A History of the End of the World

eternal life in the world to come. The yearning to be counted among the saved, and the loathing of everyone who is not saved, turns out to be one of the great engines of history.

No better example can be found than the ancient but enduring practice of linking the Antichrist to a living historical figure. The “beast” of Revelation has been a man of all seasons: Muhammad was seen as the Antichrist in the early Middle Ages, Saladin at the time of the Crusades, the Grand Sultan of the Ottoman Turks when they threatened the gates of Vienna, Napoleon in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Martin Luther denounced the pope (or, more precisely, the papacy) as the Anti-christ, and the pope returned the favor. Each generation churns up its own candidates: Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, Roosevelt and Kennedy, Moshe Dayan and Anwar el-Sadat have all been proposed at various times as the human manifestation of the Beast.

Speculation on the identity of the Antichrist, in fact, can be seen as a kind of Rorschach test for the anxieties of any given age. Henry Kissinger, for example, came under suspicion when he was shuttling between Washington, Moscow, and Beijing in the 1970s, and the Ayatollah Khomeini was first nominated only after Americans were taken hostage in Tehran during the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. Only a few years ago, Saddam Hussein was seen as a promising contender; significantly, the best-selling Left Behind series identifies Baghdad as the seat of its fictional Antichrist. Nowadays, of course, Osama bin Laden seems to have taken Saddam’s place as the satanic adversary whose coming is predicted in Revelation.

A closely related enterprise is the effort to crack the code that the author of Revelation planted so intriguingly in his text—the identity of the “beast” whose name is symbolized by the number 666. As we shall see, there is a convincing answer to the question: 666 is an alphanumeric code that can be translated into the Greek, Latin, or Hebrew name of the human being whom the author of Revelation regards as a tool of Satan. But that hasn’t stopped the biblical code-breakers, amateurs and professionals alike, from wringing new and ever more exotic meanings out of the same bloodcurdling number.

The imagery of Revelation, as we shall see, meant something quite specific—and quite different—to its author and his first readers and hearers. But the fact that we are able to understand what the “number of the beast” and the Great Whore of Babylon actually meant to a Christian visionary of Jewish birth in Asia Minor in the first century has never deterred subsequent generations from finding entirely different meanings for themselves. That’s the strange and powerful magic of Revelation: each new generation of readers is convinced that God planted a secret meaning in the text that was meant only and especially for them. And, remarkably, the failure of each previous generation to crack the Revelation code only encourages the next generation to try harder.

As a work of prophecy, of course, Revelation is wholly and self-evidently wrong. “How long, O Lord, holy and true, until you judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” demands the biblical author, quoting the souls of the dead martyrs, and he answers his own question by attributing an unambiguous promise to Jesus Christ: “Behold, I am coming soon.”³⁹ Those words were first reduced to writing nearly two thousand years ago, but the readers of Revelation are still waiting for the day of revenge that is predicted with such clarity and confidence in the ancient text.

The author of Revelation is not the only figure in Christian scriptures whose prediction of the end-times was mistaken. Jesus, according to some awkward sayings attributed to him in the Gospels, assures his followers that at least some of them will see the end of the world with their own eyes. The apostle Paul, in turn, offered the same assurance to his generation of Christians. Both Jesus and Paul were gone by the time the author of Revelation set down his vision of “things which must shortly come to pass.”⁴⁰All of them turned out to be dead wrong, and the world is still here.

The utter, obvious, and persistent failure of the world to “end on time,” as one contemporary Bible scholar wryly puts it, has compelled Christianity to reconsider how life ought to be lived in the here and now, no less in late antiquity than today.⁴¹ Once a Christian emperor seated himself on the imperial throne of pagan Rome in the early fourth century, all the bitter rhetoric of Revelation, so clearly aimed at the power and glory of the Roman Empire, was suddenly an embarrassment that needed to be explained away. By late antiquity, Revelation suddenly seemed less relevant than, say, the Gospel of Mark: “But when you hear of wars and rumors of war, do not be troubled,” Jesus is shown to sensibly caution his followers, “for such things must happen, but the end is not yet.”⁴²

Still, more than a few readers of Revelation in every age, including our own, have thrilled at the idea that the end is near. Indeed, they are perfectly willing to overlook the plain fact that the world has not ended as predicted, and they persist in poring over the text of Revelation in a fresh attempt to figure out the precise date when it will. They have always been wrong, too, of course, but nothing has discouraged the so-called date setters who study the text, crunch the numbers, and come up with dates when the world must end. Not a single century has passed since the ink dried on the first copy of Revelation without some new prediction of the precise date when its prophecies will finally come to pass.

Above all else, the author of Revelation is a good hater, and he embraces the simple principle that anyone who is not with him is against him. He rails against his rival preachers, condemning them as fornicators and false prophets. He heaps abuse on those of his fellow Christians whom he regards as insufficiently zealous for the Lamb of God. He offers the ultimate insult to Jews who do not embrace Jesus as the Messiah by insisting that Christians are the only authentic Jews. He reserves special contempt for anyone who indulges in carnal pleasure and, especially, the getting of goods. And, in a gesture of rhetorical overkill that is the hallmark of Revelation, he condemns his adversaries as not merely wrong, not merely sinful or criminal, but wholly corrupted by “the deep things of Satan.”⁴³

The black-or-white morality of Revelation—everyone and everything in the world is either all good or all bad —is artfully expressed in the author’s insistent pairing of opposites. The Great Whore is the evil twin of “the woman clothed with the sun,” the Beast is a vile parody of the Lamb of God, and the destruction of Babylon, Mother of Harlots, is followed by the creation of the New Jerusalem, a construction of crystal and precious stone that floats down from heaven. Here we find a particularly heartless theology of exclusion: the saints and martyrs will be granted eternal life, as the author of Revelation sees it, and the rest of humanity will burn in hell. Indeed, the book of Revelation fairly sizzles with the deferred pleasure of revenge.

Thus the author of Revelation, like Jesus as depicted in the Gospels, is a radical remaker of Judaism—but each moves in the opposite direction from the other. “Thou shalt love thy neighbor,” commands God in the Hebrew Bible (and not only one’s neighbor but even “the stranger that sojourneth with you”). Jesus cites the traditional Jewish commandment and then intensifies it: “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”⁴⁴ By contrast, the author of Revelation unambiguously promises his readers and hearers that God will avenge himself on their enemies and persecutors in a spasm of divine violence that can only be described as a holocaust.

“The second half of the Apocalypse is flamboyant hate and simple lust…for the end of the world,” writes novelist D. H. Lawrence, who was so appalled by what he found in Revelation that he was moved to write a commentary of his own. By his lights, the author of Revelation had devised “a grandiose scheme for wiping out and annihilating everybody who wasn’t of the elect [and] of climbing up himself right on to the throne of God.”⁴⁵

Thus, for example, the final destruction of “Babylon the Great, Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth”—the author’s symbol for pagan Rome in particular and all human sinfulness in general—betrays the lust for revenge that Lawrence discerns in the text. “Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine, and she shall be utterly burned with fire,” writes the author of Revelation, displaying not a hint of Christian charity but plenty of smug satisfaction at the scourging of his enemies. “Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets, for God hath avenged you on her.”⁴⁶ At the climax of his vision of the end of the world, the author of Revelation is seized with the uncompromising (and unseemly) desire to watch his enemies suffer and die.

“Do unto her as she has done to your people,” he implores the sword-wielding Lamb of God. “She brewed a cup of terror for others, so give her twice as much as she gave out. She has lived in luxury and pleasure, so match it now with torments and sorrow.”⁴⁷