Abstract
Contemporary analysis of the world that produced the Book of Revelation suggests that Patmos was not a penal settlement, and there is little evidence that Domitian systematically persecuted Christians. The Emperor Cult was widely practiced, but Christians were not being persecuted for lack of participation. The document makes much of God’s victory in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the slain and standing Lamb (Rev 5:6). The “saints” were not persecuted Asian Christians but, under the influence of the Book of Daniel, John’s presentation of those from Israel’s sacred history who lived by the Word of God and accepted the messianic witness of the prophets (8:3–4; 11:18; 13:7, 10; 14:12; 16:6; 17:6; 18:20, 24; 19:8; 20:6, 9). They already have life, the application of the saving effects of the slain and risen lamb “from the foundation of the world” (13:8). John addresses late first-century Asian Christians, presenting the model of these “saints,” offering them hope as they are tempted by the allure of the Greco-Roman world and its mores. He invites them into the life and light of the New Jerusalem, the Christian church (22:1–5).
Highlights
The Book of Revelation is no doubt the most challenging book in the New Testament.Most mainstream Christians do not read it, but many Christians have used the fierce and often threatening imagery as biblical judgment against individual people and institutions across the ages.This practice was passionately and widely used across all sides of the tragic and often violent divisions that shook the Christian church and European society in general in the sixteenth century.1 It continues to guide many in their search to envision what will happen at the end of all time
Asian Christians, presenting the model of these “saints,” offering them hope as they are tempted by the allure of the Greco-Roman world and its mores
What follows will suggest that the Book of Revelation, despite the literary form that it borrows from Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature, is a Christian book, not a traditional apocalypse, but rather an extraordinary instruction on “hope in dark times.”
Summary
The Book of Revelation is no doubt the most challenging book in the New Testament. Most mainstream Christians do not read it, but many Christians have used the fierce and often threatening imagery as biblical judgment against individual people and institutions across the ages. The Christian Churches, especially in Western society, use the Book of Revelation in their liturgies. This is not so much the case in the East, where a long suspicion of its helpfulness as a “Word of God” has existed.. This is hardly the voice of a suffering figure asking his audience to persevere until God makes a final intervention to destroy the destroyers (see 11:18) On the contrary, he believes that Christians are already members of a royal priesthood because of the death and resurrection of Jesus. What follows will suggest that the Book of Revelation, despite the literary form that it borrows from Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature, is a Christian book, not a traditional apocalypse, but rather an extraordinary instruction on “hope in dark times.”. “A genre of revelatory literature within a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality with is both temporal, in so far as it envisions eschatological salvation, and spiritual, insofar as it involved another, supernatural world” (pp. 4–5)
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