Read Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation for Free Online

back to life. Thus John’s visions speak to what one historian calls the Christian movement’s most powerful catalyst—the conviction that death is not simply annihilation. For after Jesus’ earliest followers first said they had seen him alive after his death, many proclaimed that everyone, after death, would be raised to new life. But John’s visions go further, as he vividly imagines
how
one might live after death—and what this means for how we live now.
    John himself faithfully reproduces Jewish tradition that speaksof God judging people “according to their works,” 1 but his visions open up a far wider range of interpretations than, for example, Jesus’ parable of divine judgment. For as Matthew tells it, that parable turns on specific deeds. The Son of Man invites into God’s kingdom those he calls blessed,
    for I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger and you welcomed me; I was naked, and you gave me clothing; I was sick and you took care of me; I was in prison and you visited me. 2
     
    When his hearers protest that they have never seen him in such straits, he replies, “Whenever you did it to the least of these members of my family, you did it to me.” Shut out from God’s kingdom are those who withhold care and compassion from those in need.
    By contrast, John of Patmos conjures cosmic war, good fighting evil until Christ crushes the dragon, through visions that can be plugged into almost any conflict. Because John more often defines “evildoers” with degrading epithets—“cowards, the faithless, abominable, filthy … and all liars” 3 —than with specific deeds, nearly anyone might claim to be on God’s side, fighting “evildoers.” Throughout the ages, John of Patmos’ visions have fortified religious anger like his own, the anger of those who suffer oppression and long for retaliation against those who torture and kill their people. Yet those who torture and kill in God’s name often cast themselves into the same drama, seeing themselves not as the “murderers” John denounces but as God’s servants delivering divine judgment.
    From the end of the second century to the fourth, as the movement increasingly developed institutional structures, some Christian leaders began to divide “the saved” from “the damned” less in terms of how they act than whether they accept a certain set of doctrines and participate—or don’t—in specific religious communities. Those who followed Athanasius’ ingenious reinterpretation of “whore” and “beast” as
Christian
enemies often came to identify “orthodox” believers alone as the saved, while consigning everyone who stood outside the Catholic communion—pagans, Jews, “infidels,” along with any Christians they called heretics—to outer darkness, both in this world and the next.
    Those adopting these lines of interpretation could appreciate how John’s apocalyptic visions helped create coherence among all who identified as Catholic Christians and to establish a common bulwark against all whom they saw as outsiders. Ever since, Christians have adapted his visions to changing times, reading their own social, political, and religious conflict into the cosmic war he so powerfully evokes. Perhaps most startling is how Constantine invoked John’s vision of Christ’s victory over Rome to endorse his own imperial rule. More than a thousand years later, Lutherans published Lucas Cranach’s pictures of the pope as the whore of Babylon in one of the first Lutheran Bibles, while an early Catholic biographer retaliated by depicting Luther, on the frontispiece, as the seven-headed beast. During the catastrophic times of the American Civil War, Confederate loyalists portrayed Lincoln being strangled by the great dragon that is the Union, while those on the Union side took as their war anthem “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which weaves Jeremiah’s and John’s prophecies in