Revealing Revelation

Some of the features of Jewish apocalyptic texts. This is usually a revelation given to somebody, to a human from some kind of divine being, an angel or some kind of. Psychopomp is the pedantic word.

Wait, I’m sorry, some kind of what psychopomp is. If that’s not a German, like EDM group, I don’t know what’s happening.

Hey, Everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation. About the same. How are the vibes today, Dan?

It’s the end of the world as we know it, I think. And I feel fine.

Yeah, that’s the way it goes. Leonard Bernstein, right?

Yes, I think so. Irving Berlin, I’m not sure.

Yeah. Lenny Bruce is not afraid. At some point we will be responsible for paying for. Or you probably have to sing them. I don’t know.

Yeah, yeah. Don’t tell the royalties people that we. That we quote things. I think you can quote a little bit. Yeah, hopefully. Yeah, but. But it is the end of the world that we’re talking about. Or is it, Dan? Because we are. We’re doing a chapter and verse that perhaps we should just call book.

Book. Yeah. My job is book, so. And that book is the book of Revelation or Revelations, if you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Right. Or if you’ve just been taught wrong your whole life. Which is totally understandable because everybody says Revelations. Everybody pluralizes. And in fairness to them, there are many revelations in this book called Revelation. There are several of them.

Well, the very first verse starts off the Revelation of Jesus Christ, but yeah, the Society of Biblical Literature, they sell T shirts, it says Revelations and then there’s a red X over the S, just as a little tongue in cheek reference to that. So.

Yeah. So I think what we’re learning is if you want to drive a Bible scholar crazy, just keep bringing up Revelations. It’ll.

It’ll.

It’ll work like a charm.

Yeah. Or. Or if you want to let them know, this is probably going to be a waste of time for me to engage.

Right, yeah, exactly. But that’s the whole. Today’s whole episode. We are going. It is. We’re doing a deep dive, baby.

Going all in the Apocalypse, as it is known in more orthodoxish traditions, and Revelation in more Protestant traditions. Oh, we’re going to talk about some manuscripts. We’re going to talk about dates we’re going to talk about authors, we’re going to cover what the text is about. And we already have a whole show on the mark of the beast, so we’ll address that, but we’re not going to. We’re not going to get stuck in the weeds there.

That beast got marked. Yeah, we, we, we marked it.

Yes. But I wanted to start. Yeah. With the. Where we get this book of Revelation from. A lot of people don’t know. This book was probably the least popular book of the Bible in early Christianity. But we do have some manuscripts of it that date to the second century CE. Our earliest manuscripts are probably. I’m going to rattle off some numbers that aren’t going to mean much to people, but we have one called Papyrus 47, which is from the Chester Beatty collection, and it’s actually the majority of, like, chapter nine through chapter 16. That’s probably third quarter of the second century CE. We got a little fragment called Papyrus 98 that is just a tiny little bit of a few verses. In chapter one, we’ve got Papyrus 115, which is a bunch of little fragments scattered all the way from chapter one to chapter 14.

We cannot reconstruct the entire book of Revelation , every last verse until the middle of the 4th century CE.

Oh, wow.

When we finally have Codex Sinaiticus, which is considered the earliest of what are called the great uncial manuscripts. And uncial is a pedantic way to say capital letter, because it is a manuscript where it is written entirely in capital or majuscule Greek letters. And there are no spaces or anything. It’s all just jammed together.

God, that’s a nightmare. That sounds like literally the worst thing to read in the world.

It is a challenge. And we have three of these that have all of Revelation. Codex Alexandrinus is the next, and then Codex Ephraimi Rescriptus is the third one. And that one we’re getting into the fifth century. And that one is. It’s called Rescriptus because it’s what’s called a palimpsest, which means that someone took an old. Someone took this text and scraped the ink off of the vellum or whatever they were using, and then turned it 90 degrees and then wrote another text on it. And somebody one day was like, I think I see lettering under this. And using, like, infrared lights, we’re able to discover that we have an entire manuscript of the whole Bible.

It’s like when you find. When they find that there was a. That, you know, Picasso painted over another painting.

For this thing.

And there’s which surprisingly seems like everybody’s had something painted over or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or, or they cover. You know, they make a mistake or they don’t like something, they cover it up.

But you reuse the canvas. Yeah, listen, paper back then was expensive. You got.

Yeah, yeah. And so we have. We have to wait until the 4th century CE. Now, quotations from the early Christian authors. We call them the patristic authors, the Church fathers with quotations from them that begin in the second century. We can fill in most of it, but still probably about a little less than 10% of the text is absent until we get down to Codex Sinaiticus in the middle of the 4th century CE. So there’s a lot of stuff that could be different. And even those manuscripts that predate Sinaiticus, those fragmentary manuscripts where we have two different manuscripts that cover the same passages, they don’t always agree. There are differences from what we have reconstructed as the authoritative text of the New Testament in every single one of those manuscripts. So if you want to dig into textual criticism, that is a whole thing, and I find it fascinating, but I think we.

We better move on before everybody turns this off.

Yeah. Get to the good stuff. I want. I want some beasts and dragons.

Yeah, well, it’s. It’s loaded with beasts and dragons. The. The text most scholars think was probably written around the early 90s CE. Now, for a time, people interpreted what this intense persecution as probably happening under Domitian, because there was a tradition that that was a period of intense persecution in the early 90s. Scholars these days are like, probably wasn’t that intense, intense persecution.

We’re talking specifically of the followers of Jesus.

Correct. On the part of the Roman Empire. And now scholars are like, it’s probably more sporadic, probably. Probably reactionary to. To things. Probably pretty isolated. And so that means that that period of the reign of Domitian is not as. As handy an anchor for dating the text. But most scholars think it’s probably right around there. There is a small minority of scholars who think it predates 70 CE, that it predates the destruction of the temple. But the folks who like to argue this are folks who are in the preterist camp for the most part. And preterism is the idea that all these prophecies about the end times were actually about the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.

At the hand of the Romans in 70 CE.

I see, so. So they’re saying that all. That all of these predictions and bad things were culminated in the destruction of the temple.

Got it. Right. And for that to be the case, the text has to have been written before 70 CE.

Bad prophesying. If you just prophesy backwards.

Well, yeah. Well, an awful lot of prophesying is prophesying backwards.

Yeah, exactly.

Ex eventu prophecy, as it’s known.

Yeah. You’re going to. You’re going to have higher accuracy.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. But less, hopefully. Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes it’s not as high. And. And that’s embarrassing. So the. The very first verse of the Book of Revelation identifies the genre of this text. Apocalypse. And apocalypse is a Jewish genre. We see it a little bit in Ezekiel. Daniel is kind of one of the main apocalypses, as we talked about in. In our episode on the Book of Daniel . Right here. The. Some of the features of Jewish apocalyptic texts. This is usually a revelation given to somebody, to a human, from some kind of divine being, an angel, or. Or some kind of psychopomp is the pedantic.

Wait, I’m sorry, some kind of what?

Psychopomp? This is a.

That’s not a German, like, EDM group. I don’t know what’s happening. What is a psychopomp? I don’t know what that is.

That. That is a kind of like a divine guide in ascent and descent and apocalyptic visions and journeys.

So somebody make a rock group out of psychopaths, please.

That would be a pretty cool one. But it does. It would need to be EDM too, or something. Something in that.

Some proximity to that, or it just doesn’t work. So the revelation is usually given within a narrative framework. Somebody’s telling a story, it’s mediated by this otherworldly being. being. Some kind of transcendent reality is communicated that reflects on temporal affairs and often climaxes with the eschaton, which is the pedantic word for the end times. So this is something going on now is the catalyst for this text. And frequently it has to do with persecution, oppression, things like that. And frequently it is kind of a fantasy about God peeling back the fabric of reality to show us that God is really in control and that ultimately everything’s going to be okay. As the great poet once said, don’t worry about a thing, because everything, every little thing, is going to be all right.

Yeah. Although the road to everything being all right in this particular eschatology is. Is long.

Crazy.

And as another poet said, if you’re going through hell, keep on going. And that’s what we’re doing in a lot of this book. Revelation takes the shape of visions and journeys and things like that. Sometimes it’s on earth. Sometimes you’re. You’re flying through the heavens. An ascent motif. And the goal is usually to bring some kind of comfort to the persecuted and. Or exhort them to faithfulness in the face of suffering and also engage in boundary maintenance to say, the good ones, the ones who are on our side, need to be doing this. You need to be staying away from these bad folks over here. So it can serve a handful of different functions, as we will see in this book of Revelation . So we have an introduction and a conclusion, and then we have. It’s usually divided into six different segments. And the first. The introduction is the first eight verses, and we’ll talk a little bit about that in a second. But the. The first section is these letters that Jesus tells John to write to the angels of the seven churches.

And this is John. This is not John.

Oh, yeah, we’ve met before. So the text just identifies the author as John, and we have no reason to think that the author of this text was not some dude named John. But there is absolutely nothing in the text that suggests this is a John. We know from previous Christian literature.

Former Johns need not apply.

Yeah, and the. The Greek of the book of Revelation is famously awful.

Oh, really?

Like, unsophisticated, awkward. There are grammatical errors and things like that.

Well, this surprises me, because my understanding is that this is the one book that was actually written in Greece, wasn’t it? No, was. It wasn’t Patmos? Wasn’t he John of Patmos?

On Patmos, off the western. Off the western coast of modern day Turkey? But yeah, I don’t. I don’t know if that island is. Is part of Greece right now, but. But no, there were other books that were written in Greece, but yeah, this is not someone who is a skilled writer. It is not nearly as sophisticated as the Gospel of John or the Epistles of John.

The first person to actually suggest, hey, what if this is the same John who wrote the gospel was Justin Martyr, about 150 CE, and there were debates. There were a lot of people who were like, yeah, no. And then there were other people who thought, hey, that makes sense. Let’s. Let’s go with that. So most scholars would say there is little chance that this was actually written by the same John. So, yeah, we got the. We got the authorship question there. It starts with the appearance of this individual to John, and he’s. He’s in the spirit on the Lord’s day, which is probably a reference to some kind of ecstatic trance or some kind of early Christian concept of being in the spirit. And the Lord’s day is. Which is still the word for Sunday in Greek, or it’s one of the words that is used in Greek today.

Kyriaki is the other word for Sunday. And he gives this little introduction that lasts the first eight verses, and ends with, look, he’s coming with the clouds. Every eye will see him, even those who pierced him. And on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail. So it is to be. Amen. And then we hear, I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come. The Almighty. So this is not a reference right here to Jesus. This is a reference to God, right? But then he has a vision of Jesus and he says he heard a loud voice like a trumpet behind him, telling him to write what you see and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus, to Smyrna, to Pergamum, to Thyatira, to Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea. And if you. If you look where these churches are, they’re all in western Anatolia. And they actually start with the city that is closest to Patmos on the western shore, and then goes clockwise around.

Anatolia is modern day Turkey. Modern day Turkey, okay.

And here’s an interesting part. He sees seven golden candlesticks. And in the midst of the seven candlesticks saw one like the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest. And it says his hair, his head and his hair were white as wool, white as snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like bronze burning in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters. This is actually taking two different figures that we saw in the book of Daniel and putting them together. This is actually. Daniel 7:9 describes the Ancient of Days as having clothing as white as snow, hair of his head like pure wool, throne was fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire. So this is the Ancient of Days. But. But the author of Revelation also says, looked like the Son of Man. One like the Son of Man, which is the description of the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven.

But they’re the same individual, and there’s a reason for this. In Daniel 7:13 , we have this statement that I saw one like a Son of man coming with the clouds of heaven, and he came to the Ancient of Days. And in Greek, the. The preposition there is heos, unto. There is a very old manuscript, the Old Greek tradition of Daniel that does not have heos, but it has hos, which is one letter different, but says that the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven came as the Ancient of Days. And would suggest that the Son of Man in some way is to be identified with the Ancient of Days as manifesting the presence of.

Those are two different things. Yeah.

Yes. And so the author of Revelation is picking up that tradition and is combining the imagery of the Ancient of Days with the imagery of the Son of Man and seven stars out of his mouth went a sharp two edged sword. We’ve heard about all this before.

Yeah, everybody knows about the sword in Jesus’s mouth. It’s. We can just blow right past it.

Yeah. Now, now you’ll recall at the end of the introduction, the Lord God Almighty said, I am Alpha and Omega. Now Jesus here says, I am the first and the last, which is not the same title, but it’s leaning into that title.

Yeah, it seems to be indicating sort of the same thing, but, but, but a different way of saying it, but.

It’s not quite there. It’s not till toward the end of the Book of Revelation that Jesus will say, I am the Alpha and the Omega.

And so we’re slow playing part of this.

This idea that Jesus manifests the presence of God.

And just to be clear, for those who don’t know their Greek alphabet, Alpha is the first letter in the Greek alphabet and Omega is the last, right?

That is correct.

It’s literally just as simple as that.

The beginning and the end, the first and the last, the author and the finisher, it’s all, all the same idea, beginning to end. And, and it’s a. What’s called a merism, which means you identify the beginning point and the end point of a spectrum as a way to refer to those points and everything in between.

Right.

So the first and the last and everything in between. I am everything. So John gets these instructions to write these letters to the churches in Asia. And these letters, some of them praise the churches, some of them also say there’s a little bit of a finger wagging going on. But they all end with this promise to those who overcome are going to get some kind of blessing. And these blessings are associated with concepts of deification, of theosis. Somehow they’re going to be united with God in a very unique way. For instance, in Revelation 3 , verse 21 says to him that overcomes is victorious, I will give to sit down in my throne with me, just as I have sat down in the throne of my Father. We have another part where it talks about the, the synagogue of Satan, which by the way, that is this, I see this passage used. There are two passages here that talk about the synagogue of Satan.

People who claim that they are Jews but are not. This passage gets deployed in a lot of phenomenally anti-Semitic ways.

Yeah, you can see that coming. Just, just the phrase itself is just. Can we not, can we retranslate that or something, please? Because I see the danger instantly.

Yeah. And, and this is, there’s actually debate about what exactly is going on here. Some people think that the, the author is criticizing Christians who are, who think that they’re better Christians because they are not converts from the Gentile community, but are, are Jewish. That’s one reading of what’s going on here. There are other readings, but basically if you feel the need to try to accuse Jews of being the synagogue of Satan, just don’t. And. Yeah, just don’t. Wrong. Yeah. And you have other promises to him that overcomes. I will give a. They’ll get a new name and names, and particularly names written on foreheads are going to come up and that’s going to be interesting. But yeah, a couple of the interesting things. We get these condemnations of Balaam and Jezebel, which seem to be encoded references to a movement or a group or some influential individual within some of these communities.

And there’s an actual argument that’s been made. It’s not a consensus view, but it’s. One of the main theories is that this is a coded reference to Paul because both of them, because what they’re accused of doing is causing people to eat food sacrificed to idols and then sexual immorality. Now here’s the thing. Paul was the one who said an idol is nothing in the world and it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing. You know, eating food sacrificed to idols doesn’t mean anything. But if you’re around weak Christians who might get scandalized, then don’t do it. Just, you know, when in Rome. And so this would have been understood as allowing the consumption of food sacrificed to idols. Now in the Book of Acts , after the Jerusalem Council, that was one of the things they explicitly said. They basically decided converts from the Gentile community don’t have to keep the Law of Moses except for four things.

Stay away from sexual immorality. Stay away from things polluted by idols. And so part of that is a reference to food sacrificed to idols. Don’t eat blood. Don’t eat things that were strangled. And Paul rejects two and a half of those things. Because Paul says it doesn’t matter what you eat. So the food sacrificed to idols, that could arguably fit with what Paul’s doing. Sexual immorality. Paul argues that it’s not a big deal for a believer to be married to a non-believer, that perhaps this is how you are going to save the non-believer. This was something that early Christians, some early Christians said was sexually immoral, that this was wrong. And so based on those two arguments, there are folks like Elaine Pagels and others who argue that this may be a coded reference to Paul that the author of Revelation really didn’t like. Paul going around telling people these things are cool when he thought they were not.

Yeah. So, yeah, it would be really fascinating if that were the case that we have the Book of Revelation coming out swinging against. Against Paul when.

Against Paul, especially considering how many like modern-day pastors and stuff use that term, Jezebel.

Well, and also evangelical Christianity today is basically Paul plus Revelation. Right. And so it would be really hilarious if Revelation was like that Paul.

And you’re in a fight with yourself.

Yeah. Condemning him as a Balaam and a Jezebel and. But I don’t think that’s a question we’ll ever get answered confidently. So.

So somebody go back in time and tell us, will you? Yeah, figure it out.

I get that question every now and then. If you go meet any historical figure from the past, who would it be? And it’s like, who wouldn’t it be? Yeah, so many cool stuff.

I’d be pretty excited to meet anybody.

Yeah. Really, really horrible. Part of one of these letters is in Revelation chapter two. I’m looking for a. Yeah, the NRSV, I think, has a decent translation here. This Jezebel, I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her fornication. Beware. I am throwing her on a bed. And those who commit adultery with her, I am throwing into great distress unless they repent of their doings. And I will strike her children dead. And all the churches will know that I am the one who searches minds and hearts and I will give to each of you as your works deserve. Some people say I will cast her onto a sickbed. The idea being I will make her sick.

But no, this is sexual violence. This is framing this personified figure as a sex worker and then saying, this is how we punish sex workers. We sexually violate them and then gonna kill their kids. And then the, the, their customers. It just says, I’m throwing them into great distress. The kids are dying. The, the woman is going to be sexually assaulted. And then the ones who are actually engaged in the, in the main part of the sin because they’re dudes, they get a slap on the wrist or something.

Yeah, you guys are naughty.

Yeah, don’t do it again. So cut it out. Yeah, this is, this is framing God as a sexual predator, as someone who is engaging in sexual violence against…

Yeah, that’s, that’s a, that’s, that’s a lot.

Yeah, it’s, it’s.

That’s kind of nuts.

It’s a lot. And, and there are… People who… go to all kinds of lengths to try to excuse this rhetoric. And I think the, the most parsimonious way to approach this is to just acknowledge that this is the author using the threat of sexual violence for rhetorical purposes. And that is awful. And don’t do that.

So fortunately, that’s the only not okay part of Revelation.

But this is one of the things. This is one of the reasons that a lot of early Christians didn’t like the book of Revelation . They come from—and we talked about this with Bart Ehrman—they come from the loving Jesus of the Gospels. To love your neighbor, the meek shall inherit the earth. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword. All of these things to get to Revelation. And this is a grotesque fantasy about this God who’s going to sexually assault a sex worker, who is going to bathe their sword in the blood of their enemies that runs up to their ankles. It’s just this grotesquely violent revenge fantasy, revenge fantasy, really.

Right.

That also includes, you know, the, the outcome, the blessings, everything. On the other side of all of this tribulation is we get all of the gold and we get all of the goods and we get all of the land and we get all… And all this abundance and everything like that. And that didn’t mesh well with the asceticism of early Christianity as well. So people saw that text and were like, yeah, I don’t really like what’s going on here. This is. Yeah, that’s not my. That’s not the Jesus I know. And Dionysius. Dionysius of Alexandria was a writer, I want to say, somewhere around between 200 and 300 CE. I don’t remember off the top of my head, but he has this to say. Some before us have set aside and rejected the book altogether, criticizing it chapter by chapter and pronouncing it without sense or argument and maintaining the title is fraudulent. For they say that it is not the work of John, nor is it a revelation. Because it is covered thickly and densely by a veil of obscurity.

And they affirm that none of the apostles and none of the saints nor anyone in the church is its author. So, yeah, Revelation, not the most popular book until Athanasius of Alexandria, which we’ll get to.

Okay, can’t wait for the Athanasius stuff.

Yeah, that’s the juicy part. So we have these letters to the seven churches and then we get the. This. We’re going through a door. We’re starting on this journey of these visions that the three main things are seven seals. And then out of the seventh seal come seven trumpets. And then out of the seventh trumpet we also have seven bowls.

And in between, do we know what a seal is in this case?

Yes. So imagine you have a rolled up document and everybody’s seen those, those Victorian era movies where somebody drips some wax on something and then pushes their thing into it. It’s something like that. Although it probably more frequently was clay. And the idea is as long as this is intact, you can be. This was your, you know, your. I forget what they call it. If you have a letter that is sealed, that can function legally to show. And you have the date or something like that on there, that can function legally to show that this was from before that time period. The idea is this is sealed, so this is valid. Whatever authority is on that seal, this is under their authority kind of thing.

And so to break the seal is to say, we no longer need this. We are now going to deploy or use whatever is inside here. So you have God sitting on their throne, 24 elders, all kinds of weird crap. And God has in their hand a, it says a book in most translations. This is a scroll. And it is sealed with seven of these seals, probably clay.

And as these seals are opened, all kinds of crazy stuff is going on. And this is all very rich symbolism. And some of it is explained and some of it isn’t. Where those.

By symbolism, I assume you mean literally true things, literally meant to be taken.

As, as literal, actual what’s actually going to happen. Yeah, and there’s. And one of the reasons you probably shouldn’t take that approach with the Book of Revelation is because you’ve got places where it’s like, and then the sun fell out of the sky, and the sky, the stars all went dark. And then like four chapters later, it’s like, and then the sun went dark. Didn’t this already happen? And, and some people will argue, no, it’s all simply cyclical. It’s it’s the same series of events told in different ways and, and through different perspectives. And there’s an argument for the cyclical nature of this, but trying to read this linearly, trying to say this comes first and this comes after, and then we’re going to go back and then we’re going to do it all over again so that we can line certain things up, I think is, is a fool’s errand because one of the things about explaining some of the imagery and then not explaining the others is that it’s kind of teasing the audience. It’s saying, I’m going to explain this imagery here, and that makes them think everything has an explanation and we’re just withholding it from you.

And that the key to unlocking this is to interpret all of the other imagery kind of like that. Maybe you don’t remember this. There’s an old Gary Larson Far Side cartoon. It’s called Cow Tools, and it was just a cow standing there in front of a table with a bunch of just bizarre looking instruments on it. And, and one of them looked kind of like a saw. And Gary Larson explained that he made the mistake of making one of them look like a saw, which led his readers to believe that the, the key to understanding this cartoon was figuring out what all the tools represent, since one of them obviously was supposed to be a saw. And so in a very similar way, we go into Revelation and they explain one symbol and then you’re like, the key is to find the interpretation of all of the symbols. And a lot of it is just trying to evoke an emotional response.

Right. I remember, I, I to your point. I remember being told as a, as a young believer that the flying locust. I don’t know, I don’t even remember what it is. You know, it’s got the scorpion’s tail and the blah, blah, blah.

And that’s actually attack helicopters that have been predicted from our time. So we know that now’s the time because they describe. It’s got the face of a man and that’s the guy, that’s the pilot. And then it’s got the, you know, the, the scorpion tail is just, they didn’t know what, he didn’t, you know, he was seeing this spinning.

You know, tail rotor and, and just thought, oh, yeah, it’s a scorpion.

Or. Yeah, it’s, it’s, we see that an awful lot, particularly with, so that, that’s where the, the four angels that are bound at the Euphrates River are going to be released, and then they’re going to go kill one third of humanity. And they’re going to be supported by a cavalry of 200 million mounted soldiers.

Right.

And their horses have the heads of lions, and they breathe fire and sulfur, and they have the tails of scorpions and the mouths, and the soldiers have multicolored, shiny breastplates. And people are, like, trying to figure this out.

It’s obviously tanks. What are you talking about? That is a perfect description of an Abrams tank.

And people are like, well, back then, they wouldn’t have known how to describe it. And it’s like, well, they knew what a siege engine was. They would have described a tank as a siege engine. We have bas reliefs and descriptions of siege engines. That’s what they would have described it as. Not this. This is not just an encoded reference to something that’s going to happen in the future. This is just a dude going, yeah. And they had the head of a lion and was breathing fire. And it is intended to evoke an emotional response. People going, whoa, that’s crazy. This is intense. That’s the whole point there.

Yeah. By the way, Siege Engine is also a great name for a band. Probably a Swedish death metal sort of something.

Yeah. Definitely not the title of a sex tape.

All right, keep going.

Not psychopomp either. Yeah.

Okay, Just. Just roll your siege engine onward, please.

So, but separating the seven trumpets from the seven bowls, we have the story of the dragon, the beasts, and the faithful. And this is what an awful lot of people like to focus on because they. They think that understanding what the beast was is going to help them to understand, to predict the geopolitical future.

Right. And the beast we know is Hunter Biden.

Hunter Biden’s laptop, actually. Yeah. So, yeah, as we. As we discussed previously, the beast is. Is a reference. There are two beasts, actually. The dragon is Satan. There are two beasts. One beast is Rome. The second beast is Nero. And this is just encoding this in a way that reminds people of these things, but also kind of throws it off into the future and is kind of like this. You know, nothing is new under the sun. The things that have happened before are going to happen again. We’re going to. We’re going to squint at them so the edges get blurry and turn it into this story about these beasts and. And all that.

And, yeah, if you want to hear more about that, Our. Our thing about the mark of the beast, we talk all about Nero and.

How 666 or 616 are. Are references to him.

And. Yeah, The Mark of the Beast was the title of that one.

That’s right.

And one interesting thing to note here, the dragon here, a lot of people say there’s a part that, where it identifies, I think it’s in chapter 12, refers to the dragon, that ancient serpent. And a lot of people suggest that this is a reference to the serpent from the Garden of Eden. And it is 100% not because the serpent from the Garden of Eden was not identified as Satan until after the New Testament. And so the serpent here is actually Leviathan. So it refers to this.

I was pretty sure you were going to say Joe Biden now. Because he’s ancient.

The. There are ancienter. Okay?

Yes, indeed. Including Leviathan.

So it talks about the ancient serpent and the dragon. And Leviathan is the primeval prehistoric chaos monster associated with the sea, who in Isaiah 27:1 in the Greek translation is referred to as both a dragon and a serpent. And it, it talks about the dragon that lives in the sea. At the end of Isaiah 27:1 , this passage is actually quoting a tradition that is also quoted in a Ugaritic text from 500 years earlier, where it talks about the wriggling serpent, the twisting serpent, exactly as Isaiah does. And then it says the dragon with seven heads. The dragon in Revelation has seven heads. And Isaiah 27:1 doesn’t say the dragon has seven heads, but there’s a part in Psalms 74 where it talks about Adonai crushing the heads, plural, of Leviathan. So it’s very clearly a reference to Leviathan. It is not a reference to the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

Anything else you think we need to treat on the dragon and the beasts?

I mean, they, they, they, they cause a lot of ruckus.

They, they, they do rough things up.

I mean, there. So their purpose in, in. In the sort of eschatology of, of the Book of Revelation is, is. What is it? They’re. They’re out there, they’re wreaking havoc, but.

Like they are the avatar of everyone who is persecuting Christians. It’s because the serpent is empowering them, empowering Rome and empowering the emperors. It is, they are the, the, the villain in the story that we want to really, really hate and that we’re going to be excited to see thrown into the lake of fire later on in the story. One thing I want to point out here is that when you’ll recall that at the beginning John was told to write the things you see, but John, you frequently see a contrast between what John hears and then it’ll usually say and I turned and looked and saw. Okay. But what he sees is always different from what he hears. So for instance, when he hears the lion of the tribe of Judah has conquered, he turns and he looks and he sees a slain lamb.

When he hears about there are 144,000 are sealed, 12,000 from each of the 12 tribes of Israel. He turns and looks and it says he sees a numberless concourse of people from all nations, kindreds, tongues and peoples.

And so that’s interesting. I’ve never caught that. I’ve never thought about that. So like the 144,000 is almost, is, is, is a, is almost or could be seen as a red herring or, or, or a, a misnomer.

It’s a more traditional going back to the Hebrew Bible expectation about the Messiah and deliverance where God is the lion of the, of the house of Judah who roars and conquers. But then when he turns and sees it’s the lamb of God who conquers through their own self sacrifice. And then the 144,000 is salvation is just for the, the tribes of Israel. But when he turns and sees he cannot number the people, they’re from every nation, kindred tongue and people. And so one way to read this is to say that they’re overturning expectations that this is what we hear about. But John is writing what he sees and it is actually different. Now that causes some, some interpretive issues because it’s, it’s kind of trying to suggest that maybe this author was a little more enlightened than than it seems. But it conflicts with a lot of other representations of God as this vengeful, violent, ruthless deity.

So that’s just something to think about as you’re negotiating with the text. That’s something to think about. And then you also have the. There’s a song that’s being sung and then they sing a new song and it’s different. And so this is an interesting little thing to notice. Let me find myself in the narrative. We talked about the mark. I don’t think we need to worry about that anymore. Toward the end of the book we get, well, we get the four horsemen, which a lot of people think there’s a lot to be unpacked from the symbolism there. I’m not personally fascinated by that issue. If you want to go see what has been proposed, a really good text is the Anchor Bible Commentary on Revelation by an author named Craig. And it could be Koester. K-O-E-S-T-E-R. I apologize.

I don’t know how to pronounce the scholar’s last name. But it’s a phenomenal discussion of all this imagery and, and what people have proposed this means. So go check that out if you’re, if you’re wanting to. To hear more about that. Toward the end, we have the culmination of all of this. We have the. Oh, and the woman who brings forth the child that has the crown and the sun on her clothes and all that kind of stuff. It’s not a constellation.

How dare you.

Holy cow.

You’re blowing our minds.

I, I think back in September, was it September when everybody was like, September 22nd is gonna be the. Some star planet is gonna be in the womb of, of Virgo or. I don’t know.

It’s all very exciting.

I didn’t think so. But you can go look in the Anchor Bible Commentary if you want a good discussion of that symbolism as well. It’s a very thorough discussion. But we have. Basically God is saying, things are going to go bad. You’re going to have a bad time to the dragon. And we have, in Revelation 20 , the sea gave up the dead that were in it, Death and Hades. Hades here being one of the words that is used to refer to Hell in the New Testament. Frequently translated Hell. The other one is Gehenna. Gehenna does not occur in Revelation. Only Hades. Death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and all were judged according to what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the Lake of Fire. Now when we think of Hell, we think of the Lake of Fire as a constituent element of Hell.

As a region in Hell. According to Revelation, the Lake of Fire is where Hell goes to be destroyed. So it’s kind of an annihilationist take here.

Are we talking about when you, when you say Death and Hades are thrown into the Lake of Fire. I picture. Because I know Hades is a Greek personified god. I’m picturing two beings being chucked into the Hell. Is there any chance that that’s what these are, our beings? I, I think that the figures, the, the sort of the, the. The demigods of death and, and hell.

Or so I, I think that that lends some color to the, the imagery. But it also says death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them. So it also seems to be the abode of the dead.

And it says, then death and Hades were thrown into the Lake of Fire. This is the second death, the Lake of Fire, which I think we get a, we notch a point on the side of annihilationism, or temporary torment followed by annihilationism. Because if you. If we understand Hades in the Book of Revelation as a personification, as an agent rather than a location, then there’s no hell in the Book of Revelation . There’s just this Lake of Fire, which seems to be where things go to be annihilated. So.

Or there’s a hell that is eventually then destroyed.

Yeah, you don’t. You don’t get our modern concept of hell until you bring. Yeah, until you bring in all of the other passages that discuss Gehenna from a bunch of different perspectives. And then you try to impose some kind of unifying framework and say, okay, so because of. Over here it says this, and over here it says this, we’re going to put those together and we’re going to bring this thing over here, and we’re going to interpret it this way. And you’re constructing a conceptual package based on the idea that all of these different texts are just presenting different. It’s all the blind man feeling the elephant.

Right.

You’re assuming there’s an elephant there instead of just a bunch of authors who are describing something that is totally unrelated to the other things.

Right. So different ideas of. Of the afterlife.

Yeah, yeah.

Or the end. Or, you know, as you say, annihilationism as the end of life.

Yeah. Of. Of existence for. For the wicked. And that’s. And that’s something that we find elsewhere in the New Testament, is something that we find elsewhere in early Jewish literature. And then we have Revelation 21:5 and 6. There was one seated on the throne says, see, I am making all things new. And then he said, write this, for these words are trustworthy and true. Then he said to me, it is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. So this is. This is Jesus, who has started off saying, I am the first and the last. And then once Jesus has sat on the throne, Jesus says, I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, which suggests that Jesus achieves some kind of unity or identification with God once all of this is over. It’s not an eternal thing, but sitting on the throne is what allows Jesus to be identified as the Alpha and Omega. But we go back to those letters and we got Jesus saying to him, who overcomes, I will give to sit in my throne with me as I have overcome and sat down.

That’s a big throne. Everybody’s sitting on it.

Well, there’s a text, the Exagoge by Ezekiel the Tragedian, who talks about Moses has a horrible nightmare where he finds himself before a gigantic throne. And the figure who has sat on the throne steps down from the throne and then tells Moses to go sit on the throne. And Moses is like, I’m unworthy.

We’re not worthy.

Which most scholars would suggest is a, a dream about deification, describing Moses becoming a deity, taking on God’s authority, which is something that we find in the literature of this period, both inside and outside the Bible. So should not be surprising to folks.

I mean, and that’s what this sitting on the throne with Jesus is, right? That’s, I mean, it’s some level of deification of the followers of Jesus.

Yep. And in the orthodox tradition, you have an idea of theosis, of deification as well, uniting with the divine essence. And you see it in John 17 , the intercessory prayer as well. Three times in that chapter, Jesus prays that his followers would become one with him, just as he is one with the Father, which is basically saying God gave God’s glory to Jesus and Jesus is saying, I want my followers to have that glory as well. So, and then after this, we get the new heavens and the new earth. And so according to the Book of Revelation , we don’t all float up to the skies and we’re not issued harps, but we actually just live on a new heaven and a new earth and there’s the tree of life, there’s the river of the water of life with all these, you know, everything’s just budding and blooming, very fertile all the time.

Great times.

Yeah, that sounds good.

And then we get this conclusion. I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book. And this is a reference to the Book of Revelation , not the whole Bible. If anyone adds to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this book. If anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away that person’s share in the tree of life and in the holy city which are described in this book. Which is how you basically tied off literature that you wanted to be very authoritative and that you wanted to insist was inspired. Because we see the same thing in Deuteronomy and we also see, interestingly, the same thing in the Letter of Aristeas, which is about the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, the creation of the Septuagint. They have a big celebration at the end and they all announce, cursed is anyone who takes anything out of this book or adds anything to it, because this is God’s will.

Well, considering what we talked about earlier about every version of each of these books being different from the last. Bad news, fellas. It didn’t work.

And I want to end by talking about how this became canon. I don’t know if we’ve discussed it before on the podcast, but I’m pretty sure it was just Constantine at Nicaea, right?

Right.

We know these things weren’t even discussed at the Council of Nicaea. Athanasius of Alexandria was a very powerful bishop who spent a lot of time fighting with the Arians. Was exiled numerous times. I think like seven times or something like that. Was exiled. But Athanasius was a big fan of the Book of Revelation , and he used it not to condemn Rome and to condemn non-Christians, but to condemn Christians to say the main message is: we need to suss out the bad Christians and we need to get rid of them. And so this was a very important book for his structuring of power. He wanted everyone to be under the authority of the Church. Was not a fan of the monasteries at the time. Monasteries were independent from the institutional church. It was a bunch of dudes going out and living in the desert and reading their gnostic literature and probably smoking stuff, we don’t know.

But they were happy to just do their chanting and do their reading. And Athanasius tried to get them under the authority of the Church and they weren’t having it. And then one of the things that he did to take over the monasteries was he wrote after a very famous monk who was very famous for opposing the institutional church, died. Athanasius wrote a hagiography of this monk talking about how much he loved the institutional church.

Just wrote the unauthorized biography and basically.

Appropriated his voice to then declare that monasteries should be faithful to the institutional church. And somehow this worked. Monasteries came under the umbrella of the Church, but he was the one who included the book of Revelation in his canon. From his festal letter from the year 367, I believe, CE, he outlined his canon, and for the first time ever, we see the Book of Revelation actually endorsed as a part of the canon. And that’s what would go on to become authoritative.

You’re telling me that an authoritarian was really fond of a book that was like basically a revenge fantasy?

Yep. Yeah. That’s how it.

Shocking.

Who could have seen it coming until now?

Nobody. But now. Now you blow the doors off it. Yeah. The people need to know. Why is nobody talking about this?

Oh, my God. Well, there you go, Revelation, folks. That’s. It’s a hell of a book. Hades. It’s one Hades of.

Hades of a book. At least until it gets thrown in the lake of fire.

That’s right. Oh man. Good stuff. Well, friends, if you’d like to hear us talk a little bit more about this and whatever else we want to get to, you can become a patron at, at the ten dollar level and you’ll get the after party stuff. Otherwise you can become a patron just to help out with the show. That’s patreon.com/dataoverdogma if you want to reach us, you can do so contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and other than that, we’ll see you again next week.

Bye everybody.

Revealing Revelation

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology