A History of the End of the World (14 page)

“It would have been an easy task to collect a long series of horrid and disgustful pictures, and fill many pages with racks and scourges, with iron hooks, and red-hot beds, and with all the variety of tortures which fire and steel, savage beasts and more savage executioners, could inflict on the human body,” writes Gibbon in
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
“But I cannot determine what I ought to transcribe till I am satisfied how much I ought to believe.”
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Modern scholars find themselves forced to concede that the persecution of Christians, especially at the time and place of the writing of Revelation, was not nearly as gruesome or as widespread as John suggests. Nero may have been the “beast” of Revelation, but the arrest and punishment of Christians during his reign took place “only in Rome and on a single occasion,” according to George Eldon Ladd, a leading Protestant theologian and commentator on Revelation.
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What’s more, they were arrested and punished on trumped-up charges of arson rather than any specific religious offense. That is why Adela Yarbro Collins calls the episode a “police action” rather than a persecution.
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During the lifetime of John, and for a couple of centuries afterward, the punishment of Christians by Roman authority remained “local in character or relatively mild in execution.” Domitian, another favorite candidate for the Beast whose number is 666, may have confined his own persecution of Christians, such as it was, to “a few families in Rome.”
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And even then, most of the Christians who fell afoul of Roman authority may have been those true believers who actively sought martyrdom. Indeed, as John himself seems to suggest, it was all too easy for a compliant Christian to escape punishment of any kind by compromising with pagan authority and casting a pinch of incense on the altar fire.

Thus, the book of Revelation must be understood as the work of a man who may not have been persecuted at all but who surely “seems to
feel
that he is a victim of injustice,”
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according to Adela Yarbro Collins. Nor does John regard the Roman authorities as his only or even his worst enemy. He is equally aggrieved by those of his fellow Christians whom he condemns as insufficiently pure and zealous. He is enraged, too, by the Jews who refuse to embrace Jesus of Nazareth as the promised Messiah despite the urgings of preachers like himself. And it is John’s habit of mind to characterize
all
of his adversaries, real or imagined, not merely as mortal enemies but as agents of the Devil—a rhetorical ploy that may be his single most enduring gift to posterity.

Of course, John was not the first or only apocalyptic prophet to see the world in which he lives—and all of human history—as a battleground in the war between God and the Devil, a theological notion known as “dualism.” The idea may have seeped into Jewish tradition from the theology of ancient Persia, and it was very much on Daniel’s mind when he beheld the horrors of occupation and oppression under the Syrian king a couple of centuries before John was born. Still, John is forced to offer his own answer to the question that asks itself: What is the proper stance of a faithful believer who is forced to live in a satanic kingdom?

One answer is to pick up the sword and fight. The Maccabees and the Zealots, for example, were willing to risk death in combat against their pagan foes and preferred to take their own lives rather than surrender when defeated in battle. Another answer is to remove oneself from the temptations and afflictions of the pagan world and to live in apart in the purity and isolation of the wilderness. The Essenes, for example, sought refuge in utopian communities like the one at Qumran in the Judean desert. But there was a third answer, and that’s the one that John chooses—to do nothing at all except watch and wait until the end-times, when God will destroy the world as we know it, raise the “saints” from among the living and the dead, and reward them with “a new heaven and a new earth.”

The same range of choices can be discerned in earlier apocalyptic writings. Both the book of Daniel and portions of the book of Enoch, for example, were written during the period of the Maccabean Revolt, but each one takes a very different stance toward the evils of paganism.
The Dream Visions of Enoch,
one of the apocalyptic works collected in the book of Enoch, seems to endorse the armed struggle of the Maccabees when it depicts the transformation of a lamb, meek and feeble, into a mighty horned ram, “an image for great military leaders and for a warrior-messiah.”
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By contrast, the “wise ones” in Daniel are willing to wait patiently and passively for the archangel Michael to come to their rescue in the end-times, even if it means martyrdom in the here and now.

“They can lose their lives in this world,” explains John J. Collins, “because they are promised a greater glory in the next.”
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Daniel, rather than Enoch, is John’s greatest influence. For all of the Sturm und Drang of Revelation, John is what scholars call a “quietist”; that is, he teaches his readers and hearers to do nothing about the evil that surrounds them except to keep the faith and keep quiet. To be sure, he envisions a bloody battle between the army of God and the army of Satan—“the battle of that great day of God Almighty”—but it will be a “war in heaven.” At the end of the world, when Rome is finally destroyed, it will be by God’s hand alone: “Rejoice over her, O heaven, and you holy apostles and prophets, for God has avenged you on her!”
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John, like other apocalyptic writers, seizes upon the lamb as the symbol of the Messiah. Remarkably, a helpless creature that serves as a sacrificial offering in the earthly temple at Jerusalem is transformed in the book of Revelation into a warrior-king in the heavenly Jerusalem. The Roman emperors who serve the Beast “shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them,” he writes, “for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings.” The Lamb is armed with an arsenal of celestial weaponry, including “a sharp two-edged sword,” and John promises that the King of Kings will one day bring them to bear in a holy war against the Devil and his minions among whom faithful Christians, John among them, are now forced to live.
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John, however, does
not
counsel his readers and hearers to pick up the sword themselves. For the pious and faithful Christians here on earth, John recommends patience and passivity even if it means imprisonment, torture, and death. Indeed, he predicts that Rome will drink itself into a stupor on “the blood of prophets and saints,” but he is instructed (and he instructs his readers and hearers) that a martyr’s death is something earnestly to be wished for: “Then I heard a voice from heaven saying to me, Write: ‘Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.’”
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Revelation is, among other things, a revenge fantasy. But it is the fantasy of someone who imagines himself to be utterly powerless. John is full of sputtering rage against Rome, but he is reduced to nursing his grudge until the great day when God deigns to descend from heaven and put an end to his enemies. “He has judged the great harlot who has corrupted the earth with her fornication,” John writes of the end-times, “and he has avenged on her the blood of his servants.”
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The end-times may be near, as John repeatedly assures his readers, but they are not yet. And in the meantime, he urges his fellow Christians to sit and wait.

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

J
ohn, 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.”
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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”
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—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.”
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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.”
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And 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.’”
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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.”
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And 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.
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Perhaps 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.”
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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”
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—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.”
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