Jesus Christ and the Emergence of the World’s Largest Religion

Thus far we have explored the religions and apocalyptic teachings of Zoroastrianism and of Judaism, and our next chapter delves into Islam. Christianity, the world’s largest religion today, is rooted in the former, while the teachings and person of Jesus remain integral to the latter. Yet Christianity departs from all three other faiths in its proclamation that Jesus Christ is God and the Messiah. As Hans Küng writes, “It is the belief in Jesus as God’s Christ which distinguishes Christians from other believers and non-believers. Alongside these two structural elements there is a third … the power of the Spirit.”¹ Küng refers, of course, to the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Christian Trinity. The Trinity is a cornerstone of the faith in which God is three entities in one essential union: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Along with the incarnation, this belief differentiates Christianity from the other ethical monotheistic religions discussed in this book—from all other major religions in the world, in fact.

“Christ” is a title derived from the Greek christos, meaning “the anointed one”—essentially a translation of the Hebrew term mashiach—and Jesus’s followers would stake their lives on the belief that he is the lord and the fulfillment of messianic prophesies in the Hebrew Bible, the savior and king, the redeemer. Israel had long conceived of a divine monarch who would rule the kingdom of heaven on Earth for eternity, one in the lineage of King David, of “the enthronement of the Davidic ruler as the birth of the son of God.”² In the Psalms (2:7–12) we read, for example:

I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto Me, Thou art My Son; this day

Ask of Me, and I shall give Thee the heathen for Thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for Thy possession.

Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.

Be wise now therefore, O ye kings; be instructed, ye judges of the earth.

Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling,

Kiss the Son, lest He be angry and we perish from the way, when His wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in Him.

So stirred were they by Jesus’s teachings and charisma that his followers identified him as the Son spoken of here by God. Following the Sermon on the Mount, “the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority” (Matthew 7:28–8:1). As Jaroslav Pelikan explains:

The identification of Jesus as prophet was a means of both affirming his continuity with the prophets of Israel and of asserting his superiority to them as the prophet whose coming they had predicted and to whose authority they had been prepared to yield. In the Pentateuch (Deut.: 18:15–22) the God of Israel tells Moses, and through him the people, that he “will raise up a prophet from among you,” to whom the people will pay heed.³

The early Christians would thus also come to identify Jesus with God—not only as the Son of God, not only as rabbi and prophet, but as God Himself, since he is divine—incarnate in human form. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was made flesh” (John 1:1). This passage from the Gospels reflects one of the most important of all Christian beliefs, that of the incarnation. Priests and kings had long been anointed with oil in Judaism, as would one day be the Messiah, hence the name given to Jesus—Christ, the anointed one.

“Christianity is a religion with a Jewish soul, a Greek mind, and a Roman body.”⁴ So taught the late, great Greek Orthodox theologian and Church historian Demetrios Constantelos. By “Jewish soul” is meant that the founder of Christianity, Jesus Christ (0 C.E.–33 C.E.),⁵ was a deeply spiritual Jew, a mystical rabbi, who was also steeped in Jewish eschatology and the belief that the End of Days was at hand. By “Greek mind” is meant the influences of Greek thought and language on the Judaism in which Jesus was imbued; scholars agree that the entirety of what Christians refer to as the New Testament was written in Greek. Furthermore, the early Church Fathers, who laid a cornerstone for Christian theology, were highly educated and well versed in Greek philosophy. By “Roman body,” finally, is meant the importance of the infrastructure of the Roman Empire to the spread of Christianity, especially beginning in the mid-fourth century, when state persecutions of members of this then-new religion ceased and it became the official religion of the empire itself. This was largely due to the realization of Constantine the Great (272–337 C.E.) that the new faith was not only to be tolerated but admired and even adopted, though this great emperor “was not even baptized until shortly before his death.”⁶

Whether or not Jesus understood himself to be the Messiah is widely debated among scholars, but it should be underscored here that “Jesus was born, lived, and died in Israel and was a Jew in every respect.”⁷ The land promised to Jews by God in the Hebrew Bible, home to their majestic temple, their axis mundi, was occupied by the Roman Empire during the life of Christ. For all the thousands of books that have been written about him, little is actually known about Jesus, and almost all of it is contained in the New Testament,⁸ whose texts were most likely written by later believers who never actually knew Jesus. So they are testimonies of faith more than historically reliable chronicles. They have been taken by most Christians across the ages as the Word of God, though, and most importantly they contain the teachings of Jesus.

Jesus was born in Bethlehem, a small city about six miles south of Jerusalem, during a time of mounting persecution for his people, a “period of disturbance and confusion which befell Judaea under the Herods.”⁹ The Herods were a dynasty (the Herodian dynasty) of Jewish men appointed by the Roman Empire to govern Judaea, or the Jewish community of the age. Herod the Great (72 B.C.E.–4 B.C.E.), “King of the Jews,” occupied this post from 34 to 4 B.C.E. “When magi (wise men) from the east came to Jerusalem looking for a child who was born ‘king of the Jews’ (Matthew 2:1–2; see also Luke 1:5), the elderly Herod the Great carefully questioned them,” as Lawrence Mykytiuk explains. Thus, King Herod “wanted to locate, identify and assassinate his new rival,” so he ordered the execution of “all the boys born in and around Bethlehem who were two years or younger,” based on information that he had received from the Zoroastrian priests, the magi, whom he had detained and interrogated.¹⁰ This event is called the Massacre of the Innocents in Christian lore, even though it “has been drenched with doubt by historians, biblical commentators, and biographers of Herod the Great.”¹¹

Fearing that Jesus, as a Jewish infant, fit the profile for elimination, his parents whisked him off to Egypt, becoming a refugee family. According to the Gospels, Jesus had been born in a manger to a Virgin mother, Mary, and her betrothed, Joseph, a carpenter. There he had been visited by the magi, who believed that this was the Messiah. These stories are central to the infancy narratives found in the Gospels (e.g., Matthew 1:2–2:23), which sometimes contradict one another on a number of points but trace Jesus’s genealogy back to King David—a condition for identifying the Messiah in Judaism.¹² However, beyond the infancy narratives, the Bible mentions nothing of Jesus’s early life until he is around twelve years old, when he astonishes the distinguished rabbis of Jerusalem with his knowledge of the Torah (Luke 2:39–52).

Around the time that he reached age thirty, Jesus was baptized in the River Jordan by a wandering preacher named John the Baptist, who had been imploring Jews to repent in preparation for the End of Time. In the Gospel of Matthew (3:4) we read that “John wore clothing made of camel’s hair and had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey.” Many were flocking to him at the river to be baptized, and Jesus did the same. One of John’s messages foretold the coming of the Messiah: “I am baptizing you with water, for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is mightier than I. I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the holy Spirit and fire” (Matthew 3: 11). When Jesus arrived from Galilee to be baptized, John hesitated, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” (Matthew 3:14). But Jesus insisted, and:

as soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:16–17).

The symbol of the dove would come to represent the Holy Spirit in Christianity. However, the dove’s action of “descending” is as important as the dove itself and has echoes in several places in the Hebrew Bible, where “the Spirit hovers (like a bird) over the righteous,” as Alexey Somov explains. “This symbolism was adopted by the pre-Gospel tradition about Jesus’ baptism to specify the manner in which the Spirit descended upon Jesus.”¹³ Those who witnessed this and heard the voice of God would be among the first Christians, the first to believe that Jesus was the Messiah. “From that time on,” as we read in the Gospel of Matthew (4:17), “Jesus began to preach and to say, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’”

With this as his core message, Jesus embarked on his world-changing ministry, one that would last for some three years before his death. During his ministry he healed the sick, performed miracles, exorcised demons, and, above all, implored all those who heard him to repent and prepare for the End of Days and the coming of the kingdom of heaven on Earth—for Judgment Day. Most rejected him, however, for Jesus’s first followers were a tiny minority of Jews, who gradually but surely became alienated from Israel. As the eminent scholar of Hebrew literature Joseph Klausner explains:

The more numerous and powerful of the Jews . . . rejected the teaching of Jesus: they rose up against it during his lifetime and, even when all the world drew nearer and nearer to Christianity, would not become Christians. Christianity was born within Israel, and Israel as a nation did not embrace it.¹⁴

And, over time, Christians would change the world like nothing else in human history ever has, a world that has not yet ended as Jesus seems to have prophesied that it would: “Assuredly I say to you, that this generation will by no means pass away until all these things take place” (Matthew 24:34). However, just two verses later Jesus proclaims that the “day and hour, knoweth no man, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.” Plenty of room is left for speculation here, thus for over two thousand years there has been great and varied deal of it in Christianity, conjecture and preaching about when the world will actually end.

Just what are “all these things that [will] take place”? Jesus’s teachings are Jewish through and through, rooted in his deep knowledge of the Hebrew Bible (there was no Talmud yet), and this informs his answers to a question that is essentially about signs of the End of Days. These signs’ purposes were perhaps best summed up by St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), one of the greatest of all Christian thinkers: “in order that the hearts of men be brought to subjection before the coming judge, and be prepared for the judgment, being forewarned.”¹⁵ In Matthew 24 (6–31) we read Jesus’s key teachings on the End of Days:

And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. . . . Therefore when you see the “abomination of desolation,” spoken of by Daniel the prophet. . . .

Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And He will send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they will gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

As these biblical passages compellingly reflect, though Jesus was an apocalyptic thinker, he was also a prophet and a messenger of love, teaching that God is love (1 John 4:8) and that we are called by God to love one another. When asked by one of his followers “which commandment was the most important of all,” Jesus responded by citing one of the most beloved of Jewish prayers (“Shema,” meaning “hear”) and a passage from the Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 9:18): “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:29–30).

Love and repentance and obedience to God. That is the meaning of life, and that is how we are to prepare for eternity during the short time that we have on Earth. And while here, how are we to pray, as Jesus was also asked? This response is known as the Lord’s Prayer, which is also inflected with apocalypticism in its statement “thy kingdom come”:

Our Father

Who art in heaven

Hallowed be thy name

Thy kingdom come

Thy will be done

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread

And forgive us our trespasses

As we forgive those who trespass against us

And lead us not into temptation

But deliver us from evil

For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory

World without end (Matthew 6:9–13).

It did not take long for Jesus and his disciples to be confronted by the scorn of both Jewish elites and Roman authorities, in part because he “had, before large numbers of people, said things that were not lawful.”¹⁶ To the former, his teachings were blasphemous, while to the latter, they were seditious. And thus was Jesus “condemned and executed in a collaboration between the Jewish authorities and the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate.”¹⁷ This execution, the crucifixion, was brutal and public, with Jesus nailed to a large wooden cross to dangle until death. His being tortured and forced to carry the cross for his own execution is referred to in Christianity as the Passion of the Christ.

Though it is difficult to imagine the anguish and fear that this tragedy caused his followers, they certainly sought explanations in scripture. Fleming Rutledge makes this point eloquently, underscoring the centrality of the Hebrew Bible for Christian conceptualizations of redemption, sacrifice, and atonement, and for the emergence of their conviction that Jesus was the long-promised Messiah:

The early Christians had no New Testament. Their single source for discovering the meaning of the strange death of their Lord was the Scriptures they had always known. Imagine the attention with which early Christian leaders searched every syllable of the Hebrew Bible how the terrible death of the Son of God had been in the mind and plan of God all along.¹⁸

Following the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection three days later—a key belief in Christianity—the risen Christ revealed himself to his disciples, and the Holy Spirit descended upon them, an experience known as Pentecost, receiving the gifts (charism) of the spirit:

When the Day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. Then there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance (Acts 2:1–4).

Seeing the apostles thus transfixed and speaking in tongues, observers simply thought that they were drunk, but Peter disabused them of that notion by saying that it was only 9:00 in the morning and citing the prophet Joel’s apocalyptic foretelling from the Hebrew Bible:

And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God,

That I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh;

Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

Your young men shall see visions,

Your old men shall dream dreams.

And on My menservants and on My maidservants

I will pour out My Spirit in those days;

And they shall prophesy.

I will show wonders in heaven above

And signs in the earth beneath:

Blood and fire and vapor of smoke.

The sun shall be turned into darkness,

And the moon into blood,

Before the coming of the great and awesome day of the Lord.

And it shall come to pass

That whoever calls on the name of the Lord

Shall be saved (Acts 2:17–21).

This is the true beginning of Christianity, a religion centered upon the faith that Jesus is God and redeemer—the savior, the Messiah, God incarnate—and that his resurrection was a clear sign that the End of Days and the coming of the Kingdom of God were nigh. Note the central place of the kingdom and the world without end. That is the aftermath of the Apocalypse, and Jesus warned humanity that we are fast heading there, so one should repent in order to be saved.

Before advancing to a discussion of the book of Revelation, Christianity’s most important apocalyptic text, let us employ one of Ninian Smart’s dimensions of religion in discussing this remarkable faith: Doctrinal/Philosophical.

Doctrinal/Philosophical Dimensions of Christianity

We begin this section by considering Smart’s important observation about the Trinity and its centrality to the emergence and history of Christianity:

The structure of the Divine in Christianity has to reflect the narrative of the faith. That narrative postulates certain crucial episodes – the creation of the cosmos, the covenant with Israel, the life of Christ, the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the second coming, and so on.¹⁹

Most of these “episodes” occurred before Jesus’s followers’ own eyes, yet some of them were not elemental to Jesus’s teachings, to his ministry. Enter Paul of Tarsus (5 C.E.–67 C.E.?), the most influential interpreter of the teachings and meanings of Jesus Christ, author of several crucial texts in the Bible, and one of the most important Christian saints. Paul was a Jew and had been an active participant in the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire: “As for Saul, he made havoc in the church, entering every house, dragging off men and women, and committing them to prison” (Acts 8:3). But one day, while on his way to Damascus, Saul (Paul) had a conversion experience that would change not only his life but the course of world history, without which it is likely that there would be no Christianity today. On that road, Saul heard the voice of Jesus denouncing the persecution of his followers. And then? “Immediately he preached the Christ in the synagogues, that He is the Son of God” (Acts 9:20). In effect, Paul became the first Christian theologian and set a cornerstone for Christian doctrine throughout the ages, penning by his own hand nearly half of the books in what Christians refer to as the New Testament. For our purposes, perhaps Paul’s most important contribution to Christianity is his solidification of the belief that Jesus Christ is “the benefactor and savior, now exalted at God’s right hand in heaven, from whence he will speedily come to earth again.”²⁰ This is a crucial notion in Christian apocalypticism known as the Second Coming. Paul’s influence on the world’s largest religion, particularly its eschatology, is thus so important that we do well to consider the insight of a leading interpreter, Leroy Waterman:

Paul’s scheme of things to come is explicitly stated in Cor. 15:22–28 and set in a clearly apocalyptic frame of thought. This plan hinges upon Christ’s Second Coming, an apocalyptic concept that Paul never questions. When that event takes place, Christ’s followers who are not alive will rise from the dead, as in Daniel 12:2. Then will come the end, when Christ will turn over the kingdom to God the Father, thus destroying all other government, authority, and power.²¹

For its first three centuries, Christianity was a persecuted religion in the Roman Empire. Its adepts were often tortured and executed, which led to one of the most important foundations of the faith: the cult of martyrs. The first of the martyrs were Saints Stephen, Peter, and Paul. St. Stephen was stoned to death circa 36 C.E., an execution in which Paul played a role, prior, of course, to his conversion to the Christian faith. St. Peter was one of Jesus’s closest disciples and would become the first bishop of Rome, leading the early Christian community there before his martyrdom. This is the taproot of the lineage of the papacy in which Roman Catholics believe. Paul would be martyred around the year 65 C.E, just before the fall of the Temple. By this time Christians cherished the bones of those who died for, rather than renouncing, their faith, which is the foundation of the cult of relics in Roman Catholicism and in Orthodox Christianity.

In contrast to Zoroastrianism and Judaism, Christianity is a highly doctrinal religion, its far-reaching diversity notwithstanding. And while Paul the Apostle established the foundation for Christian doctrine, early Church leaders (most of them referred to as “Church Fathers”) would continue his work. These Church Fathers included Irenaeus (130–202), Clement of Alexandria (150–215), Origen (185–254), Eusebius of Caesarea (260–339), and Athanasius (293–372). (We consider St. Augustine’s later massive influence in another section.) They extended Paul the Apostle’s ministry throughout the Mediterranean Roman Empire: the Middle East, Southern Europe, and North Africa. Crucial to Christianity were their gatherings in a series of councils to map out the meaning of their faith. This was of tremendous and unifying importance, as dissent has existed in Christianity for as long as Jesus’s teachings have been known, and dissent would lead to several major schisms in the religion, from the very beginning of the Church and throughout its history. This goes far in explaining the religion’s resplendent diversity today.

Arguably the two most important of the early Church councils were the First Ecumenical Council, held in Nicaea (325), and the Third Ecumenical Council, held in Chalcedon (451). The former, per Waterman, “was faced with the perplexing problem of trying to show how three persons were really not three persons, but one, and yet at the same time it was unable to deny the reality to any of the three.” The questions of Christ’s humanity and divinity and His relationship to God, as well as that of the Holy Spirit, were indeed perplexing, and Nicaea’s answer to this puzzle was to declare that the Son is one essence with the Father, as is the Holy Spirit. God was henceforth to be symbolized by the “Trinity”—“a symbol used to prevent the charge of polytheism.”²² Jesus’s eternity was further cemented at the Council of Nicaea (Nicaea is today’s İznik, Turkey), in its declaration that Jesus is “begotten, not made.” This belief is repeated at every Roman Catholic Mass around the world to this day, in the Nicene Creed:

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father.

Through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation, he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered, died, and was buried. On the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.

With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets.

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.

Amen.

There were many other councils in the history of Christianity, and we allude to a few of them later in this chapter. Although they were generally intended to centralize Christian doctrine, combat heresy, and ensure Church unity, theological disputes at several junctures in Christian history have led to major schisms and are central reasons why there is so much multiplicity in the world’s largest religion today. The most notable of these schisms occurred in 1054, 1592, and 1684. In 1054,²³ a long-simmering debate between “Western” and “Eastern” churches (Rome versus Constantinople, centrally) over several issues, especially the use of statues in sanctuaries —“graven images,” per the Ten Commandments—could not be reconciled. This led to the division between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. To this day the latter, in its many forms, prohibits the use of statues in worship and prayer. The dispute also centered on the use of unleavened bread in the Eucharistic service.²⁴

Five hundred years later, controversies surrounding church wealth and other matters sparked protests, none more influential than that led by a German Catholic monk named Martin Luther (1483–1546). “The Reformation broke out as an appeal from the authority of the institutional church to the authority of the historical Jesus,” writes Pelikan. “Luther’s principal contribution was certainly his doctrine of justification,” that humans can be saved only by the grace of Jesus Christ and not by their own works.²⁵ In addition to his doctrine of justification, Luther taught that divine revelation is contained only in the Bible—sola scriptura—and that all believers can by the grace of God serve as priests, as partakers in the priesthood of all believers. When Luther tacked his plaintive 95 Theses on the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg in 1517, he changed the world, as many by then had become disconcerted by the Roman Catholic Church and were prime for reform. The Protestant Reformation was thus launched and further fueled by the teachings of John Calvin (1509–1564) and other reform-minded theologians.

Though not as momentous, later that century another schism would further divide Christianity. King Henry VIII was refused an annulment of his marriage, so he simply took the entire Catholic Church in England and left the Roman Catholic fold, in 1534, establishing the Church of England. The ramifications of this would become especially far-reaching as Britain rose to prominence in the European endeavor to rule the world, colonizing much of it and spreading the Anglican (Episcopalian) Church to every corner of the globe. Though not linked to Luther or Calvin, this branch of Christianity would come to be counted as a form of Protestantism, whose “diversity and belief is a striking part of the Protestant heritage,” according to John Dillenberger and Claude Welch. “Protestantism accepts this ambiguity as part of its heritage. It accepts its diversity as a sign of health and of sickness.”²⁶ Further explaining this ambiguity and diversity, they add that “Protestantism is the story of individuals and groups who have taken their understanding of the gospel so seriously that they have been willing to make new forms of the church.”²⁷ And so they did, and so they continue to do in ways far more myriad and complex than can be summarized here. Instead, let us move on to the book of Revelation, Christianity’s most important apocalyptic text, and to consideration of the teachings of its leading interpreters.

The Writing of the Book of Revelation

“Apocalyptic . . . was the mother of all Christian theology,” in the sage words of Ernst Käsermann.²⁸ Bernard McGinn adds, in equally sage words, “Whatever the debates about Jesus’ own views, there is fairly broad agreement that the ‘Jesus movement,’ that is, the groups of Jews who accepted him as messiah in the years immediately after his death, understood him in primarily apocalyptic terms.”²⁹ Subsequent Christian understandings of such terms have centered upon the book of Revelation. Also called Apocalypse (Greek: “unveiling”) and Revelation to John (or Revelation to John the Divine), Revelation is the final book of the Christian Bible. As we shall see, the book has at times been marginalized in Christian history, for initially it appealed primarily to the marginalized of the Church, a new religion whose identity was far from crystalizing at the time. It quite puzzled many of the early Church Fathers, and as time has unfolded without the end coming, many Christians have turned their backs on Revelation and the eschaton.³⁰ Certainly not all have done so. The end will come. How and when remain mysteries, but as the world teeters on the brink of extinction, the text will be further scoured by the devout and detractors alike. It is the Christian go-to source for all things apocalyptic.

Abounding in fantastic symbolism, lurid violence, and tumultuous visions, Revelation is one of the most important examples of the apocalyptic literature that was widely popular between 200 B.C.E. and 200 C.E. in the part of the world where the Bible was written. According to Richard Draper, apocalyptic literature of this era exhibited three common traits:

1. 1. Eschatology – The flow of history is interrupted by God to bring on the End of Time and ultimately usher in the Kingdom of Heaven for the righteous, with evil defeated once and for all.
   2. Dualism – Good versus Evil ultimately manifest as God versus Satan, locked in a universal struggle on Earth and in heaven over absolute, eternal rule.
   3. Predetermination – All of this is preordained, and God will ultimately win in this struggle with Satan and sin.³¹

The book of Revelation (16:12–16) speaks of a violent struggle at the End of Time, known as Armageddon, and portends the ultimate victory of Jesus Christ and his righteous followers over Satan, his beasts, and his hordes of unrepentant sinners. Originally written in Greek, it is composed of 22 short chapters and 404 verses, most drawing inspiration from the Hebrew Bible. In part, it is a letter to the seven churches of Asia Minor, warning them about the impending Apocalypse, and a recording of the extravagant visions that an intriguing early Christian mystic named John received.

Who was John? Though early interpreters believed that the authors of the Gospel of John and Revelation were one and the same—a misunderstanding that may have influenced the latter’s inclusion in the Bible—most biblical scholars agree that Revelation was written by John of Patmos, a Jew-cum-Christian who may have been a disciple of John, the disciple of Jesus. Because of his faith, he had been exiled, banished as a punishment, by Roman authorities to the island of Patmos, hence the name John of Patmos. Evidently, the author of Revelation was a member of one of the seven churches of Asia Minor (in what is today Turkey) to be victimized by a series of persecutions at the hands of the Roman Empire. Located in the Aegean Sea, Patmos served, in effect, as a penal colony for persecuted Christians.

John of Patmos probably wrote Revelation near the end of the first century C.E. This was plausibly during the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian, who is likely the “Beast from the Sea” referenced in John’s text. Domitian was a brutal emperor (81–96) who, like Nero and other Roman rulers before him, ruthlessly persecuted Christians. He was assassinated in 96, and the Roman senate voted his memory into oblivion. He had, after all, instituted an ancestor cult in Ephesus for his family. Nero’s name spelled in Hebrew numerically equals 666, furthermore, making yet another cruel emperor Revelation’s beast and an early foil to Christian apocalyptic thought.

The author was clearly a mystic, someone who receives visions from the divine, and John’s came to him while meditating and praying in a cave. He was kneeling with his head stationed in a hole on the cave’s wall, his right hand clinging to a smaller hole nearby. Few things ever written have so inspired humanity, though the text needs to be understood in its historical context, otherwise it can become rather dangerous. This is the main reason it has for centuries served as “an othering machine” par excellence, legitimating the scapegoating of various non-Christian others for all the woes that befall humanity as we await the Second Coming of the savior, Jesus Christ. Timothy Beal explains:

In the process, such apocalyptic monster-making has the potential to deny the one being monstrocized – the visitor, the immigrant, the foreigner, the marginal. Denying their humanity can help justify violence against them. Indeed, it can not only help justify violence, it can ordain and bless it as part of a cosmic battle of good versus evil, God versus Satan, which will culminate in a final judgement, for which we had better be ready.³²

The book of Revelation thus sinks demonization into the core of universal history, the core of its ultimate outcome, providing fire and fury to the Second Coming. This is all the more reason to learn about its historical context. “At the time John wrote Revelation, a power struggle raged within the Christian community,” Draper explains. The book also makes Christianity victorious, rather than fading into oblivion as some ill-fated doomsday cult:

John wrote his work for those who yet clung to the truth. A careful reading of Acts through Jude leaves the thinking reader saddened, if not downhearted. The Epistles’ combined witness suggests that Jesus and his Apostles failed. By the end of that era, the gospel was no longer being preached (see Jude 1:3), many antichrists reigned in various branches of the Church (see 1 John 2:18–19; 3 John 1:9–10), and false teachers abounded (see Revelation 2:14–15; 20–23). Is that the end of the story? If it were not for Revelation, one could only conclude from these scriptures that God lost. John’s masterwork, however, tells the rest of the story. It reassured the Saints of his day that, no matter how bad conditions looked, Jesus was still in charge, history was playing out according to God’s will, and the Christians would, in the end, triumph.³³

Key Features of Revelation

Christianity thus comes full circle with the book of Revelation. Without it, the religion would have remained an obscure historical fringe group and probably would never have survived. You are, of course, encouraged to read this great apocalyptic text in its entirety, but please make sure that you are sitting down. Before considering some of the book’s most important interpreters, here is a summary of some of Revelation’s key features: The Revelation of Jesus Christ; Christ as Savior; Revelation of the Kingdom of God’s Great Enemy; Satan in Revelation and His Helpers; War in Heaven, Fallen Angels; Sin, Seduction, and the Whore of Babylon; The Antichrist.³⁴

The Revelation of Jesus Christ

The book of Revelation reveals Christ to be the Almighty (Rev. 1:1), as Pantokrator (Rev 1:8), rounding out the foundation for Christian theology in ways that earlier books of the Bible do not: “The title emphasizes one important point: Jesus rules history and governs its outcome.”³⁵

Christ as Savior

Robed as king and priest, in Revelation 1:13–16, Christ brandishes a dual-edged sword in his mouth and holds the power of “the keys of hell and death” (Rev 1:18).

Revelation of the Great Enemies of God’s Kingdom

Another key theme of Revelation is the enemy of God’s Kingdom, who is identified in Chapter Nine as having fallen from a star and as dwelling in a bottomless pit atop an army to be unleashed in the last days with a mission to destroy the people of God; locusts are part of that army:

The locusts looked like horses prepared for battle. On their heads they wore something like crowns of gold, and their faces resembled human faces. Their hair was like women’s hair, and their teeth were like lions’ teeth. They had breastplates like breastplates of iron, and the sound of their wings was like the thundering of many horses and chariots rushing into battle. They had tails with stingers, like scorpions, and in their tails they had power to torment people for five months. They had as king over them the angel of the Abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon and in Greek is Apollyon (Revelation 9:7–11).

Satan in Revelation and His Helpers

The enemy is, of course, identified with Satan, who takes the form of a red dragon with seven heads, in Chapter Thirteen, and is aided by the Beast from the Sea and the Beast from the Land, the latter transformed into the Whore of Babylon. Battle breaks out in heaven, and this dragon is repelled by St. Michael the Archangel.

War in Heaven, Fallen Angels

No comment is needed here:

Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him (Rev 12:7–9).

Sin, Seduction, and the Whore of Babylon

The Whore of Babylon, often understood in early Christianity to be the Roman Empire, is especially cunning and capable of seducing people into sin, thereby drawing them into the forces of Satan and turning them away from God in the cosmic struggle, and ultimately the apocalyptic struggle, between good and evil:

And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand filled with abominations and filthiness of her fornication. And upon her forehead was a name written: MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATION OF THE EARTH (Rev. 17:4–5).

The Antichrist

When the Antichrist becomes central in Christian eschatology and concretized by relevant readings, Revelation’s power of othering gets really serious. Though the word Antichrist does not appear in the book of Revelation, earlier beliefs about such a being of evil incarnate were easily identified with the beast that is central in the text. The beast becomes the long-prophesied false messiah, the Lord’s satanic doppelgänger. As McGinn explains:

The origins of the Antichrist legend are inseparable from the history of Jewish speculation about the end time and its proximity. Jewish scribes and seers created a powerful new religious vision of the meaning of history in the last three centuries before Jesus, one that was in full bloom during his lifetime.³⁶

The Antichrist, during the End Time, is an absolutely evil human being and a world leader who does Satan’s bidding. The End Time is said to occur between the beginning of the Millennium and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Interestingly enough, though not in Revelation, the word does appear elsewhere in the Bible (e.g., 1 John 2:18; 1 John 2: 22). Matthew 24 warns that “false christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect,” and it was an easy stretch for interpreters of Revelation to identify the Antichrist as Revelation’s “charismatic beast who would take his mark . . . a Satanic false messiah predicted to arrive before the Second Coming of Christ to seduce the masses into following and worshipping him.”³⁷

The Seven Seals (and Seven Trumpets and Seven Bowls)

In Revelation, John of Patmos writes at the opening of Chapter Five (5:1–2): “And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne a book written within and on the backside, sealed with seven seals. And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof?” John is overcome with sadness and terror because of the declaration that no one can, but the Revelator is reassured that the Lion of Judah, one in the lineage of King David, will do so, and it will be done by the Lamb. The first seal releases a rider on a white horse (crowned Christ as conqueror), the second another on a red horse, the third another on a black horse, and the fourth, death itself, on a pale green horse. These are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

In addition to John’s visions, much of the book of Revelation is based on prophecies in the Hebrew Bible, and the Four Horsemen are a case in point. In the book of Zechariah (1:8–11), for instance, we read:

I saw by night, and behold, a man riding on a red horse, and it stood among the myrtle trees in the hollow; and behind him were horses: red, sorrel, and white. Then I said, “My lord, what are these?” So the angel who talked with me said to me, “I will show you what they are.” And the man who stood among the myrtle trees answered and said, “These are the ones whom the LORD has sent to walk to and fro throughout the earth.”

In Revelation (6:1–8), the Four Horsemen thrust forth the Apocalypse in all its holy terror and devastating violence, pestilence, and famine. They have been variously interpreted across the ages, sometimes literally and sometimes allegorically, but were especially gripping during the period of Roman persecution of the early Christian community.³⁸

The Book of Revelation and Its Interpreters³⁹

Perhaps no other text in human history has been so thoroughly and so broadly interpreted—or so influential in shaping this history—as the book of Revelation. The interpretations of this text have for nearly two thousand years been as diverse as they have been dangerous, comforting, and terrifying, and we cannot thoroughly explore them here. Instead, let us outline the key ideas of some of the most significant interpreters of the book of Revelation, beginning with the great Church Father St. Irenaeus.⁴⁰

Irenaeus (130–202 C.E.)

A Greek evangelist with a skill for developing Christian community and a mission to combat heresy, Irenaeus rose to prominence as bishop of Lyon, France. He was the first known Christian theologian to interpret the number 666 and to opine that the end of the world would occur upon the fall of the Roman Empire. The Antichrist, he taught, would then reign for 3.5 years, followed by a second Advent and the resurrection of the righteous.

In his most important book, Against Heresies, Irenaeus denounces various forms of Gnosticism (alternative interpretations of Christianity) and opines at length on the book of Revelation:

We will not, however, incur the risk of pronouncing positively as to the name of the Antichrist; for if it were necessary that his name should be distinctly revealed in this present time, it would have been announced by him who beheld the apocalyptic vision. For that was seen no very long time since, but almost in our day, towards the end of Domitian’s reign.

Irenaeus further speculates at length about the number 666, engaging in historical and theological reflection, with some measure of numerology mixed in for good measure. This is “the number of the beast”—it will correspond with the beast’s name—a notion that has sparked endless speculation across the ages. For example, per Beal, “The number 666 often circulates … as simply the encoded identity of a diabolical world leader, from United States President Ronald Wilson Reagan, with six characters per name (= 666), to Adolf Hitler, whose name adds up to 666 when one uses an alphanumeric key.”⁴¹

So terrifying is the number 666 that there is actually a long word in English for the fear thereof, one that derives from Greek: hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia. In most religions, numbers play important roles and are often the source of speculations, symbolisms, enthusiasms, and dread. To further illustrate this in the context of the book of Revelation, we turn to the observations of Eugen Weber:

Scriptural numbers, likewise, symbolize spiritual messages: three stands for the Trinity, four for Creation, three plus four equal seven, perfection. Three times four equal twelve, plenitude. Jerusalem has twelve gates. The number six, which falls short of seven, is incomplete; and 666 is the culmination of incompleteness: the Beast ever yearning for divine truth but never able to attain it. Seven, in contrast, seems omnipresent: seven seals, seven trumpets, seven visions, seven vials, seven angels with trumpets, seven angels with last plagues, and even a seven-headed dragon testify to its powers.⁴²

This certainly gives a different twist to the clichés that there is “power in numbers” and that seven is a lucky number.

Augustine (354–430 C.E.)

Born in North Africa in the middle of the fourth century, Augustine was one of the greatest thinkers in Christian history, and his influence on the world’s largest religion has been far reaching and profound. As Beal explains, “Doctrines such as original sin, creation ex nihilo, salvation by grace alone, not to mention the church’s deep distrust of human sexuality, all owe their early formations to him.”⁴³ Augustine devoted his magnum opus, City of God, largely to interpreting the book of Revelation. After Jesus and St. Paul, one would be hard-pressed to identify a more determinative influence on Christianity or its apocalypticism than St. Augustine.

In Dē cīvitāte Deī contrā pāgānōs (Latin for City of God against Pagans), Augustine deviated from the millenarianism of his time, which was steeped in belief that the end was at hand. Instead, he interpreted the book of Revelation as indicating that the end was centuries away and that we could not know when it might arrive. Augustine is thus somewhat unique among early Christian theologians in devoting so much attention to the text. But ultimately he felt that the Apocalypse will be the culmination of history, unifying the people of God to “rest and see, see and love, love and praise. This shall be in the end without end” (City of God 22.30), in the City of Heaven, not the City of Earth.⁴⁴ The City of Heaven and that of Earth will coexist for a figurative thousand years between the End of Time and the Second Coming of Christ, when all will be judged and good will triumph over evil. Yet Augustine sought to tone down the influence of Revelation and the expectations of the masses by saying such things.

Ultimately, Augustine writes that all the righteous dead will one day be resurrected and gloriously restored to enter the pure City of God for eternity, with their bodies perfected. The aged will have no physical limitations, while those who died as children will enter as adults in their prime. “Bald people,” furthermore, “will get their hair back, but not all its length. Likewise people who were obese or emaciated in life will be restored to their ideal proportions…. Also, blemishes, scars, and other marks on the body will be removed … with the singular exception of the wounds of martyrs.”⁴⁵ Much to look forward to, should you be among the righteous.

Two key elements to Augustine’s demystification of the book of Revelation are his reasoning about signs of the End Time and the notion of predestination. The signs mentioned in the book are, as Karla Pollmann explains, for Augustine “unreliable guides because of their omnipresence throughout history. The world had always been scourged by wars, floods, or earthquakes at different periods and places,” and furthermore, “there had never been a lack of morally decadent, ungodly individuals, or even nations.”⁴⁶ Augustine also adhered to a doctrine of predestination, or that everything humans do has been predetermined by God.⁴⁷ Hence, the notion of faith and religious practice is not of one’s own volition, and who is saved and who is condemned is preordained and unchangeable. Therefore there is no reason to fear the book of Revelation.⁴⁸

Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179)

There is a rich legacy of female mystics in the medieval Church; almost all of them who are known to us were monastics, nuns, or anchoresses. Hildegard of Bingen is perhaps the most extraordinary, and she had much to say (and draw) about the book of Revelation. A nun by the age of eight and of a noble family, Hildegard was a German mystic, hymnologist, playwright, artist, and scientist, who throughout her life received wondrous visions. Her earliest writings and illustrations of some of her most powerful visions appear in a book that she wrote in the 1140s titled Scivias (from the Latin Scivias Domini, “Know the Ways of the Lord”). Several of these visions concern Creation and the End.

Art historians debate whether Hildegard painted the images in Scivias herself, but she did draw her visions shortly after receiving them, also writing about them in great detail, so they were at least the bases for the remarkable images in her book. For our concerns, the most important is “Vision of Last Days.” As Richard Emmerson explains, this image depicts the Antichrist “in the form of a demonic head integral to the body of the Church. . . . Hildegard clearly sees evil coming from within the Church. This is not some attack from without, whether led by the traditional Antichrist born of the Jews or an Antichrist supported by Islamic military power, as others feared.”⁴⁹ Hildegard’s own description, reflective of a sickened Church, is as shocking as it is graphic:

From the navel to the groin she had various scaly spots. In her vagina there appeared a monstrous and totally black head. . . . Lo, the monstrous head removed itself from its place with so great a crash that the entire image of the woman was shaken in all its members. Something like a great mass of much dung was joined to the head; then, lifting itself upon a mountain, it attempted to ascend to the height of heaven.⁵⁰

In this fashion, her interpretation of Revelation goes down in history as the first to de-other the text: instead of perceiving the Antichrist as Jewish or Muslim, Hildegard identifies the prophesied deceiver as a Christian birthed by a Church riven by corruption, a Church that she sought to reform. This medieval mystic envisioned this reform and return to purity as being deeply tied to the Apocalypse.⁵¹ Of course, as discussed in a subsequent section of this chapter, Protestant interpreters would later re-other the text by perceiving the Catholic pope as the Antichrist, departing entirely from Hildegard’s more forgiving perspective.

Hildegard also wrote some of the most beautiful music in Church history and was recently (in 2012, by Pope Benedict XVI) declared a “Doctor of the Church,” the fourth woman among thirty-five said doctors of all time. (The other women are Saints Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, and Therese of Lisieux.) She was exceptional for much more than her work on Revelation, as are all the interpreters covered in this chapter. “But for a woman of the twelfth century, hedged by the constraints of a misogynist world, her achievements baffle,” Barbara Newman explains. For Hildegard was:

the only medieval woman who preached openly, before mixed audiences of clergy and laity, with the full approval of church authorities; the author of the first known morality play and the only twelfth-century playwright who is not anonymous; . . . the first scientific writer to discuss sexuality and gynecology from a female perspective; and the first saint whose official biography includes a first-person memoir.⁵²

In addition, Hildegard leaves us with some of the most provocative images of the Apocalypse in Church history, and that is really high praise, as few biblical scenes have captivated artistic geniuses over the years more than the End of Days. These include Michelangelo’s masterpiece on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and Albrecht Dürer’s remarkable late-fifteenth-century woodcut illustrations. Let us now move on to another medieval mystic, painter, monastic, and writer who was captivated by the Apocalypse and offered his own influential interpretation of the book of Revelation, Joachim of Fiore.

Joachim of Fiore (1135–1202)

Joachim of Fiore was a native son of Calabria—in very southern Italy, on the toe of the peninsula’s boot—a person of deep faith who at one point went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and take up a monastic vocation, eventually becoming abbot of his monastery. His writings about the book of Revelation and his mystical visions about the End of Days echo Hildegard’s in certain respects. For example, he vividly illustrated his manuscripts by painting his visions, and he softened the animosity toward Jews and Muslims that was so prevalent in medieval apocalypticism. Brett Whalen writes:

In the captivating realm of speculation about the apocalypse, Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202) numbers among the most creative and controversial of medieval Christian figures. Through his inspired – one might say revolutionary – interpretation of the Bible, Joachim believed that he had discovered a template for understanding the totality of God’s plan for history…. Joachim’s vision of the future emphasized the harmonious conversion, rather than grudging assimilation or destruction of the Jews.⁵³

In this respect, Joachim’s interpretation of the book of Revelation is, though not as strongly as Hildegard’s, de-othering, even if he never went so far as to assert that the Church would give birth to the Antichrist. He also believed that, in addition to Jews, Muslims and pagans would convert to the Christian faith at the End of Time.⁵⁴

Joachim of Fiore devoted his life to an intense and constant study of the Bible, especially Revelation. He articulated most of his insights in his manuscript Exposition of the Apocalypse, teaching that history is trinitarian, so there are three eras: The Age of The Father, The Age of the Son, and The Age of the Holy Spirit. For Marjorie Reeves, this is “the spearhead of Joachim’s original thought,” a “great imaginative step which he took when he threw the full manifestation of the Third Person of the Trinity forward into the period ahead.” Here, “the Trinity is progressively drawing mankind on to a higher spiritual level … the ongoing work of the living God.”⁵⁵

Joachim “was one of the leading figures of this age,” per Craig Koester, “a time of ferment, in which reform movements arose within the church.”⁵⁶ In his preaching and writing, the main point was clear: “The end was near, very near, and the need to prepare the way of the Lord was urgent.”⁵⁷ So compelling was this message, and so palpable were the signs of the End of Days in their world, that Joachim’s “followers had the sense that the people of his own time had an important role to play in the final acts of the drama of world history.”⁵⁸ This is a notion that we have seen before in our consideration of Jewish messianism and Christian apocalypticism, and it takes on new force following the Protestant Reformation. Hence, we now turn to the first and most influential Protestant reformer’s interpretation of the book of Revelation.

Martin Luther (1483–1546)

A German, like Hildegard before him, but never forgotten for long periods of time like she (and never so mystically inclined), Martin Luther is arguably one of the most influential people who has ever walked the face of the earth. Luther was a monk who sparked the Protestant Reformation by railing against corruption in the Catholic Church and posting his world-transforming 95 Theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517. Remarkably, Luther was also a fierce critic of the book of Revelation and felt that it had no place in the Bible, being “neither apostolic nor prophetic.”⁵⁹ Nevertheless, Luther was seen “by his Protestant contemporaries” as “the prophet of the original gospel sent by God.”⁶⁰ And “the centre of Luther’s theology is the theology of the justification of the sinner”⁶¹—that humans are saved through faith alone, and not by their works—a notion that countered over 1400 years of Roman Catholic sacramental ritual.

The question of justification, of the forgiveness of God, whether in Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox contexts, is central to Christian apocalypticism, as who is to be saved will be determined on Judgment Day, at the End of Days, with the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. Whether that is predetermined by God, as the great French Protestant reformer John Calvin held, determined by faith alone, or determined by immersing oneself in the Catholic sacraments is one of the key questions that has divided the Church since Luther’s teachings.

Luther’s world was fraught with sickness, suffering, and poverty, all widely taken as signs that the end was near, as he believed, even if he was hardly a fire and brimstone prophet or visionary. Yet, though “Luther saw the entire plane of human existence as a battleground fought over by God and the devil,”⁶² his disdain for the book of Revelation made him hesitate to include it in his landmark 1522 German translation of the New Testament. The printing press had been invented by Johannes Gutenberg, in Mainz, just a generation before Luther’s momentous theses were publicized, and it produced the first printed Latin versions of the Bible by 1456. The appearances of both the 1456 Latin Vulgate Bible and Luther’s translation were paramount moments in the history of Christianity, yet Luther wanted to exclude Revelation from his translation.

However, when Luther invited his friend Lucas Cranach the Elder to illustrate his project, the latter chose to mostly provide pieces on Revelation, largely based on the earlier work of Albrecht Dürer.⁶³ Upon Luther’s translation of the entire Bible in 1534, “soon nearly every German household had a copy . . . including the Cranach-based depictions of the visions from Revelation,” as Beal notes. “Whether they were reading the text of Revelation or not, they were very likely looking at its pictures.”⁶⁴

Sadly, in addition to his infamous antisemitism,⁶⁵ Luther drew upon Revelation’s power of othering to target Muslims and the Catholic Church as the progenitors of the Antichrist and all things evil that Jesus would surely defeat at the End of Time. Specifically, Luther associated Turks with the Antichrist. The likes of Cranach and Dürer were beginning to draw the Antichrist wearing a tiara, representative of the pope, and some of these representations appeared in Luther’s Bible. Whereas antisemitism had long shaped Christian imaginings of the Antichrist, by the late Middle Ages and the Reformation, increasingly such imaginings among Protestants would be shaped by anti-Catholicism and Islamophobia. All of this makes Hildegard’s earlier visions of the Church’s complicity in the birth of the Antichrist even more striking.

Joseph Smith (1805–1844)

Mormonism is one of the newest and fastest growing forms of Christianity. Though a recent entrant into the Christian faith, like all other Christian traditions it is based on belief in Jesus Christ, salvation, and the afterlife. Formally known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it was founded in America by the influential prophet Joseph Smith. At the age of twenty-four, Smith received divine visions in a forest in Upstate New York and was visited by an angel named Moroni, the son of the angel Mormon, who transmitted to the prophet a new corpus of scripture, the Book of Mormon. The corpus had been supernaturally written on a set of gold plates and buried on an upstate New York hillside, and Smith was called to discover and translate them. As a hundred revelations comprise the Book of Mormon, published in 1830, it should not surprise us that Smith offered influential and rather original teachings about the book of Revelation and about the afterlife. Since Smith’s reception of the revelations, they and his teachings have spread across the globe, and today the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints counts nearly twenty million members worldwide and actively missionizes to spread the faith.

Just what did the prophet Joseph Smith teach about the book of Revelation? After receiving the Book of Mormon, Smith continued to experience divine visions and insights for several years, which are recorded and interpreted in his book Doctrine and Covenants. It is here where one finds his most concise interpretation of the book of Revelation, focusing on its fourth through eleventh chapters. For example, the seven seals discussed in Chapter Five are metaphors for seven periods of time, the last two constituting the present age and the future. Smith also explains that Revelation is best understood as part of a panorama of revelations to prophets from Moses through John of Patmos, and that all previous prophets were also shown the end of the world but were forbidden to share those visions, which were left to John to write down in a cave on Patmos Island. Smith was especially taken by this passage from Revelation, a book that he felt called to demystify: “The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Rev. 19:10). The Prophet Nephi, as recorded in the Book of Mormon, had visions similar to those of John of Patmos.⁶⁶

Prior to his martyrdom in 1844, Smith and the first Mormons who were drawn to his teachings often heard the voices of angels, saints, earlier prophets, and Jesus, and the most important messages from the Lord and Savior were decidedly apocalyptic. “‘I COME QUICKLY,’ was Jesus Christ’s constant message to Joseph and his early followers.” As a result:

Early Mormons believed that Jesus Christ would soon return, and they expected to reign with him on the earth. The wicked, meanwhile, would suffer unless they repented. “Mine anger is kindling against the inhabitants of the earth to visit them according to th[e]ir ungodliness,” Jesus Christ warned, according to the history Joseph Smith wrote in 1832. When the Son of God came, he would slay the vast majority of humankind, a wave of destruction that would cleanse the earth of all wickedness. Then, proclaimed an 1842 summary of the church’s beliefs, “Christ will reign personally upon the earth, and . . . the earth will be renewed and receive its paradisaic glory.”

Smith’s consideration of the location of some of these apocalyptic events is as unique at it is interesting, furthermore. “In 1831, Joseph Smith declared Independence, in Jackson County, Missouri, as Zion, the site of the New Jerusalem to which Jesus Christ would return.”⁶⁷ After Jesus’s appearance, the Lord would defeat the satanic armies that are prophesied in the book of Revelation. All are judged upon their deaths from the material realm, when their respective bodies and souls are separated, then judged again upon the resurrection of the dead, when the souls and bodies are reunited, and then finally on the Day of Final Judgment, when one is delivered one’s eternal fate. In a uniquely Mormon conceptualization, those who have died without having been baptized may receive “proxy baptism after death.”⁶⁸

Bob Marley (1945–1981)

Thus far, our interpreters have been Church leaders or well-embedded Church insiders who, except for Augustine, a North African, would all today be considered to have been “white.” But the book of Revelation, though clearly “of” the Church, does not belong “to” the Church, and myriad extra-ecclesiastical interpretations of the text have captivated believers over the ages. None is more interesting (to me, at least, a Caribbeanist by trade) than that of Rastafari. Emerging in Jamaica in the 1920s, Rastafari is a profoundly biblical religion. It is also Christian and reinterprets the book of Revelation in ways gravitating toward questions of racial injustice and the enslavement, deception, and oppression of Black people everywhere by “Babylon,” the world of white power and privilege.

The most distinctive belief in Rastafari is that the late emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie (1930–1974) was the Second Coming of Christ the King, the Conquering Lion of Judah. Why Haile Selassie? Rastafari is not a doctrinal religion, nor is it centralized, relying instead on frequent reflections on the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible. As Randy Goldson explains:

Archibald Dunkley, one of the Rastafari pioneers, spent two and a half years studying the Bible “to determine whether Haile Selassie was the Messiah whom Garvey had prophesied. Ezekiel 30, I Timothy 6, Revelation 17 and 19, and Isaiah 43 finally convinced him.” The pattern of validating Selassie’s divinity and messiahship from scripture continues to be a feature of Rastafari theological discourse.⁶⁹

A key element of this discourse is the identification of Selassie as one of the aforementioned Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the one to be revealed when the first of the seven seals is unveiled, the Lion of Judah, situated in the lineage of King David, Crowned Christ as conqueror.

Rastafari is thus also an intensely millenarian religion and is especially inspired by these biblical passages:

Judah is a lion’s whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he crouched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up? (Gen 49:9).

And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof (Rev. 5:5).

No Rastafarian has been more influential than the late, great reggae musician Bob Marley, who is considered a prophet among many Rastas today. His music is replete with biblical references, some 137 across nine studio albums, 17 of which are decidedly apocalyptic. The cover of one Bob Marley and the Wailers album, the 1983 classic Confrontation, depicts the Rasta in more messianic terms, riding a white horse and slaying a dragon.⁷⁰ Marley equates the struggles of Black people throughout the world with those of Daniel and his fellow Jewish prisoners, especially in his 1979 song “Survival aka Black Survivors”: “We’re the survivors, like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego (Black survivors). Thrown in the fire, but-a never get burn.” And although Marley “never directly quotes Revelation,” Dean MacNeil explains, some of his “songs are rich in allusions to Revelation.” Furthermore, “Marley ‘enacts’ Revelation in song rather than directly quoting it.” Marley references Revelation more often than any other biblical text except for Psalms.⁷¹ MacNeil concludes:

If there was an optic through which Marley read the Bible, it was the stereoscopic optic of resistance and redemption. This optic, influenced by the Book of Revelation, was applied throughout Marley’s Bible reading, whether it was Old Testament Wisdom or New Testament Pauline literature.⁷²

The righteous “a-never get burn” in Marley’s eschatology, which is quite consistent with the notions of the rapture (the assumption of the faithful up to heaven before the End of Time) and of redemption in the Bible. As in Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, in Rastafari fire awaits the wicked following Judgment Day, for in hell one finds a “Lake of Fire.”⁷³ In 4 Ezra (3:37–38) we read one of the most gripping descriptions of what awaits us all, the sinner and the righteous alike: “The pit of torment shall appear, and opposite it shall be the place of rest; and the furnace of hell shall be disclosed, and opposite it the paradise of delight.” But there is a softer tone to Rastafarian eschatology, one that unwittingly hearkens to the original liberative Zoroastrian eschatological predestination. (In the end, all will be delivered into paradise). As Patrick Taylor notes:

Rastafari is essentially different from the classical millenarianism . . . (i)n that it is essentially non-violent and teaches “peace and love.” Through divine intervention in history black people will enter into eternity and the conflicts of history will be left behind forever.⁷⁴

Conclusion

This is a wonderful idea, that “the conflicts of history will be left behind forever.” Let us all hope that is the case, though not at the expense of efforts to resolve such conflicts while we are still here on Earth. Christianity is the world’s greatest religion, in terms of number of adherents, and it is rooted in conflict and portends an end: that Jesus will return to the earth, defeat Satan, and establish an eternal heavenly kingdom on Earth—the Kingdom of God, his Father, with whom he is One. How long this will take and how it will all unfold have been the sources of endless speculation among believers, many of whom expect the rapture, as well as a seven-year period of tribulation, to precede the event. This is mentioned in the long passage from the book of Matthew quoted above, garnished forcefully in chapters 4–18 of the book of Revelation, which “describe in the most graphic language possible the great catastrophic time of trouble that is ahead for the world.”⁷⁵ The Church is to be spared, assumed into heaven prior to this time of trouble, while those who are not quite righteous enough to join them will be left here on Earth to engage in this epic struggle, the last in universal history. Though widely debated in Christian theology,⁷⁶ tribulation is generally believed to be a period during which those of us not assumed into heaven during the rapture can either join the forces of Satan and the Antichrist, and be marked with the number 666, or militate on behalf of Jesus, the Church, and the righteous, and thereby secure our own salvation, by the grace of God.

This chapter has only briefly summarized the history and scope of Christianity. It is interesting to me that despite having been born and raised Catholic, of all the chapters in this book about specific religions, I found this one the most challenging to write. Nonetheless, I hope this summary has provided a helpful platform for considering the book of Revelation and some of its leading interpreters in this religion’s remarkable history, from St. Augustine to Bob Marley. Let us now turn our attention to the religion expected to soon overtake Christianity as the world’s largest, Islam. Though Rastafari is a minor religion on the global scale, Christianity—from which it draws so much—will soon be surpassed as the world’s largest by a major one: Islam. It, too, is profoundly apocalyptic, as we will see in the following chapter.

Notes