Reading an Apocalypse

Revelation tells you what kind of book it is before it tells you anything else. Its first word in Greek is apokalypsis, an uncovering. 'This is the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show His servants what must soon come to pass.' The English title of the book is a translation of that first word, and the whole literary family is named after it.

An apocalypse, as ancient readers knew the type, has recognisable furniture. A human seer receives a vision. An otherworldly being, usually an angel, interprets it. The vision uses symbol rather than plain report: beasts for empires, horns for kings, stars and lampstands for things they are not. There is often a journey to heaven, a survey of history in coded form, a sharp division between the present age and the age to come, and a numbered series of visions. The standard scholarly definition, formulated by John J. Collins and a working group in the journal Semeia in 1979, describes the genre as revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a reality that is both temporal, in that it looks to final salvation, and spatial, in that it involves another, supernatural world. Revelation fits that description closely.

The family is large and mostly Jewish. Daniel 7 to 12 is the piece of it inside the Old Testament. Outside the canon stand 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra (chapters 3 to 14 of what English Bibles call 2 Esdras), 2 Baruch and the Apocalypse of Abraham, most of them written between roughly 200 BC and AD 120, several of them responding to the catastrophe of 70. Your students have usually never heard of these books. They should, because a genre is learned by reading more than one example of it, and a Christian who has read only Revelation is in the position of someone who has seen one sonnet and is trying to work out the rules from it.

Revelation is also two other things at once, and both matter. It is a letter. Chapter 1 verse 4 opens with the ordinary shape of a first-century letter, 'John, To the seven churches in the province of Asia: Grace and peace to you', and the book closes in 22:21 the way Paul closes, with grace. Something was written, copied and carried to named congregations in named towns. And it calls itself a prophecy, in 1:3, 22:7, 22:10, 22:18 and 22:19. In biblical usage prophecy is God's word addressed to a present situation, which may include prediction and is never only prediction.

One small detail is worth carrying through the whole module. Daniel is told to seal up his words, because they are for a distant time (Daniel 12:4 and 12:9). John is told the opposite: 'Do not seal up the words of prophecy in this book, because the time is near' (22:10). Whatever a reader concludes about the timetable, the book's own instruction is that it is open, and open now.

Revelation never once says 'as it is written'. It has no formal quotation of the Old Testament anywhere in twenty-two chapters. It is also, by common agreement, the most saturated book in the New Testament with Old Testament language. Estimates of the number of allusions range from around 250 to more than 600, and the spread is not a scandal: it reflects genuine disagreement about how faint an echo has to be before it stops counting. The point stands whichever number you prefer. Almost every image in this book was already in the student's Bible before John used it.

Daniel supplies the most. Daniel 7 shows four beasts rising from the sea, a lion, a bear, a leopard and a fourth with ten horns. Revelation 13:1-2 takes all four and builds one composite beast out of them, with ten horns and seven heads, leopard-like, with a bear's feet and a lion's mouth. Daniel 7:9 gives the Ancient of Days hair like pure wool; Daniel 7:13 brings in 'One like the Son of Man' (the BSB's capitals; the Aramaic says only 'like a son of man', and whether that is a title or a description is itself debated). Revelation 1:13-14 puts the white wool hair on the son of man, which is a theological move made by rearranging furniture rather than by making an argument. Daniel's 'a time, and times, and half a time' (7:25, 12:7) stands behind Revelation's forty-two months (11:2, 13:5), 1,260 days (12:6) and 'a time, and times, and half a time' (12:14), which are three ways of saying one span.

Ezekiel supplies the shape. The four living creatures of Revelation 4 come from Ezekiel 1, with the six wings of Isaiah's seraphim added. John eats a scroll that is sweet in the mouth and bitter in the stomach (Revelation 10:9-10), as Ezekiel eats a scroll that tastes of honey (Ezekiel 3:1-3). Gog and Magog appear in Ezekiel 38 and 39 and again in Revelation 20:8. A man with a measuring rod measures a city in Ezekiel 40 to 48 and again in Revelation 11:1-2 and 21:15-17. A river flows from the sanctuary with trees on both banks whose leaves are for healing in Ezekiel 47:12, and again in Revelation 22:1-2. Read the last nine chapters of Ezekiel and then the last four of Revelation and the running order is hard to miss.

Zechariah supplies more than students expect. Coloured horses patrol the earth in Zechariah 1:8-11 and 6:1-8, and four horsemen ride in Revelation 6. A lampstand with two olive trees beside it stands in Zechariah 4, and the two witnesses of Revelation 11:4 are described as the two olive trees and the two lampstands. Zechariah 12:10, 'they will look on Me, the One they have pierced' in the BSB, is behind Revelation 1:7. Hebrew has no capital letters, so the BSB's capitals are its translators' reading that God is both speaker and the pierced one; other translations print 'me' or 'him' in lowercase and leave the reader to decide. Behind all three prophets sit Exodus, whose plagues shape the trumpets and bowls and whose song of Moses is sung in Revelation 15:3, Isaiah, who supplies the new heavens and new earth, Psalm 2, which supplies the rod of iron, and Genesis, which supplies the serpent and the tree.

The practical consequence for a reader is large. Revelation is not a cipher dropped out of the sky for a later generation to crack. It is the Hebrew scriptures read through the resurrection of Jesus and recombined into vision. A student who works the cross references is doing the single most productive thing available in this book, and it costs nothing but time.

Start with the places where the book decodes itself, because they show the method. In 1:20 the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches and the seven lampstands are the seven churches. In 12:9 the dragon is named outright as the devil and Satan. In 17:9 the seven heads are seven mountains and also seven kings, and in 17:18 the woman is the great city that rules over the kings of the earth. When Revelation wants a symbol identified, it identifies it plainly. That is a useful control: it tells you the author did not think identification was impossible, and it tells you he did not think it was always necessary either, because most of the book's images are left undecoded.

Numbers in this book carry meaning rather than quantity, and the meanings are consistent. Seven is completeness: seven churches, seals, trumpets, bowls, spirits, stars, heads, plagues. Four is the created world: four corners, four winds, four living creatures. Twelve is the people of God, and its multiples matter, so twenty-four elders and 144,000 as twelve times twelve times a thousand. Three and a half, a broken seven, is the period of pressure. A thousand is a round vastness, as when the psalmist says God owns the cattle on a thousand hills (Psalm 50:10). None of this is a secret decoder ring. It is the ordinary numerical idiom of Jewish apocalyptic, and the first readers had it the way a modern reader has 'a dozen'.

Now the caution, which is the part most often skipped. A symbol is not a code word with exactly one referent that you swap in to get the plain meaning. Revelation 7 is the proof. In 7:4-8 John hears a precise census, 144,000 sealed, twelve thousand from each tribe, the tribes listed by name. In 7:9 he looks, and sees 'a multitude too large to count, from every nation and tribe and people and tongue'. Those two pictures are not reconciled by arithmetic. The second reinterprets the first, exactly as the Lamb will reinterpret the Lion in chapter 5. Anyone who reads Revelation as a table of equivalences will flatten precisely the moves the book is making.

So the discipline runs in two directions at once, and a reader who only runs it in one direction will go wrong. Ask first what the image did to a congregation in Smyrna or Thyatira who knew Daniel by heart and paid taxes to Rome. A reading that could not possibly have been heard by them is under suspicion. Then ask what the image does now, because the book was copied, kept and read by churches that were not in Asia and not in the first century, and a reading that locks every word into the nineties leaves those churches nothing. Holding both questions open at once is harder than picking one, and it is the job.

The author names himself John four times: 1:1, 1:4, 1:9 and 22:8. He never calls himself an apostle. He calls himself a servant, a brother and a partner in the tribulation, and in 21:14 he describes twelve foundations bearing the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb without any hint that one of them is his own. Everything else is inference.

The early church inferred a good deal. Justin Martyr, writing around the middle of the second century in the Dialogue with Trypho, chapter 81, says the author was John, one of the apostles of Christ. Irenaeus agrees, and so do Tertullian and others. Against that stands a piece of genuinely careful ancient criticism. Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria around 250, compared the Greek of Revelation with the Greek of the Fourth Gospel and the Johannine letters, noted the difference in vocabulary, idiom and grammar, and concluded that one man did not write both. His argument survives because Eusebius quotes it at length in the Ecclesiastical History, book 7, chapter 25. Eusebius elsewhere reports that Papias spoke of a 'John the elder' distinct from the apostle, and that figure has been a candidate ever since.

The stylistic fact Dionysius noticed is real. Revelation's Greek is irregular in ways the Fourth Gospel's is not. The best known example is in 1:4, where the phrase rendered 'from Him who is and was and is to come' puts a nominative where the preposition requires a genitive, which a first-year Greek student would be marked down for. Scholars divide on the cause. Some hear a writer thinking in Hebrew or Aramaic. Some argue the irregularities are deliberate, a way of making the divine name grammatically unbendable. The honest summary is that the book tells us a prophet named John, known and trusted by seven congregations in Asia, wrote it, and that nothing in the text settles which John.

On the date, the earliest external evidence is Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.30.3, who says the vision was seen not long ago, almost in his own generation, toward the end of the reign of Domitian, which means about AD 95. Most scholars follow him. The main alternative places the book under Nero or shortly after his death, about AD 65 to 70. Its arguments are internal: 11:1-2 tells John to measure a temple, which reads more naturally if a temple is standing; 17:9-11 counts kings in a way that seems to place the writer under the sixth; and the 616 variant for the number of the beast, which the next lessons will take up, fits a Latin spelling of Nero's name. Each argument has a reply. The temple in chapter 11 may be as symbolic as everything else around it, the emperor count depends entirely on which emperor you start from and whether you skip the three who ruled briefly in 69, and Nero can function as a type long after his death. The majority holds the later date, a serious and competent minority holds the earlier one, and the disagreement is not decorative: the date shapes which reading schemes are even available.

One further honest note, because students are often taught otherwise. The scale of persecution under Domitian has been seriously questioned. Revelation names exactly one martyr, Antipas of Pergamum (2:13). Leonard Thompson argued in 1990 that Domitian's monstrous reputation derives largely from hostile senatorial writers after his death, and that there is no good evidence of an empire-wide programme against Christians in the nineties. Others reply, reasonably, that the pressure the book describes needs no imperial decree: the provincial imperial cult, the trade guilds with their cultic meals, and the ordinary social cost of refusing both would supply it locally, city by city. Read the seven letters in the next lesson with this in mind. Some of those churches are being hurt. Others are comfortable, and the book treats that as the more dangerous condition.

Four schemes have organised the history of reading Revelation. They are ideal types rather than parties with membership lists, and most careful commentators combine two or three of them. What follows states each one as its own best defenders hold it, with what it explains well and what it strains to explain. This course takes no side, here or anywhere else in this module, and a reader should not be able to finish it and tell which scheme the writer of these lessons holds.

The preterist reading holds that the book addresses and largely describes the crisis of its own generation. The beast is Rome and its emperors, Babylon is the city on seven hills, and the judgements fall on the world John and his readers lived in, whether that means the fall of Jerusalem in 70 or the eventual collapse of Rome. Its strength is that it takes the book's own time words at face value: things that 'must soon come to pass', a time that 'is near', a scroll that must not be sealed. It explains why the book was sent to seven particular congregations with particular problems, it makes sense of the imperial cult material, and it accounts neatly for the 616 textual variant. What it strains to explain is the ending. Chapters 19 to 22 describe a new heaven and a new earth, a final judgement and the end of death, and no reader in any century has looked out of the window and seen them. Partial preterists answer that the consummation remains future and only the judgement scenes are past, which is the mainstream form of the view; full preterism, which places even the resurrection in the first century, is rejected as outside orthodoxy by nearly everyone who holds the partial form.

The historicist reading holds that the book charts the course of church history from the apostles to the return, so that the seals, trumpets and bowls unfold across the centuries. This was the dominant Protestant reading from the Reformation into the nineteenth century, held by Luther, by Isaac Newton, by Matthew Henry, by Albert Barnes, and worked out at enormous length in E. B. Elliott's Horae Apocalypticae of 1844; it survives today chiefly in Seventh-day Adventist interpretation with its year-for-a-day principle. Its strength is that it refuses to hand the book either to the first generation alone or to the last, and it takes seriously that the church between those generations also needed to know what it was living through. What it strains to explain is its own record. Every generation of historicists has placed itself near the end of the chart and has had to redraw it for the next generation, and the identifications have failed often enough that the method itself is now under suspicion. It also has to explain what a congregation in Thyatira was meant to do with a diagram of medieval Europe. Historicists reply that the failures belong to particular identifications rather than to the method, that date-setting has embarrassed adherents of every scheme and not only theirs, and that theirs is the one reading which builds in from the start what the book's own preservation implies, namely that it was meant to be useful to the church in every century between the first and the last.

The futurist reading holds that from 4:1 onward the book describes events still to come, gathered around a final period of tribulation, a personal antichrist, and the return of Christ. Its roots are ancient, since Irenaeus expected the beast to be a future individual, and it was revived in a systematic form by the Jesuit Francisco Ribera in 1590 and then, very differently, by J. N. Darby in the 1830s and the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909, which added the pretribulational rapture and a separate programme for national Israel. Its strength is that it takes 1:19 and 4:1 at face value, 'what must happen after these things', and that it keeps the end genuinely future, which is where the rest of the New Testament keeps it; and the instruction in 13:18 to calculate the number does look like something addressed to people who will have the man in front of them. What it strains to explain is the first three chapters and the book's own urgency. If almost everything from chapter 4 belongs to a distant generation, it is hard to see what the churches at Sardis and Laodicea were supposed to do with it, and hard to square with 1:3 and 22:10. Futurists reply that a future certainty motivates present faithfulness, which is a fair answer, and their critics reply that the detailed timetables have a poor historical record, which is also fair.

The idealist reading, sometimes called the symbolic or timeless reading, holds that the book portrays the permanent conflict between God and evil, the church and the powers, in symbolic form, and is tied to no single sequence of events. Origen and Augustine are its ancestors; in the twentieth century it was argued by William Hendriksen in More than Conquerors (1940) and, in more sophisticated forms, by G. B. Caird and Richard Bauckham. Its strength is that it matches how apocalyptic symbol actually behaves, it makes sense of the recapitulating structure the next lessons will examine, and it explains the plain fact that this book has been found useful by Christians under Nero, under Diocletian, under apartheid and under regimes John never heard of. What it strains to explain is that the book does claim a real end. Something happens in 19 to 22 that has not happened yet, and a purely timeless reading risks dissolving the hope into a mood. Careful idealists agree, and hold the symbolism together with a genuine future consummation, which is why the labels blur.

Here is what can be said without taking sides. All four schemes are held by people who read Greek, love the text and have thought hard. All four have to account for the same two sets of verses you collected in the inquiry, the near ones and the after-this ones, and each scheme is essentially a different way of holding them together. Most serious modern commentary is openly mixed: G. K. Beale describes his own approach as eclectic, and plenty of writers read the book as addressed first to Asia under Rome, as speaking perennially to the church under every Rome, and as ending in a consummation still ahead. What is settled is that this book was written to seven real congregations under real pressure, in a genre with known conventions, out of Old Testament material. What is not settled is the map. If you were taught one of these four as simply what the text says, you were not told the whole truth, and the rest of this module will keep handing you the evidence rather than the verdict.