw the heavens torn apart, and the spirit of God descending” upon him and heard a divine voice speaking from heaven, saying, “You are my son, the beloved.”
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No doubt John accepted, too, the widespread reports that many who had known Jesus had “seen the Lord” alive again, just as John said that on that Sunday morning in Patmos, some sixty years after Jesus was crucified, he, too, had seen the one who died and is “alive forever and ever.”
¹⁶

John’s predecessor, Paul of Tarsus, writing thirty to forty years before John, also claimed that he had “seen the Lord”—an event that left him shocked, stunned, and temporarily blind. As Luke later told it, Paul was traveling to Damascus, the capital city of Syria, to arrest Jesus’ followers as traitors to Jewish tradition when suddenly he was struck by a vision that turned his life around. Luke says that Paul saw a blazing light and heard a divine voice as Jesus—who had died decades earlier—challenged him from heaven, demanding, “Why are you persecuting me?”
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Paul himself said simply that “God revealed his son in me”
¹⁸
and sent him as his apostle to the Gentiles, that is, to the non-Jewish population of the Roman Empire. Paul insisted that the risen Jesus had personally revealed to him the distinctive message that he was to preach to these outsiders. As he later wrote to believers in the city
of Galatia, in Asia Minor, “I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I have preached is not of human origin, for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it,
but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ
.”
¹⁹

Paul’s impassioned preaching soon attracted a considerable following of Gentiles in the Syrian city of Antioch, but it also embroiled him in bitter disputes with other followers of Jesus. People who belonged to the Jerusalem group led by Jesus’ brother James apparently charged that Paul’s “gospel” was so radical that it contradicted what they had heard from the most respected leaders, including James himself and the disciples Peter and John. Although what Luke later wrote in the Book of Acts glossed over these disputes, Paul’s own words suggest that initially he was concerned that Peter and James—or, at any rate, their followers—might oppose him for preaching to Gentiles a “gospel” that had dropped all Torah requirements,
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although he says that finally they agreed to let him teach it.

So when other leaders in the movement accused Paul of having no credentials to speak for Jesus, whom he had never met, Paul burst out in anger. He sarcastically called his accusers “super apostles”
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who were forcing him to talk about matters that made him feel foolish and uncomfortable, since what he had to say would sound like boasting. Paul insisted that he taught only what came to him directly “through revelation”—not from Peter, James, or anyone else on earth. Paul insisted that his authority came straight from God—from “visions and revelations of the Lord.”
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To validate his claim, Paul, like Isaiah and Ezekiel, mentions a specific time—“fourteen years ago”—when, speaking obliquely, he says that “someone he knew” was “caught up to the third heaven;
whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know; God knows.”
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Repeating these words for emphasis, Paul strongly hints that he himself was “caught up into Paradise.”
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Yet unlike Ezekiel or John of Patmos, who both say that God told them to reveal what they had seen, Paul says that in Paradise he had “heard things that are
not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.
”
²⁵
While claiming that he has to keep them secret, Paul insists that these “visions and revelations” prove that his message is true, sent from God.

John of Patmos never mentions Paul’s name—perhaps, as we shall see, because he remained skeptical of Paul’s teaching and kept his distance from those who accepted it.
²⁶
John says that Jesus told him to warn “the saints” in Ephesus that although God has called them to be a holy nation, a “kingdom of priests” like Israel,
²⁷
Satan is actively working through some of them. John says that although gullible people have been taken in by “evildoers” whom they revere as prophets and apostles, Jesus praises those who realize that certain wouldbe leaders are actually Satan’s agents: “I know your works. … I know that you cannot tolerate evildoers;
you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false.”
²⁸

For nearly two thousand years, many readers have assumed that John was addressing groups of
Christians undergoing persecution,
and that Jews, as well as Romans, were persecuting them. Since he speaks with distress about those imprisoned and killed “because of the witness to Jesus,” many readers assume that John himself experienced persecution. About a hundred years after John wrote, the African convert Tertullian, who actually had seen Christians tortured and killed in a public stadium in his home
city of Carthage, speculated that John had been sentenced to death because of his testimony to Jesus, and barely escaped by having been banished instead to the remote island of Patmos, as sometimes happened in the case of condemned prisoners who could claim some social standing.
²⁹

Many historians today believe that John was not living in a time of active—or, at least, systematic—persecution.
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Yet John mentions one of Jesus’ followers, Antipas, who he says “was killed among you” as a martyr, and expresses concern that others may be arrested, even killed.
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By the time he was writing, John probably knew, too, that Jesus’ own brother James had been killed by a mob in Jerusalem, and that the Roman authorities had killed Peter and Paul. Knowing how such leaders had died, even when such killings didn’t happen often, any member of the movement might well fear further reprisals, as John does when he encourages others to “be faithful unto death”
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should they face mob violence or arrest and execution.

Although John’s prophecies are in the New Testament, we do not actually know whether he saw himself as a
Christian.
There is no doubt that John was a devoted follower of Jesus Christ, but he never actually uses the term “Christian”—probably because what we call Christianity had not yet become entirely separate from Judaism. Instead, like Peter, Paul, and other early followers of Jesus, John clearly saw himself
as a Jew who had found the messiah.
Because this placed him among a minority, he also saw himself as part of Israel’s “holy remnant,” through whom he envisioned that all nations would finally come to share in Israel’s blessings.
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The New Testament Book of Acts says that certain believers did come to be called Christians for the first time just around the time John
was writing—but, as we’ll see, unlike John, many of them probably were not born Jews.
³⁴

Writing around 90
C.E.
, John expresses alarm at seeing God’s “holy people” increasingly infiltrated by outsiders who had no regard for Israel’s priority. In retrospect, we can see that John stood on the cusp of an enormous change—one that eventually would transform the entire movement from a Jewish messianic sect into “Christianity,” a new religion flooded with Gentiles, including Greeks, Asians, Africans, Gauls, Germans, Spaniards, and Egyptians. But since this had not yet happened—not, at least, among the groups John addressed in Asia Minor—he took his stand as a Jewish prophet charged to keep God’s people holy, unpolluted by Roman culture. So, John says, Jesus twice warns his followers in Asia Minor to beware of “blasphemers” among them, who “say they are Jews, and are not,”
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and so have not traditionally belonged among God’s people: “I know the slander on the part of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.”
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Turning to those living in Pergamum, the third-largest city of Asia, crowned by the great temple of Zeus that he calls “Satan’s throne,” John repeats that Jesus knows that they live in territory dominated by the power of evil: “I know where you are living: where Satan’s throne is.”
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Six of the seven cities to which John wrote, in fact, were dominated by imperial temples.
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John opposed not only Rome’s political and military power but also her cultural influence. Like all people living within a culture they regard as alien and evil, John knew that some contact with outsiders was inevitable. But how much contact is too much? Although John was probably a native of Judea whose first
language was Aramaic or Hebrew, he wrote in Greek as a keen observer of the “pagan” behavior he saw all around him.
³⁹
John was worried about contamination, especially since he knew that many Jews tolerated much more compromise than he did. Some, like the wealthy and politically influential Egyptian Jew named Alexander, a contemporary of Jesus, gave up Jewish customs altogether while rising to the highest level of Roman administration; others, like Alexander’s nephew Philo, sought to practice Jewish purity laws and religious observance while harmonizing them with Greek philosophic perspectives.
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Had John met Jews as sophisticated as Philo, he probably would have been repelled by their easy command of Greek and the fine weave of their clothes. Unlike Philo, who praised the magnificent statues and temple to “the god Augustus” that presided over the harbor at Alexandria, his Egyptian home city, John loathed the imperial temple in Pergamum, gleaming with marble and gold, where, he said, “Satan lives.”
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