The Jewish Annotated New Testament (127 page)

²⁴
Now to him who is able to keep you from falling, and to make you stand without blemish in the presence of his glory with rejoicing,
²⁵
to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, power, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

THE REVELATION TO JOHN

This writing, attributed to an otherwise unknown prophet “John” in Asia Minor, calls itself both an
apocalypsis
, a literary disclosure of heavenly secrets, and a prophecy, an oral communication of divine intentions. One of the tantalizing features of the book is its creative combination of these two genres.

While the author’s name and the title “Lamb” for the risen Christ might suggest some relationship to the “Johannine tradition” represented by the Gospel, epistles, and the extra-canonical
Acts of John
, the language and interests of Revelation bear little in common with these other texts.

Revelation has been dated to various points in the second half of the first century, based on the author’s interest in the emperor Nero (see annotations on 13.3 and 13.18), who was assassinated in 68; while his bitterness toward Rome (17–18) and elevation of blood-martyrdom (6.9–11; 20.4) might suggest imperial persecution of Jesus-believers. One period favored by scholars is the reign of the emperor Domitian (81–96), depicted as especially horrendous by the fourth-century historian Eusebius (
Hist. eccl
. 3.17–18), who also quotes the second-century church father Irenaeus (
Adv. Haer
. 5.30.3) as attributing Revelation to late in Domitian’s reign. Yet modern historians have found little evidence that Domitian instigated any greater degree of persecution than other first-century emperors. The scenes of eschatological battles (19.11–21; 20.7–9) might reflect the Jewish revolt of 66–70 CE, while the image of a holy city without a Temple (21.22) could imply a date after the historical Temple’s destruction in 70 CE.

Some critics have sought to reconcile the range of possible dates by proposing a series of literary stages: an original apocalypse composed at about the time of the death of Nero (68), which was re-edited with an “epistolary” introduction (chs 1–3) in the later first century. But there has been no agreement on what such a “proto-apocalypse” would have looked like.

LITERARY HISTORY

While Revelation’s striking juxtapositions of vision and letter, song and list, oracle and narrative might suggest stages of compilation, and certain phrases seem to represent an editor’s glossing of an earlier text (11.14; 13.6c,18; 14.12), early manuscripts provide no evidence of prior versions. Revelation is best seen, like so many ancient documents, as a complex composition of one author, stimulated by his literary and historical context, with perhaps another’s additions soon atterwards.

OUTLINE

INTERPRETATION

Revelation is foremost visionary literature, belonging to a tradition that reaches back to Isa 6, the books of Ezekiel and Daniel,
1
and
2 Enoch
, and forward to the various apocalypses in “John’s” own time composed under the names of
Ezra
and
Baruch
. Such books combine narratives of their heroes’ visionary experiences (through a journey to heaven or some mystical disciplines) with vivid depictions of a heavenly world, populated with frightening angelic beings and in many cases cryptic revelations of events to come. If the text is attributed to a hero of the past, then historical events known to the readers would be first revealed as if prophecy, followed by events that the real author imagines will happen (cf. Dan 11–12, in which history turns to fantasy in verse 11.40). Revelation is somewhat unusual in its self-attribution to an otherwise unknown Jewish seer, “John,” but there were other ancient apocalyptic documents that likewise presented visions in the names of lesser-known seers: Dositheus, Hermas, Mani, among others. The point of all such apocalyptic texts lay in revealing the heavenly world, not as a paradisal delight but as a paradigmatic super-reality, attention to which allowed the working out of crises and frustrations in this world. With this purpose Revelation details the multiple eschatological sufferings of sinners, to excite audiences with the prospect of their enemies’ and rivals’ downfall.

It has long been customary among Christian exegetes to attribute the vindictiveness of this imagery, and the violence of the text overall, to some putative persecution that the author and his intended audience were suffering: Domitian’s policies, local pogroms, a particular efflorescence of the emperor cult, or Roman imperial rule in general. This tendency in historical interpretation manages to turn violently vindictive fantasy into righteous political critique. In fact, this apologetic justification for Revelation’s violence has had the unfortunate effect of blaming Jews as well as Romans for persecution of Christians. The text’s criticism of those who call themselves Jews and their “synagogues of Satan” (2.9; 3.9) has typically been taken as referring to real Jews (who, it follows, were persecuting John’s “Christians”). Yet this interpretation plainly fails in view of the fact that in these verses John criticizes those who are
not
Jews but only label themselves so. More importantly, Revelation shows no sense of a Christianity, or even of a Jesus-devotion, unmoored from Judaism.

The earliest uses of Revelation understood it as unrelated to any particular historical context. In second-century Asia Minor and third-century upper Egypt, for example, the book was read as sanction for an imminent millennium on earth. It is only with the fourth-century author Eusebius of Caesarea that Revelation came to be linked with the putative sufferings of John of Patmos himself, and thus interpreted in relation to a developing martyrological tradition in Christianity that elevated blood and suffering as instructive spectacles.

READING GUIDE

John’s concern is to represent his visionary authority as superior to that of rivals in the same religious movement (see, e.g., 2.14,19–23). It is in regard to John’s claim that the text should serve as prophecy in writing that we can understand his special emulation of Ezekiel as visionary model, from his image of the divine throne and its “living creatures” (cf. Ezek 1) to the precise layout of the heavenly city (11.1–2; 21; cf. Ezek 40–42), his notion of the pure in a doomed city saved by divine “seals” (14.1–5; cf. Ezek 9), and his overall priestly image of angelic liturgy. Furthermore, John’s image of women as containers, instigators, and embodiments of sexual impurity (2.20–22; 14.4; 17–19), as well as the vindictive fantasy of violence against such women (2.22–23; 17.16; 18.8–10), stand in explicit imitation of Ezekiel (23) and thus represent a resurgence of one of the less savory features of biblical tradition. We are prompted to ask, as have many anthropologists, how a concern for ritual purity, its antithesis, and its restoration can be translated so readily into misogynistic symbolism.

The text also invites attention to the transcendent orderliness of the heavenly cult, its trumpets, bowls, and incense, a theme reflected in other Jewish apocalyptic literature (
1, 2 Enoch, 2 Baruch
) but here imagined as the source of cosmic catastrophe. Indeed, the surrealism of this heavenly world allows revelations of the risen Christ’s true nature that are quite far from the human Jesus of the Gospels. Here he appears as a seven-eyed Lamb (5.6), as a luminescent old man with flaming eyes (1.12–16), and as a mounted warrior with a sword emerging from his mouth (19.11–16). He is that alternately enthroned, glorified, and militant aspect of God on which Jewish apocalyptic authors had been speculating since Ezekiel (1), Daniel (7), and
Enoch
(40–71).

READING REVELATION AS A JEWISH TEXT

Revelation provides an important witness to a variety of traditions central to Jews in the first-century eastern Diaspora.
Kashrut
is far more critical to John’s sense of religious purity (2.14,20) than Paul’s (1 Cor 8); and the text’s focus on images of sexual impurity (2.20–22; 17; 22.13) suggest that sexual purity could—even in the Diaspora—carry strict interpretations in the effort to define community. The brief glorification of celibacy (14.4), coupled with a reference to the “camp” of the righteous (20.9), allies this text with the holy-war ideology of the Qumran scrolls. The central symbols of priesthood (1.6; 5.10; 20.6b), the twelve tribes of Israel (7), and the Holy City (with or without a Temple: 11.1–2; 21–22.5) show the abiding value of these themes for Jews outside Judea and Galilee, and even after the destruction of Jerusalem. In these ways we can speak of the text as having a fundamentally Jewish frame of reference.

The various, kaleidoscopic appearances of Christ do not mitigate this Jewishness, any more than the appearances of the angel Metatron or the “Son of Man” mitigate the Jewishness of
Enoch
or
hekhalot
texts. The elevation of the executed Jesus to heavenly status is hardly more extreme than the ways many Hasidic leaders have been celebrated by their followers, and it certainly represented no departure from Judaism for the author. Thus, increasingly, scholars are looking at Revelation as a Jewish text that reveals a heavenly Christ rather than a Christian text with Jewish attributes.

In this light we must query two verses that have long been invoked as condemnations of Judaism: 2.9 and 3.9, in which John assails “those who say that they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.” Interpreters who assume the text is Christian naturally take these “so-called Jews” as real Jews, local Jews; they are “so-called” because they don’t believe in Jesus. But for John it is not Christ-belief that is the arbiter of Judaism; it is purity that is the arbiter of sainthood. Interpreted in context, as a Jewish text, it is more likely that these pretenders are—as John says—
non-Jews
claiming some Jewish identity. The most likely constituency would be Pauline Gentile God-fearers, who sought Jewish salvation through a hybrid variation on Jewish practices and who might well pose an intrinsic threat to the
purity
of Jewish Christ-veneration.

David Frankfurter

1
The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants
^*
what must soon take place; he made
^*
it known by sending his angel to his servant
^*
John,
²
who testified to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw.