A History of the End of the World

be addressing an audience for whom the Jewish scriptures are familiar and compelling. Within the 404 verses that make up the book of Revelation, by one scholar’s count, more than five hundred allusions to the Hebrew Bible can be discerned. Revelation is virtually a catalog of Jewish themes and traditions, ranging from the Twelve Tribes to the Temple of Yahweh. And yet, ironically, the best evidence of John’s Jewish identity is buried away inside the single most hateful line of text in Revelation, where John implies that he is more authentically Jewish than his adversaries in the Jewish community.

“Behold,” writes John, attributing his words to Jesus Christ, “I will make those of the synagogue of Satan who say that they are Jews and are not come and bow down before your feet and learn that I have loved you.”¹³⁰

Even John’s near-obsessive use of the number seven can be read as an allusion to Jewish scripture. God’s primal act of creation as depicted in Genesis is completed in seven days—“And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made”¹³¹—and thus seven becomes the symbol of divine wholeness in Jewish tradition. When John refers to signs and symbols in groups of seven—seven angels, seven seals, seven trumpets, seven thunders, and so on—he means to suggest that God’s will is at work in both the creation and destruction of the world.

“And the angel whom I saw lifted up his hand to heaven,” writes John of the seventh angel who appears after the seventh thunder, “and swore by him who lives for ever and ever, who created heaven and what is in it, the earth and what is in it, and the sea and what is in it, that there should be time no longer.”¹³²

Other scenes in Revelation are hot-wired to specific passages of the Hebrew Bible. John, for example, knows the passage in Ezekiel in which God hands the prophet a book of “lamentations and moaning and woe” and then issues a strange command: “Son of man, eat this scroll and go speak unto the house of Israel.”¹³³ And John claims precisely the same experience for himself: God sends a scroll (or a “little book,” according to the King James Version) by means of an angelic messenger, and John, too, is ordered to “take it and eat it up.” Here John is incorporating the Jewish scriptures into his own writing in the most literal possible way: “And I took the little book from the hand of the angel and ate it,” reports John. “And I was told, ‘You must again prophesy about many peoples and nations and tongues and kings.’”¹³⁴

The pointed reference to “peoples and nations and tongues” allows us to understand the hatred and resentment that wells up in John and spills over into the book of Revelation. “John makes a plea to Jews…who ‘own’ the tradition to accept him and his vision,” according to Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, but his preachments are rejected by the Jewish men and women in his audience. If the house of Israel refuses to recognize Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, John resolves to address himself to other peoples and nations and tongues. But he cannot overlook the insult that has been offered by the Jews who remained faithful to their own traditions, and so he returns the insult by consigning them all to the “synagogue of Satan.”¹³⁵And so, ironically, what is arguably the single most anti-Semitic line of text in all of Christian scripture can also be understood, almost poignantly, as the outcry of a Jew who has been spurned by his fellow Jews.

While John delights in alluding to and borrowing from the Hebrew Bible, he does not quote its text verbatim. Rather, he uses Jewish scripture as a “language arsenal,” according to Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, and he picks and chooses the ideas, images, and incidents that suit his own rhetorical purpose.¹³⁶ Perhaps he did not have a copy of the Bible at hand as he spoke and wrote, or perhaps he simply did not care to cut and paste from the ancient texts: “The prophetic spirit creates,” explains one Bible scholar, “it does not quote in order to teach or argue.”¹³⁷

Nor does John confine himself to strictly Jewish sources. He may denounce Greco-Roman civilization in all of its richness and splendor as the work of the Devil, but he appears to know and borrow freely from pagan iconography. Seven is a sacred number in Jewish tradition, to be sure, but it was also significant in the astrological beliefs and practices of classical paganism, which knew only seven heavenly bodies. Twelve is the number of the tribes of Israel, but it is also the number of signs in the zodiac. Astrology, in fact, is condemned in the Bible as one of the great besetting sins of paganism—“offerings to the sun and moon and constellations, all the host of heaven”¹³⁸—and yet John may have invoked precisely these images and associations in the text of Revelation.

Among the most sublime and exalted scenes in Revelation, for example, is the “great portent” that will appear in heaven to mark the beginning of the end-times: “[a] woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.” The woman, pregnant and already in labor, is stalked by “a great red dragon,” which waits to devour the newborn child as soon as she gives birth. But the archangel Michael —a figure who first appears in the book of the Daniel, John’s single favorite source in the Hebrew Bible—makes war on the red dragon, who is here and now revealed to be Eve’s original tempter, “that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan.”¹³⁹

Conventional readings of Revelation see the woman as the Virgin Mary and the newborn infant as Jesus, “a man child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron” and who “was caught up unto God, and to his throne.”¹⁴⁰ But it is also possible to discern less orthodox origins and meanings. “St. John’s mind sets to work on the lines of a very old mythic pattern,” writes Austin Farrer, who suggests that John borrowed the figure of the woman from pagan astrology—“the Lady of the Zodiac” who is “crowned with the twelve constellations.”¹⁴¹ Other scholars see the goddess Artemis, who was worshipped in such splendor in the Artemesium at Ephesus, or the goddess Roma, the “queen of heaven” whose divine child the Roman emperor was imagined to be and whose attributes are found on imperial Roman coinage from the first century.¹⁴²

Indeed, precisely the same figure is found in sacred myths all over the ancient world—“a high goddess with astral attributes: the sun is her garment, the moon her footstool, the stars her crown.”¹⁴³ Even the dire predicament of a laboring woman beset by a ravening monster is a familiar motif in pagan iconography. The Egyptian goddess Isis, for example, struggles to save her son from attacks by snakes and scorpions, and the Greek goddess Leto is menaced by a python when she is pregnant with Apollo. “In each of these myths the dragon seeks the child, not yet born, in order to devour or kill him,” explains Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza. “The woman, still pregnant, is pursued for the child she carries. She gives birth with the dragon only moments way, and the male child she has just delivered is caught up to the Heavens, safe from the dragon’s reach.”¹⁴⁴

Above all, the “war in heaven” between the archangel Michael and the red dragon—the eschatological high point of Revelation—is strongly reminiscent of the so-called combat myth that can be found in stories of creation in pagan texts from all over the ancient Near East. Indeed, the notion of a primal struggle between a high god and a primal beast—that is, a symbolic account of the struggle between order and chaos, creation and destruction—can be discerned within the Hebrew Bible itself, where Isaiah (among other biblical authors) refers to the defeat of Leviathan, “the twisting serpent and the dragon of the sea,” by a sword-wielding Yahweh.¹⁴⁵The combat myth of pagan tradition can be glimpsed only through the cracks of the biblical text, but it is the centerpiece of the book of Revelation.

Some scholars insist that such pagan associations are mostly in the mind of the beholder. And, in any event, none of the pagan subtext that might be teased out of the book of Revelation need be seen as evidence of hypocrisy on John’s part. Rather, it is a sign of John’s savvy that his “language arsenal” is not confined to Jewish sources. “John co-ops this imperial propaganda,” proposes Adela Yarbro Collins, “to claim that the true golden age will come with the messianic reign of Christ.”¹⁴⁶

After all, once he resolved to look beyond the Jewish community in search of readers and hearers, John apparently realized that he needed to use scenes and stories that would be meaningful to pagans who were strangers to the Jewish scriptures. John’s preachments would transcend both the Jewish and pagan sources that seem to have inspired him, and the words and images of Revelation came to be imprinted, deeply and ineradicably, on the Western imagination, ranging from the church paintings of medieval Europe to the music videos in heavy rotation on MTV. John, of course, fully expected that his words of prophecy—and the world itself—would last “but a short time,” and yet the sheer staying power of Revelation turns out to be John’s greatest achievement.¹⁴⁷

A few pious readers of Revelation imagine that John travels to the remote and barren island of Patmos on a kind of vision quest—he seeks a revelation and, like others who have done the same over the centuries and millennia, finds what he is looking for. Although there is nothing in the text to justify such speculation,