The Revelation of Saint John scarcely merits the title. Far from being a revelation, it is the most abstruse book in the whole Bible; and it was not written by any apostle called John. Indeed most of the material is secondhand, being borrowed liberally from the Old Testament books of Isaiah, Ezra, Ezekiel and, in particular, Daniel (which also has fantastic images of the End Time and refers to ‘one like a son of man’). Revelation essentially is Jewish scripture.

Revealing Truth Behind 'Revelation'

Although the apocalypse does not quote directly, within its four hundred or so verses are about five hundred and fifty references to the Old Testament (B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort, Greek New Testament, 184 ff.) Its core – several apocalyptic endings badly stitched together – was later given a Christian preface: a series of seven angry letters, chastising seven errant churches in western Asia Minor. Having berated the churches, Revelation then unleashes a relentless apocalyptic nightmare, badly written, repetitive and self-contradictory. In chapter after chapter, it details bizarre horrors, the supposed fate that imminently will befall the enemies of the Lord. It is the latter which gives the book its enduring popularity – a vision of the gore-fest at the End of Time.

Revelation is the outpouring of a Jew seriously embittered by Roman imperialism. This fevered Jewish mind invokes retribution for his enemies from that old, vicious god of Hebrew scripture, who rips into humanity with poetic abandon. Thus, in a whole series of ‘Ends’, God releases seven ‘vials of his wrath’ (blood, plague, sores, fire, drought, etc.); sets loose four horsemen (at the head of an army of 200 million!) ‘for to slay the third part of men’ (9.15). He has his ‘demonic locusts’ torment unbelievers for five months; etc., etc. Kings, captains, false prophets and ‘the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great’ are eaten by fowls that fly and are cast alive into a lake of ‘fire and brimstone.’

Proto-Christianity

If nothing else, the crude, unpolished construction of Revelation, reveals early proto-Christian ideas in the process of forming. The early origin of the book is attested by its doctrinal incompatibility with the rest of the New Testament. The doctrine of the Trinity is nowhere in sight. Rather, Revelation embodies Philo’s notion of ‘multiple emanations’ – the ‘seven spirits of God’ (3.1, 5.6). Later biblical books will slim this down to a single Holy Spirit. Revelation has no dogma of ‘original sin’ ; it is idolatry which damns the mass of humanity. Baptism is not mentioned; believing Jews are ‘sealed’ not baptised. There is no reference to the Eucharist – nothing so genteel as a meal with friends mars the carnage. On the day of judgement it is ‘works’ (public action) that will count, not the Pauline ‘grace through faith’. To the author’s obvious delight, ‘Babylon’ (the Roman Empire) falls unrepentant and the vast mass of humanity perish. There is no religion of love here but only undiluted hatred and lust for revenge.

In Revelation we see intermediate stages in the assimilation of preexisting, and for the most part pagan fantasy. For example, one of the godly emanations is a Christ figure, who appears in many different – and peculiar – forms. The Christ of Revelation is actually born in heaven, and under pretty extraordinary circumstances (his mother is ‘clothed in the sun, with the moon at her feet, wearing twelve stars as a crown’ – a reasonable description of Isis). This infant is going to be a bit of a Tartar:

"And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne."   – Revelation 12.5.

Thus, unlike the later books of the New Testament, Revelation has a Christ born in Heaven who rules on earth – rather than a Christ born on earth who rules in Heaven!

There is no human biography at all for this Christ – he is an entirely heavenly figure, and one with some strange appendages:

"And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two edged sword:" – Revelation 1.16.

At this point in time the polymorphous Christ is only slightly ahead of Moses in the celestial pecking order; both are spiritual agents of God. Thus in 15.3 the martyrs sing ‘the song of Moses and the song of the Lamb.’ We note from Revelation 1.5 that Christ is ‘the prince of the kings of the earth.’ Later, of course, he will be promoted to be king of kings.

Heavenly Warlord

Nothing in Revelation suggests that this Christ is ever incarnated on earth. Though said to have been ‘dead , and is alive’ (2.8), the circumstances of this dying and raising are never given. In one of the first of a series of visions, Christ appears as a high priest; later in the book, he is ‘alpha and omega’ (first and last), the beginning and end of God’s creation that has existed from all eternity. He is also the ‘bright morning star’ and the ‘Lamb of sacrifice’.

Christ’s primary role in Revelation, however, is as a Jewish warlord, who ‘doth judge and make war’. This celestial war god bears little in common with a Galilean carpenter!:

"And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God. And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God."   – Revelation 19.13,15.

The torturous ‘chronology’ of Revelation make no rational sense. Clearly at the end of the world, time is no longer linear – or maybe the storyteller is keeping his audience enthralled by retelling the gory bits. The gist, however, is that ‘soon,’ a ‘new Jerusalem’, or heaven, will descend from the clouds, with God himself at the helm, illuminating the cityscape by his own light.

A primitive attempt at describing this heaven has it is as a walled city of ‘pure gold, like unto clear glass’. It is approximately half the size of the U.S.A. – ‘twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal.’ (21.16)

Jewish Golden Age

Through the walls of this cubic city (which are also built of ‘precious stones’) pass twelve gates, each named for a tribe of Israel. Within, God, on a great white throne, has before him a book with seven seals, and also a book of life into which he enters the name of the saved. Significantly, it is God who sits in judgement, not Christ (he gets the job in the later gospels). The ‘slain and risen’ Lamb (the Christ figure) has the job of opening each seal in turn. With the opening of the seventh seal, seven angels blast away on seven trumpets, each sound releasing a new horror – fire and blood, mountains of fire cast into the sea, a burning star falling to earth, every mountain and island displaced, etc. At one point, war even breaks out in Heaven – and it is not Christ who is the conquering hero but the Jewish archangel Michael (Israel’s national champion)!

"And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven." – Revelation 12.7,8.

Some – the righteous brethren of course – are saved, but the idea of ‘resurrection in a single day’ for all of humanity (see Matthew 25) has not yet evolved. Instead, the endgame in Revelation is rather different – a two-track resurrection. In the first, Christ rules an earthly kingdom for a thousand years while Satan, confined but not defeated, is locked up in a pit. During this period, 144,000 Jewish males (12,000 from each of the twelve tribes of Israel) are the only ones to share the kingdom. In this heaven, there is not a single woman. The male elect are ‘… not defiled by women; they are virgins’ ! (14.4).Everyone else is still dead:

"But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection ... they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years." (Revelation 20.5,6)

Satan Gets Another Chance

At the end of the thousand year reign (a golden age of Jewish virginity?), Satan is loosed (by God?) and now a final apocalypse wrecks havoc on humanity (presumably raised to life in order to be killed off). Remarkably, Satan’s army is still numerous:

"And he shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea."   – Revelation 20.8.

This time round, Satan and his hordes are dispatched in a couple of sentences:

" ... and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever." – Revelation 20.9,10.

Yet even at the close of this ‘revealed future’ (after all the carnage, the final defeat of Satan and the inauguration of a new heaven and earth!), outside the golden city the heathen are still to be found!

"For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie." – Revelation 22.15.

Clearly, the one thing we are not dealing with here is a clear vision of the future. Its recycled symbols, secondhand imagery and incoherent bile are ill-digested, confused and confusing.

Revelation is nothing more than virulent anti-Roman fury meant to stiffen the brethren by lurid images of their foes in torment.

Dating the Nightmare

Despite internal evidence for an earlier dating, Christian scribes often choose to aggrandise their own ‘suffering’ by dating Revelation to the persecutions of Domitian about 96 AD. This ‘tradition’ began with Irenaeus at the end of the second century. Correctly understood as a Jewish resistance tract Revelation has nothing to do with later Christian suffering at all. Its core elements – the several alternative apocalyptic endings – almost certainly were in circulation in Palestine (particularly Galilee) in the mid-years of the first century, where such literature was popular. When was it written? The book itself tells us the answer, enigmatically but more precisely than any other book of the Bible:

"Here is wisdom. 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. (13.18)

And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space. And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition." (17.10,11)

The person these celebrated verses point to is Nero.

For over a century scholars have known that Jewish numerology or ‘gematria’ resolves the name of Nero Caesar, as it appears in Hebrew (without vowels), into the number 666. Unlike the English alphabet, all the letters of Hebrew have a numerical equivalent, which opens the door to all sorts of esoteric or ‘mystical’ use. Engels credits a fellow German with the resolution of the riddle of Revelation thus:

"This solution was given by Ferdinand Benary of Berlin. The name is Nero. The number is based on [Hebrew] Neron Kesar, the Hebrew spelling of the Greek Nerôn Kaisar, Emperor Nero, authenticated by means of the Talmud and Palmyrian inscriptions. This inscription was found on coins of Nero's time minted in the eastern half of the empire. And so -- n (nun)=50; r (resh)=200; v (vau) for o=6; n (nun)=50; k (kaph)=100; s (samech)=60; r (resh)=200. Total 666. If we take as a basis the Latin spelling Nero Caesar the second nun=50 disappears and we get 666 - 50 = 616, which is Irenaeus's reading." – On The History of Early Christianity, III.

The seven kings referred to are the emperors of Rome. At the time of writing, five are past (‘are fallen’ – Augustus, Tiberias, Caligula, Claudius, Nero), one rules still (Galba – who ruled from June 6, 68 to January 15, 69), and the prophesy is made that only one other will rule before the End. The final sentence resolves again into Nero. Could he be ‘is and is not’ (alive then dead)? How could one ‘of the seven’ be the eighth as well? The answer is that the crisis of the year 68/69 (the so-called 'year of four emperors', which ran from June 68 through to December 69) lasted long enough for rumours to spread that Nero had not died at his own hand, but had fled to Persia, had raised an army and would reclaim the throne from the interloper Vitellius. Seemingly confirming this turn of events was the appearance of an impostor on the island of Kithnos (Thermia) – about a hundred and thirty miles from Patmos – claiming to be Nero.

Revelation, and other fiery tracts of the same genre, no doubt strengthened the resolve of first century Jewish resistance. The rebels failed, as did the Apocalypse in its prediction of the imminent fall of Rome and of the Millennial Reign that would follow. Many early Christians rejected the book outright, attributing authorship and the doctrine of an ‘earthly kingdom’ to a late first century Jewish Egyptian heretic called Cerinthus.

To the chagrin of many Christians ever since, Revelation nonetheless sneaked its way into the Bible, tucked away at the back and – horror fiction apart – largely forgotten.

Well, forgotten that is, until the beast of American Christian fundamentalism emerged from its pit and gave the apocalyptic ravings a whole new lease of life.

Sources:
Friedrich Engels, On the History of Early Christianity
Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (Phoenix Grant, 1987)
Dan Cohn-Sherbok, The Crucified Jew (Harper Collins,1992)
Henry Hart Milman, The History of the Jews (Everyman, 1939)
Josephus, The Jewish War (Penguin, 1959)
Leslie Houlden (Ed.), Judaism & Christianity (Routledge, 1988)
John Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls & The Christian Myth (Westbridge,1979)
M. Baigent, R. Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (Jonathan Cape, 1991)

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