The Violence of the Lamb: Martyrs as Agents of Divine Judgement in the Book of Revelation

Abstract

The title of Paul Middleton’s book provides a crisp summary of its content: Middleton argues that, in the book of Revelation, Jesus is depicted as an agent of violent divine judgment and that the martyrs in the book follow in his train and become participants in visiting God’s wrath upon the world. Middleton thus sets himself against those who view Jesus and his people as emblems of nonviolent resistance.In ch. 1, Middleton argues that we ought to disentangle the dating of Revelation from the reign of Domitian on the basis of Irenaeus’s testimony, though he leaves the specific time of writing open to sometime in the late first / early second century. At the same time, he counters contemporary arguments that John blows the suffering of his churches out of proportion and creates the crisis of “persecution.” Middleton acknowledges that the idea of an empire-wide bloodbath is untenable but affirms that the likelihood of severe localized activity against Christians counts as bona fide persecution.Chapters 2 to 4 all have a Christological focus. In ch. 2, Middleton argues that Jesus is not a “tame lamb”—instead, his lamb-like sacrifice flows inexorably into his leonine conquest of the nations. He follows this with a depiction of Jesus as the “proto-martyr,” again emphasizing that his death in no way detracts from his divine status as victor and judge. His role in judgment becomes the theme of ch. 4, where Jesus’s participation in violent divine retribution is detailed.The final chapter focuses again on judgment and argues that John not only depicts God judging the world on behalf of the martyrs; the martyrs in fact become part of the divine army wreaking vengeance upon the “inhabitants of the earth.”Middleton’s book has much to commend it. He provides a lucid over-view of the book of Revelation, no mean feat, and he shows a deft handling of the general historical context. Middleton steers clear of ideological assertions and attempts a description of what he believes to be the Apocalypse’s own perspective. He disagrees with numerous scholars along the way but does so in a way that is thorough and fair.Yet in the end one wonders whether he is entirely fair to John himself. If Middleton’s opponents run the risk of making John a Moltmannian avant la lettre, Middleton himself risks reducing him to a caricature of fire-and-brimstone fundamentalism. On the central theme of the “violence of the Lamb,” he appears to dismiss any incongruity whatsoever between the depictions of Jesus as lion and lamb: the lamb is simply one stage on the road to ultimate conquest. Again, Middleton serves the text well by not brushing judgment under the rug—but this need not consist in denying all theological tension between the two images. Likewise, he dismisses John’s picture of the kings of the earth entering the New Jerusalem in a footnote (p. 186) as a “continuity error,” even though this has long been a key text for those who find a more redemptive vision for the nations at the close of the book. On the question of divine violence, Middleton accepts the unfortunate scholarly consensus that the repeated phrase “it was given” constitutes a simple “divine passive” that effectively lays the blame for violence on earth squarely at God’s door. The idea that God accepts responsibility for the violence of secondary agents has theological depth; the notion that God just does these things is very different and runs afoul most notably of Rev 13: 5–6, where “it was given” to the beasts to blaspheme God and his people. Does God really actively enact blasphemy against himself, or is John aware that something more complex is going on?The Achilles heel of his thesis, however, is a little-acknowledged hermeneutical stance that typically ascribes to the vision an almost one-to-one correspondence to reality: if figures in the vision are described as martyrs, a massive and literal martyrdom must await the church; if “the inhabitants of the earth” in the vision fail to repent, that must mean John has no missionary concern. This is a possible reading of the Apocalypse, but it needs considerably more argument to be deemed plausible.