Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (7 page)

John may have startled believers who lived in sight of that temple when he implied that some of their most dangerous enemies were not Romans but respected members of their own group. John says that Jesus warns that two prophets among them are actually working for Satan:

We do not know the real name of the prophet whom John derisively calls Balaam, the biblical name of an evil prophet who
sought to deceive Israel; but John accuses this prophet of encouraging idolatry by allowing Jews to eat meat that had been offered in sacrifice to pagan gods and to “practice
porneia
”
—
sexual impurity.

John says that Jesus also told him to rebuke his followers in the nearby city of Thyatira who listened to another false prophet—and, worse, a woman:

Since John refuses to speak her real name, much less admit that she is a prophet, he mockingly calls her Jezebel, to associate her with the infamous Canaanite queen who induced her husband, Israel’s king, to worship idols and even tried to kill the prophet Elijah.
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Are we to take these charges literally—that rival prophets among Jesus’ followers actually
were
“seducing [Jesus’] servants to practice fornication” and encouraging them to eat food sacrificed to idols? Here John borrows the sexual metaphor for
idolatry
that prophets like Hosea and Jeremiah used when they scolded their people for “committing adultery” against the Lord, whom they call Israel’s “true husband.”
⁴⁵
John clearly understands this
language as a prophetic metaphor that warns against consorting with foreign cultures and flirting, so to speak, with foreign gods.

But John also knew that these two issues—eating and sexual activity—aroused conflict whenever Jews discussed whether, or how much, to assimilate. Meat markets in Asia Minor and Greece, as throughout the empire, often sold meat left over from sacrifice in local temples, and government officials distributed such meat to the public to celebrate public holidays and military victories. Families often bought it to serve at dinner parties or to celebrate birthdays, marriages, and funerals.
⁴⁶
But strictly observant Jews regarded such meat as polluted; the Book of Acts tells how Peter and Jesus’ brother James, who shared a concern about purity, mediated arguments among Jesus’ followers about whether to eat such “unclean” meat or refuse it.
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Arguments about sexual activity could be even more heated. When John accuses “Balaam” and “Jezebel” of inducing people to “eat food sacrificed to idols and practice fornication,”
⁴⁸
he might have in mind anything from tolerating people who engage in incest to Jews who become sexually involved with Gentiles or, worse, who marry them.
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Because John wants Jesus’ followers to be holy, like the Israel he idealizes, he praises those who scrupulously observe the commandments and reveres those who shun sexual contact altogether, like the 144,000 men who, he says, “have not defiled themselves with women, for they are virgins.”
⁵⁰
The Greek term
parthenos,
here translated as “virgin,” does not necessarily mean that these men never had sexual intercourse, but rather that they were practicing sexual abstinence to keep themselves pure, as soldiers in ancient Israel did to prepare for holy war. The number John mentions—twelve thousand from each
tribe of his people—suggests that he sees these men as conscripts in God’s army, which required each tribe to raise an equal number of soldiers.
⁵¹

John wanted his hearers to keep themselves “holy” like those ancient Israelite soldiers, so that they would be ready to fight on God’s side in the coming battle of the end-time. This was not just John’s idea. The Dead Sea Scrolls, found in 1947, suggest that some members of the devout sect of Jews often called Essenes (perhaps from the Hebrew
Hasidim
—“holy ones”) also practiced celibacy as they waited for the day of judgment. Because of this, Eusebius, the first historian of Christianity, apparently assumed that the Essenes were Christians themselves. Most scholars today think the opposite—that their movement, already established more than fifty years before Jesus’ birth, may have influenced how John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth preached about the coming end of time.
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John of Patmos’ contemporary Josephus, a Jewish historian, investigated the Essenes when he was sixteen years old and later wrote that some of their most devoted members lived in a communal settlement at Qumran, on the Dead Sea, each having signed over his property to the community and having sworn to live by a common rule, observing strict guidelines to maintain purity while washing, dressing, working, and worshipping in common. The strictest among them, like the “holy ones” John most admired, practiced celibacy.
⁵³

Besides separating from outsiders socially and sexually, some Essenes sought to separate financially as well, or at least to limit their financial dealings with them. John, too, associates commerce with idolatrous worship and savagely caricatures “the beast from the land” for trying to force everyone to worship its master and to
require that everyone who buys or sells bear the mark of the beast—that is, “the name of the beast, or the number of its name.”
⁵⁴
We do not know exactly what John had in mind. This mark may have been an imperial stamp required on official documents, or perhaps a tattoo on the body authorizing people to engage in business or participate in trade guilds that required members to pour libations to the gods or offer grain to their statues. John might also have had in mind the images and names of Roman emperors and gods stamped on coins, which he and other devout Jews bitterly resented. Some refused to handle or touch such coins, insisting that even looking at such demonic images implicated one in idolatry. John apparently wants God’s “holy ones” to boycott economic contact with Rome altogether, since he warns that anyone who receives the mark of the beast—whether this means accepting an imperial stamp, joining a trade guild, or even handling Roman money—shall

Because the Essenes, like John, saw the Romans as God’s enemies, the latest incarnation of evil, they saw themselves at war with Rome. Most historians have assumed that, like John, they were speaking of “holy war” only
metaphorically,
since their movement began about a hundred years before the actual outbreak of war in 66
C.E.
Recently, however, British scholar Richard Bauckham has suggested that the Essenes may have been preparing for
actual war—stockpiling weapons, engaging in military exercises, and training their “holy ones” to fight as soldiers.
⁵⁶
Bauckham points out that their Scroll of the War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness, which pictures the final battle between good and evil, sketches out what may be an actual war plan, specifying how to station soldiers, what to inscribe on their weapons, at what distance from the camp to build latrines, and how to bury the dead. Archaeological remains at their settlement show that when the war reached its climax, after the Romans achieved victory around 70
C.E.
, they treated the Essenes as enemy combatants, first besieging and capturing their settlement, then slaughtering everyone who lived there.

When John of Patmos speaks of holy war, however, rather than urging God’s “holy ones” to prepare for actual combat, he pictures Jesus as a warrior king storming down from heaven, leading armies of angels, thus suggesting that God needs no human army. When John says that Jesus urges his “holy ones” to
conquer,
he apparently expects them to “conquer” as he says Jesus did—by bearing witness to God “unto death.” And while they await this final battle, John urges them to remain
holy
—sexually, socially, and religiously.

When John accuses “evildoers” of leading gullible people into sin, what troubles him is what troubled the Essenes: whether—or how much—to accommodate pagan culture. And when we see Jesus’ earliest followers, including Peter, James, and Paul, not as we usually see them, as
early Christians,
but as they saw themselves—as
Jews who had found God’s messiah—
we can see that they struggled with the same question. For when John charges that certain prophets and teachers are encouraging God’s people to eat “unclean”
food and engage in “unclean” sex, he is taking up arguments that had broken out between Paul and followers of James and Peter about forty years earlier—an argument that John of Patmos continues with a second generation of Paul’s followers.
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For when we ask, who are the “evildoers” against whom John warns? we may be surprised at the answer. Those whom John says Jesus “hates” look very much like
Gentile followers of Jesus converted through Paul’s teaching.
Many commentators have pointed out that when we step back from John’s angry rhetoric, we can see that the very practices John denounces are those that Paul had recommended.
⁵⁸

Ever since Paul had preached as “apostle to the Gentiles,” around 50 to 66
C.E.
in towns throughout Asia Minor, Greece, and Syria, he and his followers had advocated practices quite different from John’s. When converts in the Greek city of Corinth had asked Paul about meat offered in sacrifice at pagan temples, for example, Paul wrote back that since “we know no idol in the world really exists,”
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eating sacrificial meat could not do any harm. Perhaps as an afterthought, he added that the only possible harm might be to offend “the weak”—that is, people who don’t understand that pagan gods don’t exist and so regard such meat as “unclean”
—
perhaps including rigorous and observant Jews like John.
⁶⁰

What about “unclean” sexual relationships, like marriages between believers and outsiders? When Paul’s converts had raised this question, he advised them not to seek divorce, since Jesus had forbidden it, adding that such marriages could benefit unbelieving partners, perhaps even recruit pagan husbands.
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Since the groups Paul addressed consisted primarily of Gentiles, strictly observant Jews like John could have inferred that he sanctioned
mixed marriages, which some of them called “uncleanness.” The prophets John derisively calls by the biblical names of despised Gentile outsiders—Balaam and Jezebel—are likely to be
Gentile converts to Paul’s teaching.

What apparently upset John of Patmos, then, is that forty years after Paul’s death, he still heard of those he called “false prophets” giving advice that sounded suspiciously like Paul’s—telling Jesus’ followers that it didn’t matter whether they ate sacrificial meat or engaged in mixed marriages. And although Paul actually directed this relaxed teaching about Torah observance primarily toward
Gentile converts,
his letters show that intense—sometimes bitter—disputes over such matters had divided Jesus’ followers from the start.

Since John of Patmos adhered closely to Jewish tradition, and perhaps emigrated from Jerusalem, he may have personally known James, Jesus’ brother who had become a leader among Jesus’ followers there. In any case, John would have admired James’ reputation for being an observant Jew, which had earned him the nickname “James the righteous.” But in those early years, as we have seen, trouble broke out when the maverick called Paul of Tarsus came out of nowhere and began to preach a “gospel” quite different from what was taught in James’ and Peter’s circle.

Some readers may be surprised to hear of disagreement among the apostles, since many have read what Luke later wrote in the Book of Acts to gloss over this embarrassing episode. Luke pictures Peter and James inviting Paul to an “apostolic council” to discuss whether Jesus’ Gentile followers should follow some purity observances, and pictures Peter proposing a gentlemanly compromise, then closing the meeting as he and James part from
Paul “in peace.”
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But about thirty years
before
Luke wrote this version, Paul had sent a blunt and angry letter about a dispute with Peter to believers in the city of Galatia, in Asia Minor. As we’ve seen, while Paul admitted that he’d never met Jesus during his lifetime, nor had he ever been one of his followers—that, on the contrary, as a devout Jew, he had been their enemy—he insisted that Jesus,
after
his death, had appeared to him. As we’ve noted, Paul says that this revelation, which “the living Jesus” sent to him straight from heaven, completely changed his life. Convinced that God “called me so that I might proclaim [Christ] among the Gentiles,”
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Paul gave up his earlier scruples against contact with Gentiles and began to live among them and even share their “unclean” food, while preaching “his gospel” as an independent missionary based in the Syrian city of Antioch.

After three difficult years in Asia Minor and Greece, Paul says he went to Jerusalem to visit Peter and stayed for two weeks, during which he met Jesus’ brother James. Fourteen years after that, Paul says, he went back to Jerusalem with Barnabas, apparently to get the approval of James, Peter, and John, whom he calls the “recognized leaders,” and “privately … laid before them the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles, in order to make sure that I was not running, or had not run, in vain.”
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This time Paul brought the Greek convert Titus with him, apparently to help make the case that such Gentiles need not be circumcised to join “God’s people.” Paul says that James, Peter, and John finally agreed to not require such Gentiles to be circumcised and consented to what he was teaching Gentiles.