Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

“If any one has an ear, let him hear,” writes John. “Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints.” 129

Here, too, is a piece of plain advice that was overlooked by some of the most famous (or notorious) readers of Revelation. Now and then, as we shall see, Revelation has roused more than a few men and women to regard themselves as avenging angels rather than suffering saints, a roster that ranges from Savonarola in the fifteenth century to David Koresh in the late twentieth century. To his credit, John demands no such thing of his readers and hearers, and surely he would have been amazed and aghast at what some of them insisted on making of his work. But, then, the greatest failure of prophecy in the book of Revelation—aside from the fact that the world did not end as predicted—is the fact that the “Christian rabbi” did not suspect how the meanings and uses of his “little book” were destined to change as the text passed out of the seven cities of Asia Minor into the rest of the Roman Empire and, thereafter, into world history.

John, as we have seen, was almost certainly born and raised as a Jew, and he seems to be addressing an audience for whom the Jewish scriptures are familiar and compelling. Within the 404 verses that make up the book of Revelation, by one scholar’s count, more than five hundred allusions to the Hebrew Bible can be discerned. Revelation is virtually a catalog of Jewish themes and traditions, ranging from the Twelve Tribes to the Temple of Yahweh. And yet, ironically, the best evidence of John’s Jewish identity is buried away inside the single most hateful line of text in Revelation, where John implies that he is more authentically Jewish than his adversaries in the Jewish community.

“Behold,” writes John, attributing his words to Jesus Christ, “I will make those of the synagogue of Satan who say that they are Jews and are not come and bow down before your feet and learn that I have loved you.” 130

Even John’s near-obsessive use of the number seven can be read as an allusion to Jewish scripture. God’s primal act of creation as depicted in Genesis is completed in seven days—“And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made” 131—and thus seven becomes the symbol of divine wholeness in Jewish tradition. When John refers to signs and symbols in groups of seven—seven angels, seven seals, seven trumpets, seven thunders, and so on—he means to suggest that God’s will is at work in both the creation and destruction of the world.

“And the angel whom I saw lifted up his hand to heaven,” writes John of the seventh angel who appears after the seventh thunder, “and swore by him who lives for ever and ever, who created heaven and what is in it, the earth and what is in it, and the sea and what is in it, that there should be time no longer.” 132

Other scenes in Revelation are hot-wired to specific passages of the Hebrew Bible. John, for example, knows the passage in Ezekiel in which God hands the prophet a book of “lamentations and moaning and woe” and then issues a strange command: “Son of man, eat this scroll and go speak unto the house of Israel.” 133And John claims precisely the same experience for himself: God sends a scroll (or a “little book,” according to the King James Version) by means of an angelic messenger, and John, too, is ordered to “take it and eat it up.” Here John is incorporating the Jewish scriptures into his own writing in the most literal possible way: “And I took the little book from the hand of the angel and ate it,” reports John. “And I was told, ‘You must again prophesy about many peoples and nations and tongues and kings.’” 134

The pointed reference to “peoples and nations and tongues” allows us to understand the hatred and resentment that wells up in John and spills over into the book of Revelation. “John makes a plea to Jews…who ‘own’ the tradition to accept him and his vision,” according to Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, but his preachments are rejected by the Jewish men and women in his audience. If the house of Israel refuses to recognize Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, John resolves to address himself to other peoples and nations and tongues. But he cannot overlook the insult that has been offered by the Jews who remained faithful to their own traditions, and so he returns the insult by consigning them all to the “synagogue of Satan.” 135And so, ironically, what is arguably the single most anti-Semitic line of text in all of Christian scripture can also be understood, almost poignantly, as the outcry of a Jew who has been spurned by his fellow Jews.

While John delights in alluding to and borrowing from the Hebrew Bible, he does not quote its text verbatim. Rather, he uses Jewish scripture as a “language arsenal,” according to Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, and he picks and chooses the ideas, images, and incidents that suit his own rhetorical purpose. 136Perhaps he did not have a copy of the Bible at hand as he spoke and wrote, or perhaps he simply did not care to cut and paste from the ancient texts: “The prophetic spirit creates,” explains one Bible scholar, “it does not quote in order to teach or argue.” 137

Nor does John confine himself to strictly Jewish sources. He may denounce Greco-Roman civilization in all of its richness and splendor as the work of the Devil, but he appears to know and borrow freely from pagan iconography. Seven is a sacred number in Jewish tradition, to be sure, but it was also significant in the astrological beliefs and practices of classical paganism, which knew only seven heavenly bodies. Twelve is the number of the tribes of Israel, but it is also the number of signs in the zodiac. Astrology, in fact, is condemned in the Bible as one of the great besetting sins of paganism—“offerings to the sun and moon and constellations, all the host of heaven” 138—and yet John may have invoked precisely these images and associations in the text of Revelation.

Among the most sublime and exalted scenes in Revelation, for example, is the “great portent” that will appear in heaven to mark the beginning of the end-times: “[a] woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.” The woman, pregnant and already in labor, is stalked by “a great red dragon,” which waits to devour the newborn child as soon as she gives birth. But the archangel Michael—a figure who first appears in the book of the Daniel, John’s single favorite source in the Hebrew Bible—makes war on the red dragon, who is here and now revealed to be Eve’s original tempter, “that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan.” 139

Conventional readings of Revelation see the woman as the Virgin Mary and the newborn infant as Jesus, “a man child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron” and who “was caught up unto God, and to his throne.” 140But it is also possible to discern less orthodox origins and meanings. “St. John’s mind sets to work on the lines of a very old mythic pattern,” writes Austin Farrer, who suggests that John borrowed the figure of the woman from pagan astrology—“the Lady of the Zodiac” who is “crowned with the twelve constellations.” 141Other scholars see the goddess Artemis, who was worshipped in such splendor in the Artemesium at Ephesus, or the goddess Roma, the “queen of heaven” whose divine child the Roman emperor was imagined to be and whose attributes are found on imperial Roman coinage from the first century. 142

Indeed, precisely the same figure is found in sacred myths all over the ancient world—“a high goddess with astral attributes: the sun is her garment, the moon her footstool, the stars her crown.” 143Even the dire predicament of a laboring woman beset by a ravening monster is a familiar motif in pagan iconography. The Egyptian goddess Isis, for example, struggles to save her son from attacks by snakes and scorpions, and the Greek goddess Leto is menaced by a python when she is pregnant with Apollo. “In each of these myths the dragon seeks the child, not yet born, in order to devour or kill him,” explains Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. “The woman, still pregnant, is pursued for the child she carries. She gives birth with the dragon only moments way, and the male child she has just delivered is caught up to the Heavens, safe from the dragon’s reach.” 144