A History of the End of the World (9 page)

Nowhere in Revelation, in fact, does the author claim to be the apostle John, nor does he refer to any experiences that might place him among the apostles during the lifetime of Jesus. Indeed, he appears to be uninterested in—and perhaps even unaware of—the life story of Jesus as it is described in such evocative detail in the Gospels. At one point in Revelation, he makes a passing reference to the twelve apostles in the third person, which strongly suggests that he was not claiming to be one of them. And when he mentions the apostles at all, it is only in his celebrated vision of the New Jerusalem that will descend from heaven after the end of the world: “And the wall of the city had twelve foundations,” he writes, “and on them the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.”
¹³

Pious theologians and secular scholars alike have proposed some highly imaginative scenarios to explain how the same author might have written both Revelation and the Fourth Gospel. Perhaps, they suggest, the apostle John wrote Revelation when he was younger and wilder and only newly arrived in the Greek-speaking provinces of the Roman Empire—and he wrote the Gospel when he was older and wiser, and only after he had acquired a mastery of Greek over long years of practice. Or perhaps he dictated the text of each book to a different secretary or translator, one far more skilled than the other—and, if so, the Gospel is the work of the more accomplished secretary, while Revelation suffered at the hands of the incompetent one.

Yet another explanation is that the apostle died before finishing one or both of the books. According to one ancient tradition, John was martyred for his faith sometime before 70
C.E.
, which is earlier than the dates assigned to the Fourth Gospel
or
Revelation by contemporary scholars. Perhaps, then, one or both of the books were completed after John’s death by two separate redactors, each with a different understanding of his theology and an unequal mastery of Greek. One modern Bible scholar strikes an even more provocative stance when he imagines that the text of Revelation fell into the hands of a posthumous ghostwriter who was not merely inept but intent on ruining the work of St. John the Evangelist—“an arch-heretic who betrays a depth of stupidity all but incomprehensible, and only matched by his ignorance.”
¹⁴

Dionysius himself read the two books with pious but discerning eyes and was forced to conclude that Revelation was written by “another John”—that is, someone named John but not St. John the Evangelist.
¹⁵
Modern scholars share the same conviction. Bart Ehrman, for example, points out that the apostle John is described in the Gospels as illiterate, and thus could not plausibly have written
any
of the biblical works that are attributed to him.
¹⁶
And the question of authorship is still being debated by scholars and theologians: “No subject of Biblical studies has provoked such elaborate and prolonged discussion,” complains one scholar, “and no discussion has been so bewildering, disappointing and unprofitable.”
¹⁷

Indeed, readers of Revelation across the ages have never been able to resist asking the most daring and tantalizing question of all: If the author was not St. John the Evangelist, then who was the
other
John, the man who really wrote the book of Revelation?

One early and intriguing candidate for the authorship of Revelation, for example, is an otherwise obscure elder (or “presbyter”) of the early Christian church whose name was also John. He is first mentioned in the work of Papias, a bishop of the second century who is the earliest known commentator on the book of Revelation. The original writings of Papias are lost, but he is cited and quoted by other ancient sources who knew his work. According to a passage in the influential church history composed by Eusebius in the fourth century, for example, Papias was in the habit of seeking out elderly Christians of his acquaintance, the presbyter John among them, in an earnest effort to learn about the life of Jesus from eyewitnesses to the events that are described in the Gospels.

“I do not regard that which comes from books,” insists Papias in an intriguing aside, “as so valuable for myself as that which comes from a living and abiding voice.”
¹⁸

Significantly, Papias was the bishop of Hierapolis, which was located in the vicinity of Laodicea, one of the cities in Asia Minor to whose churches the author of Revelation addresses himself. Since Papias was already at work on his commentaries in the first decades of the second century, it is plausible that his sources might have included an aging eyewitness who had known the historical Jesus or, at least, a living apostle. So Papias’s passing reference to the presbyter John was enough to catch the eye of Eusebius, an early and authoritative chronicler of the Christian church. “Eusebius concludes that if John the son of Zebedee did not see the Revelation,” explains Adela Yarbro Collins, “then John the presbyter probably did.”
¹⁹

An entirely different John, and a much more famous one, has been proposed as the author of Revelation by Catholic scholar J. Massyngberde Ford, author of an idiosyncratic translation of Revelation that appears in the Anchor Bible series. Ford argues that the original author of Revelation is neither the apostle John nor the presbyter John but rather a third man—John the Baptist, the fiery Jewish prophet who is mentioned in the Gospels as well as the writings of the ancient Jewish historian Josephus. According the Gospels, John the Baptist was beheaded before the crucifixion, a fact that may explain why the author of Revelation seems to know so little about the biblical life story of Jesus of Nazareth.

Ford suggests that Revelation includes “additions” that were written into text by Jewish followers of John the Baptist “who may or may not have converted to Christian ity.” But she also points out that, when all the apocalyptic passages in the New Testament are compared, “Revelation is the only one in which Jesus is
not
the central figure.”
²⁰
For that reason, she concludes that the core of the book of Revelation is “an essentially Jewish apocalypse” that was only later repurposed for a Christian readership and then, even later, admitted into the Christian canon.
²¹
Far from being a book written
by
Jesus Christ, the core text of Revelation may not have been originally written by a Christian at all.

Indeed, the author of Revelation seems far more familiar with the Hebrew Bible—and perhaps even such obscure apocalyptic writings as the book of Enoch—than with the Christian texts that came to be collected in the New Testament.
²²
Some 518 allusions to passages of the Hebrew Bible can be found in the book of Revelation, but only fourteen references to “Jesus” or “Jesus Christ,” most of which appear in the portions that she characterizes as “Christian additions.”
²³
Even Austin Farrer, a gifted and revered Bible critic of the mid–twentieth century who piously assumes that the author of Revelation is John the Evangelist, readily concedes that he is working with ancient Jewish sources and refers to him as “the Christian rabbi.”
²⁴

Notably, Revelation is largely free of the anti-Jewish rhetoric that can be found in certain passages of the Gospels, and John proudly characterizes himself and his followers as authentic Jews. Above all, the author is plainly intrigued by such purely Jewish themes as the Temple and the Ark of the Covenant.
²⁵
By contrast, Ford finds “practically no unambiguous references to the earthly life of Jesus,” and no interest at all in such basic Christian rituals and doctrines as baptism, communion, or the Trinity.
²⁶
For these reasons, she searches for the original author of Revelation among the Jews of first-century Judea who did not live to see the crucifixion of Jesus or the birth of Christian ity. “The candidate who seems most suitable,” she insists, “is John the Baptist.”
²⁷

Like Jesus, John the Baptist is depicted in the New Testament as an apocalyptic prophet. But the Baptist offers a far gloomier vision of the end-times than anything attributed to Jesus in the Gospels: “His message is radically different from that of Jesus,” Ford writes. “John’s is one of wrath and doom rather than salvation.”
²⁸
And it is the fierce and frightening rhetoric of John the Baptist, rather than the kinder and gentler teachings of Jesus, that is echoed in the pages of Revelation. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” John the Baptist is depicted as saying in Matthew. “I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
²⁹

None of the theorists, ancient or modern, have managed to convince a majority of modern Bible scholars that the man who calls himself John in the book of Revelation is John the Evangelist, John the Baptist,
or
the presbyter John. “Sound judgment leads to the conclusion,” urges Adela Yarbro Collins, “that it was written by a man named John who is otherwise unknown to us.”
³⁰
Yet, as we shall see, the identity of the author of Revelation is one mystery that
can
be solved. And the telling details of his life offer a key to decoding the secret meanings that he wrote into the remarkable text of Revelation.

A close reading of Revelation, in fact, reveals a great deal more about its author than we know about the writers of most other biblical texts. Let’s begin with the simple fact that his Greek is flawed by “gross errors in grammar and syntax,” a fact that has prompted some scholars to conclude that John was a Jewish man born in Judea, where he grew up speaking Aramaic and acquired a lifelong hatred for the Roman army of occupation under which he lived.
³¹
The evidence for such telling biographical details, which help to explain some of the most baffling mysteries of Revelation, is subtle and speculative, but also intriguing and illuminating.

John, for example, seems to avoid using syntax that is unique to Greek and prefers to use phrasings that have a counterpart in Hebrew or Aramaic.
³²
And the precise wording of his allusions to the Jewish scriptures suggests that he knew the original Hebrew text of the Bible—or perhaps one of the ancient Aramaic translations—rather than the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Bible that was used by Jews in the Diaspora and by the authors of other books of the New Testament.
³³
Such habits of language would have been characteristic of someone who was born and raised in Judea, studied the Jewish scripture in original Hebrew or an Aramaic translation, and emigrated to the Greek-speaking provincial towns of Asia Minor only late in life.

“He writes as one who had spent many reflective years in the synagogue before his conversion,” proposes Austin Farrer in
A Rebirth of Images,
his masterwork on the book of Revelation. “So, if we put together his Jewish and his Christian periods, we may be wise to suppose that he is over fifty years old when we first hear of him.”
³⁴

Then, too, the book of Revelation betrays a hatred for the Roman empire of the kind that we might expect to find in someone whose birthplace was the Roman province of Judea. Rome, as we have seen, occupied the Jewish homeland throughout the first century, fought a long and bloody war to suppress the Jewish resistance movement, and finally destroyed the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem in 70
C.E.
, thus putting an end to the ancient rituals of Judaism as they are described in the Hebrew Bible. The slaughter of the Jewish population, including the mass crucifixion of surviving defenders of Jerusalem, is characterized as “the Roman Shoah” by Jack Miles, an acclaimed Bible critic and Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of God, in
Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God.
³⁵
Perhaps John saw such atrocities with his own eyes, and when he fled Judea to nearby Asia Minor as a war refugee, he carried a burning desire for revenge against Rome.

Some of the most lurid and disturbing imagery in the book of Revelation, in fact, amounts to an unsubtle attack on Roman imperialism. John, for example, conjures up the famous vision of “the great whore with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication,” a woman “arrayed in purple and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.”
³⁶
John sees the great whore riding on a scarlet beast with seven heads, and an angel explains to him that “the seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman is seated.”
³⁷
As his first readers and hearers would have understood without further explanation, Rome was commonly known in the arts and letters of the classical pagan world as “the city of seven hills.”
³⁸
When they cracked the code of Revelation, they saw the Beast as the Roman conqueror of the Jewish homeland.

The poor Greek in which Revelation is written—“John’s language,” declares one scholar, “is a ghetto language”—may reveal more about John’s white-hot hatred for the Hellenistic civilization of ancient Rome than it does about his deficiencies in language and learning.
³⁹
Indeed, Adela Yarbro Collins suggests that John was perfectly capable of writing in proper Greek but chose to intentionally “Semiticize” his work as “a kind of protest against the higher form of Hellenistic culture” and “an act of cultural pride of a Jewish Semite.”
⁴⁰
To help the modern reader understand the significance of his choice of language, she likens it to the use of “Black English” as a badge of honor: “It is analogous to the refusal of some American blacks to ‘talk right.’”
⁴¹

Here is the first, but hardly the last, example of why the author of Revelation can be seen as a propagandist on the front lines of a culture war. Like all apocalyptic authors since Daniel, the writer of Revelation sets himself against the alluring ways of Greco-Roman civilization as practiced in his own lifetime by the subjects of a superpower that he so memorably dubbed “the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.”
⁴²
He regarded anyone, Christian or Jew, who collaborated with Roman authority, enjoyed the pleasures of Roman arts and letters, or earned a living in commerce with the Romans as a traitor to the one true God. Indeed, as we shall see, even the simple act of taking a Roman coin in hand was the moral equivalent of apostasy in John’s eyes—an uncompromising stance that would endear him to the activists and ardent true believers in every generation that followed, including our own.