Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

And so, when Paul declares that Jesus “was made of the seed of David, according to the flesh,” 97and when Matthew reports that the Romans crucified Jesus because he claimed to be “King of the Jews” 98—a political rather than a religious offense under Roman law—their accounts are wholly consistent with what we know from sources outside the Bible about the messianic beliefs of the ancient Jewish world. And when Jesus and his disciples are shown to use the resonant words and phrases that appear in the prophetic and apocalyptic texts, they are speaking a coded language that their Jewish followers would have clearly understood.

The debate over whether Jesus is properly regarded as an apocalyptic prophet began in earnest in the opening years of the twentieth century with the writings of Albert Schweitzer, who may be better remembered today for his medical missionary work in Africa or even his expertise in the music of Bach than for his pioneering research into the life of the historical Jesus. But the earliest stirrings of the same argument go back to the very beginnings of Christianity. Nor was it merely a dispute over some abstract point of theology. The fact that the world did not end when Jesus promised it would meant that “the Church, of necessity, had to come to terms with its own foundational prophecy,” according to contemporary Bible scholar Paula Fredriksen. 99

At the very moment when the first Christians were struggling with the failure of the world to “end on time,” as Fredriksen puts it, the church was suddenly confronted with a new and startling document in which all of these tensions and contradictions were writ large. Its author boldly claims to have been granted a vision by Jesus himself. His vision is populated with characters that come directly out of the pages of the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish apocalyptic texts. He portrays Jesus as a messianic warrior-king reigning over an earthly realm. And, like Jesus and Paul, he insists that the end of the world is nigh: “Surely, I come quickly,” says Jesus at the very end of the author’s vision. 100

That highly provocative and problematic document, of course, is the book of Revelation.

By a long and cherished tradition in Christianity, the author of the book of Revelation has been identified as John, son of Zebedee, the presumed author of the Fourth Gospel and, by yet another tradition, the so-called beloved disciple of Jesus. “The Apocalypse of the Apostle John the Evangelist” is one of several titles that appear on various ancient manuscripts of Revelation. Although the question of who actually wrote Revelation has been a matter of hot controversy since the book first began to circulate in the earliest Christian communities of the Roman empire, some otherwise secular scholars still piously refer to the author of Revelation as “Saint John.”

As it turns out, we can discern a great deal more about the author of Revelation than most other biblical authors, Jewish or Christian. We know that he regarded himself as a special favorite of God—and, at the same time, a victim of persecution by a few of his fellow Christians and the whole of the pagan world in which he lived. He probably worked as a kind of freelance prophet, wandering from town to town throughout Asia Minor, delivering his strange visions and strict admonitions to whomever would gather and listen, and relying on their hospitality to fill his belly and to provide a place to lay his head at night. And he plainly nursed a bitter grudge against a couple of rival preachers whom he regarded as so unforgivably lax in their Christian beliefs and practices that he condemned them not only for spiritual error but also for acts of apostasy and even harlotry.

Remarkably, we can come up with an even more detailed and nuanced profile of the man who wrote Revelation. He was probably born in Judea, and he may have been an eyewitness to one of the great and terrible moments in ancient history—the defeat of the Jewish partisans known as the Zealots by a Roman army in 70 C.E., the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, and the dispersion of the Jewish people. His native tongue was probably Aramaic, a Semitic language that replaced Hebrew as the lingua franca in the Jewish homeland in antiquity, and he never really mastered Greek, the international language of civilized men and women in the classical pagan world. And, perhaps most remarkable of all, he was almost surely a Jew by birth, upbringing, and education, a fact that casts an unaccustomed and ironic light on a text that has been embraced by the most zealous of Christians over the last two thousand years.

For many readers of Revelation, as we shall come to see, such biographical details are awkward, embarrassing, and wholly beside the point. The author’s Jewish roots—and the linkages to Jewish texts and traditions that abound in the text of Revelation—are at odds with the crucial role the book has come to play in Christian fundamentalism. And, by the deepest of ironies, a great many readers over the ages have succeeded in convincing themselves that the author of Revelation was a benighted soul who failed to grasp the actual meanings of the visions that he beheld and described so vividly.

To the author himself, for example, the “beast” whose name is symbolized by the number 666 was almost surely a flesh-and-blood Roman emperor who lived and died in the first century of the Common Era—but generation upon generation of subsequent readers of Revelation insist that he was simply and flatly wrong. How else to explain the fact that the “beast” identified by the alphanumeric code 666 has been seen as one or another figure in a whole rogue’s gallery of malefactors, ranging from Muhammad in the Middle Ages to Napoleon in the nineteenth century to Mussolini in the twentieth century, and countless others in between?

Yet Revelation is not quite as mysterious as it seems. Scholarship, both ancient and modern, allows us to catch a glimpse of the man who composed the strange text, the world in which he lived and worked, the passions that burned so hotly in his heart and mind, and the true beliefs that he meant to instill in his first readers and hearers. Above all, it is possible to penetrate the enigmatic text and extract the coded meanings that are so deeply enciphered in the book of Revelation.

As we move forward in history, we will see that Revelation has been reread and reinterpreted in startling and even shocking ways over the centuries, and never more so than in our own times. If the author of Revelation had been granted an accurate vision of the distant future, surely he would have been appalled not only by the plain fact that the end of the world was not near but also by what would become of his “little book” in the hands of popes and kings, grand inquisitors and church reformers, messianic pretenders and self-appointed prophets—or, for that matter, best-selling novelists like the authors of the Left Behind series, televangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, or a president like Ronald Reagan.

To measure how far the book of Revelation has strayed from its original uses and meanings—and to appreciate how the text has been reinterpreted and misinterpreted over the last twenty centuries—we need a benchmark: Who actually composed the book of Revelation? Where did he come from, and where did he wander? What did he know, and what did he believe? And what did he hope to achieve by setting down the extraordinary visions that we find in the “little book” that he left behind?