Revelations: Visions, Prophecy & Politics in the Book of Revelation, a new book by Elaine Pagels, an internationally-recognized biblical scholar and former winner of the National Book Award, wrote this one with one question in mind: What does Revelation mean?
The answers she gives will be cold comfort to those who profess End of the World prophecies derived from Revelation. Pagels deflates and debunks four common myths from the last book in the Bible.
She dispels the common belief that 666 is “the sign of the Beast,” the Devil. No, she says, the passage referred to Nero, the Roman emperor who was both egotistical and demented and was loathed by early Christians and, supposedly, burned them alive to light his garden. What a sweetheart, eh? Anyway, according to Pagels, the writer couldn’t name Nero in his text, so he used the “Jewish numerology system to spell out Nero’s imperial name.”
Another belief is that the person who wrote Revelation was a Christian. Not so, Pagels says. In fact, the writer did not like some Christians, because there were many and varied beliefs rather than one common belief. There were numerous conflicts between the factions (and, hey don’t we see that today, too? I mean, if a Methodist and a Baptist start getting into the nitty-gritty of their beliefs, it could come to blows.).
Revelation reflects some of those early clashes in the church, Pagels says.
John Blake, a reviewer for CNN, put it this way: “The author of Revelation was like an activist crusading for traditional values. In his case, he was a devout Jew who saw Jesus as the messiah. But he didn’t like the message that the apostle Paul and other followers of Jesus were preaching.
“This new message insisted that gentiles could become followers of Jesus without adopting the requirements of the Torah. It accepted women leaders, and intermarriage with gentiles, Pagels says.
“The new message was a lot like what we call Christianity today.”
Another myth Pagels exposes is that the Book of Revelation is the only book of its kind. She says that several similar books were excluded from the Bible. “Early church leaders suppressed an ‘astonishing’ range of books that claimed to be revelations from apostles such as Peter and James,” Blake wrote. “Many of these books were read and treasured by Christians throughout the Roman Empire.”
The fourth myth Pagels dispels is the one that is important to my blog. It concerns the End of the World. Pagels explains that the writer of Revelation was not describing how the world ends but how his world ended.
As Blake explains, “the writer of Revelation may have been called John – the book is sometimes called ‘Book of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine’ but he was not the disciple who accompanied Jesus. He was a devout Jew and mystic exiled on the island of Patmos in present-day Turkey.”
The writer penned the book shortly after Jerusalem was sacked and burned by 60,000 Roman soldiers in 70 A.D. The city’s destruction was the result of a Jewish revolt, but the devastation was unfathomable to the early Christians. Revelation was an attempt to encourage those early Christians with the message: “God would return and destroy the Romans who had destroyed Jerusalem.”
It was not, according to Pagels, about the End of Days. But let’s face it, True Believers don’t care much for reality when they have their delusions to spur them on.
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