the book of revelation, the final book of the new testament, has some of the most dramatic and terrifying language in the bible.
In her new book Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, Princeton University religious professor Elaine Pagels places the Book of Revelation in its historical context and explores where the vision came from. doomsday apocalyptic book. .
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“The Book of Revelation fascinates me because it’s so different from anything found in the New Testament,” Pagels tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “there are no moral sermons or ethical ideas or uplifting things. it’s all visions. that’s why it attracts artists, musicians and poets throughout the century.”
pagels says that the author of the book of revelation, who calls himself john, was probably a refugee whose house in jerusalem had been razed to the ground by the romans in response to a jewish rebellion against the roman empire.
“I don’t think we’ll understand this book until we understand that it’s wartime literature,” he says. “It comes out of that war, and it comes out of people who have been destroyed by war.”
Other images in the reveal, including bright red seven-headed beasts and dragons, monsters and cosmic eruptions, were likely influenced by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which buried and destroyed the city of Pompeii, he says.
“Most people think John was writing around AD 90 in the first century. That would be 60 years after Jesus died, and Vesuvius erupted in AD 79,” she says. “Much of what we find in the Book of Revelation expressed in fantastic images are descriptions of events that were very close to John: the war in Jerusalem, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the Roman emperors who ruled at the time… It seems that [John] reacted to that, saying, ‘Jesus is coming and he is going to destroy all this.’ John was convinced that the destruction of Jerusalem was the beginning of the end times that Jesus had predicted.”
Many of the images in the book, he says, are thinly veiled metaphors for images associated with the ruling powers of Rome. The great scarlet beast with seven heads and seven crowns, for example, may represent the emperors of the Julius Caesar dynasty, says Pagels. and the name of the beast, which has no name but is represented by the numbers 666, may refer to Emperor Nero.
“this is a reference to the technique of calculating numbers and letters,” he says, “so you can take any person’s name and get a numerical value for each letter, and add or multiply them in complicated ways, and find out what is the name… juan would have wanted his readers to understand that this number, which is expressed in a mysterious code, would be understood by his readers as the name of one of those emperors who destroyed his people. .”
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shortly after john wrote the book of revelation, christians, fearing persecution from the romans, clung to his message, seeing it as a form of deliverance from evil. For the last 2,000 years, Christians have been reading revelation as if it applied to conflicts and struggles in their own time, Pagels says.
“if you read it as john intended, you think: ‘god is on our side; we, of course, are on the side of good,'” he says. “Now we could be Lutherans fighting the Catholic church, we could be Catholics fighting Lutherans… what I found so remarkable is the way people on both sides of a conflict can read the same book against each other.” /p>
During the Civil War, she says, Northerners interpreted John’s prophecies as judgments from God for America’s sins of slavery.
” ‘the battle hymn of the republic’ resonates with all those images from the book of revelation,” she says. “people in the south, in the confederacy, were also using the book of revelation, seeing the war as the battle of armageddon at the end of time, and using it against the north. and that’s the way it read in world war ii. that’s even the way it was read in the iraq war.”
interview highlights
on other books of revelation, now known as the Gnostic Gospels
“one of the surprises I found when I started working on the book of revelation is that there isn’t just one book of revelation. i.e. most people think there is one book of revelation because there is only one in canon , but i found out that this was one of an outpouring that the jews were writing the greeks who followed the greek gods were writing many books of revelation the book of ezra for example is another revelation written by a jewish prophet not a follower of jesus. but very similar to john in many respects and very distressed by the roman empire and concerned about the question of god’s justice.”
on why the book of revelation has been so controversial
“one of the reasons the book is so controversial is that people who saw his prophecies against the roman empire suggesting that the empire was going to be destroyed by god realized that those prophecies had failed. what happened instead is that the roman emperors actually became christians, and the roman empire became a christian empire, i.e. completely contrary to what the prophecy said, so some people would have said, ‘the prophecy failed , so let’s leave that in the dust like we leave other prophecies failing.’ other people said, ‘wait a minute, that’s not what it really means.’ if you interpret these images differently, and they open up to a very wide reading range, then you might say, ‘well, the prophecies are coming true a totally different way.'”
on the authorship of the book of revelation
“john apparently was not only a jewish prophet, but he was a follower of jesus of nazareth, who of course had been crucified some 60 years earlier. but they say that jesus had prophesied that the end of the world was coming, and it seemed as if jesus’ prophecy had simply failed what john saw 60 years after jesus died was that the roman empire was getting stronger than ever, and i think he responded to the enormous power of rome, which you can see in the buildings and monuments and architecture and armies, which I would have seen stationed in those provinces…
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“is the response of one of the followers of jesus, who was last seen on earth crucified and horribly tortured by the romans… and his follower john sees that jesus is enthroned in heaven and He comes back as the ruler of the world. It’s almost like a perfect retaliation for what he sees as the execution of Jesus.”
about the images in the book of revelation
“one of them is the image of a huge bright red beast with seven heads with crowns on their heads: a violent, menacing and furious monster. another is a giant whore called the whore of babylon who sits on the back of one of these seven headed dragons, and he’s drinking from a golden cup the blood of innocent people who have been killed, then there’s another image of jesus coming out of heaven and starting the battle of armageddon, which ends up in lots and lots of corpses at the end of the book.”
about what the book of apocalypse says about the new world
“it is surprising that the author does not see anything of the current world surviving, except that people who are dead come back to life in this new world. but the new world, as he sees it, will be on earth, It will be a new Jerusalem filled with the glory of God.”
about followers of jesus
“the first followers of jesus were all jews, and they don’t seem to have imagined that they would ever deviate from their adherence to their tradition. it was just that they had found the messiah of israel. it is the apostle paul. who decided that jesus had offered a message for non-jews and opened it up for the salvation of the whole world. as john sees it, yes, gentiles will eventually be included in the blessings brought by jesus, just as the hebrew bible says all the gentile nations will be blessed through of abraham, but for john the focus is on israel and the jewish people.”
on various interpretations of the book of revelation
“many christians assume that john is a christian, he’s a follower of jesus, he’s a christian book, and when the catastrophic events of the end times happen, everyone will have to convert to christianity. what i found out, and it was amazing working on this, in a sense, you could say that Christianity hadn’t been invented yet. That is, the idea of a new movement that was quite separate from Judaism and its obvious successor the way Christians see it today.” .
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