Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (10 page)

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the psychologist William James recounted many accounts of spiritual breakthrough,
including his own recovery from depression, in his book
The Varieties of Religious Experience.
James relates some experiences that are strikingly similar to those found in
other
ancient “books of revelation” not included in the New Testament. Some, like the Revelation of Peter and the Revelation of Paul, have been known for centuries; but the find at Nag Hammadi, which included the Gospel of Thomas, contains about twenty writings that offer “revelations,” many of them very different from John’s Revelation—even one that claims to be John’s
secret
book of revelation. Although these other books sometimes are titled “Apocryphon” (“something secret”) rather than “Apocalypsis,” the titles often were added later. The title of John’s book can be called “apocalypse” or “revelation,” depending on whether one translates from Greek or Latin. Such books claim to reveal divine secrets, although not necessarily about the end of the world. Historian Elliot Wolfson defines “apocalyptic” as “the revelation of divine mysteries through … visions, dreams, and other paranormal states of consciousness.”
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The Revelation of Zostrianos, written about fifty years after John of Patmos wrote, and found at Nag Hammadi in 1945, tells how the young Zostrianos, tormented by questions and overwhelmed by suicidal depression, walked alone into the desert. Finding no place “to rest my spirit … since I was deeply troubled and despairing,” Zostrianos says he had resolved to kill himself. But as he stood alone, steeling himself to do so, he says that suddenly he became aware of a being radiating light, who “said to me, ‘Zostrianos … have you gone mad?”
⁴
This divine presence, Zostrianos said, “rescued [me] from the whole world,” released him from despair, and offered illumination. Then, Zostrianos says, “
I realized that the power in me was greater than the darkness, because it contained the whole light.
”
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The Revelation of Peter, found with the others in 1945, also opens in a desperate moment. Peter says that he was standing in the temple with other disciples when “I saw the priests and the people running up to us with stones, as if they would kill us. And I was afraid that we were going to die.” Terrified, he says, he heard Jesus tell him to “put your hands … over your eyes, and say what you see.” Peter says:

Startled by visions that others reported after Jesus’ death, some Christians found that they, too, could communicate with him, as John of Patmos had—so these “books of revelation” claim. Although such revelations might not change outward circumstances—Peter’s life actually
was
in danger, and tradition tells us that, just as he feared, he was caught and crucified—the Revelation of Peter suggests that what Jesus revealed enabled him to face his death with courage and hope.

Like John of Patmos’ Revelation, these other “revelations,” written several generations after Jesus’ death, were not the work of the original disciples. Instead, followers of Jesus who chose to remain anonymous wrote many of them under the names of disciples—not to deceive their readers but to show that they were writing “in the spirit” of those whose names they borrowed. Furthermore, many of these sources are probably not written by
Christians at all. Writings like Thunder, Perfect Mind and the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth draw upon sacred traditions of Egypt and Greece and, in some cases, on the Hebrew Bible as well.
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Some, like Allogenes, might combine Jewish esoteric teaching and Greek philosophic concepts with practices similar to Buddhist meditation techniques. These diverse sources offer various ways to engage in spiritual practice—some of which go far beyond what we find in familiar Jewish and Christian scriptures. Those who wrote and loved such “revelations” acknowledged that, besides the canonical Scriptures, available to everyone, there were also
secret
writings containing advanced teaching to be shared only with “the wise.”

One such writer is the Jewish prophet Salathiel, a contemporary of John of Patmos, who would have recognized him as a kindred spirit, even though Salathiel was not a follower of Jesus. Like other prophets, Salathiel opens his revelation telling
when
and
where
he first received revelations:

Salathiel explains that he, like John, was devastated by the war that had destroyed Jerusalem and was writing around the same time, during the decade of the 90s
C.E.
The author, who calls himself Salathiel (“I asked God”),
⁹
adopted the pen name Ezra to
show that he was writing what he called the Revelation of Ezra (often called the Fourth Book of Ezra) in the spirit of the great Jewish leader who, 550 years earlier, had led his exiled people back to their land after Babylonian armies had destroyed Jerusalem. Like John, Salathiel calls Rome by the code name “Babylon,” since the Romans, too, had destroyed Jerusalem; and, like John, he is careful to refer to Rome in language obscure to outsiders. No doubt Salathiel would have applauded how John, adopting Isaiah’s image for ancient Tyre, pictured Rome as a once rich and proud queen, now beaten down and left bleeding in the dust like a common prostitute. Speaking as Ezra, Salathiel cries out to God, asking how he could allow the Romans to destroy his own people:

“Ezra” says that his agitated and passionate prayers yielded visions; God sent the angel Uriel, who “answered and said to me, ‘Your understanding has failed completely regarding this world; do you think that you can comprehend the way of the Most High?” Ignoring the angel’s implication that he is being arrogant, Ezra boldly answers, “Yes, my lord.” Uriel then demands that Ezra solve three cosmic riddles, promising that when he succeeds,
the angel will tell him what he wants to know: “He said to me, ‘Go, weigh for me the weight of fire, or measure for me a measure of wind, or call back for me the day that has passed.”
¹¹

Uriel’s riddles echo the conclusion of the Book of Job, when the Lord speaks from a whirlwind, ironically demanding answers no human being could give:

Ezra’s readers would know that questions like these had awed and shamed Job for having questioned God’s ways, and had forced him to admit that “I spoke what I did not understand; things too wonderful for me, which I did not understand … therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”
¹³
Ezra’s readers, familiar with the conventions of such wisdom literature, would expect that he, like Job, would now confess that such matters were far beyond his understanding.

Instead, Ezra breaks with conventional piety and refuses to be silenced. When Uriel triumphantly delivers the stock angelic line (“You cannot understand the things with which you have grown
up; how, then, can you understand the way of the Most High?”), Ezra utters a blunt and poignant cry of despair: “I fell on my face, and said to him, ‘It would be better for us not to be here, than to come here and live without God, and suffer and not understand why.”
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When the angel replies that “those who live on earth can understand only what is on earth,” Ezra protests that he is asking not about things in heaven but only about what human beings experience right here on earth:

What Ezra hears next resonates more with John of Patmos than Job, for now the Lord speaks about the end-time and the coming of God’s judgment:

On that day, the Lord says, “the trumpet shall sound, and when all hear it, they shall suddenly be terrified”; yet those faithful to God “shall see my salvation, and the end of my world.”
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Like John, Ezra hears that when Judgment Day comes, swift and harsh, the Lord will destroy Babylon—that is, Rome—and send “my son, the messiah”
¹⁷
(although, as we noted, Ezra does not regard Jesus of Nazareth as that messiah). When Ezra asks whether he will live long enough to see that day, the angel replies, “I was not sent to tell you about your own life, for I do not know.”
¹⁸
Fearing that he might not live to see God’s justice come, Ezra asks what happens “after death, as soon as every one of us yields up his soul?” Now Ezra, like John, hears that even after death, those who scorn God, hate his people, and ignore his law shall suffer “fire and torments, grieving and sad,” while the righteous enter into the Paradise of delight to “see with great joy the glory of [God].”
¹⁹

Waking from these visions, Ezra says, “my body shuddered violently, and my soul was so troubled that I fainted. But the angel who had come and talked with me held me, and strengthened me, and set me on my feet.”
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But when the angel reproaches him for daring to ask whether God loves human beings, Ezra speaks for everyone who has experienced heartbreak:

Although many of Ezra’s questions go unanswered, he tells how his grief and anger came to be resolved—not by theological argument
but through a powerful experience of compassion. Ezra says that the Lord told him to

When he goes into the field and stays there alone for seven days, eating only vegetables and drinking water, he sees a woman crying, “deeply grieved at heart,” her clothes ripped, her head grimy with ashes as she mourns inconsolably the death of her son, her only child. After the friends who came to comfort her finally leave her to sleep, she tells Ezra, “I got up in the night and fled, and came to this field, and I intend to stay here and eat and drink nothing, grieving until I die.” Startled by her desperation, Ezra says, “I dismissed the thoughts with which I had been engaged, and turned to her and sought to console her.” To stop her from killing herself, he rebukes her and offers hope: “If you acknowledge God’s decree to be just, you will receive your son back in due time”—presumably, in the “age to come,” in eternity.
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Like John of Patmos, Ezra says that he began writing his revelation in anguish, since the horrors he had witnessed during the war with Rome had shattered his faith. Yet although
intellectually
he had refused to accept what he heard about divine justice, his narrative shows that somehow he had internalized it. The scholar Michael Stone suggests that the author here alludes to a powerful experience of conversion, having found that he could console others only
after
he had put aside some of his own grief, along with
the questions that had preoccupied him.
²⁴
When he turned to console a heartbroken woman, he found himself speaking of God’s justice, and even God’s love, discovering within himself resources of compassion that released some of his own bitterness.

Suddenly, Ezra says, he saw the woman’s face turn radiant and flash like lightning: “I was too frightened to approach her … then she suddenly uttered a loud and terrifying cry.”
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Aghast, he watched her vanish and then transform into a great city. He fell unconscious, and he says that when he came to, an angel helped him to stand and revealed that the grieving woman was actually his beloved Jerusalem, who, after being ravaged by the horrors of war and having mourned for her dead children, was transformed into the new and glorious city of Zion, which John, too, claimed to have seen.