A History of the End of the World

the power to destroy the world, we urgently need to know what is written there, how it came to be written in the first place, and how it has been used and abused throughout the history of a world that refuses to end.

Revelation has been described as “future history.”⁴ Looking forward from his vantage point in distant antiquity, its author confidently and colorfully describes “things which must shortly come to pass.”⁵ But none of his prophecies have yet been fulfilled, at least not in any plain or literal way. That’s why readers in every age have tried to explain away the failed prophecies of Revelation by arguing that its visions must be understood as a symbolic depiction of events that will take place long after its disappointed author died a natural death. And yet, significantly, every new generation urgently believes that its own times will be the end-times.

Thus, for example, when Hal Lindsey ponders one of the fearful but baffling passages of Revelation in his best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth—“I saw the horses in a vision, and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone”—he concludes that the author of Revelation has glimpsed “some kind of mobile ballistic missile launcher” that will be deployed in a future (and final) thermonuclear war. Ironically, such pious readings are based on the assumption that the author of Revelation and his original audience could not and did not grasp the real meaning of the phenomena that are depicted in the biblical text.⁶

But even if Revelation is manifestly a work of failed prophecy, it has come to play a unique and ubiquitous role in the world in which we live today. Indeed, Revelation has always served as a lens through which the recorded history of Western civilization can be seen in fresh and illuminating ways. Across the twenty centuries that have passed since it was first composed—and, above all, at every point where contesting ideas of culture and politics have come into conflict—Revelation is always present, sometimes in plain sight and sometimes just beneath the surface.

The book of Revelation (or the Apocalypse, as the last book of the New Testament is also known) has been variously identified as the revealed word of God, the masterwork of a gifted if also calculating human author, or the ravings of a deluded religious crank—and some readers are capable of holding the thought that it is all three things at once.

For the true believer, of course, the book of Revelation is “the only biblical book authored by Christ,” as one pious commentator puts it, since its author claims to be reporting only what was revealed to him from on high.⁷ Other readers of Revelation, however, are willing to allow that human intelligence—and human artifice—are at work: “[I]t is the one great poem which the first Christian age produced.”⁸ And a few otherwise admiring critics find themselves compelled to characterize Revelation as “apocalyptic pornography,” “an insane rhapsody,” “the creative imagination of a schizophrenic,” or, as Thomas Jefferson memorably put it, “merely the ravings of a maniac.”⁹

The text of the book of Revelation was probably first spoken aloud nearly two thousand years ago by a charismatic if also overwrought preacher who wandered from town to town in Asia Minor and delivered his dire warnings about the end of the world to a few small clutches of early Christians who consented to listen. “Blessed is he who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear,” the author declares, “for the time is near.”¹⁰ That is why Bible scholars often refer to the men and women for whom Revelation was originally intended as “hearers,” a phrase that reminds us that Revelation was almost surely a sermon before it was a text and explains why the power of its language and imagery can be appreciated only “when the text is read aloud as the author intended it to be.”¹¹

Ironically, the author of Revelation was almost certainly a Jew by birth and upbringing, perhaps a war refugee from Judea who had witnessed the destruction of the Temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem by the Roman army of occupation and seethed with contempt and loathing for the conquerors of the Jewish homeland. To be sure, the author was one of those Jews who regarded Jesus of Nazareth as the long-promised and long-delayed Messiah. Yet Revelation remains so deeply rooted in Jewish history, politics, and theology that it has been called “a Jewish document with a slight Christian touch-up.”¹² Indeed, Revelation can be described as kind of midrash on the prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible, and its author has been described as a “Christian rabbi.”¹³

Once fixed on parchment or papyrus toward the end of the first century, the book of Revelation was regarded with alarm and suspicion by some of the more cautious church authorities. They were offended by the scenes of blood-shaking violence and lurid sexual promiscuity that are described so memorably in its pages. They were put off by the very idea of the thousand-year reign of King Jesus over an earthly realm, which struck them as a purely Jewish notion of what the messianic kingdom would be like. And they were equally troubled by what is not mentioned: none of the familiar scenes of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, and none of his sublime moral teachings, are to be found in Revelation.

Most alarming of all, then as now, is the unsettling spectacle of an otherwise ordinary human being who claims to have heard the voice of God. “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice,” writes the author of Revelation, “saying, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia.”¹⁴ Inspired by the example of Revelation, men and women with lesser rhetorical gifts but even more febrile imaginations have heard voices from on high—and more than a few have ended up hanging from a gallows or burned at the stake. Freelance prophecy, the authorities feared, could lead only to theological error, social and political chaos, or even worse—a fear that turned out to be thoroughly justified, and never more so than in our own world.

Indeed, Revelation can be literally crazy-making. For anyone who reads the book of Revelation from beginning to end, the experience resembles a fever-dream or a nightmare: strange figures and objects appear and disappear and reappear, and the author himself flashes back and forth in time and place, sometimes finding himself in heaven and sometimes on earth, sometimes in the here and now and sometimes in the end-times, sometimes watching from afar and sometimes caught up in the events he describes. The author refers to the same characters by different names and titles, and he describes the same incidents from different vantage points. All the while, the characters and incidents, the words and phrases, even the letters and numbers of Revelation seem to shimmer with symbolic meanings that always float just out of reach.

The sheer weirdness of Revelation has always been vexing to sober and sensible readers, starting in biblical antiquity and continuing without interruption into our own times. The early church fathers debated among themselves whether Revelation belonged in the Bible at all. Martin Luther was tempted to leave it out of his German translation of the Bible because, as he put it, “Christ is not taught or known in it.”¹⁵ More recently, George Bernard Shaw dismissed Revelation in its entirety as “a curious record of the visions of a drug addict,”¹⁶ and C. G. Jung deemed the visions of Revelation to be unworthy of serious study “because no one believes in them and the whole subject is felt to be an embarrassing one.”¹⁷ Even otherwise pious religious scholars have always been openly skeptical about what an earnest seeker can hope to achieve by parsing out the text.

“Revelation either finds a man mad,” quipped one exegete, “or leaves him so.”¹⁸

Revelation is so shackled by its own riddles and ciphers and symbols that the text must be decrypted rather than merely read. “[E]ither it has been abandoned by the readers of the Bible as being almost completely unintelligible,” observes a twentieth-century Bible scholar, “or it has become the happy hunting ground of religious eccentrics.”¹⁹ One medieval theologian, for example, was moved to scribble out more than one thousand pages of exegesis in an effort to explain his own understanding of Revelation, which itself consists of only twelve thousand words or so in the English translation of the King James Version. Still, the cast and plot of Revelation—the raw material out of which the author composes one of the great and enduring works of the human imagination—can be summed up with far fewer words.

The book of Revelation consists of a series of prophecies about the future, most of them eerie and scary. To be sure, the author opens with a few words of grudging praise or, more often, bitter denunciation for his fellow Christians, most of whom he finds to be complacent, gullible, self-indulgent, and woefully lacking in zeal. “Because you are lukewarm,” he tells the church at Laodicea, attributing his admonition to God himself, “I will vomit you out of my mouth.”²⁰ Now and then, he embellishes the text with a few pious beatitudes that are intended to authenticate his visions: “And behold, I am coming soon. Blessed is he who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book.”²¹