A History of the End of the World

3. The History of a Delusion

And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.

REVELATION 10:9

By a long and cherished tradition in Christianity, the author of the book of Revelation has been identified as John, son of Zebedee, the presumed author of the Fourth Gospel and, by yet another tradition, the so-called beloved disciple of Jesus. “The Apocalypse of the Apostle John the Evangelist” is one of several titles that appear on various ancient manuscripts of Revelation. Although the question of who actually wrote Revelation has been a matter of hot controversy since the book first began to circulate in the earliest Christian communities of the Roman empire, some otherwise secular scholars still piously refer to the author of Revelation as “Saint John.”

As it turns out, we can discern a great deal more about the author of Revelation than most other biblical authors, Jewish or Christian. We know that he regarded himself as a special favorite of God—and, at the same time, a victim of persecution by a few of his fellow Christians and the whole of the pagan world in which he lived. He probably worked as a kind of freelance prophet, wandering from town to town throughout Asia Minor, delivering his strange visions and strict admonitions to whomever would gather and listen, and relying on their hospitality to fill his belly and to provide a place to lay his head at night. And he plainly nursed a bitter grudge against a couple of rival preachers whom he regarded as so unforgivably lax in their Christian beliefs and practices that he condemned them not only for spiritual error but also for acts of apostasy and even harlotry.

Remarkably, we can come up with an even more detailed and nuanced profile of the man who wrote Revelation. He was probably born in Judea, and he may have been an eyewitness to one of the great and terrible moments in ancient history—the defeat of the Jewish partisans known as the Zealots by a Roman army in 70 C.E., the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, and the dispersion of the Jewish people. His native tongue was probably Aramaic, a Semitic language that replaced Hebrew as the lingua franca in the Jewish homeland in antiquity, and he never really mastered Greek, the international language of civilized men and women in the classical pagan world. And, perhaps most remarkable of all, he was almost surely a Jew by birth, upbringing, and education, a fact that casts an unaccustomed and ironic light on a text that has been embraced by the most zealous of Christians over the last two thousand years.

For many readers of Revelation, as we shall come to see, such biographical details are awkward, embarrassing, and wholly beside the point. The author’s Jewish roots—and the linkages to Jewish texts and traditions that abound in the text of Revelation—are at odds with the crucial role the book has come to play in Christian fundamentalism. And, by the deepest of ironies, a great many readers over the ages have succeeded in convincing themselves that the author of Revelation was a benighted soul who failed to grasp the actual meanings of the visions that he beheld and described so vividly.

To the author himself, for example, the “beast” whose name is symbolized by the number 666 was almost surely a flesh-and-blood Roman emperor who lived and died in the first century of the Common Era—but generation upon generation of subsequent readers of Revelation insist that he was simply and flatly wrong. How else to explain the fact that the “beast” identified by the alphanumeric code 666 has been seen as one or another figure in a whole rogue’s gallery of malefactors, ranging from Muhammad in the Middle Ages to Napoleon in the nineteenth century to Mussolini in the twentieth century, and countless others in between?

Yet Revelation is not quite as mysterious as it seems. Scholarship, both ancient and modern, allows us to catch a glimpse of the man who composed the strange text, the world in which he lived and worked, the passions that burned so hotly in his heart and mind, and the true beliefs that he meant to instill in his first readers and hearers. Above all, it is possible to penetrate the enigmatic text and extract the coded meanings that are so deeply enciphered in the book of Revelation.

As we move forward in history, we will see that Revelation has been reread and reinterpreted in startling and even shocking ways over the centuries, and never more so than in our own times. If the author of Revelation had been granted an accurate vision of the distant future, surely he would have been appalled not only by the plain fact that the end of the world was not near but also by what would become of his “little book” in the hands of popes and kings, grand inquisitors and church reformers, messianic pretenders and self-appointed prophets—or, for that matter, best-selling novelists like the authors of the Left Behind series, televangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, or a president like Ronald Reagan.

To measure how far the book of Revelation has strayed from its original uses and meanings—and to appreciate how the text has been reinterpreted and misinterpreted over the last twenty centuries—we need a benchmark: Who actually composed the book of Revelation? Where did he come from, and where did he wander? What did he know, and what did he believe? And what did he hope to achieve by setting down the extraordinary visions that we find in the “little book” that he left behind?

One of the identifying characteristics of an apocalypse is what scholars call “pseudonymity.” That is, most apocalyptic texts are written by flesh-and-blood authors who conceal their own identities behind the names of revered biblical figures. Thus, for example, the “false writings” of the Pseudepigrapha include works ranging from The Apocalypse of Adam to The Apocalypse of the Virgin Mary, none of which were actually written by their named authors. From its first appearance, in fact, Revelation has been regarded with skepticism by some readers who have dared to wonder out loud whether it was really written by St. John the Evangelist.

Of course, the same question can be asked about all but a few books of the Bible, including both its Jewish and Christian versions. Some Bible readers, for example, are still shocked to learn that scholars no longer believe that Moses wrote the Five Books of Moses, as the first five books of the Hebrew Bible are known in Jewish usage, or that any of the Gospels were written by the apostles whose names appear in their titles. Indeed, the bulk of the Jewish scriptures and a good deal of the Christian scriptures can be regarded as “false writings” in the sense that they were not actually written by the authors who are credited in their titles.

Exactly how the books of the Bible came to be written and named has always been the subject of much argument and speculation. One theory, for example, is that the author was followed around by a dutiful secretary who took notes and then polished up what the great man said, or that the author actually sat down and dictated to the secretary. That’s exactly how the book of Jeremiah supposedly came into existence according to an explanation that we find in the Hebrew Bible itself: “Then Jeremiah called Baruch the son of Neriah, and Baruch wrote from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the Lord, which He had spoken unto him, upon a roll of a book.”¹

Another theory holds that all but a few books of the Bible are composed of writings from several different sources, all of which were collected and compiled at some point in history by one or more editors or “redactors.” The raw material consists of myths, legends, folktales, poems, prayers, and songs—the so-called oral tradition—but also chronicles, genealogies, law codes, and works of biography and autobiography. But the received text of the Bible is the work product of the editors who stitched them together and polished them up. A variant of the same theory is that some or all of these redactions were actually composed by several individuals, or even several generations, all working together in what scholars loosely call a “school” or a “circle” or a “tradition.”

Of course, a few scholars are still willing to argue that some biblical writings were authored by a single gifted human being, man or woman, who put pen to paper (or, perhaps more accurately, a goose quill to a sheet of papyrus) and composed an immortal work of literature in exactly the same manner as Dante or Shakespeare, Mark Twain or Isaac Bashevis Singer. The biblical life story of David as we find it in the book of Samuel may be the work of a writer of genius known in biblical scholarship as the Court Historian, or so it has been suggested, and many of the most beloved and compelling stories in the book of Genesis may have been written by an even more accomplished author known as “J.” And, famously, it has been suggested that J was a woman, first by Richard Elliott Friedman in Who Wrote the Bible? and later by Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg in The Book of J.

All of these theories of biblical authorship have been applied to the book of Revelation, and with some very curious results. Some scholars, for example, argue that Revelation as we know it is actually the work of “a Johanine