A History of the End of the World (3 page)

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.”
⁴⁰
All 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

The conventional apology for such rhetorical excess is that Revelation consists of morale-boosting propaganda by and for the victims of oppression and persecution—“the messages addressed by ancient apocalyptic seers to those engulfed by suffering and overwhelmed by dread.”
⁴⁸
That is why, for example, one modern theologian insists that Martin Luther King Jr.’s
Letter from a Birmingham Jail,
a stirring manifesto of the American civil rights movement, reflects “experiences and hopes similar to the theology of Revelation.”
⁴⁹
More recently, however, some courageous scholars have suggested that the author of Revelation was probably not himself at risk of torture and death at the time and in the place where he lived and worked. Indeed, as it turns out, the rhetoric of Revelation is no less compelling to those who imagine themselves to be persecuted than it is to those who actually are persecuted.

“When thinking of the torments which will be the lot of Christians at the time of Anti-Christ,” mused Thérèse of Lisieux, a nun in nineteenth-century France, shortly before her death from illness at the age of twenty-four, “I feel my heart leap with joy and I would that these torments be reserved for me.”
⁵⁰

But it is also true that Revelation, now and then, moves some of its more excitable readers to act out their own fantasies of revenge and martyrdom. “Assurance that the end is nigh,” observes one contemporary scholar, “often brings with it profoundly dangerous baggage.”
⁵¹
A young man named Vernon Howell, for example, joined an apocalyptic sect called the Branch Davidians, dubbed himself “David Koresh” in a coded reference to two messianic figures of the Hebrew Bible, and led his followers into martyrdom in a standoff with federal law-enforcement agents, all because he was convinced that God had revealed to him that the battle of Armageddon was destined to start in Waco, Texas. Koresh, too, is an unremarkable example of a very old phenomenon, and we shall see how the apocalyptic idea has worked on unstable minds over the last twenty centuries.

Some of the recent readings of Revelation would be laughable if they were not so creepy. Contemporary traffickers in end-of-the-world prophecy have resorted to the ancient biblical text to find explanations for various phenomena of our anxiety-ridden age, both real and imagined, including alien abduction, UFOs, nuclear proliferation, the Kennedy assassination, the sexual revolution, the digital revolution, the AIDS epidemic, and much else besides—“an example of Americans’ insatiable appetite for the unusual, spectacular and exotic,” as one scholar proposes.
⁵²
And Revelation, which imagines the existence of a vast conspiracy of princes, powers, and principalities in ser vice to Satan, feeds even the most outlandish paranoid fantasies about the hidden workings of the world in which we live.

Above all, Revelation is now—and has always been—a potent rhetorical weapon in a certain kind of culture war, a war of contesting values and aspirations, that has been waged throughout human history. The author of Revelation, as we shall see, condemns any Christian who partakes of the pleasures and rewards of classical civilization at the peak of its enduring achievements in art, letters, and philosophy. When Savonarola called upon his parishioners to cast their paintings and pretty things on the Bonfire of the Vanities—and to thereby turn Florence into the “New Jerusalem” that is promised in Revelation—he was fighting a culture war against what he called paganism and we call the Renaissance. And modern readers of Revelation who inject the Bible into the rancorous public debate over the role of religion in American democracy are fighting the same war all over again.

“It’s not a shooting war, but it is a war,” declared one recent appointee to a federal judgeship, a religious fundamentalist whose nomination sparked a crisis in Congress. “These are perilous times for people of faith, not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives, but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud.”
⁵³

So the book of Revelation cannot be dismissed as a biblical oddity that belongs only to professional theologians, media-savvy preachers, and a few religious crackpots. The fact is that Revelation has come to be regarded by certain men and women in positions of power and influence as a source of inspiration, if not a divine handbook, for the conduct of war, diplomacy, and statecraft in the real world. When Ronald Reagan moved into a house whose street number was 666, he insisted on changing the address to a less satanic number, and he readily interpreted an otherwise unremarkable coup in Libya as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy:

“That’s a sign that the day of Armageddon isn’t far off,” he declared. “Everything’s falling into place. It can’t be long now.”
⁵⁴

Such beliefs are especially alarming in a man with the power to inflict a nuclear Armageddon on the enemy he dubbed “the evil empire,” yet another oblique reference to the book of Revelation. Yet Reagan is hardly the only American politician to hold such beliefs. All occupants of the White House since Reagan—and many of their most trusted counselors and confidantes—have declared themselves to be “born again,” a phrase that identifies them with a strain of religious fundamentalism that assumes the accuracy and inevitability of biblical prophecy, including the end-time prophecies of Revelation. Such literalism in the reading of the Bible was regarded as a problem by the earliest Christian authorities in late antiquity, and it is no less problematic in the culture war that is being fought in American today.

Indeed, as we shall shortly see, Revelation has served as a “language arsenal” in a great many of the social, cultural, and political conflicts in Western history.
⁵⁵
Again and again, Revelation has stirred some dangerous men and women to act out their own private apocalypses. Above all, the moral calculus of Revelation—the demonization of one’s enemies, the sanctification of revenge taking, and the notion that history must end in catastrophe—can be detected in some of the worst atrocities and excesses of every age, including our own.

For all of these reasons, the rest of us ignore the book of Revelation only at our impoverishment and, more to the point, at our own peril.

What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?

W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE,
Macbeth

A
pocalypse” is derived from the Greek word that means “unveiling,” and “Revelation” is its Latin equivalent. Both words suggest the disclosure of something that has been kept secret. Both carry the sense that the secret being revealed is not merely arcane but also deeply mysterious and perhaps even dangerous—“spooky knowledge,” as pop philosopher Alan Watts laughingly puts it.
¹
And nothing else in the scriptures of Judaism
or
Christianity is quite so spooky as the book of Revelation.

Yet, as it turns out, Revelation is hardly unique among the writings in which men and women have set down their spiritual imaginings. Seers, shamans, and self-appointed prophets, in every age and all over the world, have claimed to hear voices and see visions, sometimes with divine assistance, sometimes by means of mystical incantations or magical potions, and sometimes using only their own powerful insight. The oracle at ancient Delphi, who may have begun to babble her words of prophecy after inhaling hallucinogenic vapors rising from a fissure beneath her hillside shrine, has something in common with the contemporary computer scientist who used a microprocessor to decipher what he dubbed the “Bible Code.”

The original author of Revelation, as we shall see, stands squarely in the same tradition. He was surely a gifted poet and a powerful preacher, and some of his readers may be willing to regard him as an authentic visionary who heard voices and saw sights from on high. But the book of Revelation did not spring from his forehead as something fresh and fully formed. A kind of theological and scriptural DNA can be extracted from the text of Revelation, and its bloodlines can be traced back to far older and even stranger texts that were regarded as sacred long before the author of Revelation was inspired to speak out loud about his visions of the end of the world.

The author, for example, was hardly the first human being who claimed to see mystical visions, nor was he the first whose claims were greeted with skepticism by the guardians of religious law and order. Organized religion has always been troubled by any mere mortal—and especially any mortal who has not been duly ordained as a rabbi, priest, imam, or minister—who insists that he or she has come into contact with God. The Hebrew Bible includes a passage that rules out any direct encounter between a human being and the deity: “Man shall not see me, and live,” decrees God in the book of Exodus.
²
Now and then, God may choose to communicate with a human being, of course, but only in oblique ways: “If there be a prophet among you, I, the Lord, do make myself known to him in a vision, I do speak with him in a dream.”
³
Even then, some divine mysteries are deemed to be wholly unfit for human consumption: “The secret things,” warns Moses in the book of Deuteronomy, “belong unto the Lord our God.”
⁴

The same strict rule is carried forward into Christian scripture, a fact that prompted some early Christian authorities to declare the book of Revelation to be unworthy of admission into the New Testament. “I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord,” allows Paul—but not until God is good and ready to grant them. “For now,” he goes on, “we see through a glass darkly.”
⁵
And, to illustrate the point, he tells a tantalizing tale about a man he once knew who was carried all the way up to “the third heaven,” where he “heard unspeakable words”—is Paul speaking coyly of his own ecstatic visions?—but he refuses to repeat what was heard in heaven because “it is not lawful for a man to utter.”
⁶

So the perils of prophecy have always been obvious to guardians of orthodoxy, starting in biblical antiquity and never more so than today. David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, and miscellaneous other religious zealots, less celebrated but no less dangerous, are only the most recent examples of what can happen when a human being with delusions of grandeur, paranoid tendencies, an overheated imagination, and a certain dark charisma convinces himself and his dutiful followers that he is on a mission from God. Indeed, we will encounter many such men and women in these pages, all of whom were agitated and provoked by what they read in the book of Revelation. More than a few of them ended their days on the torturer’s rack or the executioner’s block.

Not every self-appointed seer ends in death and disgrace. A few men and women throughout history have come to be revered as authentic prophets. Moses, Paul, and Muhammad are accepted and celebrated as makers (or remakers) of the three great faiths of the West, but the roster also includes more recent religious innovators such as Joseph Smith (1805–1844), the founder of Mormonism, and Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), the creator of Christian Science. To this day, the president of the Church of Latter-Day Saints bears the title Prophet, Seer and Revelator.

Somewhere between these two realms—the prophets whom we are taught to take seriously, and the prophets whom we are inclined to regard as dangerous lunatics—lays a kind of no-man’s-land of religious imagination and speculation. Here we find a colorful assortment of eccentrics and ecstatics who asked their contemporaries to believe that the secret things of God had been revealed to them after all. Among them is the author of Revelation, and we will see that his visions are deeply rooted in the soil of that spooky landscape.

T
o understand Revelation at all, in fact, we have to explore the far older and even odder writings that shaped the imagination of its author. He apparently knew and loved many of the earlier apocalyptic writings, and he borrowed freely from them. Some of the most puzzling and perplexing passages of Revelation, in fact, snap into sharp focus when they are viewed through the lens of the apocalyptic tradition. The biblical book that is sometimes known as “
The
Apocalypse,” as we shall see, is only one of many apocalypses.

“Apocalypse” is one of the various titles that appear on ancient manuscripts of the last book of the New Testament, but the same word is also used by scholars to identify
any
text in which the author describes the secret knowledge that has been revealed to a human being by a supernatural figure of some kind. The book of Revelation, then, is
an
apocalypse, but it is hardly the first or only one; a whole library of apocalypses, some composed long before Revelation and some long after, has accumulated over the centuries. A Jewish source from the first century, for example, apparently knew of some
seventy
apocalypses that were already on offer at the moment in history when Revelation first appeared.

All but two of the apocalypses that have survived from antiquity were wholly excluded from the Bible as it is known and used in both Jewish and Christian tradition. The only exceptions are the book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible, and the book of Revelation in the New Testament. Indeed, the extrabiblical Jewish apocalypses were shunned by the rabbis of late antiquity who were the custodians of Jewish texts. Ironically, weird but illuminating Jewish writings such as
The Book of Watchers
and
The Animal Apocalypse
survive only because they were preserved and studied by ancient Christian scholars and theologians.

Some of the strangest apocalyptic texts, in fact, were lost to both Christians and Jews until they were rediscovered and retrieved in the twentieth century. Apocalypses were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at a site called Khirbet Qumran in the Judean desert, for example, and the buried archive of Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi on the banks of the Nile River in Egypt. Many of the earliest apocalyptic writings came to be included in a collection of ancient texts known to scholars as Pseudepigrapha—that is, “false writings,” a term that refers to the fact that they are often ascribed to biblical figures who manifestly did not write them.

Strictly speaking, an apocalypse might reveal all kinds of “secret things,” including mysteries and marvels that have nothing to do with the end of the world. Typically, the author of an apocalypse will start by describing a visitation by God or an angel or some other heavenly creature. The visitor from on high might conduct the author on a “guided tour” of the heavens, or grant the author a vision of Jerusalem as it will appear in the far-distant future, or show the author some “cosmological wonder” like the “storehouse of winds” or the “cornerstone of the earth.”
⁷
Sometimes the spectral visitor will allow the author to glimpse a parallel universe that is ordinarily hidden from the eyes of ordinary human beings. And sometimes the visitor will reveal the inner meaning of God’s secret master plan for humankind, including the significance of events that have already happened and events that are yet to come—that is, both “past history” and “future history.”
⁸

But the key concern in most (if not all) apocalyptic writings is the “eschaton” or end-times—that is, how and when the world will end. And curiosity about the end-times is an outgrowth of one of the great theological innovations of Judaism. The pagan civilizations of antiquity, according to a certain conventional wisdom, saw the world as an endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth—“the eternal return of the same,” according to Friedrich Nietzsche’s memorable phrase.
⁹
But the authors of the Hebrew Bible embraced the revolutionary new idea that the God of Israel is a deity who works his will through human history—and history, like any well-crafted story, has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

“An apocalypse only makes sense,” explains contemporary historian Rennie B. Schoepflin, “in a universe ruled by a God of history.”
¹⁰

The end-times as they are imagined in both Jewish and Christian apocalyptic tradition have certain features in common—an ordeal of human suffering at the hands of a satanic oppressor, the arrival of a divine savior or redeemer, a final battle between the forces of good and evil, a resurrection of the dead, a day of judgment, and, finally, the advent of a new and eternal era of divine perfection, sometimes right here on earth and sometimes in a heavenly realm. All of these story lines figure prominently in the book of Revelation, of course, but they are also found in far older texts that were already being read long before the Christian era.

In fact, the apocalyptic tradition dates back at least several centuries before Revelation was set down in writing, and—as it turns out—the idea was not confined to the Judeo-Christian world. Contrary to Nietzsche’s assertion, speculation about the fate of the world in the far-distant future can be found in the pagan writings of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. For example, the Sibylline Oracles—the enigmatic utterings of women who were believed to possess the divine gift of prophecy—were routinely consulted throughout the classical pagan world to predict the fate of both human beings and empires. The practice was so unsettling to Augustus, the first Roman emperor, that he ordered the confiscation and incineration of two thousand copies of the Sibylline Oracles—an example of how dangerous the pursuit of “future history” could be.
¹¹

Some scholars argue that the apocalyptic tradition can be linked to far older and even more exotic sources. Many of the end-of-the-world auguries that appear in the Bible—“the signs and tribulations of the end, the struggle of God and his Messiah against evil, [and] the figure of Satan and his demons”
¹²
—can be traced all the way back to the Zoroastrian writings of Persia, the earliest of which may be several hundred years older than any of the Jewish or Christian texts. For that reason, the birthplace of the apocalyptic idea, and much else that we find in the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition, may have been ancient Persia rather than the Holy Land.

The first apocalyptic authors, then, may have been familiar with “protoapocalypses” that originated outside the land of Israel and served as “models and sources” for the apocalyptic tradition whose highest expression is the book of Revelation.
¹³
And it is tantalizing to speculate on exactly how the eerie and exotic visions of Egyptian priests, Persian magi, and Greek sibyls may have insinuated themselves into the heart and soul of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Still, the “models and sources” that inspired the book of Revelation are much closer at hand: they are to be found in the biblical writings of ancient Judaism that the author of Revelation knew, loved, and copied.

Some of the most familiar figures and scenes in the book of Revelation, in fact, can be traced back to specific passages of the Hebrew Bible—Satan, the demonic armies of Gog and Magog, the Day of Judgment, the end of the world, and much else besides. When we read what is plainly written in the source texts, however, it is clear that the author of Revelation did not feel obliged to remain faithful to what he regarded as Holy Writ. Rather, he felt at liberty to embroider upon or wholly reinvent what he found in the pages of the Bible, and he borrowed ideas and images from far stranger sources, or, perhaps even more likely, he did both at once.

Satan, for example, is given only a cameo role in the Hebrew Bible, and he is never depicted as the arch-demon that the author of Revelation imagines him to be. When he is mentioned at all, Satan is merely an “accuser” or “adversary”—the literal meaning of the Hebrew word—and
not
the diabolical counterpart of God. Indeed, when the word is first used in the Hebrew Bible, it is applied to King David by a Philistine king to mark David as an enemy on the battlefield.
¹⁴
Even when used to identify a celestial figure, Satan is “not a proper name, but merely a title defining the function of a member of God’s heavenly court,” explains H. H. Rowley, an influential Baptist scholar and theologian of the early twentieth century. “He was a sort of Public Prosecutor at the bar of divine justice.”
¹⁵

The most prominent mention of Satan in the Hebrew Bible is found in the book of Job, where he is shown to be a divine counselor who slyly suggests that Job may be less truly pious than God believes him to be. Once his curiosity is piqued by Satan’s remark, God empowers Satan to test Job’s faith by afflicting him with various woes, starting with those famous boils and ending with the death of Job’s beloved wife and children: “Behold, he is in your hands,” says God to Satan, “only spare his life.”
¹⁶
So the only power that Satan enjoys in the Hebrew Bible is the power that God grants him to test Job’s faith, and the whole affair is a kind of laboratory experiment in the limits of human endurance under torture.