The Book of Revelation is the most misunderstood book of the Bible. After two thousand years and perhaps hundreds of conflicting interpretations, there is still no consensus on a meaningful interpretation. I propose that the Book of Revelation contains much of the early preaching of John the Baptist, which was widely known and circulated before the written accounts we have of him in the Gospels.
In this I’ve been influenced by the writings of J. Massyngberde Ford, a biblical scholar and expert in biblical Greek, who argued that John the Evangelist wrote Revelation in A.D. 96. The text shows evidence that parts of Revelation are not characteristic of the Greek he used in his Gospel and epistles. She argues that the Evangelist had used some of the preaching he had heard from John the Baptist and recorded that into his own text of Revelation.
This makes sense to me. John the Baptist spent some years in the desert eating locusts and wild honey. While there, he could have been taught by the Holy Spirit how to express his thoughts through visions and symbols. Ford argued that Chapters 4 through 11 of Revelation contain a repetition of the Baptist’s oral account of those visions that the Holy Spirit had inspired him to preach, particularly those that warn the Jews about rejecting their Messiah.
Taking the composition of Revelation out of its historical context leads to the prevalence of futurist interpretations, which propose Revelation as predicting a future rapture, a future tribulation and the future Millennium.
Moses’ Prophecy
Moses, during the events of the Exodus, warned the Israelites that when the Redeemer finally arrives, their descendants will reject Him, and God will punish them and give their mission to others:
But if you do not obey the voice of the LORD, your God, carefully observing all his commandments and statutes…The LORD will let you be beaten down before your enemies; though you advance against them from one direction, you will flee before them in seven. (Deuteronomy 28:15-26)
Actually, the Jewish people of Christ’s time split into two factions. One element believed in Him and inherited the mission as members of His Church, the other rejected Christ and were punished with the downfall of their leaders and nation.
Revelation does predict the downfall of Israel, both the destruction of the Temple and the city of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and the final downfall of the nation in A.D. 135. Revelation also predicts some of the trauma that Christ’s Church has to experience as history progresses.
What follows here is a brief outline as to how I understand Revelation. I rely on ancient historians Josephus, Suetonius and Tacitus for much of the history of the Jews up to the time of Christ. I see a better match of first century historical events with the visions in Revelation than modern commentators see in their apocalyptic interpretations of modern events.
Seven Seals (Chapter 6)
The seven seals come from the Baptist. They are the Baptist’s announcement to the Jews identifying the coming Messiah. Following the sixth seal is “the gathering of the 144,000” which is followed by the “others who are gathered.” These two visions predict that many are gathered from the Jews and many more gathered from the gentiles because not all the Jews will accept the Messiah. The seventh seal predicts the final fall of the nation, but the text immediately goes into another cycle of visions: the seven trumpets.
Seven Trumpets (Chapters 8-9, 11)
The seven trumpets take an altogether different view of history predicting the struggle among the Jews as they decide whether or not they will believe in Christ, as well as their growing problems with pagan Rome that also does not want to believe. The sixth trumpet depicts an angel with a scroll containing the seven thunders, but John is asked not to reveal what the thunders say. The seventh trumpet reveals that the power to rule the earth now belongs to the Lord and His Messiah.
Seven Sights
The seven sights show John how the Church of the Messiah will be formed. The first sight is the woman and the dragon (Chapter 12). An easy interpretation sees the woman as the Virgin Mary and the dragon as Herod, anxious to kill the new born infant. But there is a deeper interpretation. The woman represents the people of Israel as a whole giving birth to the new covenant, one that includes all humans with the Jewish Messiah as king and high priest.
The second and third sights are the Sea Beast and the Land Beast (Chapter 13). If the Jews look westward across the Mediterranean Sea they can imagine a huge beast rising out of the sea. This would be Rome ready to make war on the woman and her child. The Land Beast would be the current leader of Rome, Nero.
The fourth, fifth and sixth sights occur in Chapter 14 with consoling visions of the Lamb with His elect as well as the vengeance taken on the perpetrators of evil, symbolized by the angels “wielding a sickle” for the harvest at the end of time. The seventh sight is a new heaven and a new earth (Chapter 21).
Seven Bowls of Plagues (Chapter 16)
The seven bowls start over again from the beginning displaying different points of view. It first shows a prediction of God’s frustration as the Jews try to destroy the newly founded Church of the Messiah and, instead, stumble into a war with Rome. Bowls are poured onto the earth, the sea, rivers, onto the sun and upon the beast’s throne, finally on the Euphrates River to release a huge army to destroy Judea. The seventh bowl is announced with the words, “It is finished!” (Revelation 16:17). This verse predicts the utter destruction of the Jewish nation in A.D. 135.
Not many interpretations of Revelation point out this final destruction because it happened thirty-nine years after the Evangelist put Revelation into writing. The final destruction of Judea occurred in the four-year war between Rome and Bar Kochba. Bar Kochba unified the Jews under one ruler and defeated three Roman armies. He liberated Judea completely from Roman control. The Israeli people today refer to Bar Kochba’s rule as The First Jewish Commonwealth. The present Israeli government, incidentally, is considered the Second Jewish Commonwealth.
During His ministry, Jesus predicted this would happen. He warned the Jews “I have come in my father’s name and you will not receive me. Another will come in his own name and him you will receive” (John 5:43).
The seven trumpets, the seven sights and the seven bowls are all easily identified as second century events. This to me would make a historical interpretation of Revelation the only logical one.
Final Cycle of Images
Revelation 17 starts a new set of seven visions summarizing why God permitted the defeat and punishment of those who refused to accept the Messiah, had Him killed and then tried to destroy His newly-founded Church. Revelation 18 describes why the unbelieving Jews fell. Revelation 19 describes the wedding of the Lamb with His Bride, the Church, and Revelation 20 describes the binding of Satan for a thousand years to prevent him from destroying the newly inaugurated Church. I believe the thousand years were finished around the time of the Reformation when, all of a sudden, the whole Church fragmented and was seriously weakened in its ability to evangelize the world ever since.
What others describe as “the Millennium” is to me the political kingdom of early Christians that was meant to flourish and become strong while Satan was bound. Revelation 20 describes the Final Judgement. A “new heaven and a new earth” is described (Revelation 21) followed by “the new Jerusalem” (Revelation 21), both of which go beyond the Final Judgement and describe the eternal re-created universe and the new heaven and earth and the new Jerusalem.
Revelation then ends with the statement that Jesus is coming soon. It has been 2000 years since that prediction has been made, and it still has not happened, but I think we are very close to the end of God’s toleration of the wickedness of man and the devils who prod man into rejecting God.
Guadalupe and Fatima
Public revelation ceased after the death of John the Evangelist, but private revelation did not. The Virgin Mary has been appearing through children who see apparitions of her. The first major documented apparition of the Virgin Mary was in 1531 in Mexico concurrent with all the events of the Reformation. The recently unbound Satan was already confusing humans about the Church, and his efforts did succeed in seriously weakening the Church’s chance of evangelizing the whole world.
I believe Jesus sent His mother to help the Church because the Father put enmity between the dragon and the woman (Genesis 3:15). Most people today don’t realize the there was a mass conversion of eight million Amerindians within ten years of the apparitions of Guadalupe while five million Catholics in Europe left the mother Church, both events occurring simultaneously while the Reformation was ravaging Christendom.
All of us, however, are aware of what happened at Fatima in 1917. The Virgin Mary asked that the Pope gather the bishops of the world and publicly consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart. She said that God would convert Russia, end World War I and bring peace to the world.
Not only did the secular world not believe this, many Catholic bishops also refused to believe it, and the consecration was not made in time to avert World War II. Had the bishops made the consecration, I think, the world would have seen a second, much larger mass conversion, this time of Russia and probably much of Europe. The world would be incredibly different today if that conversion had occurred.
The End Times
I do not think Revelation is revealing the “end times” the way many commentators of Revelation argue. I believe God is revealing the end times through the influence of the Virgin Mary, the woman who will crush the pride of Satan. She has appeared in apparition many times in the past 170 years. A crucial series of apparitions occurred between 1972 and 1997 where Mary encouraged Fr. Stefano Gobbi to start the Marian Movement of Priests (MMP) as a cohort to counteract Satan’s ongoing attempts to destroy the Church.
The secular media is very silent on this, but much information about the MMP is available on the Internet. Books about the apparitions were published annually as the apparitions occurred. Finally, in 1998, the final edition (the 18th) of this book was printed and the apparitions ended. It contains everything the Virgin Mary told Fr. Gobbi. I recommend reading this book. It has 970 pages, about four hundred thousand words, and goes into incredible detail about how Satan is beguiling the world.
Especially interesting is Mary’s identification of 666 and how three times that number equals 1998, the year Mary predicts will be the beginning of Satan’s final attempt to overthrow Christ. Reading this book and seeing what is going on in the world, I myself wonder how close we might be to the end of the world.
Admittedly, it is hard to digest such a large topic into 2000 words. For a more detail on how I view Revelation see “Revelation: Mature Look” on www.mauriceawilliams.com.
4 thoughts on “The Book of Revelation and the Downfall of the First Chosen”
1. The Gospel of John is in cultured, elegant Greek. The letters of John are in good Greek too. Revelation is barely literate, the worst Greek in the New Testament. Not the same guy. Also he can barely keep his stories straight as his foaming mouth drips all over the manuscript. A big buildup to the Seventh Seal, and then — nothing!
2. Revelation has done more damage than any other book in the Bible. It has been meat and drink to paranoid culture warriors in any age, more recently with the “Left Behind” series and Jack Chick comics, and even in milder forms among today’s conservatives. Any strange new idea or disagreement becomes a “mark of the Devil” or a “sign of the End Times”, even when they appear in children and other loved ones. Fortunately Mr. Williams stops short of applying all that divisive imagery to the present day.
So, what do you really think about the Book of Revelation?
Hello Captcrisis,
The Gospel of John is indeed written in cultured, elegant Greek. His letters are also, but his recounting of the apocalyptic visions of John the Baptist are presented through a notably different choice of words, so much so, that many scholars are convinced that someone else composed them. I think this is because John the Baptist did not write down his visions, he memorized them. He preached these visions from memory prior to meeting Jesus Christ. John the Evangelist was a disciple lf the Baptist, and I’m sure he repeated the Baptist’s preaching from memory also.
The Baptist was martyred maybe six years before Christ was crucified in A.D. 33. The Baptist and his disciples, I think, all preached the same memorized version that the Baptist preached. I think it was easier to preach this than to discuss the ideas through a written text.
So I think the early Church was familiar with these visions which were coached in true apocalyptic terms: Visions of mystical beasts, frightening events, etc. These elements made the visions easy to remember and describe.
By time John the evangelist put the Book of Revelation into writing. This was sixty-three years after the martyrdom of the Baptist; he elected to write it down as he remembered it – the oral text. That’s the reason the choice of words do not match the Evangelist’s elegant Greek.
I think what has happened that led to the very contradictory interpretations of revelations today is that some scholars have used the very words the Baptist used to announce Christ to imply what the church of Jesus Christ will have to experience during the end times. This is one of the main points in my article.
I would like to say something in defense of the Baptist. You seem very critical of the Baptist, but Jesus said “Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist. Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” (Matt 11: 11).
The seventh seal you take issue with is the end of the first covenant religion. Because the Temple leaders rejected God’s own chosen Messiah and had him put to death, God has rejected them. In the first cycle of predicted events I characterize the seventh seal as the final fall of the nation. In the third cycle of predicted events, I characterize the seventh sight as a new heaven and a new earth. And when the bowls of plagues are finally poured onto the Earth, I characterized the seventh bowl as The End is Here and interpret that as the final, utter destruction of the Jewish nation by Severus in A.D. 135. So the end of the first covenant religion was predicted at least three times in revelations.
I think I am right on target in my preterist interpretation. The will be an ordeal for the Christianized world religion to experience but it won’t be at all like the futurist interpretations claim.
I agree with your first statement of the article. However, our paths quickly part.
For instance, there is no prophecy of the destruction of the Temple in the Book of Revelation. As you suggested, John wrote it more than 20 years after the event took place. If so, it is not a prophecy, is it.
You also suggest a role of Mary that has no basis in the Bible.
I’m mindful of the opening passages of the Book of Revelation, as well as the warning in the Epilogue. They dovetail with the words of Jesus about the end times in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21.
Where does the 6th Trumpet War fit into your analysis of the end times? It is a war that emanates from the Euphrates River area of the world and results in the death of 1/3 of mankind. It further mentions troops numbering 200 million. Today worldwide military and paramilitary strength is approaching that level. In reality, China alone could marshall that number of troops.