A History of the End of the World (11 page)

Another ancient practice that might explain John’s curious reference is the mark that was applied to the forehead, neck, or hand of someone who had been granted membership in a craft or trade guild or initiated into the cult of a pagan deity. Since the guilds invoked the patronage of a god or goddess, membership in a guild and initiation into a cult may have been one and the same thing. And the marking of guild and cult members is explained as a conscious imitation of the branding of slaves: the initiate acknowledges his or her bondage to the deity “by indentures not written on pieces of parchment,” as first-century Jewish philosopher Philo puts it, “but, as is the custom of slaves, branded on their bodies with a red-hot iron.”
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Still, the root meaning of “the mark of the beast” may be best understood as the names, numbers, and symbols that appeared on Roman coinage. For John, coinage is the ultimate and ubiquitous symbol of imperial authority graven in gold and silver—and a symbol, too, of the comforts and luxuries that some Christians buy at the price of their souls when they make the compromises that he so hotly condemns. To a culture warrior like John, a coin fashioned of gold or silver and bearing the profile of the emperor is an example of exactly what the God of Israel condemns in the Ten Commandments. Indeed, John’s fear and loathing of Roman coinage is yet another clue to his Jewish identity and yet another example of the Jewish values that suffuse the book of Revelation.

The idea that handling a Roman coin is an act of idolatry would have been an article of faith for a pious Jew from Judea. At the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem, for example, men and women on pilgrimage to the Jewish homeland from far-distant communities did not bring along the animals they would offer for sacrifice on the altar of God. Rather, they purchased what livestock they needed on arrival in Jerusalem. And, lest the pilgrims pollute the Temple by using coinage bearing the name and profile of some pagan emperor or some pagan deity, money changers were available along the approaches to the Temple to exchange pagan coins for temple currency on which no offensive names or figures were permitted to appear.

The money changers and the sellers of sacrificial animals who plied their trade at the Temple in Jerusalem are memorably featured in the Gospels, of course, but only in a tale that profoundly misrepresents why they were there in the first place. “And [Jesus] entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple” goes the account in Mark, “and he overturned the tables of the money-changers, and the seats of those who sold pigeons.”
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Jesus condemns the money changers and the sellers of sacrificial animals for turning the Temple into a “den of thieves”—but the fact is that they were providing a ser vice that
prevented
the Temple from being tainted by commerce with coinage bearing “the mark of the beast.”
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The Gospel story is not mentioned at all in Revelation, whose author would have surely understood the pious function of the money changers. For him, the only coinage that a true believer must refuse to handle is the kind that bears the names and images of the Roman emperor and his divine patrons and patronesses—that is, money inscribed with the mark of the Beast. But John’s contempt for money and his contempt for commerce are, so to speak, two sides of the same coin. When he describes the final destruction of “Babylon”—a code name for imperial Rome, not only in Revelation but also in other ancient apocalyptic writings such as the Sibylline Oracles and the Apocalypse of Baruch—John reserves some of his most wrought prose, and a certain bitter sarcasm, too, for those who profit from the buying and selling of luxuries.

“And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo anymore,” writes John in his vision of the final destruction of Rome.
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And he proceeds to provide a catalog of their wares in such sumptuous detail that it betrays both a certain envy as well as contempt: “Cargo of gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory, all articles of costly wood, bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, oil, fine flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, and slaves, that is, human souls.”
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Elsewhere in Revelation, John imagines that sinners will sizzle in a lake of fire for all eternity, a lake that “burneth with sulphur and brimstone.”
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Here, however, he contents himself with visions of merchants and shipmasters who suffer only from broken hearts at the loss of a lively trade in luxury goods as they witness the destruction of Babylon.

“The merchants of these wares, who gained wealth from her, will stand far off, in fear of her torment, weeping and mourning aloud,” writes John. “And all shipmasters and seafaring men, sailors and all whose trade is on the sea, stood far off and cried out as they saw the smoke of her burning, ‘What city was like the great city?’ And they threw dust on their heads, as they wept and mourned, crying out, ‘Alas, alas, for the great city where all who had ships at sea grew rich by her wealth! In one hour she has been laid waste.’ And a craftsman of any craft shall be found in thee no more, and the sound of the millstone shall be heard in thee no more.”
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If John is seeking to scare his readers and hearers into shunning their pagan friends, neighbors, and kinfolk, the demonization of Roman coinage—and the condemnation of the “cargo” that it could buy—was a clever psychological tool. After all, Christian true believers could congratulate themselves on their own poverty, whether self-imposed or not, by reminding themselves that participating in pagan commerce was equivalent to bargaining with the Devil. They are encouraged by the book of Revelation to console themselves with dreams of the day when God will punish the collaborators who took the Devil’s coin. And revenge, as we shall see, is among the core values of Revelation.

J
ohn’s condemnation of coinage and cargo is also consistent with what we can discern about his own way of life. Nothing in Revelation states or implies that John himself practices a trade or engages in buying and selling, or even that he holds a clerical rank in any of the seven churches that he addresses. Rather, he appears to follow the example of Jeremiah and John the Baptist; he is purely a prophet, wholly self-announced and bearing no ordination or official title. Nor does he seem to have a home in any of the seven cities. John apparently wanders from town to town, relying on the people he meets to offer him a bite to eat and a place to bed down. In that sense, he would have lived and worked in conscious imitation of Jesus and the disciples as they are described in the Gospel of Matthew.

“Take no gold, nor silver, nor copper, no bag for your journey, nor two tunics, nor sandals, nor a staff,” Jesus is shown to instruct the twelve disciples. “And whatever town or village you enter, find out who is worthy in it, and stay with him until you depart.”
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John’s life as an itinerant preacher would have been an advertisement for the ideas that he embraces with such fervor in the pages of Revelation—“an enactment of the ascetic values of homelessness, lack of family ties, and the rejection of wealth and possessions,” as one scholar has explained.
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These are the same values that are expressed in the strict rules that governed the members of an apocalyptic community like the one at Qumran near the Dead Sea, and in the pronouncements of the apocalyptic prophet whose name was Jesus: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests,” says Jesus, “but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.”
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Some scholars speculate that John renounced a life of wealth and privilege in order to take up his calling as a prophet. The argument is highly speculative but intriguing. Since banishment was a penalty reserved for aristocrats under Roman law, they imagine, John himself must have been a member of the Jewish priestly caste and a man of high rank in the Jewish homeland. One ancient source, a bishop of Ephesus called Polycrates, seems to affirm as early as the late second century that John was an ordained priest rather than a self-appointed preacher. Based on such meager evidence, one scholar proposes that John was banished to Patmos directly from a life of comfort in Jerusalem, Alexandria, or perhaps even the imperial capital of Rome.
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But the text of Revelation suggests that John, like Jesus himself, was a man of humble origins who never aspired to rank or riches and, in fact, detested those who did.

A wandering preacher and missionary like John would have been a familiar figure among the Christian communities of the seven cities. The Didache, a Christian manual of religious instruction from roughly the same era—and a work with its own apocalyptic passages—calls on all good Christians “to share their firstfruits, money, and clothes with any true prophet who wishes to settle among them.”
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And the Didache confirms that prophets—or at least the authentic prophets who speak “in the spirit”—deserved to be taken seriously.
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Long after the Jewish rabbinical tradition had declared the age of prophecy to be over, the Christian churches of the Roman Empire were still prepared to welcome any man (or woman) who claimed and appeared to be a “true prophet.”

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.
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Thus, 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.”
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But 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.”
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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.
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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.”
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Once 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 Christian ity, 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 Christian ity 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.
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