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

CHAPTER ONE John's Revelation: Challenging the Evil Empire, Rome

John says, he sees standing under the altar "the souls of those who had been slaughtered for their witness to God" crying out in a loud voice: "'Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?'"12

we begin to understand what he wrote only when we see that his book is wartime literature. John probably began to write around 90 C.E., having likely fled from a war that had ravaged Judea, his homeland.24 John may actually have witnessed the outbreak of war in Jerusalem in 66 C.E.

John was not a traditional Jew, since he had joined the radical sect devoted to Jesus of Nazareth. Although later Christian tradition identified him as John of Zebedee, one of Jesus' disciples, John of Patmos belonged to the second generation of Jesus' followers, who had heard what the early disciples reported Jesus secretly telling them: that he himself was God's messiah, the chosen future king of Israel.

John, persuaded by their preaching, was one of those in the next generation who insisted that Jesus was still God's appointed future king of Israel—and, indeed, of the whole world. They claimed that God had brought him back to life and that soon Jesus would return from heaven to earth and vanquish his enemies as God's chosen ruler of the universe—"King of kings, and Lord of lords."

Jesus repeatedly warned that Judgment Day—and God's kingdom—would come within one generation: "There are some standing here who will not die until they see the kingdom of God having come with power. ... I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place."

in 70 C.E., Roman armies stormed Jerusalem, burned down the temple, and reduced the city center to charred rubble. When this happened, John and others loyal to Jesus were both horrified and excited, for this must mean that everything else he had prophesied would now happen. Jesus had warned that "wars and rumor of wars" would be "only the beginning of the birth pangs [of the messiah]" and told them to expect persecution, saying that "in those days there will be such suffering as has not been from the beginning of the creation until now, no, and never will be."33 But Jesus had added that, after these catastrophic events, his followers would see "the son of man coming in the clouds, with great power and glory," to establish God's kingdom:

But by the time John began to write his Revelation, nearly thirty more years had passed. Now two generations had come and gone—and John, along with Jesus' other followers, must have wondered how the prophecy had failed. For when John traveled through Asia Minor, he could see evidence everywhere that the kingdom that actually had "come with power" was not God's—it was Rome's.

What might have angered this provincial Jewish prophet even more than the degrading picture of captive nations like his own would be to see Roman triumphs displayed not simply as imperial propaganda but as religious devotion

The distinction between religion and politics would have made no sense to them—or, for that matter, to most of their contemporaries. 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.

submission to Roman rule not as defeat but as submission to the will of the gods.

Octavian's victory caused an enormous crisis for Antony's allies, who now had to deal with their enemy as their ruler, one who had mercilessly killed those who opposed him in Rome. When the Roman Senate voted him the honorific title Augustus ("revered one" or "majestic one"), the Asian leaders who had sworn loyalty to Mark Antony now demonstrated their loyalty by offering the new emperor unprecedented honors.

building the most spectacular temple in the entire city to honor as divi ("divine") the very rulers who had devastated Jerusalem and destroyed the Great Temple of God.

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.

Nearly three thousand years ago, Israel's poets and storytellers, familiar with such ancient stories, began to tell how Israel's God, like Marduk, fought against a many-headed dragon, a sea monster whom they called by such names as Leviathan and Rahab. Some said that only after crushing and killing such monsters could God, like Marduk, establish the world and deliver it from the powers of chaos.

While the Babylonian story pictures the great sea monster as a female, the "mother of all monsters" and of all gods, Hebrew storytellers often speak of Leviathan as male. Others suggest that when God created these sea monsters on the fifth day of creation, he made them, like all the other animals, in pairs: Leviathan, a female monster from the sea, and Behemoth, a male monster from the land—apparently a version of the story that John of Patmos adapted to tell, in his Revelation, how the dragon's two allies emerged, first the "beast from the sea" and then the "beast from the land."

While we think of dragons as creatures of folktales and children's stories, Israel's writers conjured them as images of the forces of disintegration and death that lurk in the background of our world and threaten its stability.66

Isaiah revises the ancient story to suggest that "in the beginning," when God fought the primordial dragon, he failed to actually kill it. Thus Israel's prophets began to project God's battle with Leviathan from the beginning of time to its end, anticipating that, as Isaiah says, "on that day"—the great day at the end of time—finally God will "kill the dragon that is in the sea"

Since Isaiah, like other prophets, sees the forces of evil embodied in foreign oppressors, he clings to the hope that God will send a messiah—a king divinely chosen to lead his people to victory. But in his own time, the prophet envisions God's beloved, Israel, as a pregnant woman, crying out in anguish before she gives birth to the promised messiah:

John of Patmos was immersed in the prophetic writings, and here he draws upon their images of Israel as a woman and "the nations" as monsters who threaten her, picturing Rome as Isaiah and Ezekiel had envisioned Israel's enemies six hundred years earlier. John reshapes Isaiah's vision of Israel as a woman laboring in childbirth to make it the central drama of his prophecy75

John's Book of Revelation, then, vividly evokes the horror of the Jewish war against Rome.

his vision of a great mountain exploding86 reflects the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 C.E. The dragon's seven heads suggest the emperors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, as "the number of the beast" may allude to the hidden name of Nero.

John also wants to do more than tell what happens; he wants to show what such events mean. He wants to speak to the urgent question that people have asked throughout human history, wherever they first imagined divine justice: how long will evil prevail, and when will justice be done?

CHAPTER TWO Visions of Heaven and Hell: From Ezekiel and John of Patmos to Paul

So even before telling his visions of the end, when the most powerful rulers on earth shall fall from the heights and those now oppressed shall reign victorious with Christ, he opens his Revelation with seven letters meant to transform the way Jesus' followers see themselves right now.

John knew that he was competing with other prophets, and was angry that some of his hearers were also listening to them and heeding their messages. John says that "the son of man" ordered him to denounce these lying prophets and warn their followers that he is coming soon to punish—even kill—those who listen to "that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet"5 and to the man he calls Balaam—John's contemptuous names for the two competitors whose messages clash with his own.

Paul himself said simply that "God revealed his son in me"18 and sent him as his apostle to the Gentiles,

"I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I have preached is not of human origin, for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ."19

Paul says that in Paradise he had "heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat."25 While claiming that he has to keep them secret, Paul insists that these "visions and revelations" prove that his message is true, sent from God.

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.

John stood on the cusp of an enormous change—one that eventually would transform the entire movement from a Jewish messianic sect into "Christianity,"

Minor—he took his stand as a Jewish prophet charged to keep God's people holy, unpolluted by Roman culture. So, John says, Jesus twice warns his followers in Asia Minor to beware of "blasphemers" among them, who "say they are Jews, and are not,"35 and so have not traditionally belonged among God's people:

John opposed not only Rome's political and military power but also her cultural influence.

John was worried about contamination, especially since he knew that many Jews tolerated much more compromise than he did.

Are we to take these charges literally—that rival prophets among Jesus' followers actually were "seducing [Jesus'] servants to practice fornication" and encouraging them to eat food sacrificed to idols? Here John borrows the sexual metaphor for idolatry that prophets like Hosea and Jeremiah used when they scolded their people for "committing adultery" against the Lord, whom they call Israel's "true husband."45

But John also knew that these two issues—eating and sexual activity—aroused conflict whenever Jews discussed whether, or how much, to assimilate.

strictly observant Jews regarded such meat as polluted;

Because John wants Jesus' followers to be holy, like the Israel he idealizes, he praises those who scrupulously observe the commandments and reveres those who shun sexual contact

practicing sexual abstinence to keep themselves pure, as soldiers in ancient Israel did to prepare for holy war.

John apparently wants God's "holy ones" to boycott economic contact with Rome altogether,

When John of Patmos speaks of holy war, however, rather than urging God's "holy ones" to prepare for actual combat, he pictures Jesus as a warrior king storming down from heaven, leading armies of angels, thus suggesting that God needs no human army. When John says that Jesus urges his "holy ones" to conquer, he apparently expects them to "conquer" as he says Jesus did—by bearing witness to God "unto death." And while they await this final battle, John urges them to remain holy—sexually, socially, and religiously.

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

Those whom John says Jesus "hates" look very much like Gentile followers of Jesus converted through Paul's teaching.

The prophets John derisively calls by the biblical names of despised Gentile outsiders—Balaam and Jezebel—are likely to be Gentile converts to Paul's teaching.

When forced to defend himself and his message, then, Paul does what other prophets and visionaries did: appeal to a higher authority that he said came to him "by revelation"—although not everyone accepted his claim.

As John saw it, Paul's converts were not like the Gentiles whom Jews had called "those who show reverence for God" and who had long sought to join with them to worship their God. Those old-fashioned Gentiles had known their place, keeping a respectful distance from those born Jews, since they realized that gaining full access to the Jewish community would require them to change their whole way of life. Men would have had to undergo surgery to become circumcised; both men and women would have had to adopt sexual, social, and dietary practices that would separate them from their former families and friends before they could qualify to join God's holy people.

By contrast, some of Paul's converts were saying that, having been "baptized into Jesus Christ,"71 they were as good as those born Jews—maybe even better.

John not only sees himself as a Jew but regards being Jewish as an honor that those who fail to observe God's covenant—especially non-Jews—do not deserve. For if John knows the term "Christian," he never mentions it, much less applies it to himself.

Since Roman rulers already regarded Jews as "atheists" so far as their gods were concerned, for the most part they followed the policy of treating Jews as legally tolerated "atheists."

when Jesus' followers aroused popular hostility and came to the magistrates' attention, they were Gentile converts.

Much of what Paul wrote, in fact, could be read—and has been read ever since—to mean that God disinherited the Jewish people in favor of Gentile believers, whom Paul calls the "spiritual Israel," by contrast with those whom he calls "my kindred according to the flesh, who are Israelites,"85 who belong "to Israel according to the flesh."

By the time John of Patmos traveled to Asia Minor, then, he found many followers of Paul who apparently assumed that even groups consisting largely of Gentile converts had now, in effect, become Israel.

The first person we know who aggressively called himself "a Christian" to distinguish himself from Jews was the Syrian convert Ignatius of Antioch.

The differences between John's groups and Ignatius', then, also involved power struggles. Had anyone asked both John and Ignatius who should lead Jesus' followers? Both, no doubt, would have said the same thing: Jesus Christ himself. But since both lived two to three generations after Jesus' death, when pressed to say who should succeed Jesus as leader now, each would have answered differently. John, who envisioned Jesus' followers as outposts of Israel, believed that these groups, like Israel, while divinely guided by angels, should humanly be led by prophets like himself. Ignatius, on the other hand, adopted what Paul taught: that God had appointed as leaders "apostles first, prophets second."94 Ignatius believed, too, that the apostles, in turn, had designated "bishops" ("supervisors" in Greek) and "priests" ("elders" in Greek).95

Unlike John, who saw himself as a prophet, Ignatius identified himself as a "supervisor," or bishop, nothing less than "the bishop of Syria," as if he were the sole rightful leader of all Christians in Syria.

Ignatius was the first, so far as we know, to actively promote—and represent—this new system of leadership. Writing to Jesus' followers in Asia Minor, Ignatius insisted that every real "church" must have a bishop, as well as priests and deacons: "without these, nothing can be called a church!"96

Instead of challenging prophetic authority when visiting Philadelphia, Ignatius apparently decided to claim it himself

what Ignatius says God impelled him to shout was not what his hearers expected but what he preached all the time: "Pay attention to the bishop, the priests, and the deacons!"

I did not learn this from any human source. It was the spirit that kept on speaking in these words. ... Do nothing apart from the bishop ... prize unity; avoid schism; imitate Jesus Christ.101

when Ignatius later writes to believers in Philadelphia, he rejects what John and the gospel writers take for granted—that what validates faith in Jesus are "the Scriptures" of the Hebrew Bible, especially its prophecies.

On the contrary, Ignatius declares, the primary sources are not the Hebrew Scriptures but what he finds in Paul's letters: "for me, the primary sources are [Christ's] cross, his resurrection, and the faith that comes through him."105

Yet declaring that his own faith is founded upon "[Christ's] cross, his resurrection, and the faith that comes through him," Ignatius demands a radical break with the Jewish past: "If anyone interprets Judaism to you, do not listen to him." What matters now, he declares, is Christianity, not Judaism.107

Besides adopting the term "Christian," he was the first among Jesus' followers, so far as we know, to claim this name for himself and to use the term "Christianity." He may have even coined this word,

Although Ignatius claims to belong to the new "Israel," he does not claim to be a Jew. In fact, his writings played a key role in reversing how Christians thought about Jewish tradition. Unlike Christians who validated their "gospels" through testimonies from the Hebrew Scriptures, Ignatius accuses those who "introduce Judaism" of heresy! Yet while repudiating "Judaism," this Syrian convert was so convinced that he and other "Christians" had taken on Israel's identity that he urged his fellow believers to avoid offending "the Gentiles," as if he actually were Jewish himself.

CHAPTER THREE Other Revelations: Heresy or Illumination?

Like John of Patmos' Revelation, these other "revelations," written several generations after Jesus' death, were not the work of the original disciples. Instead, followers of Jesus who chose to remain anonymous wrote many of them under the names of disciples—not to deceive their readers but to show that they were writing "in the spirit" of those whose names they borrowed.

Revelation of Ezra

Speaking as Ezra, Salathiel cries out to God, asking how he could allow the Romans to destroy his own people: You delivered the city into the hands of your enemies. Then I said in my heart, Are those who live in Babylon any better? ... I have seen countless evil deeds ... during these thirty years, and my heart failed me, for I have seen how you tolerate those who sin, and have spared those who do evil, and have destroyed your own people ... and have not shown to anyone how your way may be understood ... what nation has kept your commandments so well [as Israel]?10

God sent the angel Uriel, who "answered and said to me, 'Your understanding has failed completely regarding this world; do you think that you can comprehend the way of the Most High?"

I beseech you, my lord, why have I been endowed with the power of understanding? For I did not want to ask about heavenly things, but about those things which we experience every day ... why the people you loved have been given to godless tribes ... and why we pass from the world like insects, and our life is like a mist?15

when the angel reproaches him for daring to ask whether God loves human beings, Ezra speaks for everyone who has experienced heartbreak: I spoke [that way] because of my grief ... every hour I suffer agonies of heart, while I strive to understand the way of the Most High.... For it would have been better for the dust not to have been born, so that the mind might not have been made from it. But now the mind grows with us, and therefore we are tormented, because we die, and we are conscious of it.21

Like John of Patmos, Ezra says that he began writing his revelation in anguish, since the horrors he had witnessed during the war with Rome had shattered his faith.

Thus Ezra, like John, expresses anger over Israel's destruction and longs for God to set things right as he looks forward to the day when God's messiah casts Israel's oppressors into a fiery pit, raises the righteous back to life, and reigns in the new Jerusalem.

when I had drunk it, my heart poured forth understanding, and wisdom increased in my breast, and my spirit retained its memory; and my mouth was opened.26

Seeing the spirit as divine intoxication, Ezra says that inspired words now poured forth from him, so that "during forty days, ninety-four books were written." The first twenty-four, he says, turned out to be the traditional twenty-four books of the Hebrew Scriptures, which the Lord told him to publish for everyone to read. But Ezra says that he was told to keep secret the seventy books that followed and show them to no one but "the wise," for "in them are the springs of understanding, the fountains of wisdom, and the river of knowledge."27

many Christians during those early centuries had heard not only of Jesus' public teaching from books like the gospels of Matthew and Luke but also of a wide range of secret gospels and revelations,

Secret Revelation of John

the Jesus who appears in the Secret Revelation reveals not only future events but "what is visible and invisible"—what is already, and always, present.

draws upon esoteric—or, as some would say, mystical—Jewish tradition.

although God's transcendent being, characterized as masculine ("primordial Father"), is beyond human comprehension, what we can know of God is a genuine, but lesser, form of divine being, often characterized in feminine form, here called by various names—Protennoia (a Greek term that could be translated as "primordial consciousness"), Mother, even Mother-Father or Holy Spirit. 31

The Secret Revelation concludes as Jesus says to John, "I have told you all these things so that you might write them down, and give them secretly to your kindred spirits, for this is the mystery of those who become spiritually stable."34

the Book of Acts says that after Jesus died, he appeared to his disciples in resurrected form and continued to speak with them for forty days, but that then he ascended bodily into heaven:

Traditionally, Christians have taken this to mean that after that time, those seeking access to Jesus could find it only indirectly, through "apostolic tradition," as they called the oral and written accounts that the apostles were said to have handed down for the benefit of those born too late to ever speak directly with Jesus.

Note: So, why are some visions, like those of Paul or John of Patmos, accepted as genuine, and others, like most of the apocryphal texts or Marcion or Valentinian, rejected? The gates of ijtihad are closed for Christians as well as Muslims. Edit

the Secret Revelation of James invites—and encourages—its hearers to seek ongoing revelation, then shows Jesus teaching them how to do so.

Jesus promises that when they actually understand what these parables mean, they will see that the kingdom of God is not just an event coming at the end-time but a reality into which one may enter here and now. But Jesus says that whoever wants to understand this must come to know God experientially, through an inner, intuitive kind of knowing : "unless you receive this through gnosis, you will not be able to find [the kingdom]." Next Jesus offers paradoxical teaching, urging Peter and James not only to follow him but even to "become better than I; make yourselves like the son of the Holy Spirit!"39

Irenaeus also seems to have read the Secret Revelation of John, or similar "secret writings," since he briefly describes its content. He sharply warns his congregations to reject the unspeakable number of apocryphal and illegitimate writings, which [the heretics] themselves have forged, to confuse the minds of foolish people who are ignorant of the true Scriptures.47

The Gospel of Truth, also found at Nag Hammadi, has a wider scope: it tells how all beings, alienated from God, suffer anguish and terror as they search "for the One from whom they came forth"49 and ends as those who receive the true gospel are resting in God, no longer searching for truth, since "they themselves are the truth ... and the Father is within them, and they are in the Father ... set at rest, refreshed in the spirit."50

Although we do not know for sure who collected the "revelations" found at Nag Hammadi, many scholars think they were Christian monks who appreciated a wide range of disparate sources, perhaps including such non-Christian writings as the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth.

Youel then begins to show him the structure of divine reality and promises that despite the difficult path ahead, "if you completely devote yourself to seeking, you shall know the good that is in you, and then ... you shall know yourself as one who comes from the God who truly exists."56

Thunder, Perfect Mind (more literally translated "Thunder, Complete Mind"61

where John of Patmos sees only opposites—Christ against Satan, the saved and the damned, holiness and filth, the virgin bride and the whore of Babylon—this revelation sees opposites in dynamic interaction and so claims to speak for the "complete mind."

the poem called Thunder, Perfect Mind, which contemporary American authors from Toni Morrison to Leslie Marmon Silko have woven into their writing, speaks as if the divine presence were everywhere—worshipped

While John of Patmos acknowledges no feminine power within the divine, many of the "revelations" found at Nag Hammadi, from the Secret Revelation of John to Allogenes and Thunder, Perfect Mind, give voice to feminine manifestations of God.

What are we to make of this outpouring of books of revelation—Jewish, Christian, pagan—during those early centuries? And why was John of Patmos' very different book the only "book of revelation" included in the New Testament?

Note: Is this really the central question of the book? Edit

Some scholars who study the Nag Hammadi texts have said that such writings deserved to be excluded, because they appeal to a spiritual elite.

these secret writings tend to prescribe arduous prayer, study, and spiritual discipline, like Jewish mystical texts and esoteric Buddhist teachings, for those engaged in spiritual quest.

many do differ markedly from John's also in the way they envision the relationship between humankind and God. Most Jews, Christians, and Muslims avoid characterizing their relationship with God as do the initiates in Allogenes and the "Discourse," who seek to discover themselves within the divine.

since such writings are directed toward people willing to devote themselves to spiritual practice and seek direct contact with God, they tend to bypass any need for "clergy."

Note: I.e., it's all political Edit

Orthodox theologians insisted that the rest of humankind, apart from him, are only transitory creatures, lost in sin—a view that would support what would become their dominant teaching about salvation, offered only through Christ, and, in particular, through the church they claimed to represent.

CHAPTER FOUR Confronting Persecution: How Jews and Christians Separated Politics from Religion

Seventy years after John wrote Revelation, his visions of terror and hope inspired a revival movement called the New Prophecy—an

the late 160s, when a Christian named Montanus began speaking "in the spirit" near Philadelphia,

a woman follower of Montanus named Quintilla received a vision of Christ descending to her—this time in the form of a woman—to reveal that the "new Jerusalem" John had foreseen was about to descend, spelling Rome's downfall.

Everywhere Montanus traveled with the two women prophets who initiated the revival with him, Priscilla and Maximilla, they aroused enthusiastic supporters—and hostile opponents.

Those who accused the "new prophets" of being inspired by Satan also attacked John's now famous—or infamous—Book of Revelation, saying that what it "revealed" was nothing but the mad ravings of a heretic.

A movement that they had regarded as a marginal nuisance was becoming a cause for serious concern as groups now organized and headed by bishops attracted many new converts, especially among the urban poor.

When the movement began, Montanus, Priscilla, and Maximilla, called the Three, had traveled from church to church in Asia Minor, echoing John of Patmos' words as they proclaimed that the Holy Spirit had come upon them to renew devotion to Christ

The boldness—and, no doubt, the success—of their preaching inflamed their opponents, who called them demon-possessed and accused them of disrupting worship as they prophesied in ecstatic trance,

Heated arguments split churches throughout Asia Minor, threatening schism. A majority of bishops there voted to censor the "new prophets" and declared that their two favorite books—the Book of Revelation and the Gospel of John—contained nothing but blasphemous lies.

Gaius insisted that the "age of prophecy" was over, having been succeeded by the "age of the apostles," now represented by clergy like himself.

In Rome, the convert Justin, called the Philosopher, seized on the Book of Revelation during a debate with the Jewish philosopher Trypho as proof that "the gifts of prophecy, which previously resided among your people, have now been transferred to us"12—that is, to Christians.

What made the Book of Revelation especially compelling to Justin were events he was seeing before his own eyes around the years 160 to 165—events that he believed John had prophesied. Justin declared that John, like Jesus, had "predicted that we would be slaughtered and hated for the sake of his name ... and this has actually happened."14

In a world in which patriotism, family piety, and religious devotion were inseparable, Justin boldly tried to drive a wedge between what we call politics and religion—and so to create the possibility of a secular relationship to government.

Christians stop short of offering religious devotion to the gods,

there was some precedent for what he was asking, especially since the emperor Augustus, around 6 C.E.,20 had allowed Jews to demonstrate loyalty to Rome in ways that did not directly violate their ancestral customs.

an empire in which politics and religion seemed inextricably intertwined, then, some Jews found ways to untwist these strands and open the way for what later generations would call separation of church and state.

Gentile converts like Justin might have aroused even more suspicion than Jews, since they had no ancestral tradition to blame for refusing to offer the ordinary tokens of loyalty to Rome.

as persecution intensified, Irenaeus, like Justin, believed that he was seeing John's prophecies of the end fulfilled before his eyes.

in 177, Irenaeus saw riots break out even in Gaul as believers were hounded and beaten and others arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and strangled, while, some said, more than forty "confessors," many of them known to him, were tortured and killed

he declared, "the prophetic spirit" speaks through the Book of Revelation, and also through the Gospel of John. Those who reject these inspired books, he wrote, "disregard the gift of the spirit, which in these last days has been poured out upon the human race," and also will have to reject the apostle Paul, "since he speaks explicitly about prophetic gifts and recognizes both men and women prophesying."27 Like Justin, Irenaeus endorsed the view that "John, the Lord's disciple" wrote both the Book of Revelation and the Gospel of John.

identifying John of Patmos with Jesus' disciple helped domesticate this controversial prophet by drawing him into the circle of "the Twelve" and thus into ecclesiastically sanctioned authority.

Irenaeus suggests that the increased intensity of persecution not only proves that John of Patmos' prophecies are true but also shows clear continuity between his prophecies and those of Daniel and Jesus.

By linking John's visions of "the beast" and the "false prophet" with Antichrist, Irenaeus introduced an interpretation that, from his time to our own, has proved enormously influential. For although many readers, like Irenaeus, claim to find "the Antichrist"—that is, a false, deceptive messiah—in the Book of Revelation, this figure is never mentioned there.

By linking "the beast" with "Antichrist"—namely, that "the beast" who embodies alien ruling powers is also inextricably linked with false belief, and false belief, in turn, with moral depravity—Irenaeus makes a crucial interpretation of John's prophecies. Irenaeus wants to show that God's judgment demands not only right action but also right belief.

25:31ff)—Irenaeus insists that moral action and right belief are inseparable. He argues that only those who accept "true doctrine" actually do act morally;

Because Irenaeus believes that in the persecutions he can see "the beast" at work, he finds John's visions of the end-time powerfully compelling. Like Justin, he also claims that "the beast" works not only through outsiders who persecute Christians but also through Christian insiders, the "false brethren" whom he calls heretics.

Insisting that moral depravity is inseparably linked to false belief, Irenaeus ends his book by solemnly pronouncing God's judgment against Christians who secretly follow Satan, those internal enemies he calls heretics

While Justin and Irenaeus experienced the decades between 160 and 180 C.E. as the onslaught of the beast's persecution, many of their contemporaries saw these same years as the empire's golden age, when the "philosopher emperor," Marcus Aurelius, ruled Rome. Yet although Marcus was famous for integrity and fairness, he had no tolerance for Christians.

By the time Marcus Aurelius became emperor in 161, he and his advisers had begun to take Christians seriously as a threat.

Stories like this led Galen, Marcus' personal physician, to grudgingly admire the courage he had seen some of them show, although he thought they were fools to believe in miracles and dead people raised. Marcus himself, less forgiving of those accused of atheism and disloyalty to Rome, noted in his private journal that what some admired as courage was nothing but theatrical bravado.

When increasing pressure and more frequent arrests failed to stop the movement from growing, another member of Marcus' circle, the Platonic philosopher Celsus, wrote a serious critique to expose it.41

Celsus wrote that what alarmed him most was the sense of a hostile, breakaway faction forming—and growing dangerously—within the empire. Since Celsus devoutly worshipped the gods and supported the emperors, he despised Christians for aiming their message at disaffected and marginal people, appealing primarily to slaves, gullible women and children, pickpockets, thieves, and prostitutes.

if everyone were to adopt the Christians' attitude, there would be no rule of law; legitimate authority would be abandoned.45

Tertullian marveled at God's power made visible to thousands of spectators in Carthage on an unforgettable spring day, March 7, 203, when the twenty-two-year-old convert Perpetua walked steadily, with focused gaze, into the amphitheater to die for refusing to sacrifice to Rome and her gods.47

Shortly after these executions, Tertullian himself joined the New Prophecy movement, inspired by John's Revelation, which had given courage to Perpetua and her companions throughout their ordeal. Tertullian, like Justin and Irenaeus, championed the writings that these martyrs especially loved—the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation.

But after defiantly adding that Christians pay taxes only because Jesus told them to do so52 and that they subject themselves to "the powers that be" because Jesus' apostle Paul had told them that "all powers that exist are ordained by God for your good,"53 Tertullian, like Justin, turns to threats.

Thus Apuleius' story answers the question with which his quest, like those of many seekers, had begun: what kinds of revelation are false, and which are genuine? His account suggests that the truest wisdom is offered by the priests of Isis, who plumb the depths of ancient Egyptian lore.

Justin had explained that Christian baptism offers "illumination" to the initiate who offers the requisite prayers, takes a purifying bath, and so is "born again," like those initiated into the mysteries of Isis or Mithra.64 Furthermore, Justin praised Jesus much as Apuleius praised Isis—as the divine Word (logos) who sends divine illumination to everyone on earth who has ever received it, from Moses to Plato.

Ambitious and gifted men coming from the provinces, like Apuleius himself, instinctively recognized that the empire's cosmopolitanism demanded conformity to its shared values. So although he could embrace almost any kind of religious devotion, he despised foreign cults whose practices violated Roman sensibilities—the

Apuleius, like Celsus, despised Christians for pitching their message to the dregs of the empire.

When Apuleius devoted himself to Isis and saw all divinity encompassed by her, he embraced a universal vision, one that allowed—even encouraged—him to continue to respect and pay homage to the entire pagan pantheon,

Christian baptism, along with indoctrination into Jewish traditions about God, cut off the initiate from such universal worship. On the contrary, Christian initiation alienated everyone who received it from Rome and her gods

Everyone instinctively seeks God, he says, but finds divine revelation not, as Plato says, through the intellect but through intuition, which is available to everyone. When it comes to knowing God, Tertullian tells his audience, being illiterate may be an advantage:

Expecting his hearer to agree that educated people are often fools, Tertullian encourages him to "have faith in your soul; thus you will believe in yourself."68

Tertullian mocks those who offer sacrifice and pray that the gods will protect them, for, he says, "as you yourselves secretly know," the gods are nothing but dead men whom later generations imagine as heroes. Consequently, Roman religion is nothing but a flimsy fabric of lies.71

From this Tertullian concludes that Roman law, which claims divine sanction, is merely an arbitrary invention: "Your law is not right; it is only a human construct

Tertullian urges them to admit that instead of loving and trusting the emperor, they fear him and resent his power.

Declaring himself a citizen of that "heavenly country," Tertullian claims that John's vision stands as a judgment against the demonic empire now ruling the world and gives him courage to stand as a free man on earth.

Tertullian demands from Roman magistrates something unprecedented—something for which he might have been the first to conceive the idea that American revolutionaries, more than fifteen centuries later, would incorporate into their new social and political system: freedom of religion,

"It is a fundamental human right, a power bestowed by nature, that each person should worship according to his own convictions, free from compulsion."76

CHAPTER FIVE Constantine's Conversion: How John's Revelation Became Part of the Bible

On February 23, 303, the emperor Diocletian ordered his soldiers to destroy churches, confiscate and burn their sacred books, and strip anyone who resisted of civil rights, status, and police protection. This edict was enforced throughout much of the empire but most seriously in Egypt,

between 303 and 310, Christians in Alexandria reported that 660 of their own were killed in that city alone.

The Egyptian bishop Athanasius was the first, so far as we know, to place the Book of Revelation in his version of the New Testament canon, when he saw how to use it as a weapon—not against Rome and its rulers but against other Christians whom he called heretics.

Now Constantine openly preferred Christians when making official appointments and began to treat bishops virtually as his agents,

After the year 312, when Constantine first declared his preference for Christianity, he had chosen to become the patron of those Christians who called themselves catholic (from the Greek for "universal"). Within a few years he had adopted their practice of calling all other Christian groups, along with their clergy, heretics—that is, in effect, sectarians—who, he now declared, had no legal right to meet for worship, even in private homes, much less to own churches. In 324 he "legislated an end to all heretical sects"10 and ordered that their property be confiscated

Some say the trouble began when Alexander, the Catholic bishop of Alexandria, publicly challenged what Arius, a popular Libyan priest in his diocese, preached about Jesus,

Christians who agreed to accept the Nicene Creed were entitled to share in the special exemptions and legal privileges awarded to Catholic Christians, while those who questioned or rejected it outright could be cut off and excluded—not only from earthly advantages but also from eternal ones, since many agreed with what Bishop Irenaeus had declared two centuries earlier: that "outside the church there is no salvation."

Having gained this support from the emperor and the council, Alexander effectively won the right to supervise not only the churches in Alexandria but those in all of Egypt.

while a council of more than fifty bishops gathered to choose his successor, seven others met separately and ordained Athanasius, the former bishop's young secretary, as the new head bishop. This outcome was intensely disputed.19 Those opposed to Athanasius objected that he was not even a priest and, at age twenty-eight, below the minimum age requirement for a bishop; furthermore, some charged that he had engineered his own ordination.20

the emperor effectively ratified Athanasius' election

besides schismatic priests and bishops, Athanasius also confronted thousands of Christians in Egypt, many in the monastic movement, who had remained independent of his ecclesiastical hierarchy

During his long struggle to accomplish this, Athanasius found an unlikely ally in John of Patmos—especially as Irenaeus had read him.

Athanasius campaigned tirelessly against Christians who questioned or qualified the phrases in the Nicene Creed, calling them Arians, to imply that they were not real Christians but only schismatic followers of the exiled priest Arius.

the bishops sided with Arius and his supporters and voted to depose Athanasius. Constantius ordered Athanasius to vacate his office and go into exile.

Athanasius declared that his opponents, of whatever party, were not Christians at all but "the devil's people,"26

as the conflict intensified, Athanasius increasingly interpreted the whore of Babylon, who drinks human blood, no longer as Rome but rather as heresy personified.

During this controversy, Athanasius raised a basic question: how could an emperor validate a bishop?31 Ignoring his own early appeal for Constantine's support for his election, he asked rhetorically: when did Christian churches ever recognize a magistrate's order?

Athanasius dared accuse the emperor Constantius not only of clearing the way for Antichrist but of having become Antichrist himself:

When living in an empire ruled by a Christian who supported his Arian opponents, then, Athanasius interpreted John's Book of Revelation as condemning all "heretics," and then made this book the capstone of the New Testament canon, where it has remained ever since. At the same time, he ordered Christians to stop reading any other "books of revelation," which he branded heretical and sought to destroy—with almost complete success.

Athanasius realized that in order to unite all Christians in Egypt under his leadership, he would have to take on the monasteries, and this would not be easy. Many of these monasteries had sprung up throughout Egypt independent of any centralized church authority; some monks, too, looked to monastery leaders and spiritual teachers, not bishops, for direction.36

as he admired stories of courageous hermits, Pachomius hesitated to follow their example. Hadn't Jesus urged his followers to "love one another"? And couldn't one build an actual society on that principle?

divine revelation telling him to build a communal house that he hoped would become an outpost of heaven on earth. Claiming his vision's guidance, he urged others seeking God not to live simply as "solitaries" but as members of a spiritual community.

New recruits who arrived knowing how to read and write worked in a room set aside as a library. Some copied Coptic manuscripts of the Scriptures and other writings, while those who knew Greek translated sacred writings from Greek into Coptic to be read to the whole community.

a newcomer seated among his monastic "brothers" might hear sacred readings from the Scriptures and, since no New Testament canon had yet been codified, also from books that Athanasius would condemn as "heretical."41

recent research suggests, however, that early in the fourth century, before Athanasius' campaign to reform the monasteries had succeeded in making them conform their teaching to orthodox doctrine, many monks might have seen these diverse writings pointing in the same direction as the great pioneers of their own monastic tradition.

Because what matters most is receiving the Holy Spirit's guidance and coming to know oneself, Anthony offers no doctrines that he requires believers to learn, and no beliefs that he demands they accept. Instead, as the scholar Samuel Rubenson says, since "the chief criterion is experience," Anthony "invites and implores the reader to discover and understand himself."70

"what counts is not intellectual capacity ... but a state of mind characterized by insight and true perception."71

As monks set out to build new houses in territory that bishops and priests claimed as their own dioceses, they often clashed with the Catholic clergy.

Because Pachomius usually initiated new building projects by saying that a divine voice or an angel had told him to do so, clergy who opposed his expansionist moves accused him of receiving "revelations" from Satan, not God.

Instead he effectively coopted the most famous of them—Anthony—by writing an admiring biography picturing Anthony as his own greatest supporter. Since Anthony had died, Athanasius had a somewhat free hand, and his biography turned Anthony into a model monk—a model, that is, of what the bishop wanted monks to be.

although in his letters Anthony never mentions bishops, clergy, or church rules, Athanasius pictures him instead as a humble monk who willingly subordinates himself to the clergy and "the canon of the church."

When Pachomius died of plague in 346, plunging the federation into a leadership crisis, Athanasius intervened.

Theodore, widely regarded as more pragmatic, had maintained frequent contact with the bishop. When Theodore finally took charge as leader of the federation, he formalized connections between the monastic federation and the church hierarchy,

in 367, when Athanasius wrote a famous Easter letter telling Christians what henceforth they could hear, teach, and discuss—and what to censor—Theodore

Athanasius first denounced "spiritual teachers," especially those respected for their education. Then, declaring original human thinking to be evil, he ordered Christians to reject all "illegitimate secret books" as "invention[s] of heretics," full of "evil teachings they have clearly created."82

Athanasius set out a list of sacred books that, he declared, Christians could keep, a list that turned out to be the earliest known record we have of what would become—and remains to this day—the church's New Testament canon.

Athanasius intended his list not only as a canon—that is, a standard of measurement—but one that he insisted was unchangeable.

when bishops and Christian leaders among Athanasius' contemporaries composed their lists of "canonical books," all others whose lists survive left out John's Book of Revelation—and often only this book.

Eusebius acknowledges that at the time he was writing (c. 325–340), there was as yet no officially accepted list of "canonized" New Testament books. Yet Eusebius expresses so much ambivalence about the Book of Revelation that he actually places it both on the list of books he calls "universally accepted" and on the list of books he calls "illegitimate."86

because Athanasius believed that Jesus' disciple John wrote the Book of Revelation, he apparently took these words to mean that John, or even God himself, whose spirit inspired John, endorsed his canon, sealing what the bishop intended—and successfully campaigned to have become—the fixed canon of the New Testament.

Like Irenaeus, Athanasius interprets Revelation's cosmic war as a vivid picture of his own crusade against heretics and reads John's visions as sharp warnings to Christian dissidents: God is about to divide the saved from the damned—which now means dividing the "orthodox" from "heretics."93

Athanasius' reading suggests that what makes the difference between heaven and hell is whether one believes in Jesus as "essentially the same being" as God, as the Nicene Creed prescribes, or rejects the "truth necessary for salvation" and so falls into everlasting fire,

Because he has heard that "the heretics" boast "about the books they call 'apocryphal," Athanasius orders that no one is to discuss or teach, much less read, what he calls the "empty and polluted" books written and revered by people "who do not seek what benefits the church."95

A few years later, when he ordered that all the meeting places of "heretics" be confiscated and turned over to Catholic bishops, Eusebius says that he had "decided that certain people had to be eliminated from humanity like a poison," since they infect "the whole world" with "great evil." Finally, Constantine would include Jews among the horde of evildoers he felt called upon to vanquish, since he saw them as "killers of the prophets, and the murderers of the Lord."102

Athanasius came toward the end of his own long crusade and died in May 373.

Having been bishop for more than forty-five years (although he had spent seventeen of them in exile), he and his allies were able to require many monks, as well as other Christians, to accept the Nicene Creed as, indeed, the "truth necessary for salvation." He also had enormously extended the authority, resources, and prestige of the Catholic clergy, having brought many churches and monasteries under their supervision. Finally, he also had persuaded many Christians to accept his version of the canon as the only "authorized" scriptures of the New Testament.