Season 3 · Episode 7
Full episode description
Part 1 of Revelation reads the book where it was written. Patmos, a Greek island in the Aegean, in the 90s CE. The empire of Rome at the height of its confidence. The Temple in Jerusalem destroyed two decades earlier. The author, a Jewish prophet named John, in exile.
This episode walks:
- the man, John of Patmos, who was almost certainly not John the son of Zebedee or the author of the Gospel of John, but a Jewish-Christian prophet writing under his own name
- the imperial cult that required citizens to acknowledge Caesar as a god, an act John regards as the worship of the Beast
- the genre of apocalypse, a Jewish form already well established by John’s day, including the Book of Daniel and 4 Ezra, written to encode hope under oppression
- the dragon, traced through the Hebrew Bible from the chaos waters of Genesis through Leviathan and Rahab to its arrival in Revelation 12
- the Beast, decoded through the numerical value of the name Nero Caesar, who had presided over the first imperial persecution of Christians in 64 CE
- the case that John was attacking Pauline Christianity as well as Rome, that the compromised Christians in the seven letters to the churches are Paul’s gentile converts who would eat meat sacrificed to idols and pay imperial taxes
- Ignatius of Antioch, writing a generation later, as John’s opposite pole, championing institutional Christianity, episcopal authority, and accommodation with Rome where John demanded confrontation
Revelation was the most contested book in the canon for three centuries. Part 2 will follow how it was decoded, repurposed, and finally absorbed.
Not from tradition. From evidence.