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.”
Most don’t know that 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 "
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
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,” 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”
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John Has a
Nightmare in a Cave,
In which
gentle Jesus is impersonated by a divine sadist. |
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 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 who held steady, even to
martyrdom, and doom “heathens” to eternal hellfire. Given the scarcity of Christians 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 wrote the Gospel of St. John, despite what the tradition claims),
he was very likely 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 though 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 who were few in
number, and as with any one 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.
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.
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 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 now it’s
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 the door of “salvation” had better settle in for a long wait. To pass the time, recommended reading is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
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