Revelation considered

A witty and informative review by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker about a new book by Elaine Pagels on the Book of Revelation can be found here.

In my experience, Revelation has not been paid much attention in Catholic education or liturgy.  I think most see it as a bit of an oddball book full of obscure references and not really worth trying to decode in full.   Protestant evangelicals, on the other hand, do treat it as a big Hollywood movie, as Gopnik amusingly compares it to in his opening paragraphs:

That ending—the Book of Revelation—has every element that Michael Bay could want: dragons, seven-headed sea beasts, double-horned land beasts, huge C.G.I.-style battles involving hundreds of thousands of angels and demons, and even, in Jezebel the temptress, a part for Megan Fox. (“And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.”) Although Revelation got into the canonical Bible only by the skin of its teeth—it did poorly in previews, and was buried by the Apostolic suits until one key exec favored its release—it has always been a pop hit. Everybody reads Revelation; everybody gets excited about it; and generations of readers have insisted that it might even be telling the truth about what’s coming for Christmas.

Gopnik notes the unoriginal part of Pagel's book:

Pagels then shows that Revelation, far from being meant as a hallucinatory prophecy, is actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time John was writing. It’s essentially a political cartoon about the crisis in the Jesus movement in the late first century, with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed and the Saviour, despite his promises, still not back.

but goes on to point to the more novel argument put by her:

 Revelation is essentially an anti-Christian polemic. That is, it was written by an expatriate follower of Jesus who wanted the movement to remain within an entirely Jewish context, as opposed to the “Christianity” just then being invented by St. Paul, who welcomed uncircumcised and trayf-eating Gentiles into the sect. At a time when no one quite called himself “Christian,” in the modern sense, John is prophesying what would happen if people did. That’s the forward-looking worry in the book. “In retrospect, we can see that John stood on the cusp of an enormous change—one that eventually would transform the entire movement from a Jewish messianic sect into ‘Christianity,’ a new religion flooded with Gentiles,” Pagels writes. “But since this had not yet happened—not, at least, among the groups John addressed in Asia Minor—he took his stand as a Jewish prophet charged to keep God’s people holy, unpolluted by Roman culture. So, John says, Jesus twice warns his followers in Asia Minor to beware of ‘blasphemers’ among them, ‘who say they are Jews, and are not.’ They are, he says, a ‘synagogue of Satan.’ ” Balaam and Jezebel, named as satanic prophets in Revelation, are, in this view, caricatures of “Pauline” Christians, who blithely violated Jewish food and sexual laws while still claiming to be followers of the good rabbi Yeshua. Jezebel, in particular—the name that John assigns her is that of an infamous Canaanite queen, but she’s seen preaching in the nearby town of Thyatira—suggests the women evangelists who were central to Paul’s version of the movement and anathema to a pious Jew like John. (“When John accuses ‘Balaam’ and ‘Jezebel’ of inducing people to ‘eat food sacrificed to idols and practice fornication,’ he might have in mind anything from tolerating people who engage in incest to Jews who become sexually involved with Gentiles or, worse, who marry them,” Pagels notes.) The scarlet whores and mad beasts in Revelation are the Gentile followers of Paul—and so, in a neat irony, the spiritual ancestors of today’s Protestant evangelicals.

 All interesting stuff.

 

But, as a long time fan and promoter of the importance of gnostic writings (perhaps too much so), Pagel's book apparently goes on to talk about them, again, in the context of the times.  Gopnik quotes a "feminist" poem found at Nag Hammadi with this very funny line:

As an alternative revelation to John’s, she focusses on what must be the single most astonishing text of its time, the long feminist poem found at Nag Hammadi in 1945 and called “Thunder, Perfect Mind”—a poem so contemporary in feeling that one would swear it had been written by Ntozake Shange in a feminist collective in the nineteen-seventies, and then adapted as a Helen Reddy song.

As to how the book got into the Bible at all:

Pagels’s essential point is convincing and instructive: there were revelations all over Asia Minor and the Holy Land; John’s was just one of many, and we should read it as such. How is it, then, that this strange one became canonic, while those other, to us more appealing ones had to be buried in the desert for safekeeping, lest they be destroyed as heretical? Revelation very nearly did not make the cut. In the early second century, a majority of bishops in Asia Minor voted to condemn the text as blasphemous. It was only in the three-sixties that the church council, under the control of the fiery Athanasius, inserted Revelation as the climax of the entire New Testament. As a belligerent controversialist himself, Pagels suggests, Athanasius liked its belligerently controversial qualities. “Athanasius reinterpreted John’s vision of cosmic war to apply to the battle that he himself fought for more than forty-five years—the battle to establish what he regarded as ‘orthodox Christianity’ against heresy,” she writes.

That's probably about as much as I should fairly quote.  Go read the whole thing: it's great.