A HISTORY & CRITICISM OF “THE APOCALYPSE”
by R. F. Dietrich
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Most of what most
people in the West know about “the Apocalypse” has come to them, mostly
indirectly, from “The
Revelation of St. John the Divine,” as the King James Bible
translates it, sometimes more generally referred to as “The Book of
Revelation.” And the title of that
book could just as easily and probably more accurately be translated as “The Apocalypse of St. John
the Theologian.” The Greek
word "Apokalypsis" actually
appears in the original title (of the earliest manuscript we have, that is),
a word that generally refers to “a revelation” but which by association with
this particular book came to have the more specific reference to “a
revelation of the End of Days.” And “Divine” in the context
of " But who were John’s
enemies? The Romans, for sure, and
Jews who did not accept Jesus as the Messiah, but the long assumption that
this book is strictly a Christian polemic against non-believers in the
divinity of Jesus may not be exactly correct.
Instead this book more likely reflects a crisis contemporaneous with that
brought by Roman persecution but perhaps thought more destructive, as it refers
to an early fight to the death between two kinds of Christians, the original Judeo-Christians
and the Pauline newcomers, the Gentile Christians, and those Christian Jews
who mistakenly (from John’s point of view) tolerated the Gentiles and the
changes they brought. The Judeo-Christians
had been headquartered in Jerusalem (originally led by James the brother of
Jesus, apparently) before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D.
70, and John seems to have been an expatriate follower of them in the
Diaspora that followed who took exception to the impiety of the new Pauline Christians
slowly but surely infiltrating John’s churches in Asia Minor (today’s Turkey)
and turning “Christianity” into a Gentile religion that was not observant of
Judaic laws. In fact, Paul (formerly
known as “Saul of Tarsus,” a city on what is now the south coast of Turkey)
appears to have been kicked out of the Jerusalem congregation precisely over the
issue of whether Gentiles were to be included or not. These two conflicting forces in the early
Jesus movement agreed about the Romans as the common enemy, and both
excoriated Jews who did not accept Jesus as the Messiah, but otherwise they were heretics to each other, and that’s
why Gentile Christians may in John’s view be worse than outright unbelievers and
deserving of the hell-fire and damnation he wishes for them, for they are
misrepresenting Christ’s ministry in a way that John feels will destroy the
true Christianity more certainly than the Romans might. It’s the enemy within more than the enemy
without that John hates most. In
short, the extravagant and extreme imagery of the Book of Revelation,
characterizing John’s enemies as subject to fantastic punishment, may thus be
best understood as the imagery of a political cartoon.* At any
rate, John’s “revelation,” his channeling of Jesus, was supposedly
experienced in a cave on the Dodecanese Greek island of Patmos just off the
coast of what is today Turkey and dictated by him to a scribe/companion named
Prochoros (according to local monkish
“tradition”). This occurred, most
scholars think, in about 95 A. D., during the reign of Domitian when the heat
of Roman persecution was suddenly turned up on the early Christians (mostly Judaeo-Christians) of Asia Minor and John himself was
sent into exile on Patmos, presumably as punishment for his refusal to render
unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, as Caesar saw it. John would be shocked PATMOS, really three islands connected by land bridges,
looks rather like a replicating virus, with the largest island at the top
giving birth to a smaller island below and that island giving birth to an
even smaller island below that. But
naturally this three-in-one configuration was thought confirmation of “The
Trinity” by those who in the 4th Century voted to include this
book in the New Testament (a close vote, by the way, partly because many of
those voting against remembered its origins as a polemic against Gentile
Christianity), although the different sizes
of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost islands must have created some
knotty theological problems. John's
island was the one in the middle, where he not only had revelations but did battle, it’s said, with “devil women” (to John, a
redundancy). Similarly,
according to The Autobiography of
Malcolm X, this island is also where a mad black scientist, angry with
Allah, invented the devil white race (another redundancy?). Busy place! Wonder what's in the Ouzo there?
THE DISNEY WORLD OF “THE
APOCALYPSE”
According
to tradition, John was on Patmos for only 18 months before
returning to Ephesus on the mainland, but during his exile he so feared the
Roman threat and the possibilities for backsliding and even heresy among the
Christians (mostly Judaic-Christians) on the mainland of Asia Minor (the
"Seven Churches") that he dictated his revelation from Jesus partly
as a warning against that and partly as a bolstering of the faith by
promising an impending Day
of Judgment that would reward Christians (Judaeo-Christians?)
who held steady, even to martyrdom, and doom “heathens” to eternal
hellfire. Given the scarcity of
Christians (of either the Judaic or Gentile sort) at that time, John seemed
to mean that 99.999999999% of the world’s population was automatically damned
and doomed to eternal hellfire because they were
"heathens," whether they knew it or not. Today the "heathens" are perhaps
down to about 80% of the world's population at any given moment. Quite a roast, at all times! If you’ve actually read “Revelation”
from beginning to end, which most Christians have not, you may have found
yourself surprised by its erudition and allusiveness, given that it presents
itself as a spontaneous “vision.”
This library and literary quality will become especially apparent if
you read an edition of the New Testament that indicates, usually in a center
column, all references in the text to the Old Testament, an amazing number in
the case of this book. The object of
such editions of the Bible was to colonize Jewish scripture, to show that the
whole point of the Old Testament was to prefigure the New Testament. Well,
whoever John was (and it’s unlikely that he was the same man who is referred
to as the “beloved disciple” of Jesus in the New Testament or the one who
wrote the Gospel of St. John, despite what the tradition claims), he was
undoubtedly Jewish and knew Jewish scripture backwards and forwards. And one thing he knew is that he had not
invented “the Apocalypse,” for apocalyptic formulas and imagery appear in
many books of the Old Testament, from which he frequently borrowed or to
which he frequently alluded. “Apocalypse Now!” seems to have
been an increasingly popular call for some Jews from the time of the
Babylonian Exile on (from 586 B.C. on), even after the exile Jews were
allowed by Cyrus the Persian to return from Babylon to Jerusalem in 538 B.C.,
for what they returned to in the centuries to come was mostly invasion by and
intolerable subordination to other peoples, such as the Greeks and the
Romans. But does this mean that the Old Testament “Hebrews” John quoted invented “the Apocalypse”? No, indeed, for historical records make clear that much Jewish scripture refers to and/or is an adaptation of even earlier scripture and literature of the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Canaanite peoples. In this case, the Jews seem to have gotten their ideas about an apocalypse mainly from Persian religion, most likely from what we call “Zoroastrianism,” which Jews came in contact with in many parts of the ancient world, as it was for centuries the dominant religion of the area. Nobody really knows the origin of any
human idea, but as far as historians have been able to determine, the inventor of apocalyptic
thinking was Zoroaster, the founder of Zoroastrianism. Who was Zoroaster? And what exactly is “apocalyptic
thinking”? “Zoroaster” is the name the Greeks
gave to a Persian religious prophet named “Zarathustra,” although even that
is a translation. Nietzsche tried to revive the original name by titling one
of his more outlandish books Also Sprach
Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra),
but “Zoroaster” still seems to be preferred.
Zoroaster or Zarathustra, when and where did he live and what was he
about? Just as
the Greeks gave us the wrong name, so too they may have gotten Zoroaster's
dates wrong, which was not hard to do in that
pre-scientific day and age.
Almost every reference work you consult will tell you that Zoroaster
existed in the sixth century B.C., but they do this because they’ve relied on
the ancient Greeks for their dating.
Knowledgeable scholars who have closely examined the few writings of
Zoroaster that have survived do not believe that, linguistically and
culturally, they belong to sixth century Whatever the case, apocalyptic
thinking, and all the formulas that derive from that, seems to have blown
into Zoroaster’s mind at a time when he and his people were under great stress. And that is requirement # 1 for those who
aspire to be serious apocalyptic thinkers.
You have to believe that your world is about to come to a catastrophic
end unless the gods intervene and turn catastrophe into triumph. Apocalyptic thinking is extremely
desperate thinking, last-ditch thinking. And of course human subjectivity rules. The
world at large may be under no special threat, but all that matters is that
you perceive it as severely threatened, or at least that the
world as it matters to you is so threatened, as with the Jews
at many stages of their history, and as with the early Christians (Judaeo or Gentile) who were few in number, and as with
anyone at any time who thinks things have come to such a badness that only
divine intervention will save the day by bringing an end to the world as it
is and replacing it with a better world.
Now very
little is actually known about Zoroaster, but, if he existed literally, it
seems he was a member of a pastoral, Indo-European tribe which at some time had
found its way to the northeast corner of what is today’s Iran (where also,
our geneticists tell us, ancestors of most people of European descent spent
some time before wandering on). More
aggressive and war-like people were pressing upon Zoroaster’s people from all
sides, and apparently he foresaw the extinction of himself and his people
unless God intervened. Zoroastrianism
had a number of gods, but chief amongst them was Ahura
Mazda (or Ormazd or Ormuzd),
and it was to this god that Zoroaster appealed for an apocalyptic intervention, including
a Judgment Day that would separate the sheep from the goats, the saved from
the damned, once and for all, thus bringing to “the saved” a sort of heaven
on earth, what later came to be called a “New Jerusalem.” God knows, the Old Jerusalem, of
all ages, needed to be replaced, and still does! The
apocalyptic thinker imagines that the world is full of “bad people”
(possessed by "evil spirits," in Zoroastrianism) who must be
“cleansed” from the earth so that the earth can be a proper home for “the
righteous” (those possessed by "good spirits," in
Zoroastrianism). Apocalyptic thinkers
tend to talk a lot about that which is “pure” and that which is “impure,”
which is a development from the Zoroastrian melodrama of a war between
"the forces of light" (Luke Skywalker) and "the forces of
darkness" (Darth Vadar). The “righteous” and
“their kind” are of course “pure.”
Others are “impure” and must be “cleansed.” Genocide in the mode of melodrama, in short. Thus the
example of Nazi Germany, which took its apocalyptic sense of history, its
Nordic and anti-Jewish “Final Solution,” right out of the New Testament and,
ironically, the Jewish prophecy that made straight the way. St. John was so intensely angry with his
fellow Jews who did not accept Jesus as the Messiah prophesied in Jewish scripture
that he damned them as Satanic, consigned those who didn't convert to eternal
hellfire, and thus opened the door for all the purges and pogroms to
come. Hitler just ran with a ball
hiked to him by the Church and the And thus
too the former “Yugoslavia,” where Moslems, Greek Orthodox Christians, and
Roman Catholic Christians saw each other as “impure” and would have
“cleansed” the earth of such “impurity” if we had let them. Thus too today’s
Israel/Palestine, where they’re fixing for a fight to the finish, after first
getting the whole world involved in taking sides in a "Holy
War." But not to
worry--everything will be just fine after we kill all the Evil Doers. That is
another key element of apocalyptic thinking, from Zoroaster on—the war to end
all wars, the “Holy War”
that the Bible calls “Armageddon.”
Actually, the Bible doesn’t call it that; it just says
that the “Hill of Megiddo” (which is what “Armageddon” means) marks the
general area where the armies involved will gather before marching on to
Jerusalem for the battle. Moslems
believe in that final “Holy War” too, and that’s why we’re in the mess we’re
presently in. Osama bin Laden and his
surrogates lead a Moslem army, so to speak, convinced that the West must be
“cleansed” of infidels and brought to a Judgment of God. Some Shiite Moslems apparently think the
place where the war will begin is in what we call Note that
the chief originators and promoters of apocalyptic thinking are all male,
however many females have since been attracted to this thinking. It seems the male imagination naturally
turns to thoughts of all-out war.
That’s always the best way to settle things, isn’t it? Last one standing, that sort of thing? And note
too that although theoretically it is always expected that God
will start the Apocalypse, in practice it is always men who try
to start the battle, in hopes of encouraging God to make His move. And that is why all actual attempts at an
Apocalypse have been man-made, not God-made, and probably always will
be. Osama bin Laden is just the latest
hoping to get Allah to act like a real man.
What drives the apocalyptic male nuts is God’s
seeming reluctance to mix it up.
This leads to a consideration of the subtext of apocalyptic thinking, which will explain why men feel that they have to start the apocalyptic ball rolling. Consider what is being implied by apocalyptic thinking. It is implicitly a criticism of God! What apocalyptic thinking is really saying is this---“God, you really screwed up when you made this bad, bad world. We righteous people want a better world, one that recognizes our righteousness and rewards us properly for it. Quit stalling and make us a better world! And get rid of all these awful people who don’t see things as we do! We want to live amongst nothing but saints like ourselves!” There is of course not a single religious leader of any apocalyptic-minded religion who will admit that this is the subtext of their apocalyptic thinking, for none of them would be caught dead criticizing the very God they are hoping will save them. So subterfuge is called for. Sometimes the subterfuge takes the form of twisting the hate-filled Book of Revelation into an ironic expression of God's Love in His determination to destroy evil. A reverse symbolism is imposed by some in which the violent, warlike, hellfire imagery of a sadistic, vengeful warrior Jesus is read as a purely metaphorical expression of the extreme means to which a loving God will go to save your soul. "We had to destroy the village in order to save it," is the way it was put in the Vietnam War. And then it was Baghdad’s turn for a little “shock and awe”! But of course that is not the way symbolism works. The symbol and the thing symbolized cannot contradict; they must belong to the same linguistic field, positive or negative. If one wishes to claim that this is paradox rather than contradiction, the same rule applies—you cannot use “hate” to mean “love.” Or rather you can, but you defeat your ends by using words so irresponsibly and exposing your real feelings! Another subterfuge is to shift the blame for a poorly made world ("poorly made" from the human perspective, of course, but one must grant that the universe seems to have been modeled after a demolition derby by a “creator” with the mentality of a 12-year-old boy who loves explosions! Or perhaps a better analogy for the universe revealed by the Hubble Space Telescope is that of a pool table “break”). Because there has always been a great reluctance on the part of the pious to blame God for the awful world they insist He created, they are forced to pretend that it is “Satan” or the “bad people” who have messed it up (especially that damned Eve and her apple! And that whore Mary Magdalene's another bad apple!), and thus their constant appeal to God that His divine patience with such “badness” come to an end. How long, O Lord? The answer to "how long?" ironically appears at the end of “The Lord’s Prayer”: “Forever and ever, world without end, amen.” And so those who are thinking of piously gathering at some “holy place” in the expectation of a biblical Apocalypse coming to pass and perhaps an escape from it through some special door of “salvation” had better settle in for a long wait. To pass the time, recommended reading is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. *This
very plausible argument is to be found in Elaine Pagel’s
book Revelations, Visions, Prophecy,
and Politics in the Book of Revelation (Viking), which has been well
reviewed in The New Yorker of March
5, 2012 (p. 78) by Adam Gopnik. |
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