Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

One of the identifying characteristics of an apocalypse is what scholars call “pseudonymity.” That is, most apocalyptic texts are written by flesh-and-blood authors who conceal their own identities behind the names of revered biblical figures. Thus, for example, the “false writings” of the Pseudepigrapha include works ranging from The Apocalypse of Adam to The Apocalypse of the Virgin Mary, none of which were actually written by their named authors. From its first appearance, in fact, Revelation has been regarded with skepticism by some readers who have dared to wonder out loud whether it was really written by St. John the Evangelist.

Of course, the same question can be asked about all but a few books of the Bible, including both its Jewish and Christian versions. Some Bible readers, for example, are still shocked to learn that scholars no longer believe that Moses wrote the Five Books of Moses, as the first five books of the Hebrew Bible are known in Jewish usage, or that any of the Gospels were written by the apostles whose names appear in their titles. Indeed, the bulk of the Jewish scriptures and a good deal of the Christian scriptures can be regarded as “false writings” in the sense that they were not actually written by the authors who are credited in their titles.

Exactly how the books of the Bible came to be written and named has always been the subject of much argument and speculation. One theory, for example, is that the author was followed around by a dutiful secretary who took notes and then polished up what the great man said, or that the author actually sat down and dictated to the secretary. That’s exactly how the book of Jeremiah supposedly came into existence according to an explanation that we find in the Hebrew Bible itself: “Then Jeremiah called Baruch the son of Neriah, and Baruch wrote from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the Lord, which He had spoken unto him, upon a roll of a book.” 1

Another theory holds that all but a few books of the Bible are composed of writings from several different sources, all of which were collected and compiled at some point in history by one or more editors or “redactors.” The raw material consists of myths, legends, folktales, poems, prayers, and songs—the so-called oral tradition—but also chronicles, genealogies, law codes, and works of biography and autobiography. But the received text of the Bible is the work product of the editors who stitched them together and polished them up. A variant of the same theory is that some or all of these redactions were actually composed by several individuals, or even several generations, all working together in what scholars loosely call a “school” or a “circle” or a “tradition.”

Of course, a few scholars are still willing to argue that some biblical writings were authored by a single gifted human being, man or woman, who put pen to paper (or, perhaps more accurately, a goose quill to a sheet of papyrus) and composed an immortal work of literature in exactly the same manner as Dante or Shakespeare, Mark Twain or Isaac Bashevis Singer. The biblical life story of David as we find it in the book of Samuel may be the work of a writer of genius known in biblical scholarship as the Court Historian, or so it has been suggested, and many of the most beloved and compelling stories in the book of Genesis may have been written by an even more accomplished author known as “J.” And, famously, it has been suggested that J was a woman, first by Richard Elliott Friedman in Who Wrote the Bible? and later by Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg in The Book of J.

All of these theories of biblical authorship have been applied to the book of Revelation, and with some very curious results. Some scholars, for example, argue that Revelation as we know it is actually the work of “a Johanine circle, school or community.” 2Others see Revelation as a composite of several different and unrelated texts, each one written in a different time and place by a different author—or by various “schools”—and all of them cobbled together at some later date by a pious editor who struggled to impose some kind of order on the chaos of words and images.

But, thrillingly, most modern scholars agree that the book of Revelation is the work of a single author who was a mystic and a visionary, a charismatic preacher and a poet of unexcelled and enduring genius. Whether Revelation is read as Holy Writ or a work of literature, one of the great enterprises of biblical scholarship has been the effort to extract the biography of its author from the text itself and the traditions that have grown up around it. As we begin to glimpse the details of his life and work, however obliquely and speculatively, we will be able to read the book of Revelation in new and illuminating ways.

Not unlike the book of Jeremiah, Revelation opens with a straightforward claim of divine authorship with the assistance of a few celestial go-betweens and a human secretary. The text passes from God to Jesus to an angel and finally to a human being whose name is given as John: “The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants what must soon take place,” according to the opening lines of text, “and he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John.” 3On the strength of these assertions, pious Christians have embraced the book of Revelation as “the only biblical book authored by Christ.” 4

The claim of divine authorship is not so clear in the rest of the text itself. Revelation is written in the first person, but more than one narrator is speaking to us. Sometimes the voice we hear belongs to the human author who calls himself John, and sometimes John is merely quoting the various celestial figures whom he encounters—God, Jesus, and a series of angelic emissaries. Still, John clearly presents himself as the human being whose visions are recorded in the text, and he is commonly credited as its author. But we are still left with a nagging question: Is he the apostle whose name is given in the New Testament as John, son of Zebedee?

By way of self-introduction, John describes himself to the seven churches in Asia Minor for which the book of Revelation was originally intended: “I, John, your brother and comrade in tribulation and patient endurance in Jesus.” 5The fact that the author of Revelation calls himself “John,” however, hardly means that he is the same John who is mentioned in the Gospels. The Hebrew name “Yohanan” and its Greek equivalent, “Ioannes,” both of which are rendered in English translation as “John,” had been in common usage among both Jews and Christians long before the Gospels or Revelation were first composed. Indeed, the New Testament itself knows of several men called John, including not only the apostle John but also John the Baptist, a wandering preacher who is among the first to proclaim Jesus to be the Messiah.

The tradition that the apostle John wrote the book of Revelation began with its first appearance among the Christian communities of the Roman Empire. Irenaeus (ca. 120–ca. 200), an influential Christian bishop in what is now the city of Lyons in southern France, reports that Revelation “was seen not very long ago, almost in our generation, at the close of the reign of Domitian”—that is, no later than 96 C.E. 6And Irenaeus is the very first commentator to attribute the authorship of Revelation to “John, the disciple of the Lord,” a belief that was affirmed by several other early church fathers, including Justin Martyr and Origen. But a more cautious bishop, Dionysius of Alexandria (ca. 200–ca. 265), while conceding that Revelation is a work “of which many good Christians have a very high opinion,” was the first to insist that Revelation and the Fourth Gospel “could not have been written by the same person.” 7