Domitian’s Reign: History and Rhetoric

Abstract

Abstract The separation of the seer’s language from the social order is an artificial one. John’s language—its shape, its genre, the vision it transmits—communicates a message, and that communication is a social act that takes its place in the social order. However visionary John’s writing is, it does not operate in a symbolic universe apart from the world of actual, social relations. Moreover, the social order does not exist as a given, simply to be observed with the aid of proper historical tools. The social order is a construction for a person contemporary with it. How much more so for a historian working nineteen centuries later! The historian reconstructs events, imagines social connections, and extrapolates from limited sources so as to construct a plausible order of society. There is room for alternative constructions on issues both small and great. In brief, the “social historical situation” is an imaginative construction built from a critical reading of primarily linguistic evidence—books, speeches, inscriptions, and coins. In the following chapters I offer a plausible reconstruction of Domitian’s reign (chap. 6), social organization in the province of Asia (chap. 9), and the place of Jews and Christians in that province (chaps. 7 and 8). This social order, reconstructed almost entirely from sources other than the Book of Revelation, will provide further evidence that the seer and his audience did not live in a world of conflict, tension, and crisis. Christians lived quiet lives, not much different from other provincials. The economy, as always, had its ups and downs; and the government kept the peace and demanded taxes.