A History of the End of the World (8 page)

“Grass will grow in your jawbones, Akiva ben Yosef,” one pragmatic rabbi is quoted in the Talmud as saying to Rabbi Akiva, “and the Messiah will not have appeared.”
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Not all of the self-styled messiahs of the early years of the Common Era, however, can be so easily written off. Among the most charismatic and visionary figures of the apocalyptic tradition in Judaism was one whose mission and message were destined to change the history of the world. He, too, allowed his followers to believe that he was the Messiah, and he promised them that the prophecies of Daniel would soon be fulfilled.

His name was Yeshua bar Yosef but he is known to the world as Jesus.

T
he historical Jesus, in fact, “is best understood as a first-century Jewish apocalypticist,” according to contemporary Bible scholar Bart D. Ehrman. An “apocalypticist,” as the term is used by scholars, means someone who embraces most or all of the strange new ideas that we find in the book of Daniel and the apocalyptic writings that did not make it into the Bible: “Jesus thought that the history of the world would come to a screeching halt, that God would intervene in the affairs of this planet, overthrow the forces of evil in a cosmic act of judgment, and establish his own utopian Kingdom here on earth,” writes Ehrman in
Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium
. “And this was going to happen with Jesus’ own generation.”
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The idea that Jesus embraced the same urgent and dire expectations that we find in the first book of Enoch, Daniel, and Revelation has always been unsettling to some Christians. Indeed, most contemporary Bible scholars are more comfortable in regarding Jesus as a kind and gentle moral teacher who taught his followers how to lead decent lives here on earth rather than one of those prophets of doom who are depicted in
New Yorker
cartoons with a signboard that declares: “The End Is Near!” When cutting-edge Bible critics argue that we ought to understand Jesus as a crypto-communist, a proto-feminist, or a gay activist, they are seeking to paint over the portrait of Jesus that we actually find in the New Testament.

A plain reading of the Gospels, however, is the best evidence that Jesus believed and taught that the world was coming an imminent end. “Truly, I say to you,” says Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, “there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”
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Taken literally, the passage openly and confidently predicts that the events described in the apocalyptic writings will take place within the lifetimes of his contemporaries. The same notion is found in the letters of Paul, which are among the earliest of all Christian texts and the ones whose flesh-and-blood author is most confidently identified by scholars.

“For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God,” writes Paul in the First Letter to the Thessalonians. “And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”
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Indeed, the suggestion that Jesus was a believer in the apocalyptic idea is obliquely confirmed in the historical record. By a tradition common to both Judaism and Christian ity, for example, it was held that the Messiah would be a direct descendant of King David—“a shoot out of the stock of Jesse,” according to a potent phrase from the prophecies of Isaiah.
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The Romans, mindful of the tradition, regarded the mere claim of Davidic blood as a claim to Jewish kingship. In fact, the Tenth Legion of the Roman army of occupation in Judea remained under standing orders from four successive emperors “to hunt out and execute any Jew who claimed to be a descendant of King David.”
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And so, when Paul declares that Jesus “was made of the seed of David, according to the flesh,”
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and when Matthew reports that the Romans crucified Jesus because he claimed to be “King of the Jews”
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—a political rather than a religious offense under Roman law—their accounts are wholly consistent with what we know from sources outside the Bible about the messianic beliefs of the ancient Jewish world. And when Jesus and his disciples are shown to use the resonant words and phrases that appear in the prophetic and apocalyptic texts, they are speaking a coded language that their Jewish followers would have clearly understood.

The debate over whether Jesus is properly regarded as an apocalyptic prophet began in earnest in the opening years of the twentieth century with the writings of Albert Schweitzer, who may be better remembered today for his medical missionary work in Africa or even his expertise in the music of Bach than for his pioneering research into the life of the historical Jesus. But the earliest stirrings of the same argument go back to the very beginnings of Christian ity. Nor was it merely a dispute over some abstract point of theology. The fact that the world did not end when Jesus promised it would meant that “the Church, of necessity, had to come to terms with its own foundational prophecy,” according to contemporary Bible scholar Paula Fredriksen.
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At the very moment when the first Christians were struggling with the failure of the world to “end on time,” as Fredriksen puts it, the church was suddenly confronted with a new and startling document in which all of these tensions and contradictions were writ large. Its author boldly claims to have been granted a vision by Jesus himself. His vision is populated with characters that come directly out of the pages of the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish apocalyptic texts. He portrays Jesus as a messianic warrior-king reigning over an earthly realm. And, like Jesus and Paul, he insists that the end of the world is nigh: “Surely, I come quickly,” says Jesus at the very end of the author’s vision.
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That highly provocative and problematic document, of course, is the book of Revelation.

And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.

R
EVELATION
10:9

B
y a long and cherished tradition in Christian ity, the author of the book of Revelation has been identified as John, son of Zebedee, the presumed author of the Fourth Gospel and, by yet another tradition, the so-called beloved disciple of Jesus. “The Apocalypse of the Apostle John the Evangelist” is one of several titles that appear on various ancient manuscripts of Revelation. Although the question of who actually wrote Revelation has been a matter of hot controversy since the book first began to circulate in the earliest Christian communities of the Roman empire, some otherwise secular scholars still piously refer to the author of Revelation as “Saint John.”

As it turns out, we can discern a great deal more about the author of Revelation than most other biblical authors, Jewish or Christian. We know that he regarded himself as a special favorite of God—and, at the same time, a victim of persecution by a few of his fellow Christians and the whole of the pagan world in which he lived. He probably worked as a kind of freelance prophet, wandering from town to town throughout Asia Minor, delivering his strange visions and strict admonitions to whomever would gather and listen, and relying on their hospitality to fill his belly and to provide a place to lay his head at night. And he plainly nursed a bitter grudge against a couple of rival preachers whom he regarded as so unforgivably lax in their Christian beliefs and practices that he condemned them not only for spiritual error but also for acts of apostasy and even harlotry.

Remarkably, we can come up with an even more detailed and nuanced profile of the man who wrote Revelation. He was probably born in Judea, and he may have been an eyewitness to one of the great and terrible moments in ancient history—the defeat of the Jewish partisans known as the Zealots by a Roman army in 70
C.E.
, the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, and the dispersion of the Jewish people. His native tongue was probably Aramaic, a Semitic language that replaced Hebrew as the lingua franca in the Jewish homeland in antiquity, and he never really mastered Greek, the international language of civilized men and women in the classical pagan world. And, perhaps most remarkable of all, he was almost surely a Jew by birth, upbringing, and education, a fact that casts an unaccustomed and ironic light on a text that has been embraced by the most zealous of Christians over the last two thousand years.

For many readers of Revelation, as we shall come to see, such biographical details are awkward, embarrassing, and wholly beside the point. The author’s Jewish roots—and the linkages to Jewish texts and traditions that abound in the text of Revelation—are at odds with the crucial role the book has come to play in Christian fundamentalism. And, by the deepest of ironies, a great many readers over the ages have succeeded in convincing themselves that the author of Revelation was a benighted soul who failed to grasp the actual meanings of the visions that he beheld and described so vividly.

To the author himself, for example, the “beast” whose name is symbolized by the number 666 was almost surely a flesh-and-blood Roman emperor who lived and died in the first century of the Common Era—but generation upon generation of subsequent readers of Revelation insist that he was simply and flatly wrong. How else to explain the fact that the “beast” identified by the alphanumeric code 666 has been seen as one or another figure in a whole rogue’s gallery of malefactors, ranging from Muhammad in the Middle Ages to Napoleon in the nineteenth century to Mussolini in the twentieth century, and countless others in between?

Yet Revelation is not quite as mysterious as it seems. Scholarship, both ancient and modern, allows us to catch a glimpse of the man who composed the strange text, the world in which he lived and worked, the passions that burned so hotly in his heart and mind, and the true beliefs that he meant to instill in his first readers and hearers. Above all, it is possible to penetrate the enigmatic text and extract the coded meanings that are so deeply enciphered in the book of Revelation.

As we move forward in history, we will see that Revelation has been reread and reinterpreted in startling and even shocking ways over the centuries, and never more so than in our own times. If the author of Revelation had been granted an accurate vision of the distant future, surely he would have been appalled not only by the plain fact that the end of the world was
not
near but also by what would become of his “little book” in the hands of popes and kings, grand inquisitors and church reformers, messianic pretenders and self-appointed prophets—or, for that matter, best-selling novelists like the authors of the Left Behind series, televangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, or a president like Ronald Reagan.

To measure how far the book of Revelation has strayed from its original uses and meanings—and to appreciate how the text has been reinterpreted and misinterpreted over the last twenty centuries—we need a benchmark: Who actually composed the book of Revelation? Where did he come from, and where did he wander? What did he know, and what did he believe? And what did he hope to achieve by setting down the extraordinary visions that we find in the “little book” that he left behind?

O
ne of the identifying characteristics of an apocalypse is what scholars call “pseudonymity.” That is, most apocalyptic texts are written by flesh-and-blood authors who conceal their own identities behind the names of revered biblical figures. Thus, for example, the “false writings” of the Pseudepigrapha include works ranging from
The Apocalypse of Adam
to
The Apocalypse of the Virgin Mary,
none of which were actually written by their named authors. From its first appearance, in fact, Revelation has been regarded with skepticism by some readers who have dared to wonder out loud whether it was really written by St. John the Evangelist.

Of course, the same question can be asked about all but a few books of the Bible, including both its Jewish and Christian versions. Some Bible readers, for example, are still shocked to learn that scholars no longer believe that Moses wrote the Five Books of Moses, as the first five books of the Hebrew Bible are known in Jewish usage, or that any of the Gospels were written by the apostles whose names appear in their titles. Indeed, the bulk of the Jewish scriptures and a good deal of the Christian scriptures can be regarded as “false writings” in the sense that they were not actually written by the authors who are credited in their titles.

Exactly how the books of the Bible came to be written and named has always been the subject of much argument and speculation. One theory, for example, is that the author was followed around by a dutiful secretary who took notes and then polished up what the great man said, or that the author actually sat down and dictated to the secretary. That’s exactly how the book of Jeremiah supposedly came into existence according to an explanation that we find in the Hebrew Bible itself: “Then Jeremiah called Baruch the son of Neriah, and Baruch wrote from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the Lord, which He had spoken unto him, upon a roll of a book.”
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Another theory holds that all but a few books of the Bible are composed of writings from several different sources, all of which were collected and compiled at some point in history by one or more editors or “redactors.” The raw material consists of myths, legends, folktales, poems, prayers, and songs—the so-called oral tradition—but also chronicles, genealogies, law codes, and works of biography and autobiography. But the received text of the Bible is the work product of the editors who stitched them together and polished them up. A variant of the same theory is that some or all of these redactions were actually composed by several individuals, or even several generations, all working together in what scholars loosely call a “school” or a “circle” or a “tradition.”

Of course, a few scholars are still willing to argue that some biblical writings were authored by a single gifted human being, man or woman, who put pen to paper (or, perhaps more accurately, a goose quill to a sheet of papyrus) and composed an immortal work of literature in exactly the same manner as Dante or Shakespeare, Mark Twain or Isaac Bashevis Singer. The biblical life story of David as we find it in the book of Samuel may be the work of a writer of genius known in biblical scholarship as the Court Historian, or so it has been suggested, and many of the most beloved and compelling stories in the book of Genesis may have been written by an even more accomplished author known as “J.” And, famously, it has been suggested that J was a woman, first by Richard Elliott Friedman in
Who Wrote the Bible?
and later by Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg in
The Book of J.

All of these theories of biblical authorship have been applied to the book of Revelation, and with some very curious results. Some scholars, for example, argue that Revelation as we know it is actually the work of “a Johanine circle, school or community.”
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Others see Revelation as a composite of several different and unrelated texts, each one written in a different time and place by a different author—or by various “schools”—and all of them cobbled together at some later date by a pious editor who struggled to impose some kind of order on the chaos of words and images.

But, thrillingly, most modern scholars agree that the book of Revelation is the work of a single author who was a mystic and a visionary, a charismatic preacher and a poet of unexcelled and enduring genius. Whether Revelation is read as Holy Writ or a work of literature, one of the great enterprises of biblical scholarship has been the effort to extract the biography of its author from the text itself and the traditions that have grown up around it. As we begin to glimpse the details of his life and work, however obliquely and speculatively, we will be able to read the book of Revelation in new and illuminating ways.

Not unlike the book of Jeremiah, Revelation opens with a straightforward claim of divine authorship with the assistance of a few celestial go-betweens and a human secretary. The text passes from God to Jesus to an angel and finally to a human being whose name is given as John: “The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants what must soon take place,” according to the opening lines of text, “and he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John.”
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On the strength of these assertions, pious Christians have embraced the book of Revelation as “the only biblical book authored by Christ.”
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The claim of divine authorship is not so clear in the rest of the text itself. Revelation is written in the first person, but more than one narrator is speaking to us. Sometimes the voice we hear belongs to the human author who calls himself John, and sometimes John is merely quoting the various celestial figures whom he encounters—God, Jesus, and a series of angelic emissaries. Still, John clearly presents himself as the human being whose visions are recorded in the text, and he is commonly credited as its author. But we are still left with a nagging question: Is he the apostle whose name is given in the New Testament as John, son of Zebedee?

By way of self-introduction, John describes himself to the seven churches in Asia Minor for which the book of Revelation was originally intended: “I, John, your brother and comrade in tribulation and patient endurance in Jesus.”
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The fact that the author of Revelation calls himself “John,” however, hardly means that he is the same John who is mentioned in the Gospels. The Hebrew name “Yohanan” and its Greek equivalent, “Ioannes,” both of which are rendered in English translation as “John,” had been in common usage among both Jews and Christians long before the Gospels
or
Revelation were first composed. Indeed, the New Testament itself knows of several men called John, including not only the apostle John but also John the Baptist, a wandering preacher who is among the first to proclaim Jesus to be the Messiah.

The tradition that the apostle John wrote the book of Revelation began with its first appearance among the Christian communities of the Roman Empire. Irenaeus (ca. 120–ca. 200), an influential Christian bishop in what is now the city of Lyons in southern France, reports that Revelation “was seen not very long ago, almost in our generation, at the close of the reign of Domitian”—that is, no later than 96
C.E.
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And Irenaeus is the very first commentator to attribute the authorship of Revelation to “John, the disciple of the Lord,” a belief that was affirmed by several other early church fathers, including Justin Martyr and Origen. But a more cautious bishop, Dionysius of Alexandria (ca. 200–ca. 265), while conceding that Revelation is a work “of which many good Christians have a very high opinion,” was the first to insist that Revelation and the Fourth Gospel “could not have been written by the same person.”
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Dionysius, like countless other Bible critics to come, was alert to the obvious and disturbing contrasts between the Fourth Gospel and Revelation, including the marked differences in the fundamental theological stance of each work: the Gospel embraces what theologians call a “present” eschatology, while Revelation knows only a “futuristic” one.
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According to certain passages in the Gospel of John, for example, Christians need not wait until the end-times to enjoy the blessing of eternal life; rather, they are saved in the here and now: “Whoever lives and believes in me shall never die,” says Jesus. “He who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life.”
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By contrast, Revelation insists that salvation must await the end of the world—the Tribulation, the Resurrection, and the Day of Judgment—at some unknown moment in the future when “the trumpet call is sounded by the seventh angel” and “the mystery of God is fulfilled.”
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Perhaps even more provocative, at least to expert readers of ancient Greek, are the differences in language and literary style between the Gospel of John and the book of Revelation. When scholars compare the words and phrases of Revelation and the Fourth Gospel in order to calculate the number of Greek terms that are used in both texts but nowhere else in the New Testament, they find only eight words in common.
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An even more unsettling difference between the two texts is found in each author’s command of the common (or “Koine”) Greek in which the Christian scriptures are written. The Greek used in the Gospel is “correct and elegant,” while the Greek used in Revelation is “inaccurate and even barbarous,” according to Adela Yarbro Collins, a leading expert on the book of Revelation (and the spouse of John J. Collins, a fellow specialist in apocalyptic studies).
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