Revelation is the most violent, the most contested, the most rewritten, and the most misunderstood book of the Christian Bible. Its dragon came from Babylon. Its Babylon was Rome. Its Beast was Nero. Its enemies inside the church were the converts of Paul. Its author would not have called himself a Christian.
Season 2 · Episode 19
This episode reads Revelation from inside outward. The man on Patmos, the Roman cities he had walked, the imperial cult he had seen carved in marble, the apocalyptic genre he was working in, the older dragon he was stretching toward Rome, the enemies inside the church he was attacking, and the long fight over whether his book belonged in the canon at all.
John of Patmos was almost certainly a Jew from Judea. His Greek is rough. His imagination is saturated with Ezekiel, Daniel, Isaiah, and Zechariah. He had probably survived the outbreak of the Jewish War in 66 and the burning of the Temple in 70, and ended up working an itinerant circuit through the seven cities of Roman Asia: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea. By the 90s he is on Patmos, writing. Why he is there is less clear than tradition makes it sound.
The book makes sense once you see what he had walked through. In Ephesus, a colossal statue of Titus, the general who burned the Temple. At Aphrodisias, the Sebasteion, a three-story marble temple of "the holy ones," the Roman emperors, with sculptural panels of Claudius strangling personified Britain by the hair, and Nero forcing a naked Armenia to the ground. The historian Simon Price showed that the imperial cult was not generic propaganda. It was genuine devotion. For John, the Roman boot was theological.
Apocalypse is a recognised ancient genre. Pseudonymity, bizarre symbolic visions, violent repetitions, triumphalist movement from tragedy to triumph, motivational function for communities under pressure. Daniel, 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra all share the family. The seven-headed dragon is older than the Bible: Marduk and Tiamat in Babylon, the storm god Baal killing seven-headed Lotan at Ugarit, Leviathan in the Hebrew prophets. The dragon was always the empire that destroyed God's people. The faces change. The dragon does not. John names Rome Babylon for one reason: Babylon burned Jerusalem in 587 BCE, Rome burned it in 70 CE. New empire, same crime.
John has two enemies. Rome is the first. The second is inside the church. The rival prophets he calls Balaam and Jezebel are almost certainly Pauline Christians teaching exactly what Paul taught: that meat sacrificed to idols is meaningless, and that mixed marriages can stand. The "synagogue of Satan" passages, read against Paul's claim that gentile converts were the true children of Abraham, look like a Jewish prophet's fury at pagan converts claiming Israel's name. John never uses the word "Christian." Ignatius of Antioch, the man who may have invented the word, was the opposite of John in almost every way that mattered, and Ignatius's movement is the one that survived.
Josephine Ford and others have argued that the seams of an older Jewish apocalypse still show. The references to Jesus can often be lifted out of their sentences without breaking the grammar. The Lamb is a Jewish image. What is distinctively Christian is its identification with Jesus, and the identification reads as added rather than original. Revelation does not become a smooth Christian book. It becomes a Christian book with a Jewish spine that never quite straightens.
The fight over its canonical status runs three centuries. Justin Martyr is the first to assign it to John the apostle. Dionysius of Alexandria argues from style that the Gospel and the Apocalypse cannot share a hand. Eusebius classifies the book on two of his own lists at once. Cyril of Jerusalem omits it. The Council of Laodicea in 363 omits it. Decoded, the book is not subtle: seven hills are Rome, the woman who rules the kings of the earth is Rome, "Caesar Neron" in Hebrew letters yields 666 (or 616 in a variant spelling). Irenaeus welds the figure of "Antichrist" from 1 John onto the beast. Augustine spiritualises the millennium. Athanasius, in his Festal Letter of 367, pivots the symbols against fellow Christians and seals the canon with Revelation's own closing warning. Constantine puts the dragon under his feet on imperial coins. Luther wants the book out of the New Testament in 1522. The fight has never quite ended.
Key themesJohn of Patmos as Jewish prophet, the seven-city postal circuit, imperial cult and the Sebasteion, the apocalypse genre, the dragon from Babylon to Rome, 4 Ezra as the alternative, Balaam and Jezebel as Pauline rivals, the synagogue of Satan, Ignatius as the opposite pole, the Jewish spine, the long authorship fight, Dionysius and the style argument, decoding 666 and the seven hills, Irenaeus inventing the Antichrist, Augustine's millennium fix, Athanasius pivoting the symbols, Constantine baptising the book, Luther wanting it out.