The Bible's Book of Revelation is basically a fever dream of epic proportions. It describes
the fiery end of the world, and the Book of Revelation can be interpreted a lot of
different ways. Here's the big ol' story behind the Bible's Book of Revelation.
Many people interpret Revelation as a sign of what’s going to happen in the future. But for
its author, it wasn't a mystic prophecy of something that was going to occur thousands
of years later - it was actually both a rousing propaganda message and revenge fantasy all in one.
According to Elaine Pagels, one of the world's foremost biblical scholars,
the author of Revelation had just lived through an unimaginable catastrophe.
In 70 CE, an armed Jewish revolt in Jerusalem was put down by 60,000 Roman soldiers who also
burned down the temple and destroyed the city. As far as the revolutionaries were concerned,
this was not how things were supposed to go. Early followers of Jesus didn't think his return
was something far off, but very soon, even in their lifetimes. He was supposed to come back and
destroy Rome, the empire that killed him. Instead, Rome was the one winning, and Jesus was nowhere
to be found. What had happened to the plan? So the author of Revelation, known only as John,
wrote a book about how Jesus would return and annihilate his enemies, the Romans.
He was writing anti-Roman propaganda and a rousing motivational tract.
The aim was to make sure the followers of Jesus didn't give up or despair.
He was definitely going to come back and kick butt very soon.
The Bible isn't the first book you might turn to for gratuitous violence, but it's definitely
in there. And Revelation doesn't skimp. Everyone has heard of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse,
but less well known are the horses of Revelation Chapter 9 Verses 17-19,
which have the heads of lions and tails made of snakes. These particular horses are said
to breathe "fire, smoke, and sulfur," and they wind up killing a third of all humans.
Of course, there are your standard horrible plague symptoms, like non-believers getting painful sores
all over their bodies, being boiled alive by the Sun, or giant hailstones falling to the Earth and
splatting people. But there are also some set pieces Hollywood would be proud of, like when
the Sun goes black and the Moon turns to blood, or a dragon shows up and almost eats an infant.
Two of the most bizarre elements of the book have to be the locusts and the wine press.
The former descend on Earth but are given scorpion stings,
which they use not to kill humans but "to torture them for five months." The wine press is used to
smoosh people to pulp until their blood is flowing five feet deep through the streets.
There is so much crazy that occurs throughout the book, it's no wonder Revelation says mankind will,
quote, "long to die." Unfortunately for the people of Earth, they’ll get no such luck.
Considering how much Revelation has influenced the world, it's extremely
concerning that it probably shouldn't have been included in the Bible at all.
Christianity existed for hundreds of years without an official Bible. There were plenty of books
being passed around, but no one had decided what was considered legit. Around 360 years
after Jesus died, the process of putting together Christianity's holy book began, and Elaine Pagels
says perhaps no one had more say over what made it into the New Testament than Bishop Athanasius.
Described as "pugnacious" and "fiery," this controversial dude managed to get deposed
and exiled a whopping five times in his 46 years as a bishop. He also absolutely loved Revelation.
He didn't love it because it spoke to him on a deeply spiritual level,
but because he saw its potential as a way to attack any Christian who questioned his authority.
Instead of non-believers and Romans being the enemy described in Revelation,
he saw the bad guys as the people of his own religion who didn't do and say exactly what
he thought they should. Including Revelation in the Bible meant he could threaten perceived
heretics with that weird wine press stuff. Athanasius would probably have been a fan
of another form of brutal Christianity from several centuries later. Because as they say:
"Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!"
Interestingly, many church leaders wanted to see Revelation end up in the scrap heap
instead of closing out the Bible. Athanasius' predecessor called it, quote, "unintelligible,
irrational, and false." Not a rousing endorsement of what some people now see as God's actual words.
Especially since, you know…in the end, Athanasius got his way.
Though the author of Revelation is considered a saint and an all-around important guy in various
Christian churches, he wasn't a big fan of the people who actually started those religions.
To an even greater extreme than St. Peter, John was Jewish through-and-through.
In the early years of the Church, there wasn't one agreed-upon way to be a Christian. Different sects
were fighting to become the biggest and most "correct." The John who wrote Revelation was
very much of the idea that Jesus had come to the Earth to be the Jewish messiah. This put him at
odds with Paul, the guy who more than anything shaped the version of Christianity that "won."
John wanted traditional Jewish values to continue. He didn't like that gentiles
could become followers of Jesus without adhering to the rules set out in the Torah.
And he was definitely against women in power. At one point in Revelation he refers to a woman who
was a leader in an early church community as a, quote, "Jezebel." And he was not exactly a
fan of intermarriage between Jewish followers of Jesus and gentile believers. He didn't even want
the new churches to accept gentile members, calling one that did a "synagogue of Satan."
Even at the time these views would have seemed old-fashioned to many new Christians. It makes
sense that John's version of the budding religion was the one that died out quickly.
It would appear that some people have gotten their ideas about the Antichrist and the sign
of the beast, 666, not from actually reading Revelation but from watching The Omen.
666 and the beast were never supposed to represent a future evil Antichrist
who Jesus would return and defeat. Revelation is just lousy with numerology.
For example, the number 7 shows up constantly, and 666 is very much part of that. The verse in
question that invokes the famous number says, "Let the person who has insight calculate
the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. That number is 666."
The number was never meant to be random; it stood for a very specific name:
That of the Emperor Nero. Christians had good reason to
absolutely hate Nero, since he'd cracked down on their religion violently. There was even a
rumor he'd used Christians as torches in his garden by burning them alive.
He was the ultimate baddy, so he got specially singled out as an evil beast. John couldn't get
away with openly writing bad stuff about Nero, so he used the Jewish numerology system, which the
right readers would've easily been able to crack. Nor is the "mark of the beast" actually on
the beast, it's on everyone else. Revelation Chapter 13 Verses 16-17 says the beast makes
everyone on Earth get this mark or they won't be able to buy and sell anything.
Elaine Pagels says this might have stood for Roman imperial stamps, coins, or even actual tattoos.
Since Revelation is often interpreted as the story of a future apocalypse,
it gets cited as proof of an upcoming end of days by a lot of people.
In the old days it wasn't people you'd consider crazies, either.
Scotsman John Napier, born in 1550, is celebrated for his contributions to math and science,
but less so for his writing on Revelation that predicted the world would end in 1688 or 1700.
Conveniently for Napier, he’d be six feet under by that point, so he'd never find out he was wrong.
Same with the German pastor Johann Bengel, who calculated the thousand-year reign of Christ
prophesied in Revelation would begin in 1836. Even David Koresh of the Branch Davidian cult
saw himself as the lamb mentioned in Revelation and was preparing to open the seven seals to
bring on the end times. Which he took to mean, that apparently, he should publish a book.
Koresh and many of his cult members died in Waco, Texas, in 1993, a dark day in U.S. history.
More recently, a secretive conspiracy theorist who goes by the pseudonym
"David Meade" interpreted a description of a woman in Revelation in an interesting way.
He claimed that the description implied that a complicated astronomical combination of the
constellation Virgo, the planet Jupiter, the Moon, the Sun, and various other stars and planets,
would bring on the beginning of the end. He first announced this would happen September 23, 2017.
Being wrong didn't dissuade Meade, and he set the for-real date as April 23, 2018.
Unless we didn't notice something, it looks like that one missed too.
If you ever wanted to visit a holy place and get a nice Mediterranean vacation out of it as well,
the cave of the apocalypse should be on your list. John wrote in Revelation Chapter 1 Verse 9 that he
was on the Greek island of Patmos when he received his vision and dictated it to his disciple
Prochoros. However, the claim that we've found the exact cave he did this in is only based on legend.
Still, it's important enough historically that both the cave and the monastery built
around it in the Middle Ages were granted UNESCO World Heritage status in 1999.
Despite the lack of proof, the cave of the apocalypse, now usually called the Holy Grotto,
has been a popular pilgrimage destination for hundreds of years. Visitors still show up by
the thousands. The entrance is now surrounded by the monastery, but you are allowed to go in
the cave itself. There's a mosaic showing John getting his visions and the cleft in the rock
where the voice of Christ supposedly came from. A fenced-off area is alleged to be where John
slept every night, though no one seems to care where poor Prochoros got his Z's. There's even the
rock John used as a pillow. The indentation his head made from repeated use is outlined in silver.
To add to the realism, a monk sits on the rock and tells visitors how the book was written. Once you
get your spiritual fill, it's time for ouzo.
“Opa!”
Revelation stands out in the Bible because it's so drastically different in style and tone from
virtually all the other books. That's because it's the only example of apocalypse literature
that’s made it into the final cut. But it's far from the only religious tome from that time that
covered trippy, end-of-the-world scenarios. Jewish authors started writing apocalypse
literature around 300 BCE. They were heavily influenced by the Zoroastrianism of the Persians,
as well as the destruction of Jerusalem a couple hundred years before. This genre of
writing usually included a cosmic battle between good and evil, one or more messiahs showing up to
fix everything, and an end to the current terrible times, giving way to a wonderful
age. Written around 90 CE, the Book of Revelation is actually a pretty late addition to this canon.
While it's the only official biblical apocalypse book, Revelation does have some unofficial
competition. At almost the exact same time John was dictating his vision on the island of Patmos,
someone was writing IV Ezra. It was taken seriously as a holy book by many of the early
church fathers, and by Christians in general, well into the Middle Ages. Christopher Columbus even
cited it as proof there was a lot more land than water on the Earth. In general, IV Ezra isn't as
over-the-top as Revelation, but it still relays plenty of crazy visions about the end times.
Evangelicals have an inordinate amount of influence on the United States’ Middle East
policy, specifically when it comes to Israel. If a politician isn't evangelical themselves,
they still want that large voting bloc to support them, which means sometimes
supporting a foreign policy based on Revelation. One former Liberty University student wrote in
America Magazine that in college he was taught the establishment of the nation of Israel in 1948 was
proof the end times were nigh. According to the evangelical interpretation of Revelation, before
Jesus can come back, Jewish people have to return to Israel, rebuild the temple, and accept Christ
as their savior.This will trigger the end times. So the establishment of Israel was evidence
it's the beginning of the end, and protecting Israel's existence is vital for the fulfillment
of the events that take place in Revelation. In fact, a 2015 survey found 73 percent of
evangelicals believe events in Israel are part of the prophecies in the Book of Revelation.
This was why it was such a big deal for evangelicals when President Trump moved
the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in May 2018. They saw it as another "fulfilled prophecy."
The Book of Revelation means different things to different people. It all comes down to
which of the four main ways they interpret it. The four horsemen in Revelation stand for war, famine,
death, and either Christ or the Antichrist, depending on who you ask. But even then,
what they mean for the world is totally contingent on which of those four ways you read the book.
Using preterism, we've got nothing to worry about. People who take this view think John
was talking about events that had already happened, between the ministry of John the
Baptist and the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. In other words, the four horsemen have come and gone.
But believers in futurism think nothing mentioned in the book has happened yet.
Every single thing is going to occur sometime in the future, so we've got a lot of terrible destruction to look forward to.
On the third hand, historicism says we're in the
middle of the events of Revelation right now. They started 900 years ago and some
of the horsemen have already been causing trouble, while others are still to come.
Finally, allegory means taking a purely spiritual view of Revelation. Nothing in it is literal. It's
a symbolic story that's meant to be interpreted by individuals. Any death, famine, and war the world
is going through is entirely non-horsemen-related. So what's the truth? That's for you to decide. You'd just… better hurry.
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