A History of the End of the World

that he is speaking the truth, as God gave him the light to see the truth, when he reveals what he calls “things which must shortly come to pass.”¹⁶²

John does not seek to win praise as a great author, nor can the book of Revelation be safely contained and dismissed as a work of literature. Rather, he clearly means to win converts for Christianity, and he wants his message, so fierce and so dire, to reach the whole world. And, significantly, he does not intend his message to endure for the ages for the simple reason that he is convinced—and wants to convince his audience—that the end of the world is nigh: “Behold, I come quickly,” John hears Jesus Christ say in his vision. “Blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book.¹⁶³

Surely the greatest of all the ironies in John’s life and work is the simple and unavoidable fact that the things he predicts in the book of Revelation did not come to pass quickly or, for that matter, at all. John himself would have been shocked and heartbroken to know that we are all still here to read what he wrote two thousand years ago. That is why the book of Revelation and the apocalyptic tradition in Judaism and Christianity have been called, aptly if also poignantly, “the history of a delusion.”¹⁶⁴ To put it another way, Revelation is the history of the end of the world and, as we shall see for ourselves, the history of a world that refused to end.

4. The Apocalyptic Invasion

I don’t know what is happening in other parts of the world, but in this country where we live the world no longer announces its end but demonstrates it.

POPE GREGORY THE GREAT (540–604)

When Jerome set himself to the task of translating the Bible into Latin in the fourth century, he was forced to confront all the bafflements and contradictions of the book of Revelation. The tale that John tells, as we have seen, is hard to follow and even harder to understand. The names, colors, numbers, and images that John conjures up are freighted with secret meanings, but exactly what they are supposed to signify is mostly a matter of speculation. At certain moments, John salts his text with what can only be described as brainteasers. Now and then, John explains a few of the symbols and solves a few of the riddles, but even when he does, the answers only raise more questions: “Revelation,” concluded the frustrated Jerome, “has as many mysteries as it does words.”¹

Some of the most famous mysteries, like the identity of the Roman emperor whose name is enciphered as the satanic number 666, are hidden in plain sight in the text. Other mysteries are to be found in questions that seem to ask themselves: John insists that the world will end soon, but he never reveals exactly when. And some mysteries are woven deeply and intricately into the theological fabric of the text itself. Where in the book of Revelation, for example, is the kind and gentle teacher whom Jesus is depicted to be in some of most exalted passages of the Gospels? “Love your enemies,” says Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, “bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which spitefully use you, and persecute you.”² By contrast, the author of Revelation knows only a violent and vengeful Jesus, “clad in a robe dipped in blood,” armed with a two-edged sword, mounted on a warhorse, and commanding the “armies of heaven” in a war of extermination against his enemies.³

“From his mouth issues a sharp sword with which to smite the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron,” writes John, who seems to delight in describing the carnage that the celestial warrior-king will leave behind on the battlefield after the war between God and Satan. “Come, gather for the great supper of God,” calls an angel to the vultures in midflight, “to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men, the flesh of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great.”⁴

Perhaps the single greatest contrast between the rival theologies of Revelation and the Gospels is found in the passages where the end-times are described. According to the vision of judgment day in a passage of the Little Apocalypse as it appears in Matthew, Jesus will welcome into the heavenly kingdom all those who gave food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, clothed the naked and sheltered the homeless, and visited the sick and the imprisoned. “Verily I say unto you,” announces Jesus in what is arguably the single most sublime and yet revolutionary line of text in all of the Christian scriptures, “inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”⁵

John, however, has nothing quite so encouraging or elevating to say to good-hearted men and women who hope to achieve salvation through acts of kindness and compassion here on earth. According to Revelation, the first souls to be saved—or “sealed,” as John puts it—will be the 144,000 men whose only apparent merit is that they “have not defiled themselves with women.”⁶ At the time of the first resurrection and judgment, only the saints and martyrs—those who refused to worship the “beast” or receive his mark on their hands and foreheads, and those who were beheaded for professing their belief in Christ—will be raised from the dead to reign alongside Jesus during the millennium that he will spend as king on earth.

Then, after Satan is released from the bottomless pit and defeated once and for all, the rest of the dead will be resurrected and judged “by what they had done.”⁷ John does not specify what kind of conduct in life will bring salvation after death, but the strong implication throughout the book of Revelation is that faith counts more than good works, and only the “saints” will be spared from eternal punishment. Everyone else—including not only “murderers, fornicators, sorcerers and idolators” but also “the cowardly, the faithless, and the polluted”—will spend all of eternity in “the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.”⁸

Readers of the Christian scriptures, ancient and modern, have been troubled by the contrast between these two ways of imagining the end of the world. One modern scholar, for example, characterizes Revelation as “sub- Christian” precisely because John is so obsessed with vengeance-taking and so little concerned with the acts of care and mercy that Jesus advocates in the Gospels.⁹ The Christian case against Revelation is memorably summed up by Martin Luther at a point in his life when he was not yet fully convinced that Revelation belonged in the Bible at all.

“My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book,” Luther writes in the preface to a German edition of the Bible that he published in 1522. “There is one sufficient reason for the small esteem in which I hold it—that Christ is neither taught in it nor recognized.”¹⁰

Luther, as we shall see, was hardly the first or only Bible reader to view the book of Revelation with alarm and concern. At its first appearance, Revelation was nearly excluded from the Christian scriptures, and its strange and punishing text has always puzzled, agitated, threatened, and offended many Christians who were prepared to accept Revelation as Holy Writ. But it also true that Revelation ultimately seized and held the Christian imagination—and, in some ways, the Western imagination—over the next fifteen centuries. John’s little book, sweet in the mouth but bitter in the belly, may have turned out be a failure as a work of prophecy, but it remained the equivalent of a best seller in the Middle Ages and long after.

Revelation has always been regarded by some Christian authorities as a dangerous book. Just as John seems to have intended, the text is capable of stirring up powerful emotions in its readers and hearers. Revelation is, by turns, a revenge fantasy, a parade of horribles, and something of a freak show. And the potent and intoxicating text sends some readers into their own fits of mystical ecstasy in which divine voices are heard and miraculous sights are seen. Nowadays, of course, we may be tempted to regard such phenomena as manifestations of mental illness, but the clergy of the infant Christian church were equally skeptical of ordinary men and women who claimed to be visionaries.

The earliest recorded example of religious excess inspired by the book Revelation dates back to the middle of the second century, a half century or so after the text first appeared in the Christian world. Revelation was the favorite biblical text of a man called Montanus, who appeared around 156 in the region of Asia Minor known as Phrygia, not far from the seven churches to which John addresses his letters, and announced himself to be a prophet in his own right. Among his coterie were Maximilla and Prisca, two charismatic young women who—like Montanus himself—were able to put themselves into ecstatic trance states at will and claimed to receive their own