A History of the End of the World (12 page)

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.
⁷⁹
Indeed, both John and his Jewish role models regarded apostasy and sexual promiscuity as interchangeable sins.

The Greek word that is customarily translated as “fornication” (
porneusai
) carries the sense of “playing the harlot,”
⁸⁰
but it is unlikely that Jezebel and her followers engaged in literal acts of prostitution or even sexual promiscuity. Rather, fornication is probably best understood as a code word used by biblical authors to describe what scholars call “syncretism”—that is, the mixing and matching of various religious beliefs and practices that was so common in classical paganism. John, in fact, may have used the word “fornication” to refer to nothing more scandalous than the making of marriages between couples who would be forbidden to marry under Jewish law but not Roman law.

But the words and phrases selected by John are intended to suggest that Jezebel herself and her Christian followers were, quite literally, willful and defiant sexual outlaws who insisted on engaging in their carnal adventures even after they had been warned of the consequences. Indeed, the text of Revelation suggests (even if it does not describe) scenes of ritual harlotry, orgiastic sex, and the careless spawning of bastard children, all of which have prompted some scholarly readers to regard Revelation as a work of “apocalyptic pornography.”
⁸¹

“And I gave her time to repent of her sexual immorality, and she did not repent,” says the Son of God in condemning Jezebel. “Behold, I cast her into a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her I will throw into great tribulation, unless they repent of her doings, and I will strike her children dead.”
⁸²

The same double-edged meanings may be buried in John’s condemnation of “the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, which thing I hate” and other Christians who embrace what he darkly refers to as “the deep things of Satan.”
⁸³
Although the Nicolaitans are wholly unknown outside the pages of Revelation, the early church fathers suggested that they were a band of heretics led by Nicolas, a wholly obscure figure who is mentioned briefly in Acts.
⁸⁴
Some scholars are willing to entertain the notion that John is referring to “a Christian libertine group” whose teachings included not only sorcery and other satanic practices but also “sexual license” as a tool of spiritual enlightenment.
⁸⁵
The Nicolaitans supposedly taught that “the really wise and mature Christian must know life at its worst as well as at its best,” according to Scottish biblical scholar and broadcaster William Barclay, and so “it was right and necessary to commit the grossest and the most depraved sins in order to experience what they were like.”
⁸⁶

But it is also possible (and even more likely) that the Nicolaitans, like Jezebel and Balaam, were easygoing and open-minded Christians who were willing to make the compromises that allowed them to participate fully in the “social, commercial, and political life” of the pagan communities in which they lived. The hateful and inflammatory labels that John slaps on his theological enemies may be no more than “code names” that he uses to identify Christian pastors and preachers who “allowed eating food sacrificed to the idols and accepted compromise with the emperor cult.”
⁸⁷
If so, their worst offense—and perhaps their only offense—was placing themselves on the wrong side of what John regarded as the no-man’s-land of a culture war.

John reveals nothing about the more intimate aspects of his life, and we simply do not know whether he has a wife and children or, for that matter, any family at all. But he allows us to see that he is plainly put off by human sexuality, and when he mentions sex at all, he cannot seem to conceive of a sexual encounter between a man and a woman as something other than fornication. Indeed, John makes it clear in the book of Revelation that he regards
all
sexual conduct—even sex within marriage—as a kind of defilement.

For example, John predicts that 144,000 souls will be taken up to some celestial counterpart of Mount Zion, where they will be granted the privilege of following the Lamb “wherever he goes.”
⁸⁸
They are “redeemed from mankind as first fruits for God and the Lamb,”
⁸⁹
a phrase that harks back to the ritual of animal sacrifice at the Temple in Jerusalem and suggests that they are martyrs who made the ultimate sacrifice to God. To distinguish the “first fruits” from the rest of humanity, they will be “sealed upon their foreheads” with the name of God and the name of the Lamb.
⁹⁰
And John carefully notes that they are also distinguishable for a less obvious reason: all of them are lifelong celibates.

“These are the ones who were not defiled with women,” writes John, “for they are virgins.”
⁹¹

A certain discomfort with sexuality of all kinds, even within marriage, can be found throughout the apocalyptic tradition.
The Book of Watchers,
for example, blames the existence of evil in the world on the fact that angels descended from heaven and “corrupted themselves” by engaging in sexual intercourse with women “in all their uncleanness.”
⁹²
Josephus reports that at least one order of Essenes shunned marriage and childbearing, and archaeologists suggest that the apocalyptic community at Qumran was largely, if not entirely, celibate. And the idea of sex as a defilement is deeply rooted in certain passages of the Hebrew Bible, where sexual conduct between any man and woman renders both of them ritually impure: “If a man lies with a woman and has an emission of semen,” goes a passage in Leviticus, “both of them shall bathe themselves in water, and be unclean until the evening.”
⁹³

The same fussy attitude toward sex can be found in both Jewish
and
pagan tradition. A priest or a soldier need not be celibate, but he must refrain from sexual intercourse in advance of certain activities, including both the performing of rituals and the fighting of battles. The requirement of sexual abstinence before battle is one that the Maccabees embraced in their own war against assimilation and occupation, but a pious pagan soldier might do the same. John, too, appears to believe that Christian soldiers must prepare themselves for the final battle between God and Satan by avoiding all defiling conduct, including sex. But John’s stance toward sex, as toward everything else, is absolute and uincompromising.

Here is a clear example of John’s distinctive approach to the moral instruction of the Hebrew Bible. He seizes upon a biblical commandment, and then he proceeds to radicalize it. Sex is a “removable defilement” under biblical law—one who has been defiled by engaging in sex need only immerse oneself in a ritual bath to purify oneself—but John seems to argue that
any
sexual encounter between men and women ought to be avoided.
⁹⁴
Since he is convinced that the end-times are approaching but he does not know exactly when they will arrive, John seems to recommend that men and women alike ought to stop sleeping with each other once and for all so they will be ritually pure when the end comes, whether that happens tomorrow or at some unknowable moment in the future.

So John sees sex as something dirty and defiling under
all
circumstances. The only truly exalted human beings in Revelation are virgins and martyrs, and all his enemies are whores and whoremongers. And he is both distrustful and disdainful of women in general: the only mortal woman whom John mentions by name, the rival prophet whom he calls Jezebel, is condemned as a seducer and a fornicator. All of the passages of Revelation that touch on encounters between men and women betray a deeply conflicted attitude toward sexuality, according to Adela Yarbro Collins, “involving perhaps hatred and fear of both women and one’s own body.”
⁹⁵

Other readers of Revelation suspect that John may protest too much when it comes to the condemnation of sex. D. H. Lawrence, far better known for erotic novels like
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
than for his biblical exegesis, points out that the greatest fornicator in all of Revelation, the Whore of Babylon, is a titillating figure, and perhaps intentionally so. “How they
envy
Babylon her splendour, envy, envy!” rails Lawrence in his own commentary on the book of Revelation. “The harlot sits magnificently with her golden cup of wine of sensual pleasure in her hand. How the apocalyptists would have loved to drink out of her cup! And since they couldn’t how they loved smashing it!”
⁹⁶

Indeed, John betrays something dark and disturbing in his own sexual imagination at precisely the moment when he conjures up the famous seductress, richly draped in silk and jewels, and casts his mind’s eye on what she carries in her hand—“a golden cup full of the impurities of her fornication.”
⁹⁷
In a book full of revelations great and small, it is highly revealing passage. When John invites us to imagine exactly what “abominations” and “impurities” are sloshing around in that golden cup, the man who wrote the book of Revelation is telling us everything we need to know about his own tortured attitude toward human sexuality.

John is plainly obsessed with purity in all things, including not only abstract notions of theology but also such thoroughly human concerns as sex, food, and money. And his obsessive personality may help us understand why the book of Revelation has always exerted such a powerful influence on readers with similar traits, ranging from religious zealots to the clinically insane. Indeed, as we shall see, John provides a proof text for code breakers and conspiracy theorists who, like John himself, are prone to see the Devil in the unlikeliest of guises.

A
mong the mysteries that John scatters through the text of Revelation, none has borne such strange fruit as “the number of the beast”—that is, the alphanumeric code that is meant to symbolize the name of the Roman emperor under whom John is living and working, the emperor whose name is chiseled on stone altars in the seven cities and stamped on coins of gold and silver that circulate throughout the empire. “Here is wisdom,” writes John in what may be the single most obsessively pondered passage in the whole of Revelation. “Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.”
⁹⁸

One approach to penetrating the secret of the number 666 focuses on the contrast between the symbolic meaning of sixes and sevens in the book of Revelation. John, as we have seen, was obsessed with the number seven, a symbol of divine perfection that derives from the fact that God is shown in Genesis to complete the creation of the world in exactly seven days. If seven symbolizes divine perfection, as Bible commentators have long suggested, then six symbolizes human (rather than satanic) imperfection—and 666 “is the number of a man,” as John plainly states.