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The Book of Revelation does not belong in the Bible.

The last book in the New Testament, Revelation, is remarkably popular today.  Few people read Revelation itself, but millions have read a book series called Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days.  Books seven and eight in the series (The Indwelling and The Mark) by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list.  The Remnant began at number one on the Times best-seller list.  Roughly 65 million copies have been sold in over forty languages, though only in America has it become a publishing phenomenon.

Left Behind assumes an evangelical doctrine called “rapture.”  The term nowhere appears in the Bible, but is the recent creation of evangelical Protestantism in the United States, first appearing in the 1830s.  Rapture claims that at the end of days, all Christians will rise “in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.”  First Thessalonians 4:17 is an often-cited Biblical source, but its meaning is obscure. /1/  The word “ rapture ” never appears in the Bible.  Nor does the Book of Revelation say anything about the followers of Jesus being taken out of the world before it all goes up in flames.  

Like all apocalypses, the rapture fantasy can be dangerous.  Older readers may remember Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, who stated in testimony before Congress that while it’s essential to preserve our resources for future generations, he remarked that he wasn’t sure how many future generations there would be before the apocalypse and Christ’s subsequent return.  Casper Weinberger, then Secretary of Defense, agreed. /2/  When you think this way, everything from nuclear war to climate change becomes less significant.  

The Left Behind series loves violence.  In this respect, it is true to Revelation, the bloodiest book in the Bible.   This, though, is not why there was so much debate over whether to include it in the canon we call the Bible, a book of books.  For many Christians, not Revelation, but the Gospels teach the true lesson of Christianity: non-violence and love of neighbor in the face of hatred (Matthew 22:36-40).  Hardly a hint of this remains in Revelation.  

An awfully strange book

Just to remind you how strange the Book of Revelation is, I’ll quote from 12:1-4.  Revelation has many such passages.   

A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. 

Revelation is a book of non-stop violence.  God unleashes the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the sun falls from the sky, and half the population is destroyed.  Revelation is unconcerned with human violence but with the violence of God. Every calamity, such as war, famine, and natural disasters, is sent from heaven.   The seven seals are broken by Christ, the bloodied Lamb of God, unleashing a series of catastrophes.  In Revelation, the crucified Christ takes his revenge. John explicitly states that the book is all about the “wrath of God” and the “wrath of the Lamb” (6:16–17; 11:18; 14:10; 16:19; 19:15). John Dominic Crossan calls Revelation “the most relentlessly violent book in all the canonical literature of the great religions of the world.” /3/

John of Patmos, no relation to the disciple, wrote Revelation about 90 AD.  Revelation means unveiling.  It was a letter directed to seven churches whose members succumbed to a variety of temptations, such as sexual immorality and idol worship. While the book is remarkably weird to most modern readers, it would have been familiar to many contemporaneous readers, who would have read other stories of a fantastic dream revealed to the author.  Daniel is the most well-known of this genre. 

John’s message to the seven churches is a metaphor for the eternal battle between God and Satan and how the church members cannot avoid being participants.  This is basically Augustine’s interpretation,  helping to make Revelation less chaotic and fantastic. Augustine’s interpretation is sometimes characterized as “amillennialism.”  It is not a prediction about the endtime; it is about the battle between God and Satan now.  The 1000 years mentioned in 20:4 is, according to Augustine, not a literal 1,000 years but the time between Christ’s first and second coming.  The “millennium” is the spiritual reign of Christ rather than a physical one on earth. /4/ 

Super-short summary

Chapters 4-8.  The first image is God in his throne room with a scroll sealed with seven seals.  Only the bloodied lamb, the crucified Christ, can open them.  The opened seals reveal the four horsemen of the apocalypse.  Subsequent seals reveal an earthquake, and the stars fall to earth.  

Chapters 8-11.  Seven trumpets sound, each signifying a catastrophic event. Four angels kill a third of mankind, and a third more are killed by magical horses. 

Chapters 12-14.  But the nations do not repent, even in the face of the two beasts, the second of which has the famous number 666 (or 616), a number that represents Nero.  The beast is defeated only when the church imitates Christ’s sacrifice, and two (or more) members lay down their lives before the beast.  

Chapters 15-16 describe the seven bowls of God’s wrath.  The second bowl turns the sea into blood, killing everything in it.  The sixth allows the kings of the East to gather for the final battle on a plain in Northern Israel called Armageddon.  It is a metaphor for God’s battle against evil (gog from Ezekiel, c. 38, where so much of Revelation comes from).  

Chapters 17-20.  Still, the people do not repent.  John has a vision of a “great prostitute” called Babylon, who is seated on a beast (a powerful political entity).  Jesus appears on a white horse, and in place of his tongue is a sword (19:15).  Depicted is the ultimate destruction of this wicked world system, followed by the binding of Satan, the thousand-year reign of Christ (Millennium), and the final judgment of the evil at the end of the world.

Chapters 21-22.  John sees a new heaven and a new earth.  God will dwell with man on earth, where he will “wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death.” (21:4) 

The symbols of this fantastic vision would have been clear to many of John’s first readers.  He was depicting the military and economic power of the Roman Empire.  Rome is simply the latest version of humanity in rebellion against God.  Nations that exalt their own economic and military security to divine status aren’t limited to the past or the future. Babylons will come and go, leading up to the day when Jesus returns to replace them all with his Kingdom.

How did Revelation make it into the Bible?

In a move not unfamiliar in history, the enemy without (Rome) became the enemy within the faith.  The whore of Babylon became Christians holding other beliefs, above all Arians, followers of Arius.  By the time of the Council of Nicea (324-337 CE), Rome was no longer a threat.   Constantine had made Christianity the official religion of the empire.  What need was there for Revelation?

The issue of the status of Jesus divided Christians.  Was Christ entirely God as well as fully man, and what would that mean?  The Greek term was homoousios (ὁμοούσιος), “essentially the same” as God.  On the contrary, Arius held that Jesus was the son of God and subordinate to him.  Leading the fight against Arianism, Athanasius interpreted the whore of Babylon, who consumes human blood, no longer as Rome but rather as the Arian heresy personified.  Constantine had been right to promote the council at Nicea as uniquely valid since he said there that “all the fathers” had supported the true faith against the “Antichristian heresy.”

Athanasius interpreted John’s Book of Revelation as condemning all “heretics” and then made this book the capstone of the New Testament canon, where it has remained ever since. At the same time, he ordered Christians to stop reading any other “books of revelation,” which he branded heretical and sought to destroy — with almost complete success. (Pagels, p 144) 

Together with his allies, they persuaded many monks and most Christians to accept his version of the canon, concluding with Revelation as the only authorized version of the New Testament (Pagels, p 169). /5/ 

Was there an alternative? 

Pagels points to various versions of Gnosticism as an alternative conclusion to the New Testament.  I simply don’t get it.  The works of the gnostics are no more continuous with the New Testament, above all the Gospels than Revelation.  Various Gnostic gospels, such as Treatise on the Resurrection, or Letter to Rheginos, taught that the resurrection of Jesus Christ “was not a physical reality, but a transformation of consciousness in the believer, a transition to a newness with God.”  This newness represents a unity with God, God in me, me in God.  This isn’t the Gospels.  The Gnostic Anthony held that no doctrine was needed. /6/  Many Nag Hammadi texts seek spiritual union with God; God is within us all.  This union does not reflect orthodox Christianity.  John’s Book of Revelation, for all its flaws, is clear that Christianity teaches the separateness of God. 

The Real Problem with John’s Book of Revelation

The big problem with Revelation is that the most important teaching of Jesus Christ, expressed through his life even more than his words, is absent: “Strength made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:9)  Instead, John returns to the old idea of God as a mighty power who will destroy the enemies of Christianity and put good Christians back on top.  Revelation misunderstands Christianity, even though it finds some warrant in what Christ said about the eschaton.

The Gospels teach the power of poverty. Instead of a God conquering our enemies, the Gospels tell the story of God allowing himself to be tortured to death so that he might experience human pain, teach us how to live, and so give us eternal life (John 3:16; 5:24; Matthew 19:29; 25:46).  But Jesus’ teachings are not just about belief. They are about action.

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. (Matthew 25: 35-36)    

Nothing of this teaching remains in the Book of Revelation. 

To be sure, Christ’s teaching about love and care for all humanity comes with eternal punishment for those who don’t (Matthew 25: 40-46).  Nevertheless, the tone of the Gospels is primarily one of love and care for those in need, taught by a God-man who gave his life to save humanity.  Revelation, on the other hand, is about a powerful God who will destroy Christ’s enemies in one final battle, returning to earth to establish his kingdom in power and glory.  The tone and the lesson are entirely different.  In John’s Revelation, the bloodied lamb takes his revenge.  In Christ, there is no revenge.

The reality of symbolism

The Book of Revelation is symbolic. Jesus is not going to kill babies, torture almost everyone on earth, and then execute them in the most horrifying way one can imagine. The book is a metaphor about how God will restore justice, destroy evil, and make the world good again, a paradise for those who are faithful (Ehrman, p 166).

John uses symbolism to convey a message of hope to those who feel persecuted.  In the end, God will triumph, and evil will be destroyed. But why, asks Ehrman, does John tell this story in such incredibly violent and gory terms?  Symbols reveal an author’s deepest values, commitments, and beliefs.  As Pieter de Villiers puts it, 

This is language that soaks the imagination of readers in violence….It is language that draws its listeners into an atmosphere of bitter and agonistic opposition against others and that categorizes people in terms of either good or evil with dangerous consequences. /7/

John understands God as a God of wrath.  Love is absent.  To be sure, John says that Christ “loves us,” “freeing us from our sins by his blood” (1:5), but John does not say a word about God loving anyone or anything. God is a God of wrath, determined to wreak vengeance through catastrophes and torments sent from heaven (Ehrman, p 167).

D. H. Lawrence

Lawrence’s last book was Apocalypse, a study of the book of Revelation.  Lawrence hated the book.  Though he never mentions Nietzsche, Lawrence’s analysis sees John’s Revelation as a version of Nietzsche’s “last man,” filled with envy.  Revelation is driven not by the sacrificial love of Jesus but by envy of Roman power.  God will use brutal force to give Christians what the Romans had: the power and wealth of empire.  With that, they would rule the world, as Rome had done.

For decades, Ehrman read Revelation as a story of hope. It was written for Christians who were ruthlessly oppressed and persecuted and meant to show them that, in the end, justice would be done, good would triumph, God would overcome the miseries of this world, and his followers would be rewarded for their faithfulness (Ehrman, 170).

But how will they be rewarded? God will destroy every other man, woman, and child on earth, no matter their goodness to the poor and oppressed, so that the faithful followers of Jesus, those who believe in a particular doctrine, can have all the wealth and power in the world  (Ehrman, p 172).  Revelation is less concerned with hope for the future than it is with hope that the powerful will suffer forever.  That’s Nietzsche’s account of Christian envy, not Christ’s.  It’s an account that sees wealth and domination as ultimate goods.  

Conclusion

So, how might the Bible have ended?  As it properly does with the Letters of John 1-3, especially 1 John.  These are the Books that immediately precede Revelation.  The perspective is that of the Gospel of John.  In John 1, Jesus is coextensive with God.  It’s not a great book, and while likely not written by the same John who wrote the Gospel, it nonetheless lays out the basic principles of Johanian Christianity while admonishing those who would disbelieve. That’s all that is needed.  James adds the need to act as a Christian, not just believe or worship like one.  But the Letter of John 1 is a nice summary. /8/  By the time of the last of the seven uncontested letters of Paul (Philemon), the New Testament has long since done its work.  

 Notes

1. 1. The ancient Greek (1 Thessalonians 4:17) term rendered as rapture is harpazō (ἁρπάζω), which in context means “we shall be caught up,” or “we shall be taken away.”  It is an ambiguous reference and a slender reed upon which to rest such an ambitious concept.
   2. https://www.npr.org/2023/04/03/1167715957/armageddon-shows- how-literal-readings-of-the-bibles-end-times-affect-modern-time 
   3. John Dominic Crossan, “Divine Violence in the Christian Bible,” pp 227-228.
   4. Frank A. James III, “Augustine’s Millennial Views,” Christian History (15), 1987. 
   5. Eusebius, a bishop, was so ambivalent about the Book of Revelation that he placed it both on the list of books he calls “universally accepted” and on the list of books he calls “illegitimate.”  This as late as 325-340.  Today almost all Christians accept that Jesus was co-equal with God, “of one substance.”  However, only in the Gospel of John is this crystal clear.  Not only in the first chapter(1-18) but in statements by Jesus such as “Before Abraham was, I Am.” (8:58)
   6. Jenott and Pagels, Letters of Saint Anthony, pp 557-589 (letter 6). 
   7. Pieter G. R. De Villiers, “The Violence of Nonviolence in the Revelation of John,” p 194.  
   8. A super-short Book, Jude, follows the Letters of John 1-3 but is not important.  

 References

Anthony’s Letters and the Nag Hammadi Codex 1, ed. Lance Jenott and Elaine Pagels, in The Journal of Early Christian Studies, 18:4 (2010): 557-589 [letter 6]. 

John Dominic Crossan, “Divine Violence in the Christian Bible,” in The Bible and the American Future, ed. Robert Jewett et al.  Wipf and Stock, 2010.

Pieter G. R. De Villiers, “The Violence of Nonviolence in the Revelation of John,”  Open Theology.  https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2015-0007.

Bart Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About The End.  Simon and Schuster, 2023.  

D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse.  Viking Press, 1960 [original 1931).

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  Edited and translated by R. J. Hollingdale.  Penguin Classics, 1961.   [The prologue introduces the “last man.”]

Elaine Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Politics, and Prophecy in the Book of Revelation.  Viking/Penguin, 2012.