communities where they all trolled for followers and benefactors. But he also appears to hold a principled objection to his rivals: they are apparently encouraging Christians to go along and get along with the pagan authorities of the cities where they live and work. Exactly here we find the front line in the culture war that John is fighting in the pages of Revelation. For a man like John, a Christian who compromises is a Christian who sins.
To understand the compromise that a Christian in Pergamum or Thyatira might be willing to make, we need to recall what a convert to Christianity was expected to do—and to refrain from doing. At a crucial moment in the early history of Christianity, the first Christians decided to abandon the bulk of Jewish law, including the ritual of circumcision, the dietary laws of kashrut, and the strict observance of the Sabbath, all of which were hindrances to the conversion of pagans to the new faith. But they retained a few taboos: a pagan convert to Christianity could forgo the painful ordeal of adult circumcision, but he (or she) had to “abstain from the pollution of idols and from unchastity and from what is strangled and from blood”—that is, they must refrain from dining on meat that had been sacrificed to a pagan god or goddess.77
Even these minimal rules, however, meant that a Christian man or woman would be cut off from the ordinary pastimes and transactions of daily life in a Roman town—or so a strict and uncompromising Christian like the author of Revelation would have insisted. The craft and trade guilds opened their meetings with a few words of prayer to one or another god or goddess from the pantheon of classical paganism. The imperial coinage carried the faces and figures of the Roman emperor and the Roman gods. Even a casual meal taken with friends or family who were still pagans would be likely to include a course prepared with meat that had been “sacrificed” to the gods, for the simple reason that animal offerings and butchering for human consumption were virtually one and the same thing in the ancient world. And so a good Christian, lest he or she be sullied with the sins of idolatry, ought to shun the pagan coinage, the pagan guilds,
Not a few Christians were apparently willing to compromise on some or all of these points. Like the Jews who adopted Greek ways of life during the Maccabean Revolt, at least some Christians in the cities of Asia Minor apparently did the same. Thus, the Christian communities where John preached included Christians who joined the pagan guilds, bought and sold merchandise with the imperial coinage, and sat down to dinner with friends and relations who were not Christians. And some of their pastors, including the ones John calls Jezebel and Balaam, apparently blessed the compromise. For some Christians and their clergy, the compromise was a way of sparing themselves from persecution and, at the same time, availing themselves of the profits that were available for those who engaged in the crafts or in commerce.
But for the author of Revelation—as for Daniel and other apocalyptic writers before him and various true believers who came after him—even the slightest compromise with true belief is condemned as a crime against God. John values rigor and purity of belief above all else, and he makes no meaningful distinction between handling a Roman coin and engaging in Satan worship. Indeed, he finds halfhearted Christians to be literally stomach turning, and he imputes the same revulsion to God himself: “Because you say, ‘I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,’” God is made to announce in the book of Revelation, “so then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of my mouth.’”78
Lack of zeal, in other words, literally makes John (or, more precisely, God himself) sick to his stomach. But an even more exacting standard is applied to his fellow preachers: if they fail to meet his exacting standards of piety and true belief, they are no better than harlots and witches. And that’s what has always made the moral logic of Revelation so appealing to men and women in every age who, like John, who regard the slightest mis-step as a plunge into hell.
John, always given to rhetorical excess, does not restrict himself to quibbling with Christians who do not bother to ask their hosts exactly how the meat on the table came to be slaughtered. To be sure, he accuses both Balaam and Jezebel of teaching faithful Christians “to eat things sacrificed unto idols.” But he goes on to denounce them for “seducing” Christians “to commit fornication,” the emblematic moral crime that so obsessed the classical prophets of the Hebrew Bible.79 Indeed, both John and his Jewish role models regarded apostasy and sexual promiscuity as interchangeable sins.
The Greek word that is customarily translated as “fornication” (
But the words and phrases selected by John are intended to suggest that Jezebel herself and her Christian followers were, quite literally, willful and defiant sexual outlaws who insisted on engaging in their carnal adventures even after they had been warned of the consequences. Indeed, the text of Revelation suggests (even if it does not describe) scenes of ritual harlotry, orgiastic sex, and the careless spawning of bastard children, all of which have prompted some scholarly readers to regard Revelation as a work of “apocalyptic pornography.”81
“And I gave her time to repent of her sexual immorality, and she did not repent,” says the Son of God in condemning Jezebel. “Behold, I cast her into a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her I will throw into great tribulation, unless they repent of her doings, and I will strike her children dead.”82
The same double-edged meanings may be buried in John’s condemnation of “the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, which thing I hate” and other Christians who embrace what he darkly refers to as “the deep things of Satan.”83 Although the Nicolaitans are wholly unknown outside the pages of Revelation, the early church fathers suggested that they were a band of heretics led by Nicolas, a wholly obscure figure who is mentioned briefly in Acts.84 Some scholars are willing to entertain the notion that John is referring to “a Christian libertine group” whose teachings included not only sorcery and other satanic practices but also “sexual license” as a tool of spiritual enlightenment.85 The Nicolaitans supposedly taught that “the really wise and mature Christian must know life at its worst as well as at its best,” according to Scottish biblical scholar and broadcaster William Barclay, and so “it was right and necessary to commit the grossest and the most depraved sins in order to experience what they were like.”86
But it is also possible (and even more likely) that the Nicolaitans, like Jezebel and Balaam, were easygoing and open-minded Christians who were willing to make the compromises that allowed them to participate fully in the “social, commercial, and political life” of the pagan communities in which they lived. The hateful and inflammatory labels that John slaps on his theological enemies may be no more than “code names” that he uses to identify Christian pastors and preachers who “allowed eating food sacrificed to the idols and accepted compromise with the emperor cult.”87 If so, their worst offense—and perhaps their only offense—was placing themselves on the wrong side of what John regarded as the no-man’s-land of a culture war.
John reveals nothing about the more intimate aspects of his life, and we simply do not know whether he has a wife and children or, for that matter, any family at all. But he allows us to see that he is plainly put off by human sexuality, and when he mentions sex at all, he cannot seem to conceive of a sexual encounter between a man and a woman as something other than fornication. Indeed, John makes it clear in the book of Revelation that he regards
For example, John predicts that 144,000 souls will be taken up to some celestial counterpart of Mount Zion, where they will be granted the privilege of following the Lamb “wherever he goes.”88 They are “redeemed from mankind as first fruits for God and the Lamb,”89 a phrase that harks back to the ritual of animal sacrifice at the Temple in Jerusalem and suggests that they are martyrs who made the ultimate sacrifice to God. To distinguish the “first fruits” from the rest of humanity, they will be “sealed upon their foreheads” with the name of God and the name of the Lamb.90And John carefully notes that they are also distinguishable for a less obvious reason: all of them are lifelong celibates.
“These are the ones who were not defiled with women,” writes John, “for they are virgins.”91
A certain discomfort with sexuality of all kinds, even within marriage, can be found throughout the apocalyptic tradition.