Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation

When John accuses "evildoers" of leading gullible people into sin, what troubles him is what troubled the Essenes: whether—or how much—to accommodate pagan culture. And when we see Jesus' earliest followers, including Peter, James, and Paul, not as we usually see them, as early Christians, but as they saw themselves—as Jews who had found God's messiah—we can see that they struggled with the same question. For when John charges that certain prophets and teachers are encouraging God's people to eat "unclean" food and engage in "unclean" sex, he is taking up arguments that had broken out between Paul and followers of James and Peter about forty years earlier—an argument that John of Patmos continues with a second generation of Paul's followers. For when we ask, who are the "evildoers" against whom John warns? we may be surprised by the answer. Those whom John says Jesus "hates" look very much like the Gentile followers of Jesus converted through Paul's teaching. Many commentators have pointed out that when we step back from John's angry rhetoric, we can see that the very practices John denounces are those that Paul had recommended.

characterizing Christians as criminally minded people whose meetings were covers for secret rituals involving “people of both sexes, and all ages,” including children, in group orgies:

When John accuses 'evildoers' of leading gullible people into sin, what troubles him is what troubled the Essenes: whether - or how much - to accommodate pagan culture. And when we see Jesus' earliest followers, including Peter, James, and Paul, not as we usually see them, as early Christians, but as they saw themselves - as Jews who had found God's messiah - we can see that they struggled with the same question. For when John charges that certain prophets and teachers are encouraging God's people to eat 'unclean' food and engage in 'unclean' sex, he is taking up arguments that had broken out between Paul and followers of James and Peter about forty years earlier - an argument that John of Patmos continues with a second generation of Paul's followers. For when we ask, who are the 'evildoers' against whom John warns? we may be surprised at the answer. Those whom John says Jesus 'hates' look very much like Gentile followers of Jesus converted through Paul's teaching. Many commentators have pointed out that when we step back from John's angry rhetoric, we can see that the very practices John denounces are those that Paul had recommended.

Those whom John says Jesus “hates” look very much like Gentile followers of Jesus converted through Paul’s teaching. Many commentators have pointed out that when we step back from John’s angry rhetoric, we can see that the very practices John denounces are those that Paul had recommended.

Although John’s prophecies are in the New Testament, we do not actually know whether he saw himself as a Christian. There is no doubt that John was a devoted follower of Jesus Christ, but he never actually uses the term “Christian”—probably because what we call Christianity had not yet become entirely separate from Judaism. Instead, like Peter, Paul, and other early followers of Jesus, John clearly saw himself as a Jew who had found the messiah.

John’s visions of such monsters, then, are modeled on creation stories even older than those in Genesis.

A close reader of the Hebrew Scriptures would see that John was invoking prophetic images to interpret the conflicts of his own time, just as the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah had interpreted the Babylonian War around six hundred years earlier.

Revering the ruler was less a matter of worshipping a human being than of showing respect for the gods who had placed him there, and so shaped the destiny of nations.

Just as the poet Marianne Moore says that poems are “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” John’s visions and monsters are meant to embody actual beings and events.

What John did in the Book of Revelation, among other things, was create anti-Roman propaganda that drew its imagery from Israel’s prophetic traditions—above all, the writings of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel.