Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

In fact, John was forced to contend with more than one rival among the self-styled prophets of Asia Minor, including a man and a woman whose competition he regards as so dangerous that it inspired some of the most vicious verbal abuse in a book that is full of rage. We do not know their real names, but he dubs one “Jezebel” and the other “Balaam,” borrowing the names of a couple of notorious malefactors from the Hebrew Bible. And he condemns both of his rivals with the single most serious charge that he could have laid against them, the sin of false prophecy.

John’s obsession with false prophets, as it turns out, anticipates one of the besetting problems with the book of Revelation, then and now. By the time John appeared in Asia Minor, Jewish tradition was already deeply skeptical of self-announced seers and messianic pretenders. The infant church, too, would soon come to distrust men and women like John who insisted that they were messengers of God. Indeed, John’s own prophetic credentials would be challenged before the book of Revelation was finally admitted into the Christian scriptures. And, as we have seen in our own lifetimes, readers of Revelation who regard themselves as prophets can be dangerous and even deadly. Yet, ironically, the fear of false prophets is writ large in Revelation itself.

The letters to the seven churches that open the book of Revelation include a general warning against false prophets—“those who call themselves apostles but are not”—and a series of messages to various churches about specific men and women whom John accuses of the same sin. 72Thus, John passes along the praise of the “Son of God” for the church at Ephesus for recognizing and rejecting the apostates whom he calls “Nicolaitans”: “Thou hatest the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.” 73But he censures the members of the church at Pergamum for their laxity toward the false prophet he calls Balaam. And he condemns the church at Thyatira for embracing the seductive prophetess he calls Jezebel.

“I know your works, your love and faith and ser vice and patient endurance,” writes John to the church at Thyatira, passing along a message from the Son of God. “But I have this against you, that you tolerate the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and beguiling my servants to practice immorality.” 74

As elsewhere in Revelation, John draws on Jewish scriptures in denouncing his rivals. Balaam is the pagan enchanter who is sent by the king of Moab to pronounce a curse on the invading Israelites, according a memorable tale in the book of Numbers, and ends up being scolded for his dimwittedness by his own ass. The humble creature plainly sees an angel of the Lord barring their path with a drawn sword, but the benighted Balaam does not. 75

And Jezebel is the apostate wife of the Israelite king called Ahab. She seduces her husband into worshipping pagan gods and goddesses, contrives to murder the prophets of Yahweh, and is condemned in the Second Book of Kings for her many “harlotries” and “witchcrafts.” 76Once again, John is assuming that his hearers and readers would recognize and understand these associations, a fact that suggests they were fellow Jews who had only recently come to embrace Jesus as the Messiah.

Some measure of professional jealousy might have been in play here. John, after all, would have been forced to compete with other wandering prophets for the attention and, crucially, the generosity of the Christian communities where they all trolled for followers and benefactors. But he also appears to hold a principled objection to his rivals: they are apparently encouraging Christians to go along and get along with the pagan authorities of the cities where they live and work. Exactly here we find the front line in the culture war that John is fighting in the pages of Revelation. For a man like John, a Christian who compromises is a Christian who sins.

To understand the compromise that a Christian in Pergamum or Thyatira might be willing to make, we need to recall what a convert to Christianity was expected to do—and to refrain from doing. At a crucial moment in the early history of Christianity, the first Christians decided to abandon the bulk of Jewish law, including the ritual of circumcision, the dietary laws of kashrut, and the strict observance of the Sabbath, all of which were hindrances to the conversion of pagans to the new faith. But they retained a few taboos: a pagan convert to Christianity could forgo the painful ordeal of adult circumcision, but he (or she) had to “abstain from the pollution of idols and from unchastity and from what is strangled and from blood”—that is, they must refrain from dining on meat that had been sacrificed to a pagan god or goddess. 77

Even these minimal rules, however, meant that a Christian man or woman would be cut off from the ordinary pastimes and transactions of daily life in a Roman town—or so a strict and uncompromising Christian like the author of Revelation would have insisted. The craft and trade guilds opened their meetings with a few words of prayer to one or another god or goddess from the pantheon of classical paganism. The imperial coinage carried the faces and figures of the Roman emperor and the Roman gods. Even a casual meal taken with friends or family who were still pagans would be likely to include a course prepared with meat that had been “sacrificed” to the gods, for the simple reason that animal offerings and butchering for human consumption were virtually one and the same thing in the ancient world. And so a good Christian, lest he or she be sullied with the sins of idolatry, ought to shun the pagan coinage, the pagan guilds, and the table fellowship of their pagan friends and relations.

Not a few Christians were apparently willing to compromise on some or all of these points. Like the Jews who adopted Greek ways of life during the Maccabean Revolt, at least some Christians in the cities of Asia Minor apparently did the same. Thus, the Christian communities where John preached included Christians who joined the pagan guilds, bought and sold merchandise with the imperial coinage, and sat down to dinner with friends and relations who were not Christians. And some of their pastors, including the ones John calls Jezebel and Balaam, apparently blessed the compromise. For some Christians and their clergy, the compromise was a way of sparing themselves from persecution and, at the same time, availing themselves of the profits that were available for those who engaged in the crafts or in commerce.

But for the author of Revelation—as for Daniel and other apocalyptic writers before him and various true believers who came after him—even the slightest compromise with true belief is condemned as a crime against God. John values rigor and purity of belief above all else, and he makes no meaningful distinction between handling a Roman coin and engaging in Satan worship. Indeed, he finds halfhearted Christians to be literally stomach turning, and he imputes the same revulsion to God himself: “Because you say, ‘I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,’” God is made to announce in the book of Revelation, “so then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of my mouth.’” 78

Lack of zeal, in other words, literally makes John (or, more precisely, God himself) sick to his stomach. But an even more exacting standard is applied to his fellow preachers: if they fail to meet his exacting standards of piety and true belief, they are no better than harlots and witches. And that’s what has always made the moral logic of Revelation so appealing to men and women in every age who, like John, who regard the slightest mis-step as a plunge into hell.

John, always given to rhetorical excess, does not restrict himself to quibbling with Christians who do not bother to ask their hosts exactly how the meat on the table came to be slaughtered. To be sure, he accuses both Balaam and Jezebel of teaching faithful Christians “to eat things sacrificed unto idols.” But he goes on to denounce them for “seducing” Christians “to commit fornication,” the emblematic moral crime that so obsessed the classical prophets of the Hebrew Bible. 79Indeed, both John and his Jewish role models regarded apostasy and sexual promiscuity as interchangeable sins.