Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

Indeed, the author of Revelation seems far more familiar with the Hebrew Bible—and perhaps even such obscure apocalyptic writings as the book of Enoch—than with the Christian texts that came to be collected in the New Testament. 22Some 518 allusions to passages of the Hebrew Bible can be found in the book of Revelation, but only fourteen references to “Jesus” or “Jesus Christ,” most of which appear in the portions that she characterizes as “Christian additions.” 23Even Austin Farrer, a gifted and revered Bible critic of the mid–twentieth century who piously assumes that the author of Revelation is John the Evangelist, readily concedes that he is working with ancient Jewish sources and refers to him as “the Christian rabbi.” 24

Notably, Revelation is largely free of the anti-Jewish rhetoric that can be found in certain passages of the Gospels, and John proudly characterizes himself and his followers as authentic Jews. Above all, the author is plainly intrigued by such purely Jewish themes as the Temple and the Ark of the Covenant. 25By contrast, Ford finds “practically no unambiguous references to the earthly life of Jesus,” and no interest at all in such basic Christian rituals and doctrines as baptism, communion, or the Trinity. 26For these reasons, she searches for the original author of Revelation among the Jews of first-century Judea who did not live to see the crucifixion of Jesus or the birth of Christianity. “The candidate who seems most suitable,” she insists, “is John the Baptist.” 27

Like Jesus, John the Baptist is depicted in the New Testament as an apocalyptic prophet. But the Baptist offers a far gloomier vision of the end-times than anything attributed to Jesus in the Gospels: “His message is radically different from that of Jesus,” Ford writes. “John’s is one of wrath and doom rather than salvation.” 28And it is the fierce and frightening rhetoric of John the Baptist, rather than the kinder and gentler teachings of Jesus, that is echoed in the pages of Revelation. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” John the Baptist is depicted as saying in Matthew. “I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” 29

None of the theorists, ancient or modern, have managed to convince a majority of modern Bible scholars that the man who calls himself John in the book of Revelation is John the Evangelist, John the Baptist, or the presbyter John. “Sound judgment leads to the conclusion,” urges Adela Yarbro Collins, “that it was written by a man named John who is otherwise unknown to us.” 30Yet, as we shall see, the identity of the author of Revelation is one mystery that can be solved. And the telling details of his life offer a key to decoding the secret meanings that he wrote into the remarkable text of Revelation.

A close reading of Revelation, in fact, reveals a great deal more about its author than we know about the writers of most other biblical texts. Let’s begin with the simple fact that his Greek is flawed by “gross errors in grammar and syntax,” a fact that has prompted some scholars to conclude that John was a Jewish man born in Judea, where he grew up speaking Aramaic and acquired a lifelong hatred for the Roman army of occupation under which he lived. 31The evidence for such telling biographical details, which help to explain some of the most baffling mysteries of Revelation, is subtle and speculative, but also intriguing and illuminating.

John, for example, seems to avoid using syntax that is unique to Greek and prefers to use phrasings that have a counterpart in Hebrew or Aramaic. 32And the precise wording of his allusions to the Jewish scriptures suggests that he knew the original Hebrew text of the Bible—or perhaps one of the ancient Aramaic translations—rather than the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Bible that was used by Jews in the Diaspora and by the authors of other books of the New Testament. 33Such habits of language would have been characteristic of someone who was born and raised in Judea, studied the Jewish scripture in original Hebrew or an Aramaic translation, and emigrated to the Greek-speaking provincial towns of Asia Minor only late in life.

“He writes as one who had spent many reflective years in the synagogue before his conversion,” proposes Austin Farrer in A Rebirth of Images, his masterwork on the book of Revelation. “So, if we put together his Jewish and his Christian periods, we may be wise to suppose that he is over fifty years old when we first hear of him.” 34

Then, too, the book of Revelation betrays a hatred for the Roman empire of the kind that we might expect to find in someone whose birthplace was the Roman province of Judea. Rome, as we have seen, occupied the Jewish homeland throughout the first century, fought a long and bloody war to suppress the Jewish resistance movement, and finally destroyed the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem in 70 C.E., thus putting an end to the ancient rituals of Judaism as they are described in the Hebrew Bible. The slaughter of the Jewish population, including the mass crucifixion of surviving defenders of Jerusalem, is characterized as “the Roman Shoah” by Jack Miles, an acclaimed Bible critic and Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of God, in Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God. 35Perhaps John saw such atrocities with his own eyes, and when he fled Judea to nearby Asia Minor as a war refugee, he carried a burning desire for revenge against Rome.

Some of the most lurid and disturbing imagery in the book of Revelation, in fact, amounts to an unsubtle attack on Roman imperialism. John, for example, conjures up the famous vision of “the great whore with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication,” a woman “arrayed in purple and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.” 36John sees the great whore riding on a scarlet beast with seven heads, and an angel explains to him that “the seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman is seated.” 37As his first readers and hearers would have understood without further explanation, Rome was commonly known in the arts and letters of the classical pagan world as “the city of seven hills.” 38When they cracked the code of Revelation, they saw the Beast as the Roman conqueror of the Jewish homeland.

The poor Greek in which Revelation is written—“John’s language,” declares one scholar, “is a ghetto language”—may reveal more about John’s white-hot hatred for the Hellenistic civilization of ancient Rome than it does about his deficiencies in language and learning. 39Indeed, Adela Yarbro Collins suggests that John was perfectly capable of writing in proper Greek but chose to intentionally “Semiticize” his work as “a kind of protest against the higher form of Hellenistic culture” and “an act of cultural pride of a Jewish Semite.” 40To help the modern reader understand the significance of his choice of language, she likens it to the use of “Black English” as a badge of honor: “It is analogous to the refusal of some American blacks to ‘talk right.’” 41

Here is the first, but hardly the last, example of why the author of Revelation can be seen as a propagandist on the front lines of a culture war. Like all apocalyptic authors since Daniel, the writer of Revelation sets himself against the alluring ways of Greco-Roman civilization as practiced in his own lifetime by the subjects of a superpower that he so memorably dubbed “the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.” 42He regarded anyone, Christian or Jew, who collaborated with Roman authority, enjoyed the pleasures of Roman arts and letters, or earned a living in commerce with the Romans as a traitor to the one true God. Indeed, as we shall see, even the simple act of taking a Roman coin in hand was the moral equivalent of apostasy in John’s eyes—an uncompromising stance that would endear him to the activists and ardent true believers in every generation that followed, including our own.