Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (9 page)

Distressed as he was by such people, John could hardly have imagined what he might have seen as the greatest identity theft of all time: that eventually Gentile believers not only would call themselves Israel but would claim to be the
sole rightful heirs
to the legacy of God’s chosen people. Nor did John foresee that Paul’s “gospel,” which adapted Jesus’ message for Gentiles, would soon overflow the movement to create, in effect, a
new religion.

What John of Patmos preached would have looked old-fashioned—and simply wrong—to Paul’s converts in such cities as Ephesus and in Syrian Antioch, which eventually became the center of the Pauline circle.
⁹⁰
The first person we know who aggressively called himself “a Christian” to distinguish himself from Jews was the Syrian convert Ignatius of Antioch. Converted to Paul’s message perhaps around 80 or 90
C.E.
,
⁹¹
twenty to thirty years after “the great apostle” first preached in his home city, Ignatius so zealously took this message to heart that he took Paul as the model for his own life. Calling himself Christophoros, “Christ bearer,” this strong-minded believer traveled through Asia Minor about fifteen years after John had been there and, like John, wrote letters to seven churches near the coast, including three to groups of Jesus’ followers in Ephesus, Smyrna, and Philadelphia—the same cities that John had addressed.

Like John, Ignatius identified with people who suffered persecution. Claiming the name “Christian,” in fact, would cost him his life. For, after declaring himself a Christian before a Roman magistrate, he was sentenced to die horribly, consigned “to the beasts”—to be torn apart by wild animals in a public spectacle. In one of the messages he sent while being transported from Syria to
Rome for execution, he complained that he was “chained to ten leopards,” the hostile soldiers who guarded him. When the convoy stopped at night while moving through Asia Minor, other Christians bribed the guards in order to meet with him, bringing food and providing him with the means to send letters. Writing a famous—some say fanatical—letter to Jesus’ followers in Rome, where he was to die, Ignatius pleaded with them to not intervene or help him escape, declaring that he passionately hoped to “die for God”:

Apparently Ignatius got his wish and died in a bloody struggle before a shouting crowd in the Roman Colosseum around the year 110.
⁹³

Because Ignatius and John both saw themselves as leaders among Jesus’ followers, commentators often have assumed that they taught and believed the same things. Yet when we look more closely, we can see that each upheld a different vision of who “God’s people” are—and who should be their leaders. The differences between John’s groups and Ignatius’, then, also involved power struggles. Had anyone asked both John and Ignatius who should lead Jesus’ followers? Both, no doubt, would have said the
same thing:
Jesus Christ himself.
But since both lived two to three generations after Jesus’ death, when pressed to say who should succeed Jesus as leader now, each would have answered differently. John, who envisioned Jesus’ followers as outposts of Israel, believed that these groups, like Israel, while divinely guided by angels, should
humanly
be led by prophets like himself. Ignatius, on the other hand, adopted what Paul taught: that God had appointed as leaders “apostles first, prophets second.”
⁹⁴
Ignatius believed, too, that the apostles, in turn, had designated “bishops” (“supervisors” in Greek) and “priests” (“elders” in Greek).
⁹⁵

Unlike John, who saw himself as a prophet, Ignatius identified himself as a “supervisor,” or bishop, nothing less than “the bishop of Syria,” as if he were the sole rightful leader of all Christians in Syria. When some people objected and accused him of acting as if he were an apostle, Ignatius replied indignantly that “I am not giving orders like an apostle”; he claimed only to be one of their designated successors. Ignatius was the first, so far as we know, to actively promote—and represent—this new system of leadership. Writing to Jesus’ followers in Asia Minor, Ignatius insisted that every real “church” must have a bishop, as well as priests and deacons: “without these, nothing can be called a church!”
⁹⁶

Yet these could be fighting words among groups led by prophets like John. John never mentions “bishops” at all. The only “apostles” whom John reveres are Jesus’ twelve disciples, “the twelve apostles of the Lamb,”
⁹⁷
whom he envisions in heaven. When John hears of certain people still alive who are promoting themselves as “apostles” in Ephesus, he responds with alarm. He congratulates Jesus’ followers in Ephesus for having met them with
suspicion, first testing them, then rejecting them as frauds and “evildoers”: “
I know that you cannot tolerate evildoers;
you have tested
those who say they are apostles and are not,
and have found them to be false.”
⁹⁸
John may have suspected that such wouldbe apostles were coming from Pauline circles, where believers called apostles often presided, trying to enter established groups and take them over.

Ignatius, for his part, knew of groups like John’s, led by prophets, and fiercely campaigned against them. Whether Ignatius knew of John of Patmos and his prophecies we do not know, since he never mentions him by name.
⁹⁹
But when he visited Jesus’ followers in the city of Philadelphia, in Asia Minor, at first he trod carefully, anticipating opposition. Although he was hoping to establish a new kind of leadership there, Ignatius knew that Philadelphia had been famous for its active prophets from the time when the apostle Philip’s four daughters, all prophets, had lived there to the time when John of Patmos had found in Philadelphia a strong following, as had the respected female prophet Ammia.
¹⁰⁰

Instead of challenging prophetic authority when visiting Philadelphia, Ignatius apparently decided to
claim it himself
. He writes that while he was worshipping with Jesus’ people there, suddenly the spirit of God came upon him and he shouted out in worship, as inspired prophets did: “I cried out when I was with you; I cried out in a loud voice—God’s own voice!” But what Ignatius says God impelled him to shout was not what his hearers expected but what he preached all the time:
“Pay attention to the bishop, the priests, and the deacons!”
Ignatius admits that some people who heard him objected, charging that rather than speaking “in the spirit” Ignatius had faked it, having been told in advance that
members of that congregation looked on bishops and priests with suspicion. Ignatius denies that anyone had told him anything and swears by God that

Despite his claim of speaking in prophecy, and the cautious respect he expresses for ancient prophets, when Ignatius later writes to believers in Philadelphia, he rejects what John and the gospel writers take for granted—that what validates faith in Jesus are “the Scriptures” of the Hebrew Bible, especially its prophecies. Thus the Gospel of Mark opens with Isaiah’s oracle of a “voice crying in the wilderness”
¹⁰²
to suggest that Isaiah prophesied the coming of John the Baptist; and the Gospel of Matthew prefaces every episode, where possible, with passages from the oracles of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Zechariah, as well as the Psalms of David, to show that these foretold the events that happened through Jesus. As we’ve seen, John of Patmos, too, saturated what he wrote with allusions to the prophecies of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel.
¹⁰³

Ignatius, by contrast, hardly ever cites passages from the Hebrew Scriptures and argues with believers who regard them as the primary, or “ancient,” sources (in Greek,
ta archaia
): “I have heard some people say, ‘If I don’t find it in
the primary sources,
I don’t believe in what is preached as gospel.”
¹⁰⁴
On the contrary, Ignatius declares, the primary sources are not the Hebrew Scriptures but what he
finds in Paul’s letters: “for me, the primary sources are [Christ’s] cross, his resurrection, and the faith that comes through him.”
¹⁰⁵

Against those who insist on going back to what “is written” in the Hebrew Scriptures, Ignatius defends his own teaching by saying, “but it
is
written”—written, that is, in Paul’s letters. His opponents could reply that Paul’s letters don’t count, since they aren’t “the Scriptures”—and would not be officially regarded as such, by most Christians, for generations to come.
¹⁰⁶
Yet declaring that his own faith is founded upon “[Christ’s] cross, his resurrection, and the faith that comes through him,” Ignatius demands a radical break with the Jewish past: “If anyone interprets Judaism to you, do not listen to him.” What matters now, he declares, is
Christianity,
not Judaism.
¹⁰⁷

Like many converts, then, Ignatius sharply marked off his new life “in Christ” from his pagan past. Besides adopting the term “Christian,” he was the first among Jesus’ followers, so far as we know, to claim this name for himself and to use the term “Christianity.” He may have even coined this word, perhaps to show his family and neighbors that he had not simply joined what he saw as an inferior provincial cult called Judaism. Ignatius apparently regarded people like John, who validated the gospel through the Hebrew Scriptures, as foolishly—and fatally—mistaken, for he goes so far as to say that “whoever is not called by this [new] name [Christian] does not belong to God!”
¹⁰⁸

Although Ignatius claims to belong to the new “Israel,” he does not claim to be a Jew. In fact, his writings played a key role in
reversing
how Christians thought about Jewish tradition. Unlike Christians who validated their “gospels” through testimonies from the Hebrew Scriptures, Ignatius accuses those who “introduce
Judaism” of heresy! Yet while repudiating “Judaism,” this Syrian convert was so convinced that he and other “Christians” had taken on Israel’s identity that he urged his fellow believers to avoid offending “the Gentiles,” as if he actually were Jewish himself. Eventually, as we know, John of Patmos would be seen by the majority of his readers as a
Christian,
after members of that movement posthumously adopted him—along with Paul, the disciples, and Jesus himself—into what some would call a “new race,” neither Jewish nor Gentile but a “third race” called
Christians
.
¹⁰⁹

Thus, what began among devout Jews—Jesus, Paul, James, Peter, and John of Patmos—within forty to fifty years had ignited a new movement that would claim to supplant Jewish tradition. Paul, who had described himself as “an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin”
¹¹⁰
—believing that a revelation from Jesus required him to open the gospel message to “the nations,” as Jews called Gentiles—succeeded in translating it into terms they could understand and practice. But during the decades after Paul’s death in 65
C.E.
, as the movement that would become “Christianity” increasingly attracted crowds of newcomers, most of them Gentiles, Paul’s version proved powerfully influential. Eventually, it would eclipse or at least modify what his predecessors had taught.

Whose revelations, then, are genuine—Paul’s or those of John of Patmos? The future of the movement would turn on this question—or, more accurately, on which would gain acceptance as “canonical.” As we shall see, two hundred years later, influential Christian leaders chose
both
and wrestled them into the same New Testament canon. But we now know that during those turbulent years, some leaders suppressed an astonishing range of
other
“revelations” that Christians throughout the empire read and treasured. Who made those decisions, and why? How did John of Patmos’ “revelation” come to trump so many others and become the only one included in the New Testament? To these questions we now turn.

I
n times of distress, driven beyond ordinary endurance, we may find ourselves asking how—or whether—we can survive. The historian Norman Cohn suggests that people living in social or political crisis often become increasingly preoccupied with the “end-times,” just as John of Patmos began to write in the aftermath of the Jewish war.
¹
As war, uprisings, and economic turmoil threatened the stability of the Roman Empire, countless other people—Jews, pagans, and Christians—produced a flood of “revelations,” many only recently discovered.

Yet crises occur in every generation and, for that matter, in every lifetime; and those who survive them often speak of insights that have nothing to do with the “end-times.” From the first century to the present, certain people have told how, in crisis, they suddenly, unexpectedly, experience God’s presence—or some presence—offering hope. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, writing of his time spent in a Nazi death camp, tells how, for a moment, he vividly experienced his wife’s presence, although he didn’t know whether she was alive or dead. He relates, too, a conversation with a dying young woman whose sanity at first he questioned when she told him that the tree outside was speaking to her, saying, “I am life—eternal life.”
²