A History of the End of the World

For Ann, Jennifer, Adam, and Remy (Holzer) Kirsch,

Paul and Caroline Kirsch,

Marya (Kirsch) and Ron Shiflett,

and

Lillian Heller Conrad

“…inscribe us in the Book of Life…”

Epigraph

One
Something Rich and Strange

Two
Spooky Knowledge and Last Things

Three
The History of a Delusion

Four
The Apocalyptic Invasion

Five
“Your Own Days, Few and Evil”

Six
To Begin the World Over Again

Seven
The Godless Apocalypse

Appendix
The Book of Revelation

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Searchable Terms

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Credits

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

Itself a cabalistic book, the night was crowded with sacred names and symbols—mystery upon mystery. The stars looked like letters of the alphabet, vowel points, notes of music. The world was a parchment scrawled with words and song. He was surrounded by powers, some good, some evil, some cruel, some merciful, but each with its own nature and its own task to perform.

 

I
SAAC
B
ASHEVIS
S
INGER,
The Slave

Revelation has as many mysteries as it does words.

J
EROME

I
know the ending,” goes the slogan on a license-plate frame that can be spotted here and there on the streets and highways of America. “God wins.”

It’s a credo that pious Jews, Christians, and Muslims hold in common, although they might quibble on exactly what is meant by the word “God.” But the plainspoken slogan conceals a profound and enduring mystery: human beings of all faiths, in all times and all places, have wondered when and how the world will come to an end. Nowadays, of course, the very same questions are being asked (and answered) by scientists rather than theologians. For the Christian true believer, however, “the ending” refers to a scenario that is described in horrific and heart-shaking detail in the single scariest book in all of scripture, the book of Revelation.

The beginning of the end, according to Revelation, will be augured by mysterious signs and wonders—a black sun and a blood-red moon, the stars falling to earth, persecutors and false prophets, plague and pestilence and famine. Then the satanic arch-villain who has come to be called the Antichrist will rise to absolute power on earth. After seven years of oppression and persecution under the Antichrist, Jesus Christ will descend from heaven in the guise of a warrior-king, lead a celestial army of resurrected saints and martyrs to victory over the demonic hordes at the Battle of Armageddon, drape Satan in chains and confine him in a bottomless pit, and reign over an earthly kingdom for one thousand years.

At the end of the millennium, Satan will break out of his bonds, and Jesus Christ will be compelled to fight a second and final battle. At last, the dead will be resurrected, the living and dead alike will be judged, and the earth as we know it will be destroyed once and for all. The end of the world, according to Revelation, will be followed by the creation of “a new heaven and a new earth,” a celestial paradise where the Christian saints and martyrs will spend eternity in perfect bliss. Everyone else will sizzle forever along with Satan in a lake of fire and brimstone.

That’s the pitch line for the book of Revelation, so to speak, but the text itself is something even richer and stranger.
*
The nightmarish landscape conjured up by its author is stalked by God and the Devil, the Lamb and the Beast, a lascivious whore and a woman in labor, angels and demons in the countless thousands, and a bestiary of monsters so grotesque and so implausible that they would not seem out of place in a comic book or a horror flick. At certain moments, in fact, the book of Revelation resembles nothing so much as an ancient prototype of the psychological thriller and the monster movie, and its imagery seems to fire the same synapses in the human brain.

Nowadays, Revelation finds its most ardent readers in Christian fundamentalist circles, but even someone who has never opened the very last book of the New Testament is likely to find the plot and characters to be hauntingly familiar. The idea that the world will end (and soon)—and the phantasmagoria of words, numbers, colors, images, and incidents in which the end-times are described in the book of Revelation—are deeply woven into the fabric of Western civilization, both in high culture and in pop culture, starting in distant biblical antiquity and continuing into our own age. The Battle of Armageddon, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Seventh Seal, the Great Whore of Babylon, and, more obliquely, the Antichrist, the Grim Reaper, and the Grapes of Wrath have migrated from the pages of Revelation to some of our most exalted works of literature, art, and music as well as the sports pages, the movie screen, and the paperback best seller.

Above all, the book of Revelation has always been used as a kind of codebook to discover the hidden meanings behind the great events and personages of history—war and revolution, kings and conquerors, pandemic and natural disaster. And the words and phrases of Revelation, its stock figures and scenes, have been recycled and repurposed by artists and poets, preachers and propagandists—all in ser vice of some religious or political or cultural agenda. The conquest of Jerusalem by medieval crusaders, the Bonfire of the Vanities in Florence during the Renaissance, the naming of the newly discovered Americas as the New World, and the thousand-year Reich promised by Adolf Hitler are all examples of the unlikely and unsettling ways that the book of Revelation has resonated through history. Even today, end-of-the-world fears and fantasies are peddled by Hollywood moviemakers and best-selling novelists, hard-preaching televangelists and presidential hopefuls.

Still, the book of Revelation is regarded by secular readers—and even by progressive Christians of various denominations—as a biblical oddity at best and, at worst, a kind of petri dish for the breeding of dangerous religious eccentricity. Most Jewish readers have never bothered to crack open a copy of the Christian scriptures, and when they do, they are deeply offended to find that Jews are described in Revelation as members of “the synagogue of Satan.”
¹
Indeed, the fact is that Revelation has
always
been regarded with a certain skepticism—as “a curiosity that accidentally and embarrassingly belongs to the New Testament”—even within pious Christian circles, and even in antiquity.
²
So the ironic and disdainful treatment of Revelation in Ingmar Bergman’s
The Seventh Seal,
a darkly postmodern motion picture that questions whether God exists at all, is not wholly anachronistic.

“Death is behind your back. His scythe flashes above your heads. Which of you will he strike first?” cries an overwrought preacher of the High Middle Ages as he wanders through a plague-ridden countryside in the company of flagellants and penitents. “You are all doomed, do you hear? Doomed! Doomed! Doomed!” And a battle-scarred squire, newly returned from the Crusades and wholly disillusioned with both God and humankind, retorts: “Do they really expect modern people to take that drivel seriously?”
³

Whether we approach the book of Revelation as drivel or divine mystery, however, the fact remains that Revelation is still embraced with credulity and deadly seriousness by a great many men and women in the modern world, and not only by the kind of true believers who announce their deepest convictions on their bumpers. Indeed, the readers of Revelation in modern America include a few men who have possessed the godlike power to incinerate the world with the launch codes of the American nuclear arsenal.

Like the popes and kings of the Middle Ages who consulted with apocalyptic seers for advice on statecraft, more than one recent American president was raised in a faith that instructs him to read and heed the book of Revelation as God’s master plan for human history. And so, if the book of Revelation is still embraced by men with the power to destroy the world, we urgently need to know what is written there, how it came to be written in the first place, and how it has been used and abused throughout the history of a world that refuses to end.

Revelation has been described as “future history.”
⁴
Looking forward from his vantage point in distant antiquity, its author confidently and colorfully describes “things which must shortly come to pass.”
⁵
But none of his prophecies have yet been fulfilled, at least not in any plain or literal way. That’s why readers in every age have tried to explain away the failed prophecies of Revelation by arguing that its visions must be understood as a symbolic depiction of events that will take place long after its disappointed author died a natural death. And yet, significantly, every new generation urgently believes that its own times will be the end-times.

Thus, for example, when Hal Lindsey ponders one of the fearful but baffling passages of Revelation in his best-selling
The Late Great Planet Earth—
“I saw the horses in a vision, and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone”—he concludes that the author of Revelation has glimpsed “some kind of mobile ballistic missile launcher” that will be deployed in a future (and final) thermonuclear war. Ironically, such pious readings are based on the assumption that the author of Revelation and his original audience could not and did not grasp the real meaning of the phenomena that are depicted in the biblical text.
⁶

But even if Revelation is manifestly a work of failed prophecy, it has come to play a unique and ubiquitous role in the world in which we live today. Indeed, Revelation has always served as a lens through which the recorded history of Western civilization can be seen in fresh and illuminating ways. Across the twenty centuries that have passed since it was first composed—and, above all, at every point where contesting ideas of culture and politics have come into conflict—Revelation is always present, sometimes in plain sight and sometimes just beneath the surface.

T
he book of Revelation (or the Apocalypse, as the last book of the New Testament is also known) has been variously identified as the revealed word of God, the masterwork of a gifted if also calculating human author, or the ravings of a deluded religious crank—and some readers are capable of holding the thought that it is all three things at once.

For the true believer, of course, the book of Revelation is “the only biblical book authored by Christ,” as one pious commentator puts it, since its author claims to be reporting only what was revealed to him from on high.
⁷
Other readers of Revelation, however, are willing to allow that human intelligence—and human artifice—are at work: “[I]t is the one great poem which the first Christian age produced.”
⁸
And a few otherwise admiring critics find themselves compelled to characterize Revelation as “apocalyptic pornography,” “an insane rhapsody,” “the creative imagination of a schizophrenic,” or, as Thomas Jefferson memorably put it, “merely the ravings of a maniac.”
⁹

The text of the book of Revelation was probably first spoken aloud nearly two thousand years ago by a charismatic if also overwrought preacher who wandered from town to town in Asia Minor and delivered his dire warnings about the end of the world to a few small clutches of early Christians who consented to listen. “Blessed is he who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear,” the author declares, “for the time is near.”
¹⁰
That is why Bible scholars often refer to the men and women for whom Revelation was originally intended as “hearers,” a phrase that reminds us that Revelation was almost surely a sermon before it was a text and explains why the power of its language and imagery can be appreciated only “when the text is read aloud as the author intended it to be.”
¹¹

Ironically, the author of Revelation was almost certainly a Jew by birth and upbringing, perhaps a war refugee from Judea who had witnessed the destruction of the Temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem by the Roman army of occupation and seethed with contempt and loathing for the conquerors of the Jewish homeland. To be sure, the author was one of those Jews who regarded Jesus of Nazareth as the long-promised and long-delayed Messiah. Yet Revelation remains so deeply rooted in Jewish history, politics, and theology that it has been called “a Jewish document with a slight Christian touch-up.”
¹²
Indeed, Revelation can be described as kind of midrash on the prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible, and its author has been described as a “Christian rabbi.”
¹³

Once fixed on parchment or papyrus toward the end of the first century, the book of Revelation was regarded with alarm and suspicion by some of the more cautious church authorities. They were offended by the scenes of blood-shaking violence and lurid sexual promiscuity that are described so memorably in its pages. They were put off by the very idea of the thousand-year reign of King Jesus over an earthly realm, which struck them as a purely Jewish notion of what the messianic kingdom would be like. And they were equally troubled by what is
not
mentioned: none of the familiar scenes of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, and none of his sublime moral teachings, are to be found in Revelation.

Most alarming of all, then as now, is the unsettling spectacle of an otherwise ordinary human being who claims to have heard the voice of God. “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice,” writes the author of Revelation, “saying, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia.”
¹⁴
Inspired by the example of Revelation, men and women with lesser rhetorical gifts but even more febrile imaginations have heard voices from on high—and more than a few have ended up hanging from a gallows or burned at the stake. Freelance prophecy, the authorities feared, could lead only to theological error, social and political chaos, or even worse—a fear that turned out to be thoroughly justified, and never more so than in our own world.

Indeed, Revelation can be literally crazy-making. For anyone who reads the book of Revelation from beginning to end, the experience resembles a fever-dream or a nightmare: strange figures and objects appear and disappear and reappear, and the author himself flashes back and forth in time and place, sometimes finding himself in heaven and sometimes on earth, sometimes in the here and now and sometimes in the end-times, sometimes watching from afar and sometimes caught up in the events he describes. The author refers to the same characters by different names and titles, and he describes the same incidents from different vantage points. All the while, the characters and incidents, the words and phrases, even the letters and numbers of Revelation seem to shimmer with symbolic meanings that always float just out of reach.

The sheer weirdness of Revelation has always been vexing to sober and sensible readers, starting in biblical antiquity and continuing without interruption into our own times. The early church fathers debated among themselves whether Revelation belonged in the Bible at all. Martin Luther was tempted to leave it out of his German translation of the Bible because, as he put it, “Christ is not taught or known in it.”
¹⁵
More recently, George Bernard Shaw dismissed Revelation in its entirety as “a curious record of the visions of a drug addict,”
¹⁶
and C. G. Jung deemed the visions of Revelation to be unworthy of serious study “because no one believes in them and the whole subject is felt to be an embarrassing one.”
¹⁷
Even otherwise pious religious scholars have always been openly skeptical about what an earnest seeker can hope to achieve by parsing out the text.