The Theology of the Book of Revelation Read online

  Yet if Revelation resembles in a very general way the kind of prophecy John might have delivered orally in person, it is also a far more elaborate and studied composition than any extemporary prophecy could have been. Revelation is a literary work composed with astonishing care and skill. We should certainly not doubt that John had remarkable visionary experiences, but he has transmuted them through what must have been a lengthy process of reflection and writing into a thoroughly literary creation which is designed not to reproduce the experience so much as to communicate the meaning of the revelation that had been given him. Certainly Revelation is a literary work designed for oral performance (1:3), but as a complex literary creation, dense with meaning and allusion, it must be qualitatively different from the spontaneous orality of most early Christian prophecy.

  Therefore it may not have been just because he could not be with his churches in person that he wrote this prophecy. He wrote from Patmos (1:9), an inhabited island not far from Ephesus. It has most often been assumed that 1:9 indicates he was exiled there, whether in flight from persecution or legally banished to the island. This is possible, but it is also possible that he went to Patmos in order to receive the revelation (‘on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus’ could refer back to 1:2, where these terms describe what he ‘saw’; but on the other hand, cf. 6:9; 20:4).

  Although most early Christian prophecy was oral, not written, John had plenty of models for a written prophecy, both in the prophetic books of the Hebrew scriptures and in the later Jewish apocalypses. In its literary forms what he writes is indebted to both kinds of model. It is clear that John saw himself, not only as one of the Christian prophets, but also as standing in the tradition of Old Testament prophecy. For example, in 10:7 he hears that ‘the mystery of God will be fulfilled, as he announced to his servants the prophets’. The reference (with allusion to Amos 3:7) is almost certainly to the Old Testament prophets. But then John goes on to record his own prophetic commissioning (10:8–11) in a form which is modelled on that of Ezekiel (Ezek. 2:9–3:3). His task is to proclaim the fulfilment of what God had revealed to the prophets of the past. The whole book is saturated with allusions to Old Testament prophecy, though there are no formal quotations. As a prophet himself, John need not quote his predecessors, but he takes up and reinterprets their prophecies, much as the later writers in the Old Testament prophetic tradition themselves took up and reinterpreted earlier prophecies. It is a remarkable fact, for example, that John’s great oracle against Babylon (18:1–19:8) echoes every one of the oracles against Babylon in the Old Testament prophets, as well as the two major oracles against Tyre.1 It seems that John not only writes in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, but understands himself to be writing at the climax of the tradition, when all the eschatological oracles of the prophets are about to be finally fulfilled, and so he interprets and gathers them up in his own prophetic revelation. What makes him a Christian prophet is that he does so in the light of the fulfilment already of Old Testament prophetic expectation in the victory of the Lamb, the Messiah Jesus.

  REVELATION AS AN APOCALYPSE

  Biblical scholarship has long distinguished between Old Testament prophecy and the Jewish apocalypses, which include the Old Testament book of Daniel as well as such extra-canonical works as 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch. The extent and character of the continuity and the differences between prophecy and apocalyptic are highly debatable. But the distinction means that the relationship between Revelation and the Jewish apocalypses has also been debated. Often the issue has been posed in a misleading way, as though John himself would have made the kinds of distinction modern scholars have made between prophecy and apocalyptic. This is very unlikely. The book of Daniel, which was one of John’s major Old Testament sources, he would certainly have regarded as a prophetic book. If he knew some of the post-biblical apocalypses, as he most probably did, he will have seen them as a form of prophecy. The forms and traditions which Revelation shares with other works we call apocalypses John will have used as vehicles of prophecy, in continuity with Old Testament prophecy.

  We may still ask in what sense Revelation belongs to the genre of ancient religious literature we call the apocalypse. J. J. Collins defines the literary genre apocalypse in this way:

  ‘Apocalypse’ is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.2

  The reference to eschatological salvation would be disputed in some recent study of the apocalypses. Although the apocalypses have conventionally been thought to be about history and eschatology, this is not necessarily true of all of them. The heavenly secrets revealed to the seer in the extant Jewish apocalypses cover a rather wide range of topics and are not exclusively concerned with history and eschatology.3 John’s apocalypse, however, is exclusively concerned with eschatology: with eschatological judgment and salvation, and with the impact of these on the present situation in which he writes. The heavenly revelation he receives concerns God’s activity in history to achieve his eschatological purpose for the world. In other words, John’s concerns are exclusively prophetic. He uses the apocalyptic genre as a vehicle of prophecy, as not all Jewish apocalyptists did consistently. So it would be best to call John’s work a prophetic apocalypse or apocalyptic prophecy. With that qualification, it obviously fits the definition of the genre apocalypse quoted above, and there should be no difficulty in recognizing its generic relationship to the Jewish apocalypses, while at the same time acknowledging its continuity with Old Testament prophecy.

  There are many ways in which John’s work belongs to the apocalyptic tradition. He uses specific literary forms and particular items of apocalyptic tradition that can also be traced in the Jewish apocalypses.4 But for our purposes, it is more important to indicate two very broad ways in which Revelation stands in the tradition of Jewish apocalyptic literature.

  In the first place, John’s work is a prophetic apocalypse in that it communicates a disclosure of a transcendent perspective on this world. It is prophetic in the way it addresses a concrete historical situation – that of Christians in the Roman province of Asia towards the end of the first century AD – and brings to its readers a prophetic word of God, enabling them to discern the divine purpose in their situation and respond to their situation in a way appropriate to this purpose. This contextual communication of the divine purpose is typical of the biblical prophetic tradition. But John’s work is also apocalyptic, because the way that it enables its readers to see their situation with prophetic insight into God’s purpose is by disclosing the content of a vision in which John is taken, as it were, out of this world in order to see it differently. Here John’s work belongs to the apocalyptic tradition of visionary disclosure, in which a seer is taken in vision to God’s throne-room in heaven to learn the secrets of the divine purpose (cf., e.g., 1 Enoch 14–16; 46; 60:1–6; 71; 2 Enoch 20–1; Ap. Abr. 9–18).

  John (and thereby his readers with him) is taken up into heaven in order to see the world from the heavenly perspective. He is given a glimpse behind the scenes of history so that he can see what is really going on in the events of his time and place. He is also transported in vision into the final future of the world, so that he can see the present from the perspective of what its final outcome must be, in God’s ultimate purpose for human history. The effect of John’s visions, one might say, is to expand his readers’ world, both spatially (into heaven) and temporally (into the eschatological future), or, to put it another way, to open their world to divine transcendence. The bounds which Roman power and ideology set to the readers’ world are broken open and that world is seen as open to the greater purpose of its transcendent Creator and Lord. It is not that the here-and-now are left behind in an escape into heaven or the eschatological future, but that
the here-and-now look quite different when they are opened to transcendence.

  The world seen from this transcendent perspective, in apocalyptic vision, is a kind of new symbolic world into which John’s readers are taken as his artistry creates it for them.5 But really it is not another world. It is John’s readers’ concrete, day-to-day world seen in heavenly and eschatological perspective. As such its function, as we shall notice in more detail later, is to counter the Roman imperial view of the world, which was the dominant ideological perception of their situation that John’s readers naturally tended to share. Revelation counters that false view of reality by opening the world to divine transcendence. All that it shares with the apocalyptic literature by way of the motifs of visionary transportation to heaven, visions of God’s throne-room in heaven, angelic mediators of revelation, symbolic visions of political powers, coming judgment and new creation – all this serves the purpose of revealing the world in which John’s readers live in the perspective of the transcendent divine purpose.

  A second important sense in which Revelation stands in the tradition of the Jewish apocalypses is that it shares the question which concerned so many of the latter: who is Lord over the world? Jewish apocalypses, insofar as they continued the concerns of the Old Testament prophetic tradition, were typically concerned with the apparent non-fulfilment of God’s promises, through the prophets, for the judgment of evil, the salvation of the righteous, the achievement of God’s righteous rule over his world. The righteous suffer, the wicked flourish: the world seems to be ruled by evil, not by God. Where is God’s kingdom? The apocalyptists sought to maintain the faith of God’s people in the one, all-powerful and righteous God, in the face of the harsh realities of evil in the world, especially the political evil of the oppression of God’s faithful people by the great pagan empires. The answer to this problem was always, essentially, that, despite appearances, it is God who rules his creation and the time is coming soon when he will overthrow the evil empires and establish his kingdom.6 John’s apocalypse in important ways shares that central apocalyptic concern. He sees God’s rule over the world apparently contradicted by the rule of the Roman Empire, which arrogates divine rule over the world to itself and to all appearances does so successfully. He faces the question: who then is really Lord of this world? He anticipates the eschatological crisis in which the issue will come to a head and be resolved in God’s ultimate triumph over all evil and his establishment of his eternal kingdom. How John deals with these themes is significantly distinctive, as we shall see, but the distinctiveness emerges from his continuity with the concerns of the Jewish apocalyptic tradition.

  DIFFERENCES FROM OTHER APOCALYPSES

  At this point, having fully recognized that Revelation belongs to the literary genre of the apocalypse, we should notice two purely formal, literary ways in which it is distinctive when compared with other apocalypses. The first is rarely noticed. John’s work is highly unusual in the sheer prolific extent of its visual imagery. It is true that symbolic visions are typical of the genre. But in other apocalypses other forms of revelation are often as important or more important. There are often long conversations between the seer and the heavenly revealer (God or his angel), in which information is conveyed in terms quite different from the visual symbols that dominate Revelation (cf., e.g., 4 Ezra 3–10; 2 Bar. 10–30). There are often long passages of narrative prophecy (e.g. Dan. 11:2–12:4), of which Revelation has very little (cf. 11:5–13; 20:7–10). The proportion of visual symbolism in Revelation is greater than in almost any comparable apocalypse. But there are further differences beside the proportion. Symbolic visions in the apocalypses commonly have to be interpreted by an angel who explains their meaning to the seer (e.g. 4 Ezra 10:38–54; 12:10–36; 13:21–56; 2 Bar. 56–74). Such interpretations are rare in Revelation (7:13–14; 17:6–18), whose visual symbols are so described as to convey their own meaning. The symbols can thus retain a surplus of meaning which any translation into literal terms runs the risk of reducing.

  Furthermore, the kind of symbolic vision which is typical of the apocalypses is relatively short and self-contained, comprising just one section of an apocalypse (e.g. Dan. 7; 8; 4 Ezra 10; 11–12; 13). The imagery of such a vision will be peculiar to it, not recurring in other parts of the apocalypse. Revelation, by contrast, is really (from 1:10 to 22:6) a single vision. The imagery is common to the whole. From time to time the scene shifts and fresh images may be introduced, but, once introduced, they may recur throughout the book. Thus John’s vision creates a single symbolic universe in which its readers may live for the time it takes them to read (or hear) the book. Both the profusion of the visual imagery and the unity and continuity of the visionary sequence make Revelation distinctive among the apocalypses.

  This is not to be explained simply by supposing that John had a remarkably powerful visual imagination. The power, the profusion and the consistency of the symbols have a literary–theological purpose. They create a symbolic world which readers can enter so fully that it affects them and changes their perception of the world. Most ‘readers’ were originally, of course, hearers. Revelation was designed for oral enactment in Christian worship services (cf. 1:3).7 Its effect would therefore be somewhat comparable to a dramatic performance, in which the audience enter the world of the drama for its duration and can have their perception of the world outside the drama powerfully shifted by their experience of the world of the drama. Many of the apocalypses could have something of this effect. But Revelation’s peculiarly visual character and peculiar symbolic unity give it a particular potential for communicating in this way. It is an aspect of the book to which we shall return.

  A second formal, literary difference between Revelation and the Jewish apocalypses is that, unlike the latter, Revelation is not pseudepigraphal. The writers of Jewish apocalypses did not write in their own names, but under the name of some ancient seer of the biblical tradition, such as Enoch, Abraham or Ezra. The explanation for this phenomenon is not easy to discern.8 It is unlikely that the authors of the apocalypses seriously intended to deceive, more probable that they wished to claim the authority of an ancient tradition, in which they felt themselves to stand, rather than an independent authority of their own. But pseudepigraphy had an important literary consequence. The authors of apocalypses had to set them fictionally in a situation in the distant past. Of course, they were writing for their own contemporaries and with their own situation in view, but they could not do so explicitly, except by representing the apocalyptic seer as foreseeing the distant future, the period at the end of the age in which the real author and his readers lived.

  By contrast, John writes in his own name. He is certainly very conscious of writing within the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, but he is himself a prophet within that tradition. Since he stands at the culmination of the whole tradition, on the brink of the final eschatological fulfilment to which all prophecy had ultimately pointed, his authority is if anything greater than that of his predecessors. Of course, the authority really resides not in himself but in the revelation of Jesus Christ to which he bears prophetic witness (1:1–2). But his prophetic consciousness is such that, like Isaiah or Ezekiel, he feels no need of pseudonymity but writes in his own name (1:1, 4, 9; 22:8) and relates his own commissioning to prophesy (1:10–11, 19; 10:8–11).

  It is instructive to compare 22:10 with the verses on which it is modelled, at the end of the book of Daniel, the canonical apocalypse to which John’s prophecy is much indebted.9 The angel tells Daniel: ‘keep the words secret and the book sealed until the time of the end … Go your way, Daniel, for the words are to remain secret and sealed until the time of the end’ (Dan. 12:4, 9). Daniel’s visions relate to a future distant from the time in which Daniel lived. His prophecy is to remain secret, hidden in a sealed book, until the time of the end when the people who live at that time will be able to understand it. John’s angel gives strikingly different instructions: ‘Do not seal up the words of the prophecy
of this book, for the time is near’ (22:10; cf. 1:3). John’s prophecy is of immediate relevance to his contemporaries. It relates not to a distant future but to the situation John himself shares with his contemporaries in the seven churches of Asia. Hence he evokes this situation at the opening of his prophecy: ‘I John, your brother who share with you in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance …’ (1:9). Hence he addresses, not just the seven messages of chapters 2–3, but the whole book to his contemporaries in the seven churches of Asia (1:4, 11). It is their situation which is the eschatological situation on which the end of history immediately impinges.

  This explicit contemporaneity of John with his readers means that he can address their actual situation not only more explicitly but also with more concreteness and particularity than was possible for apocalyptists writing under an ancient pseudonym. This brings us back to the third literary genre to which Revelation belongs: the letter.