Talmud Review of Book of Revelation Main Points
The Last Trumpet
Many people mistakenly call the concluding volume of the Christian Bible "Revelations." It is actually the (one) Revelation to John. Elaine Pagels may be playing on that common error with the title of her latest book, "Revelations," though in this instance information technology is accurate: she places the biblical Book of Revelation in the context of other ancient narratives of visions and prophecy. Her business relationship highlights several prophetic works and visionaries, from Ezekiel to Paul to the ancient sect of prophesying Christians called the Montanists, and others. Pagels also discusses the afterlife of Revelation in the Christianity of late artifact through the fourth century. Her thesis is that apocalyptic literature — visions, prophecies, predictions of cataclysm — has ever carried political ramifications, both revolutionary and reactionary, liberal and bourgeois, from the very showtime upward until today, as seen in conservative iterations of millennial dispensationalism and the hugely popular "Left Backside" series of novels about the end of the world. The apocalyptic is political.
"Revelation" is from the Latin translation of the Greek word apocalypsis, which can designate any unveiling or revealing, fantastic or ordinary. Scholars also refer to the document every bit the Apocalypse of John. And that aforementioned Greek word provides the label for all sorts of aboriginal literature that scholars call "apocalyptic." The biblical text purports to relate a real vision experienced by an otherwise unknown Jew named John — not the Apostle John, nor the same person equally the bearding author of what we phone call the Gospel of John. But we have no reason to dubiousness that his proper noun was really John. It wasn't an unusual proper noun for a Jew.
John wrote his vision, prefaced with messages to 7 churches in Asia Small-scale (modernistic western Turkey), from the island of Patmos in the Aegean Sea. We may imagine John, Pagels suggests, as an sometime Jew who had lived through the Jewish war with Rome, during which Jerusalem was decimated and the Temple destroyed in the year seventy. He may take seen the thousands of Jews killed and thousands of others carried to Rome every bit slaves. Bitter about the dominating imperial power, he may accept wandered through Syria and Asia Pocket-size, along the manner meeting other followers of the crucified prophet Jesus, other "cells" of worshipers of the Jewish Messiah who was killed and mysteriously raised from the expressionless.
But when he gets to western asia Minor, he comes across many gentile Christians, quite possibly in churches founded by the now expressionless Campaigner Paul. Dissimilar John, they seem to be relatively well off. They unremarkably go forth fine with their not-Christian neighbors. They may be prospering from the Pax Romana, the "peace" sustained past Roman domination. They are marrying and having children, running their pocket-size businesses, ignoring the statues, temples and worship of other gods that surround them.
For John, this Christian toleration of Rome and its idols is offensive. This is not a benign governmental power. It is the Whore of Babylon, arrogantly destroying the earth. John writes (in this theory) to warn the churches, and he relates his vision to provoke alarm at the Evil Empire. That vision predicts the destruction of Rome by angelic armies, followed by the salvation of faithful disciples of the bloody, horned warrior-lamb Jesus. Those who resist volition, in the end, be rewarded.
Paradigm 
The Apocalypse, the Revelation to John, has over the centuries been read past many Christians to predict events that might happen in their own time. In the 1980s, journalists discussed President Ronald Reagan'south statements that biblical prophecies might be fulfilled in our days, when other nations would set on Israel and a great war would cease with the Second Coming of Christ. But Reagan was but one in a long line bringing John's prophecy into our times.
Pagels, the author of "The Gnostic Gospels," details how Revelation and other apocalyptic writings have frequently urged fright and hatred of ruling powers, if not then frequently armed revolt. Revelation was originally anti-Roman propaganda. Two centuries earlier, around 164 B.C., a Jew wrote down another series of visions in order to incite resistance against Hellenizing Jewish leaders in Jerusalem and their patron king, Antiochus Four Epiphanes, ruler of the Greco-Syrian Seleucid empire. That book, published in the Old Testament nether the pseudonym Daniel, is i of the primeval ancient apocalypses, and it influenced Jewish and Christian literature thereafter. Around A.D. 100, another Jew, not a Christian, recorded his ain visions, nowadays known as four Ezra, also stoking the fires of anti-Roman hatred and prophesying Rome's destruction. As Pagels illustrates, apocalyptic visions have been put to political purposes throughout history, down to the armies on both sides of the Ceremonious War, echoed for Northern soldiers in "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" but also inspiring Southern generals.
1 of the significant benefits of Pagels's volume is its demonstration of the unpredictability of apocalyptic politics. Christians in the 2d and third centuries wrote "hidden" books that promoted a rather quietistic form of scholarly Christianity, more adventurous in its theology and mythology than what was coming to be chosen "orthodoxy." Many of the texts discovered in 1945 near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, sometimes chosen "Gnostic" scriptures, characterize "secret" revelations. Other Christians, who were winning the boxing to own the label "orthodox," used Revelation to oppose Christians they labeled "heretics." They interpreted the "brute" it describes to exist some arch-heretic or Satan as the inventor of heresies. The Whore of Babylon was no longer Rome, simply a heretical opponent of orthodoxy. Revelation wasn't depoliticized. Its politics had shifted.
Once the empire had a Christian patron in Constantine, the meaning of Revelation changed again. For Constantine, after his ain "vision," he himself was the conquering ruler for good, and the "dragon" of Revelation referred non merely to Satan but also to Constantine's human rivals for the throne. Constantine later took heretics, schismatics within the church and eventually even Jews to exist the apotheosis of the Evil One. Revelation had not lost its political power, only its political utilise had changed.
Pagels's book does contain a few modest historical mistakes. The apostate Jew Alexander, who rose to loftier political office in Egypt, was not the uncle of the Jewish philosopher Philo, only his nephew. Galatia is the name of a region, not a city. More important, Pagels sometimes makes ancient people and concepts as well familiar to u.s.. Information technology is anachronistic, I believe, to portray the appeals for toleration made by Tertullian, a 2nd-century Christian, or by Jews earlier, as anything similar the Enlightenment principle of the separation of politics and religion. That is to take distinctly modernistic ideas into the ancient earth, where they don't belong.
But such missteps do nothing to mar the story Pagels tells. The meaning of the Apocalypse is ever malleable and set up to hand for whatever crisis ane confronts. That is i lesson of Pagels's book. Another is that we all should be vigilant to keep some of us from using the vision for violence against others.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/books/review/revelations-by-elaine-pagels.html
0 Response to "Talmud Review of Book of Revelation Main Points"
ارسال یک نظر