**Diogenes the Cynic ** posted this in another thread:
“You should understand, though, that Revelations was never regarded as a prophesy of the future until the 19th century. In its historical context it was about the destruction of Israel and God’s eventual vengence on Rome.”
I was wondering if there was anymore to this and why it became a prophesy of the future at all?
Revelation was part of a body of what is known as “apocalyptic” literature. This was form which was popular in the second century CE in the wake of the Roman sack of Jerusalem. Apocalyptic literature was heavily symbolic, and often used the imagery of dreams or visions to articulate its message. Some Apocalyptic literature actually contained coded messages within its metaphors. The communites to which the writings were addressed possessed “keys” to the code, which explained what certain images meant. This was done as a way to secretly criticize Rome, or the emperor in a way that would be meaningless without the key.
Some of the symbolism was more traditional. Numbers and colors had individual signifance. The number 7, for instance, was the number for God. The number 6 symbolized imperfection or sin. The number three symbolized perfection. The number 666, therefore, is a number which three times fails to be 7. Perfect evil. The number of the “beast,” or Caesar.
Apocalyptic literature was intended to comfort the faithful and assure them that God would have the last word. At this time, it was thought that Jesus was coming literally any day. Around the third century, Christians sort of stopped looking at Revelation as presaging the future, and this interpretation was revised by Adventists and others in the nineteenth century.
WHY they chose to interpret Revelation this way, who knows? William Miller was one of the first to do it, and it seems to have just caught on. I think modern pop culture works like Hal Lindsey’s Late, Great Planet earth and the movie The Omen have helped to cement the idea that futuristic interpretations of Revelation are more traditional or accepted than they really are.
just an echo from great debates
who was the author
Diogenes the Cynic - I’m not challanging the accuracy, but rather, am interested in further research - can you provide a site or better yet, books regarding this?
sorry to cut across
there seems to be a lot
on this subject
i am researching jacov prasch’s site for a better view…
Revelations just scraped into the New Testament canon by the skin of its teeth, and may well have joined books like the Shepherd of Hermes, the Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles, etc in purdah. It was thought by many early Church Fathers that Revelations could well lead the untutored astray, a foreboding which proved to be right on the money.
[quote]
Originally posted by Khadji
Here is a good rundown of Revelation as it pertained to Rome from the PBS website.
It is really just a part of [url=http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/]this[/site] which gives a good overview of the apocalyptic movement in general, and atlks about some of the 19th century futuristic interpretations of Revelation
This link gives some good refence books, or you could just google books apacalyptic literature.
Oops, I forgot to paste Khadji’s quote. :smack: Well you know what I MEANT to post.
God, I screwed up that second link too. Here it is again.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/
Diogenes the Cynic- I’m about to read the sites you furnished, and thanks for the helpful answers; I did have a quick question that came to mind though: If there were many of these “revelation” types of literature, why did the one that made it into the bible? Also, what is to be made of the last line in revelations that says something to the effect of “don’t add anything to this”?
The eye-brow raising aspect of Diogenes claim, as quoted in the OP and reasserted above, is hardly the significance of Revelations in the context it was originally written, nor it’s significance in 19th and 20th century sub-cultures. What surprised me - and I’m not an expert - is the claim that there was something essentially new about 19th century interpretations. After all, it’s almost an academic cliche to see a millinnarian tradition throughout Western culture - see the writings of, say, Norman Cohn, Richard Landes or The Apocalypse (British Museum, 1999) ed. by Frances Carey (the catalogue of a fabulous exhibition on the subject). I wouldn’t particularly be unsympathetic to a thesis that there was something unique about the 19th century developments - it’s just the fact that this can’t be passed off as utterly obvious. At he very least, you’ll have to indicate where the details of this interpretation can be found.
Well, first off, it is not the only apocalyptic work in the bible. Several chapters of the books of Ezekiel (38-39), Isaiah (24-27), Zephaniah (1:14-18) and several sections of Daniel (especially the Apocryphal/Deutero-Canonical chapters) are written in the apocalyptic style or in a proto-apocalyptic style. As to why it is the only one to make it into the New Testament: it is not absolutely clear. There are different contributing factors, but I am not sure that we can point out any one specific reason.
If I had to “pick” a reason, I would note that apocalyptic literature was very much a Jewish phenomenon. We have several different apocalypses from the same period, and they are pretty much all addressed to Jewish audiences (although some were popular among Jewish Christians). So there was not a strong sense of shared theology with the early Christians for most of the apocalypses. Even the Revelation of John was addressed to Christian communities who had substantial memberships from among the Jewish diaspora in Asia Minor. As early Christianity shifted to being a religion of the Gentiles, fewer “Jewish” influences were felt or brought forward into the traditions of the new religion.
Considering the events recounted in the 20th chapter of Revelation (note the singular; the Greek original was titled Apokalypsis, which is a singular noun), I would be hard put to appraise it as “past” events in any way.
The oldest Greek mauscript with the book of Revelation is the Codex Sinaiticus, which is also noted in the Guinness Book of World Records as one of the highest-priced, if not the highest-priced, ancient manuscripts ever sold. The Sinaitic Manuscript did not contain any other written “revelations” that did not “just barely make it into the Bible,” let alone any of the apocryphal New Testament books Cecil mentioned in one of the more recent Straight Dope books.
Early church fathers thought that a few stray passages referred to the end of the world, but the first real futuristic interpretation of Revelation (and Daniel, for that matter) seems to have been devised by Fransisco Ribera in 1590, who also first came up with the the idea of the anti-Christ as a single person.
Futuristic ideas existed as a minority for the next couple of hundred years, but really picked up steam in with 19th century protestants like John Darby, who also pushed the idea of the “rapture.”
Here is a site which gives a brief rundown of futurism.
Christian writings since the generation after the Apostles show just as much tendency to regard Revelation as predicting future events as to regard it describing past or current events. The farther in time & location the Christians were from the 70 AD Roman siege of Jerusalem, the greater tendency to regard The Revelation as current/future. The only main differences between Medieval futurist views of Revelation & modern futurist views are candidates for AntiChrist, no concept of a Rapture before the Tribulation, and a general denial of a literal earthly Millenial reign of Christ (Rev 20 was regarded as predicting the Church Era.)
(especially the books PARDISE RESTORED and THE DAYS OF VENGEANCE by
David Chilton, and THE BEAST OF REVELATION and BEFORE JERUSALEM FELL by Kenneth Gentry) for good info about Revelation’s application to the First Century AD.
The preterist view was that most of revelation, including the ant-Christ, had already been fulfilled. This was the Catholic Church’s defense against the Historicist notion that the anti-Christ was the Church itself, or the institution of the Papacy (although not a specific pope).
It wasn’t until Ribera that there was any notion of the anti-Christ as a specific Bogeyman of the future.
Except that Cohn has “Italian Joachites” in the 1240s identifying Frederick II as the Antichrist. And that’s just from the briefest of re-consultations of The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957, Pimlico, 1993, p112-3).
Well, Joachim himself, was a historicist who cast the Jews as the anti-Christ. Joachites believed that the bulk of Revelation had already been fulfilled, and that the world was going to end sometime before 1260. The appellation of “antichrist” to Frederick II was more adjectival than titular. anyone who was hostile to the church was, by definition, anti-Christ
We should back up here a second and remember that the term “antichrist” does not actually appear in Revelation. (Really, it’s true. Look it up.) The word occurs four times in the New Testament, all of them in the Epistles of John. Here they are.
As you can see, “antichrist” in this context simply referred to those who denied Christ…
2 Thessalonians makes reference to the coming of a “lawless one,” a false god who will be destroyed by Christ, but it does not use the term antichrist.
The beast, in its original historical context, is clearly the emperor of Rome (probably Domitian, possibly Nero) but during the dark ages, the “Beast,” the “Lawless One” and the “Antichrist” became conflated in popular imagination, largely because of poorly educated preachers.
This fusion of imagery was cemented by the visions of Hildegard of Bingen in the 12th century, as well as by the writings of Joachim. Bear in mind, though, that although the seeds of millenialism are present at this point, they rely on visionary experiences, the Epsistles of John, and 2 Thessalonians far more than Revelation, which is specifically what the OP asked about. There was no real popular movement to read Revelation, itself, as a blueprint for the future until the 19th century.
Which means that, in talking about popular movements, the strict original Biblical meaning of “Antichrist” isn’t necessarily terribly relevant.
I can only reiterate that Cohn disagrees: for example "The Sibylline and Johannine [i.e. *Revelation*] prophecies deeply affected political attitudes. For medieval people the stupendous drama of the Last Days was not a phantasy about some remote and indefinite future but a prophecy which was infallible and which at almost any given moment was felt to be on the point of fulfillment. " (p35) Of course, virtually any assertion about medieval attitudes about anything has to be treated cautiously, but my impression is that Cohn expressing the concensus view here.