Opening the Book of Revelation

We speak a wisdom to those who are mature, but not a wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away. Rather, we speak God’s wisdom, mysterious, hidden, which God predetermined before the ages for our glory…
—1 Corinthians 2:6-7

The Book of Revelation, or The Apocalypse of St. John, is a book full of mystery. Indeed, St. Jerome famously observed that the Book of Revelation has as many mysteries as it has verses. But to one who is willing to read the Book of Revelation and the rest of the Holy Scriptures with the eyes of faith, that is, to read them in the same Spirit in which they were written, these mysteries are not impenetrable, since the Word of God itself gives us many helps toward entering into the mysteries.

The season of Advent looks toward Christ’s Second Coming in a particular way as we reflect on the glorious Incarnation and the enduring presence of the Lord in our lives. Throughout this season I will be offering daily posts examining the Book of Revelation, sharing some principles by which each of us can read the Book fruitfully ourselves as a means of entering more deeply into the mysteries of the Incarnation.

Accordingly, the posts in the beginning of this series will be dedicated to learning from Scriptural examples how to interpret the kind of Biblical literature to which the Book of Revelation belongs. The next posts will focus on passages of the Old Testament that unlock particular passages of the Book of Revelation. To complete the series, we will embark together on a reading of the Book of Revelation itself, putting into practice what we have learned.

In our society today there is so much sensationalism surrounding the Book of Revelation, so many bold yet contradictory claims to knowledge, that I hope you will bear with a bit of a preamble for the sake of ensuring a sound, well-founded, and profitable reading free from baseless speculation, so as to be on course toward entering into the true mysteries of the Book of Revelation.

Bear with me if this first post seems a little dry. But when seven-headed beasts and antichrists start flying around, we’ll want to have our principles firmly in place.

Successful communication between author and reader requires that the reader bring certain things to his reading of the text. For instance, if it is a text written in English, the reader must bring a knowledge of the English language. If you are attempting to interpret this text on the assumption that I am writing in French, you must be very confused by now. This principle goes well beyond mere grammar, however—for instance, if you are trying to interpret this piece as a humor column, you must be very disappointed by now.

Even if the reader does not bring the things the author expects, however, he may manage to produce an interpretation that has some degree of internal consistency. With the text of a human author such a reinterpretation may have merit, because the reader’s ideas and his creative use of the text may be better than the author’s ideas and his purpose in writing. But this cannot be the case with divinely authored texts, where we must follow the intent of the author. This “constraint” upon our reading does not so much limit us as free us to discover God’s revelation to us, a message which is marvelous beyond anything we could have made up by our own cleverness.

Since the point of the Holy Scriptures is for God to reveal his message to us, to read them successfully we must approach them with the things that allow us to receive that message. For the Book of Revelation these things are, chiefly, a lively faith that seeks to understand and an intimate familiarity with the Old Testament.

St. Augustine observes in his book On Christian Doctrine that there are many ambiguities of language, even in Scripture, that cannot be resolved by one’s knowledge of grammar, no matter how knowledgeable one may be. In such cases one must interpret according to the rule of faith. This means not just any religious belief that people call “faith,” but the divine and Catholic faith that comes to us by virtue of the same Holy Spirit who inspired the sacred author.

The Vatican II Constitution on Sacred Scripture Dei Verbum provides us with guidance on what a faithful reading involves:

§ 11. Those divinely revealed realities which are contained and presented in Sacred Scripture have been committed to writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit…In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by Him they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted.

§ 12 Since God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in human fashion…to search out the intention of the sacred writers, attention should be given, among other things, to “literary forms.” For truth is set forth and expressed differently in texts which are variously historical, prophetic, poetic, or of other forms of discourse. Since Holy Scripture must be read and interpreted in the sacred spirit in which it was written, no less serious attention must be given to the content and unity of the whole of Scripture if the meaning of the sacred texts is to be correctly worked out. The living tradition of the whole Church must be taken into account along with the harmony which exists between elements of the faith.

This conciliar document on divine revelation teaches us a great deal, including these three key truths:
1. that faith receives the Scriptures as the Word of God;
2. that we should be attentive to the literary form in the Scriptures;
3. and that we should be attentive to the Spirit by whom the Scripture was written, through considerations of the content and unity of the whole of Scripture, the living tradition of the whole Church, and the analogy of faith.

Concerning literary form, we see that the Book of Revelation contains internal cues about what kind of literature it is. It repeats five times that it is prophecy or prophetic message (Rev 1:3, 22:7, 10, 18, 19). Furthermore, comparison of Revelation with other books of the Bible shows extraordinarily extensive reference to the Old Testament, with a strong likeness to books and passages of the Old Testament that are clearly prophetic.

If you know the Old Testament, then you can tell by reading the Book of Revelation that whatever language you are reading it in, whether Greek or English or Latin or Spanish, the “language” it is really written in is “Old Testament.” Since St. John and the early Christians to whom he wrote knew the Old Testament as well or better than we know our favorite TV shows and movies, it makes sense that God would give him visions that used images from the Old Testament. Almost every verse in the Book of Revelation has an allusion to an Old Testament passage, and many of them have several.

Therefore, in order to learn how to interpret the Book of Revelation rightly, we ought to read it in the context of the whole Bible, with special attention to prophecy from the Old Testament, and apply what we learn under the guidance of the rule of faith.

Now, we can’t expect the pope to do all our thinking for us, because that’s not his job. But we can expect the pope and the Church’s magisterium to give general guidelines and set bounds by ruling out specific errors. That way we are freed from running headlong into serious error and so can exercise our powers of thought upon the text.

For this we need a lively faith ourselves, and an intimate familiarity with the Old Testament. Or if we do not have the latter yet, a willingness to delve into it and learn. I hope that we will discover together just how fruitful such a reading can be over this Advent series.

 
Image: Unknown German Master, Vision of St John the Evangelist

How different the man who devotes himself to the study of the law of the Most High! He explores the wisdom of the men of old and occupies himself with the prophecies; He treasures the discourses of famous men, and goes to the heart of involved sayings; He studies obscure parables, and is busied with the hidden meanings of the sages.
—Sirach 39:1-3

Most people do not need a lot of convincing that there are parts of the Bible that are hard to understand.

Instead, many people need a bit of encouragement to believe that we can discover the meanings of the more obscure Biblical passages without descending into arbitrariness, untrustworthy guesswork and speculation, or simply accepting it on the authority of someone who claims to know, without seeing for ourselves what sense it makes. The purpose of these posts is to give the principles that will allow each of us to read and interpret the Book of Revelation in a way that is faithful to its inspired meaning.

Being faithful to the meaning of Scripture does not mean that whatever first pops into our heads when we see the words is the true meaning. We saw in the Vatican II Constitution Dei Verbum that the proper reception of Holy Scripture means not only that faith receives the Scriptures as the Word of God, but also that we should be attentive to the literary form in the Scriptures and attentive to the Spirit by whom the Scripture was written. Interpretation in accordance with the Spirit who inspired it means attention to the content and unity of the whole of Scripture, the living tradition of the whole Church, and the analogy of faith, that is, how the truths of the faith fit together coherently.

So if the kind of writing is a report of a prophetic vision, we had better read it in a way appropriate to a report of a prophetic vision. Most of us have no practical experience of interpreting prophetic visions other than what we learn from the Bible. But that’s okay, because the Word of God itself teaches us what this interpretation should look like, in the many passages where a person inspired by God gives his authoritative interpretation of a prophecy.

This is where the need for faith comes in, because in order to go where the sacred text is pointing us we will have to begin our thinking from things we can only know because we believe them in faith. For starters, we believe in faith that prophecy is not merely a literary fiction expressing the writer’s own religious aspirations, but a real gift given by a God who actually exists and reveals himself by means of the prophecy. Furthermore, we will take the prophet’s or the sacred author’s interpretation of the prophecy as authoritative because we believe in faith that the Church’s Scriptures are in fact the word of God. Additionally, we accept that one book of Scripture really can help us interpret another book even though the sacred authors and the books they write are very diverse in culture, historical setting, and personal characteristics, because the same Holy Spirit who works through each of them is the primary author of all.

But the Christian faithful need not be daunted at the idea of interpreting the imposing prophecies in the Book of Revelation, because Scripture gives us a veritable academy of prophetic interpretation. Our “professors” in this school will be Moses, Joseph, St. Paul, St. John, Daniel the Prophet, Gabriel the Archangel, and Our Lord Jesus Christ. Could we possibly do any better than to take them as our teachers? This sounds to me like an all-star faculty.

Next time we will begin our lessons by sitting at the feet of Joseph.

 
Image: Salvador Dali, The Endless Enigma

Then the LORD came down in the column of cloud, and standing at the entrance of the tent, called Aaron and Miriam. When both came forward, he said, “Now listen to the words of the LORD: Should there be a prophet among you, in visions will I reveal myself to him, in dreams will I speak to him.
—Numbers 12:5-6

Pharaoh then said to Joseph: “I had a dream but there was no one to interpret it. But I hear it said of you ‘If he hears a dream he can interpret it.’” “It is not I,” Joseph replied to Pharaoh, “but God who will respond for the well-being of Pharaoh.”
—Genesis 41:15-16

We need to learn three things about prophecy in the Bible before we get to the Book of Revelation:
1. It needs to be interpreted;
2. it reveals its message to some people while concealing it from others;
3. and it has multiple layers of true interpretation and multiple true fulfillments.

Today we will learn from Joseph about point #1: Prophecy must be interpreted.

Open your Bible (or click here) and read Genesis 41, the whole chapter, then come back to this post.

There are some important things to notice about this event.

First, Pharaoh is able to receive the vision and to know that it has a true prophetic interpretation—but he doesn’t know what it is.

Second, God gave the gift of the vision to Pharaoh, but He also willed that Pharaoh would have to seek out someone else to whom God had given the gift of interpreting it.

Third, had Pharaoh remained on the surface and decided that the vision was warning him about cows that eat other cows, he would have interpreted the vision wrongly—and Egypt would have perished. Interpreting the dream in a superficially literal way would not have been more faithful to the prophetic vision, nor would it have been “playing it safe” to interpret it thus. It would have meant error, disaster, and ruin. Only with Joseph’s help was Pharaoh able to learn what it was that God intended to signify with the strange symbols of cannibalistic cows.

Fourth, the correct interpretation makes sense, but only once it has been explained. No matter how smart or learned Pharaoh and his wise men were, they still could not have figured it out. It is not simply that their science was inadequate because they lived a long time ago; it is rather that natural science is itself inadequate to figure out the God who radically transcends nature.

History tells us that the Egyptians were very interested in figuring out dreams and kept records of them for that purpose, and we might even concede that they could provide rationally satisfying interpretations of dreams from time to time. We might suppose that there are some consistent things about human psychology that make dream-symbolism consistently reflect the dreamer’s subconscious thought, so an empirical approach like the Egyptians’ might have discovered some of these, allowing ‘magicians’ to extrapolate reasonable guesses about the meaning of a dream, even if they didn’t know why it worked. Or we might suppose that the magicians were right sometimes because demons occasionally intervened to make some of their superstitious practices appear to work. But if the dream is not a product of the dreamer’s mind but truly a message from God, with a meaning decided on by God in accord with conventions devised and chosen by God, then the true interpretation will not be known unless God gives it, as Joseph testifies (Gen 40:8).

Notice that this is completely consistent with the nature of divine revelation. God does tell us some things that we could have figured out on our own, like the precepts of the natural moral law. However, he also reveals many things that human reason cannot discover unaided, like the truths of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Once they are revealed to us, we can see that they make sense. But we could not have deduced them on our own from our natural knowledge, no matter how advanced our natural science or philosophy might be.

How can we apply these lessons to the Book of Revelation?

First, anyone who can read can read the Book of Revelation. But not everyone who reads it knows the right interpretation immediately.

Second, the prophetic vision and the interpretation of the prophetic vision are both gifts that are God’s to give, and he gives them to whom he wills. He often gives them separately, as he gave the vision to Pharaoh but the interpretation to Joseph. Just because God gave St. John both the vision and understanding of the vision, does not mean that we will understand the vision right away.

Third, we see the wisdom of the Catholic Church in insisting that the prophetic visions of the Book of Revelation must be interpreted as symbols. A hyper-literalist interpretation, even though motivated by a certain sort of reverence for the text, actually obscures the true meaning of the vision and denies access to the mysteries by remaining on the surface of the words.

Fourth, the right interpretation makes sense, but we can’t figure out the full message by brains and research alone—it has to be given by God. We might receive it through someone else to whom God has given it. This means that when we don’t know, we should pray to God to be given insight into the mystery and not be too afraid or too proud to accept guidance from God’s holy Church and the great authorities of the Tradition.

 
Reginald Arthur, Joseph Interpreting Pharaoh’s Dream

And he taught them at length in parables…
—Mark 4:2

Yesterday we looked at prophecy in Scripture and saw that it needs to be interpreted in order to receive the message God is sending through it, and what that interpretation looks like.

That was the first of our three points about prophecy in Scripture:
1. that it needs to be interpreted;
2. that it reveals its message to some people while concealing it from others;
3. and that it has multiple layers of true interpretation and multiple true fulfillments.

To illustrate the second point, that prophetic messages reveal while at the same time concealing, let us look to a familiar example—the parables of Jesus. Jesus is, of course, more than a prophet, but his speech contains much that is in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets.

People often say that Jesus was a great teacher because he used examples in the form of parables that ordinary people in his time and place could relate to and understand right away.

But this conception of Jesus’ parables is not the whole story. If the message of the parables were obvious to all on the first hearing, then the Apostles and the majority of first-century Jews would have been astonishingly dimwitted, because they rarely seem to have understood Jesus’ parables. Or perhaps Jesus was just not a very good communicator, since nobody understood what he was saying! Neither of these explanations is satisfactory, so there must be something wrong with the assumption that the meaning of Jesus’ parables is immediately clear to all.

Actually, Jesus explained to the Apostles why he used parables, and they transmitted this explanation to us in the Gospels. It is perhaps not what we might assume.

And when he was alone, those present along with the Twelve questioned him about the parables. He answered them, “The mystery of the kingdom of God has been granted to you. But to those outside everything comes in parables, so that ‘they may look and see but not perceive, and hear and listen but not understand, in order that they may not be converted and be forgiven.’”
—Mark 4:10-12

This is perhaps a bit shocking, and it might even seem like Jesus is endorsing a Gnostic view that gives chaff to the common folk and true wheat only to the elite. But the truth of the matter becomes clear when we realize that the parables are a tool that God uses to reveal himself to all mankind—not just the select few.

Imagine if the ability to understand Jesus’ teaching depended primarily upon human abilities like wits, reasoning skills, and learning. Then the kingdom of God would belong primarily to those with powerful brains and good education. Instead, it is those who accept God’s gracious gifts of faith and charity who receive the interpretation of the parables and enter into their depths, irrespective of their natural intellectual abilities; the rest remain outside, no matter how learnedly they can pontificate about the hypothetical meanings of the parables.

Consider the many places in the Gospel of John where Jesus teaches by making some statement that on the face of it seems outrageous, as when he says that he will “destroy this temple and in three days rebuild it” (John 2:19), that he can give living water “welling up into eternal life” (4:14), or that can offer his flesh to eat as the bread of eternal life (6:55-58).

These enigmatic statements confuse Jesus’ listeners. For some, this confusion is an opportunity to be drawn into deeper understanding and intimacy with Jesus. When they admit that they don’t understand, he is willing to engage them and draw them to himself. For others it is an occasion to delude themselves further. When they refuse to admit their need, they keep themselves from him. And if they blame him or subject him to hostile interpretation, they end up opposing him.

Jesus is not a subject to be mastered, like algebra or chemistry, or a cosmic force to be figured out and controlled, like electromagnetism. He is a person with whom one either has a relationship, or not. And because he is a divine person, entering into a relationship with him will be on his terms and at his initiative, or it will not occur.

What lessons should we take from Jesus’ parables to our study of the prophetic visions of the Book of Revelation? The prophetic vision admits God’s friends who—by God’s grace—are willing to accept the true interpretation from him, but it screens out the unworthy, who refuse. As the first verse of Revelation says, the book is “the Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave to him, to show his servants what must happen soon” (my emphasis). Learning and scholarship and a good brain can help us a great deal if put at the service of our faith, but first and foremost we must respond to God’s self-revelation with faith and love, accepting the true interpretation from God.

 
Image: Abraham Bloemaert, Landscape with the Parable of the Tares Among the Wheat

And he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are! How slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spoke! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them what referred to him in all the scriptures.
—Luke 24:25-27

In the previous two posts, we stated that prophetic speech in the Bible
1. needs to be interpreted;
2. reveals its message to some people while concealing it from others;
3. and has multiple layers of true interpretation and multiple true fulfillments.

Now that we’ve had a look at the first two, let us see how Scripture interprets Scripture as a means of understanding the third and perhaps least obvious one.

In the light of the Holy Spirit, history is never just a collection of brute facts. All of history, down to the fall of a sparrow, is ruled by the almighty providence of a God who is eternal and all-knowing, in a way that doesn’t negate the free will of the people he created and sustains in being. Because of God’s providence, history itself is more richly layered with meaning than the most splendid novel ever written. Much of Sacred Scripture, then, is the theological interpretation of the past, putting it in the context of the present, the future, and God’s eternity.

Because of this, the whole of Scripture, even records of historical events, can be interpreted as a kind of prophecy. This is in fact how Jesus interprets the entire Old Testament—as prophecy about him. We can read from Genesis to Deuteronomy very closely and not find a single verse that says plainly that “the Second Person of the Holy Trinity will unite human nature to Himself in hypostatic union and be born of a virgin named ‘Mary’ in Bethlehem during the reign of a future king you’ve never heard of. Be sure not to misjudge him, because he is the Messiah—even though he might get you pretty annoyed, like all the prophets will.” Yet Jesus insists that Moses, meaning the books of the Pentateuch, tells of him. Clearly if Jesus is right, and we know in faith that he is, prophetic interpretation of the sort we have been learning is required in order to understand what he means.

Jesus and his contemporaries—even his enemies—agreed that past events recorded in Scripture could be interpreted as multi-layered prophecy. To illustrate, see Matthew 2:4-6. When the Magi asked Herod where to find “the newborn king of the Jews,” Herod assembled “all the chief priests and the scribes of the people” and “inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born.” They told him “in Bethlehem of Judea” and cited Micah 5:1 as evidence. But if you look at the passage from Micah yourself, you will see that its original historical context has to do with military and political deliverance from the threat of the Assyrians hundreds of years before Christ. Which meaning is the “right” one? Both of them.

But a prophetic vision or oracle can have more than just two meanings, one immediate and historical, the other about Jesus. Jesus’ own interpretation of part of the Book of Daniel shows us how one prophetic sign can have multiple fulfillments throughout history.

In Daniel 8, Daniel has a prophetic vision that is difficult for him to understand. He prays, and the angel Gabriel comes twice to explain the vision to him, once in chapter eight and once in chapter nine. The angel interprets part of the vision as referring to what he calls the “desolating abomination” (Dn 9:27).

When interpreting the Book of Daniel, Jesus refers to “the desolating abomination spoken of through Daniel the prophet” as something that has yet to come (Mt 24:15, Mk 13:14); but at the same time, the angel Gabriel in Daniel 8 states clearly that Daniel’s vision and all it contains refer to the actions of the Medes, Persians, and Greeks (Dn 8:20), actions that happened well before Jesus’ lifetime.

So on Jesus’ authority, the “desolating abomination spoken of through Daniel the prophet” has at least two fulfillments in the course of history.

Our understanding of the kind of prophecy the Book of Revelation is will be enriched if we take note of the type of writing in the Bible called “apocalyptic.” “Apocalypse” (Greek ἀποκάλυψις, “apocalypsis” in the Latin of the Vulgate) is the self-designation of the Book of Revelation in verse 1, though in English we often call it “revelation.” Both words contain the idea of the drawing back of a veil. A form of this word is used in the Book of Daniel (Dn 2:22 and 2:28) to describe what Daniel does, or rather what God does through Daniel.

If you are not familiar with the genre of apocalyptic literature, an excellent way to learn about it is to study the Book of Daniel closely. There are many books of this style produced by ordinary human authorship without divine inspiration, but Daniel is the Old Testament’s outstanding example.

The more familiar you become with the characteristics of the Book of Daniel, the more you will notice that there are other books in the Bible that have apocalyptic qualities or passages, such as Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Zechariah.

In apocalyptic literature, hidden meaning abounds, concealed behind strange imagery. There is often a heavenly messenger who mediates and sometimes explains the message. The book may be rooted in historical events, but the future looms into view, and the discourse is directed toward the consummation of history in the “day of the Lord.”

Although it may be useful to distinguish literarily between “prophets” and “apocalypse” as the NABRE does, clearly the two are not mutually exclusive—Revelation calls itself both “apocalypse” and “prophetic message,” and many Old Testament prophets have apocalyptic elements. Both will help us understand the Book of Revelation, but the Old Testament books where they overlap will be especially useful.

In Matthew 24, Jesus gives his interpretation in the context of an apocalyptic discourse that itself has multiple referents. Historical scholars will tell you, quite correctly, that the immediate historical referent of Jesus’ speech is the impending destruction of Jerusalem. Since this involves the destruction of the Temple, considered by Jews to be the most important thing in the world and a ‘microcosm’ of the universe, this is rightly considered an ‘end of the world.’ But it is not difficult for a reader reading with the eyes of faith to perceive that this apocalyptic discourse of Jesus is applicable to the end of the world properly speaking as well.

Jesus’ apocalyptic prophecy interpreting Daniel’s apocalyptic prophecy creates a text remarkably dense and rich in meanings, layer upon layer upon layer, none of which can be opposed to the others. All of these meanings are present at once in the original vision of Daniel, but can only be understood through the steady unfolding of divine revelation, received and responded to in faith.

Having seen all this, we will not be confused by the manifold interpretations the prophetic visions of the Book of Revelation demand. When we figure out one interpretation, we will not stop there, but will expect that there are others as well, some of which have been fulfilled in the past, and some of which remain for future ages.

Now that we have looked at the three principles of Biblical prophecy, our first round of preparation to read the Book of Revelation is complete. Going forward, we will arm ourselves further for a profitable reading of the Book by studying some Old Testament prophecies that it quotes or alludes to directly. Remember that whatever language one reads the Book of Revelation in, the “language” of its symbols is, by and large, “Old Testament.” Therefore, building up our Old Testament “vocabulary” will increase our comprehension of the prophetic visions of St. John’s Apocalypse.

Image: Willem Drost, The Vision of Daniel

If you are a fan of “Star Trek: the Next Generation,” you may have seen a terrific if cerebral episode entitled “Darmok.” Captain Picard is stranded on a lonely planet with a ship’s captain of an alien race he has never encountered before, and his trusty Universal Translator device doesn’t seem to be working; or rather, it does its job, but he still has no clue what his counterpart is talking about. He hears everything the alien captain says translated into English, but every utterance is something puzzling like “Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra. Temba, when the walls fell!” Eventually Picard realizes that his counterpart is speaking entirely in references to his culture, so even with a perfect translation of the words he still can’t understand the meaning until he learns more about Darmok, Jalad, Tenagra, and the rest.

We have studied at some length how to interpret the prophecies of the Old Testament. But if we just plunge into the book without learning the “vocabulary” of its images, we will be in much the same situation as Captain Picard—understanding all the words but few of the meanings.

Fortunately, we don’t have to challenge savage alien wildlife to a knife fight like Capt. Picard in order to learn the “vocabulary” of the Book of Revelation. The “word bank” St. John’s visions draw upon is our spiritual heritage: the Old Testament. Even those of us who can’t quite remember how many Books of Kings there are or whether Shealtiel is a good guy or a bad guy may find that we know more of the references than we expect.

But first, let’s see why it makes so much sense that God would give St. John visions that use the Old Testament in this way. We can understand it in terms of what we have learned about prophetic visions in the previous posts: that they require interpretation, that they conceal from some while revealing to others, and that they have manifold meanings and fulfillments.

1. Requires Interpretation.
The way God speaks to us in the Bible is not typical of bureaucratic regulations or even scientific treatises. It is personal self-revelation, as one friend communicating to another. Time spent in conversation with a beloved friend isn’t a waste of time; no one worries about how to extract everything there is to know about a friend in the most economical fashion possible so as to drop him and get on to other things.

If that’s the case, why is God’s self-revelation often so derivative? Why does the Book of Revelation constantly refer to other things God inspired? Why doesn’t God just say something totally new?

One major reason is that truly great literature is always intertextual, always locating itself within a larger world of symbols, stories, and tropes in order to express the truth more beautifully and deeply. In a much simpler way this is true even in casual conversations with friends—much of the time what delights us about our friends’ comments is not their cultured brilliance and polish, but the references to a life lived in common, to joys and sorrows shared and enriched by recollection. To outsiders such conversation would probably be mundane at best, but to friends who understand all of the subtle allusions and references, it is a source of rejuvenation and communion. The allusiveness and intertextuality of the Scriptures captures this dynamic of human interaction and elevates it into literary art and spiritual mastery. This interpretative nature of the Book of Revelation also makes the next two points possible.

2. Conceals from some while revealing from others.
God’s self-revelation is for everyone insofar as his call is universal, but it is not for everyone in the same way. For instance, the book will always be opaque to those who refuse friendship with God, because it is written largely in references to a culture beloved by the people of God and boring to most others: the Sacred Scriptures.

In the time of St. John and the early Church to whom he wrote, there was a very practical pastoral dimension to the cultural opacity of the Book of Revelation, as it was best not to let the pagans who were persecuting Christians in on everything about their spiritual resistance to them. But that is not all there is to it. Who doesn’t love “getting” the cultural references in a book, TV show, or movie? It makes us feel included and privileged that we are in the know. How much more so when the book is God’s revelation? How much more so when these references give us access not to pop culture or even to literary culture, but to the very mysteries of God? The pagans who were persecuting the early Church generally didn’t care to devote the necessary study to the Old and New Testament to understand the references and thus the Book of Revelation. But Christians love the Scriptures for the sake of God, and not primarily as a tool to understand secret communications. So the Book of Revelation is to us not a tedious code but a privileged place of communion with the Lord.

3. Multiple layers of meaning.
The Book of Revelation is written so that it can say a lot with a little. It is only twenty-two short chapters long, yet since almost everything stands for many things, the symbols in its short span bear an amazing depth and multiplicity of meaning. Some of the fulfillments are known to everyone in the Church, some are yet to come, and some perhaps God reserves for those who are advanced in mystical union with him, as is true of the rest of the Scriptures.

Because of this, we don’t need to worry about getting to the end or exhausting the Book of Revelation. Like the rest of Scripture, it is a well that we can come to drink from again and again. Some people (especially those who try to ‘go it alone’ without the Church) seem to have a panicked approach to interpreting it. They seem to think that their salvation hangs on their ability to understand every single prophecy, or perhaps that they will be punished if they do not figure out all its secrets right now. On the contrary, the Catechism of the Catholic Church lays out the basic end-times beliefs needed for healthy Christian life (around paragraph 666—seriously), and most of us would probably be surprised at how little the Catechism has to say on the topic.

The Book of Revelation, like the rest of the Bible, is not a secret codebook by which God communicates winning plays to a privileged elite. It is God’s personal communication to his friends, intended to change our lives and bring us closer to him. To deepen and enrich our lives of faith, hope, and love, we will want to return to the Bible again and again to contemplate its mysteries.

We will return to the Old Testament in the next few posts to prepare ourselves for our reading of Revelation. We will consider three important images from the Old Testament and what the sacred author tells us they symbolize: Beasts, the Mark on the Forehead, and Marital Fidelity. After a brief additional discussion of numbers and narrative conventions in the Old Testament, the final course of posts will begin: a tour of the Book of Revelation, applying what we know.

 
Image: Michelangelo, Last Judgment

Then I saw a beast come out of the sea with ten horns and seven heads; on its horns were ten diadems, and on its heads blasphemous names. The beast I saw was like a leopard, but it had feet like a bear’s, and its mouth was like the mouth of a lion. To it the dragon gave its own power and throne, along with great authority.
—Revelation 13:1-2

In the first year of King Belshazzar of Babylon, as Daniel lay in bed he had a dream, visions in his head. Then he wrote down the dream; the account began: In the vision I saw during the night, suddenly the four winds of heaven stirred up the great sea, from which emerged four immense beasts, each different from the others. The first was like a lion, but with eagle’s wings. While I watched, the wings were plucked; it was raised from the ground to stand on two feet like a human being, and given a human mind. The second beast was like a bear; it was raised up on one side, and among the teeth in its mouth were three tusks. It was given the order, “Arise, devour much flesh.” After this I looked and saw another beast, like a leopard; on its back were four wings like those of a bird, and it had four heads. To this beast dominion was given. After this, in the visions of the night I saw a fourth beast, terrifying, horrible, and of extraordinary strength; it had great iron teeth with which it devoured and crushed, and it trampled with its feet what was left. It differed from the beasts that preceded it. It had ten horns. I was considering the ten horns it had, when suddenly another, a little horn, sprang out of their midst, and three of the previous horns were torn away to make room for it. This horn had eyes like human eyes, and a mouth that spoke arrogantly.
—Daniel 7:1-8

Now that we have had the characteristics of Biblical prophecy illumined by examples from Scripture, let us inspect three key examples from the images of the Old Testament that constitute the “vocabulary” of the Book of Revelation. For the sake of simplicity, we will confine ourselves to examples of prophetic symbols that the sacred author himself clearly explains.

The three examples we will consider are:
1. Beasts
2. The Mark on the Forehead
3. Marital Fidelity and Infidelity

So, to begin: The Beasts.

One of the most famous images in the Book of Revelation is the Beasts. Is there anything to suggest that this could be drawing on the Old Testament? Yes, certainly. Daniel has multiple visions with beasts in them. Can we make a more definite connection? Again, the answer is yes, definitely. The beast in Revelation 13:1-2 is composed of leopard, bear, and lion. Daniel has a vision with beasts that are like a leopard, a bear, and a lion (Dn 7). Is this an allusion to the passage in Daniel? Of course it is, and a very explicit one at that.

Remember that St. John’s Apocalypse is for people who know the Bible very, very well—as well as we know our favorite movies and TV shows. We all know how a single line composed of completely ordinary words can bring back the whole world of associations created with the story that made it famous. “We’ll always have Paris.” “To be, or not to be.” “May the Force be with you.” Even individual word choices can trigger associations for people who are immersed in a narrative. For those of us who remember President Clinton’s woes, perhaps we also remember that Jay Leno didn’t even have to give any context at all to make jokes that made people laugh—he had only to say the words “White House” and “intern” (innocent words in themselves) in proximity. Everyone got it who was immersed in the news. In a similar way, the Book of Revelation is intended for an audience immersed in the Scriptures.

Now that we aware that this is definitely a reference to Daniel, the natural question is, “What do the Beasts in Daniel’s vision mean?” There is one, consistent answer to that question: wicked kings and kingdoms. Daniel’s beast-visions are explained in plain language by an angel, and they all refer to wicked kings who persecute God’s people.

“These four great beasts stand for four kings which shall arise on the earth.”
—Daniel 7:17

He answered me thus: “The fourth beast shall be a fourth kingdom on earth.”
—Daniel 7:23

After the vision of beasts in Daniel 7 comes another vision of beasts, this time a ram and a he-goat. Again, the angel Gabriel tells Daniel that the beasts in his vision signify kings:

“The two-horned ram you saw represents the kings of the Medes and Persians. The he-goat is the king of the Greeks, and the great horn on its forehead is the first king.
—Daniel 8:20-21

The lion-bear-leopard correspondence is only one point of contact between the beast-visions in the two books. Another important one is the horns. In both the horns of the beasts are prominent. In both there are ten-horned beasts, and horns have eyes and can talk.

Again, Daniel is told quite clearly that the horns represent kings, too.

The ten horns shall be ten kings rising out of that kingdom; another shall rise up after them, different from those before him, who shall lay low three kings.
—Daniel 7:24

The he-goat is the king of the Greeks, and the great horn on its forehead is the first king. The four that rose in its place when it was shattered are four kingdoms that will issue from his nation, but without his strength.
—Daniel 8:21-22

In Daniel’s visions beasts represent kings or kingdoms, and horns represent kings. Therefore when God gives subsequent visions that directly reference Daniel’s visions, we ought to interpret those beasts and horns likewise as kingdoms and kings.

This might seem like something of a let-down. After all, strange monsters are an exciting topic, while wicked kings are kind of dull. But it makes sense that God gave his message this way.

Evil is banal and ultimately boring. But at the same time, we have to beware of the evil that does more than just kill our bodies. The animal-monster wicked kings in Daniel and Revelation are the minions of the ultimate monster, the Devil, who tries to get us to join the enemies of God by committing mortal sin. That’s why Jesus says, “Do not fear those that can harm the body but afterwards can do nothing.”

Why does it make sense that God communicates the truth about the true enemies of Christians by using prophetic visions?

1. Prophetic visions have a sacramental quality to them, in that they make invisible realities visible. They make spiritual truths accessible in a way understandable to both the learned and simple.
2. Like Jesus’ Parables, they hide meaning from those ‘outside’ while communicating effectively to those who are close to God.
3. Evil may be banal and ultimately boring, but God isn’t boring, so it is fitting that he communicates his messages in a non-boring way. And even if the images of prophetic visions can be confusing, the one thing they are not is boring.

When we realize that the realities symbolized in the prophetic vision are actually pretty normal things like wicked rulers, we should not be disappointed. Rather we should look at “boring” old normal reality in a new way, because of what we saw when the veil was drawn back from the spiritual realities normally invisible to us in this life.

In the next post we’ll look at the Mark on the Forehead in Old Testament prophetic vision.

 
Image: Albrecht Durer, The Revelation of St John 12: The Sea Monster and the Beast with the Lamb’s Horn

Then I saw another angel come up from the East, holding the seal of the living God. He cried out in a loud voice to the four angels who were given power to damage the land and the sea, “Do not damage the land or the sea or the trees until we put the seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God.”
—Revelation 7:2-3

Then I saw another beast come up out of the earth; it had two horns like a lamb’s but spoke like a dragon… It forced all the people, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to be given a stamped image on their right hands or their foreheads, so that no one could buy or sell except one who had the stamped image of the beast’s name or the number that stood for its name.
—Revelation 13:11, 16-17

The spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven and brought me in divine vision to Jerusalem… Then the glory of the God of Israel moved off the cherub and went up to the threshold of the temple. He called to the man dressed in linen with the scribe’s case at his waist, and the LORD said to him: Pass through the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and mark an X on the foreheads of those who grieve and lament over all the abominations practiced within it. To the others he said in my hearing: Pass through the city after him and strike! Do not let your eyes spare; do not take pity. Old and young, male and female, women and children—wipe them out! But do not touch anyone marked with the X. Begin at my sanctuary. So they began with the elders who were in front of the temple.
—Ezekiel 8:3, 9:3-6

Another very famous set of images from the Book of Revelation is the Seal of God and the demonic parody of it, the Mark of the Beast.

Many people who have read the Book of Revelation are on the lookout for a bodily mark or some modification of the body that would constitute the “Mark of the Beast;” once I even saw a pamphlet arguing that EZ-Pass is that baneful brand. But is the Book of Revelation primarily warning us about the condition of our bodies, or the condition of our souls?

We saw by comparison with the Book of Daniel that the visions of beasts in the Book of Revelation are not warning us to stay away from dangerous animals that can harm the body but do nothing to the soul. Those who are wise and instructed in the Scriptures see that it is warning us about the true danger of wicked rulers who do the will of the devil.

Similarly, we can see that God claiming his own by marking their foreheads (and by extension the devil’s parody of this) is an adaptation of the image from Ezekiel’s prophetic vision quoted above.

But in the Book of Ezekiel, did the forehead mark in Ezekiel’s vision correspond to a bodily mark that was visible in everyday life outside the vision, or did it signify something else? Reading Ezekiel shows that the latter is definitely the case. The mark of God on the forehead of the innocent was something that only Ezekiel and the angels could see, and Ezekiel could only see it in his vision. Outside the vision, it didn’t look like a bodily mark at all. It looked like some people staying faithful to God in their hearts and in their actions, lamenting the evils that others did, while others were forsaking God by committing wicked acts and participating in false religious rites.

Therefore when we read in the Book of Revelation a prophetic vision involving marks on the forehead in a way that clearly invokes Ezekiel’s vision, we should expect that Revelation, like Ezekiel, is showing us invisible, spiritual realities by means of visible symbols. By reasoning from Ezekiel, we should expect that the Marks of God and of the Beast in Revelation correspond to faithfulness to God and his worship and perseverance in wickedness and false religion respectively.

Although some may find this surprising, it is not at all an innovation in Christian interpretation of the Book of Revelation. St. Thomas Aquinas comes to just the same conclusion in his Summa Theologiae, where he says “The ‘character [mark] of the beast’ may be understood to mean either the obstinate malice for which some are assigned to eternal punishment, or the profession of an unlawful form of worship.”

The devil doesn’t care about the state of your skin—he cares about the state of your soul, to ruin it. What he really wants is to get you out of the Catholic Church and into error and sin and have you stay there obstinately.

Those who remain on the surface of the Book of Revelation and are thus unable to enter into its mysteries and receive its true message tend to interpret St. John’s visions as if they were primarily about bodily dangers, like a physical Mark of the Beast, or avoiding bodily evils, like suffering. This is a perennial temptation, as we see in the popularity now of the so-called “prosperity Gospel.” But it is just the opposite of what Jesus tells us in the Gospels. “Take up your cross and follow me,” says the Savior, and “do not fear those who can kill the body.”

Certainly it matters what we do with our bodies, since a human being is a unity of body and soul, and therefore we can sin by our actions done with the body. But the Book of Revelation is not primarily about bodily goods—instead, it points us toward the higher spiritual truths it reveals through visible signs in prophetic visions.

 
Image: Statue of Hypnos

When the LORD began to speak with Hosea, the LORD said to Hosea: Go, get for yourself a woman of prostitution and children of prostitution, for the land prostitutes itself, turning away from the LORD.
—Hosea 1:2

The LORD said to me in the days of King Josiah: Do you see what rebellious Israel has done? She has gone up every high mountain, and under every green tree she has played the prostitute… With her casual prostitution, she polluted the land, committing adultery with stone and wood.
—Jeremiah 3:6, 9

Then one of the seven angels who were holding the seven bowls came and said to me, “Come here. I will show you the judgment on the great harlot who lives near the many waters. The kings of the earth have had intercourse with her, and the inhabitants of the earth became drunk on the wine of her harlotry.” Then he carried me away in spirit to a deserted place where I saw a woman seated on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names, with seven heads and ten horns.
—Revelation 17:1-3

Marital fidelity or infidelity is a very important image in the Old Testament, and in the Book of Revelation as well. Faithful marriage is a good in its own right, and adultery a serious sin, but they are also potent symbols of larger spiritual realities: fidelity and infidelity to the covenant with God.

In the Old Testament we see that some adultery is entirely figurative, as in the Jeremiah passage above, where the referent of the word is clearly idolatry. Therefore when we hear in the Book of Revelation about “virgins” and “harlots,” we should not immediately jump to the conclusion that they are virgins and harlots in the ordinary, everyday sense, but we should ask whether they are rather symbols of spiritual realities.

But that doesn’t mean that sexual morality itself is irrelevant to the spiritual life or the Book of Revelation. Because adultery is never “just” a wrong against one’s spouse but also a sin against God, sexual immorality and abandonment of God are inextricably linked. Sins against temperance may be the kind of sin that least directly attacks God as God. But they are the most dangerous because they are so appealing, and they can certainly be mortal sins. And if one becomes attached enough to the sin to decide not to accept the grace of repentance and return to the life of sanctifying grace, how can one hope to stand fast against further and greater sins that oppose God more and more directly?

Thus we read in the Book of Numbers:

While Israel was living at Shittim, the people profaned themselves by prostituting themselves with the Moabite women. These then invited the people to the sacrifices of their god, and the people ate of the sacrifices and bowed down to their god. Israel thereby attached itself to the Baal of Peor, and the LORD’s anger flared up against Israel.
—Numbers 25:1-2

Our enemy the Devil, who “prowls about like a roaring lion,” knows that if we’re living the Christian life, he probably can’t get us to renounce Christ and become a hardened apostate all in one go. That’s not very appealing. But if he can get us to be unwilling to be sorry for a serious sin that misuses something that is very pleasurable and appealing, such as sex, the possibility opens up for him to maneuver us into obstinate opposition to Christ and his Church.

Thus, in the Bible, sexual morality is seen to be the tip of an iceberg, the visible part of a larger spiritual war that is invisible—but which the Book of Revelation makes visible.

 
Image: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Au Salon de la rue des Moulins

Before we begin our tour of the Book of Revelation itself in the next post, it is fitting that we take a look at a couple of points that will save a lot of explanation later on, then take stock of what we’ve learned so far.

1. Symbolic Numbers
2. Narrative flow—Recapitulation

1. The Book of Revelation is full of symbolic numbers. Since we have seen that Revelation is a book of prophetic visions, the elements of which are symbols of spiritual realities, it makes sense that the numbers present in the book would be symbols of something else, not just random quantities.

Even outside prophetic visions, symbolic numbers are an ordinary part of the speech patterns in the Old Testament. The ancient Hebrews habitually used numbers to mean something other than their quantitative value. It doesn’t mean that they were foolish or dishonest; it just means that those were the conventions of speech that they used. We, on the other hand, would be foolish to ignore these conventions when reading a book that presumes knowledge of them, as Revelation does.

For instance, besides the quantitative meaning that the numbers could have, three can mean “a few” and five can mean “several.” Seven and ten are numbers of completeness and perfection. Twelve means “all Israel.” A thousand means “very many, an indefinitely large amount.” Forty has associations of ascetic purification and encounter with God, going back to Noah and Moses.

There are other numbers less commonly known but also important. One of them is from the Book of Daniel. Historically, the persecution that the people of God suffered at the hands of Antiochus Epiphanes IV lasted for about three and a half years. This was such an intense and memorable persecution that “three and a half years” became a symbolic way of saying “persecution by the enemies of God,” regardless of the duration of the persecution. Even as a quantitative unit, “three and a half years” could be expressed in a variety of ways: “a time, two times, and a half time,” or “one thousand three hundred thirty-five days,” or “one thousand two hundred ninety days,” or the other similar formulas found in Daniel 12 and Daniel 7 (keep in mind that with their lunar calendar and its intercalary months they weren’t as nitpicky about calendric calculations as we are, in addition to being less accountant-like about numeric quantities to begin with).

This is not as strange as it might seem at first glance—we do the same thing in our culture today. For instance, the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, was so memorable to us that the numbers “9″ and “11″ used together now can be used without explanation among Americans as a synonym for “terrorist attack on our land” or even “unspeakable tragedy.” All someone has to do is say “9/11″ and a whole host of associations comes flooding back to us. Likewise if someone were to speak of “another 9/11,” we would all know what he meant, and we wouldn’t necessarily expect that it would have to happen on that exact calendar date.

2. Narrative flow – Recapitulation
“Recapitulation” can mean either a break in the action to discuss something that happened earlier, or it can mean starting the story over again and presenting it from the beginning in a different way. Both of these happen often in the Bible, and both techniques are used in the Book of Revelation. I would like to focus especially on the second one.

One of the biggest, most classic mistakes people make with the Book of Revelation is assuming that the whole thing must be one continuous vision that displays the end of the world as though St. John’s vision were just a straight, single, beginning-to-end chronological timeline of the history of the world, albeit represented with odd symbols.

Of course we are now familiar with the symbolic and figurative nature of the images in Revelation. But assuming that the whole book is one unitary chronological narrative could still cause havoc with our attempts to understand. The narrative-flow error combined with the above number-interpretation error produces the doctrinal error known as “millenarianism,” or “chiliasm,” which supposes that the world will end after the great tribulation, with Christ setting up an earthly kingdom that will last for a thousand years (hence “millenium”). It was a common error in the early Church, before the Church clarified the matter. Even some early saints accepted it by innocent mistake.

Protestant interpreters are particularly liable to this error because, erring about the Catholic Church, they do not see that “Christ already reigns through the Church” (CCC 680). Jesus says in the Gospels that the Kingdom of God is “at hand” (Mt 3:2, 4:17; Mk 1:15), “among you” (Lk 17:21). Jesus’ coming upon earth is the “time of fulfillment” (Mk 1:15), and in Jesus’ action the kingdom of God “has come upon you” (Lk 11:20). In what or by what is the kingdom of God “present,” “among you”? In Jesus. Origen coined the word autobasileia (meaning something like ‘himself-kingdom’) to refer to this truth found in the Scriptures. We also know from Scripture that the Church is the body of Christ (I Cor 12:12, Rom 12:4-5, Col 1:18). Therefore it is in the Church that the kingdom of God is to be found, in an incipient way now, and perfected in the glory of heaven.

While the Church bears witness that Christ already reigns through his Church, she insists that the messianic fulfillment of the Kingdom of God will not be something within history but “beyond” it. The Catechism of the Catholic Church denounces the error of millenarianism as “the Antichrist’s deception” (CCC 676).

It is completely reasonable that the flow of the Book of Revelation should work this way—that the story should start over again and be retold in different ways. We modern people sometimes do the same thing in our storytelling—for example, Akira Kurosawa’s groundbreaking film Rashomon tells the same story from a number of perspectives, with no explanation, yet everyone who sees it understands that each story relates the same event. Also, consider an extremely famous Biblical precedent: Genesis 1 and 2’s two different creation stories, back to back. This doesn’t mean creation happened twice, and just because the stories are different doesn’t mean they are contradictory. Such a rich reality is best handled by multiple accounts from different perspectives. Perhaps that is why this technique is often found in Biblical prophetic visions, as when Pharaoh’s dream in Genesis 41 presents the same thing in two different ways, or with Daniel’s two different visions of beasts (Dn 7-8).

So, to recap briefly what we’ve covered so far:

Prophetic speech in the Bible:
1. Needs to be interpreted;
2. Reveals its message to some people while concealing it from others;
3. Has multiple layers of true interpretation—multiple true fulfillments.

The prophetic imagery of the Book of Revelation draws heavily from the symbolic vocabulary of the Old Testament, especially prophetic visions. Studying them we found that in the prophetic visions and messages, beasts signify spiritual monsters (wicked kings), the mark on the forehead signifies spiritually belonging to God or false gods, and marital fidelity or infidelity signifies spiritual fidelity or infidelity to God.

Notice how spiritual these visions are! In the Old Testament, God chiefly promised temporal, earthly rewards, though also holding out the spiritual life for those who were ready for it. In the New Testament, the promises are chiefly of spiritual goods and eternal rewards, though there are some temporal and earthly elements. Since the Book of Revelation belongs to the New Testament, we should not expect the Book of Revelation to be less spiritual than the Old Testament. Therefore an interpretation of the various images of the Book of Revelation that is chiefly about bodily and earthly goods and evils is most likely on the wrong track. But if our interpretation is chiefly about spiritual and eternal realities, though not to the exclusion of historical and bodily realities, we will likely be on the right track.

Our interpretative work in reading, then, should avoid these common errors:
1. Expecting the prophecies of the Book of Revelation to be primarily about bodily things with temporal consequences rather than about spiritual things with eternal consequences.
2. “Spiritualizing” everything in a way that ignores the importance of the body and the actions we do with it.
3. Placing too much importance on private revelation or interpretation rather than on the public revelation God entrusted to His Church, or failing to trust the Holy Spirit’s guidance of the Catholic Church.

Next time: The Beginning of the Book of Revelation!

 
Image: Jasper Johns, Numbers in Color, 1958-59

The first questions we need to ask about the Book of Revelation are the most basic: Who, what, where, and when is this about? Is it about the early Church under the Roman Empire? The Church right now? The Church at the end of the world?

Fortunately, these all have the same easy answer: “Yes.” Remember what Jesus’ interpretation of Daniel taught us about multiple true fulfillments of apocalyptic visions throughout history.

Next, we need ask, “Why?” What is the purpose of the book? It is to strengthen the faith of Christians to endure the time of trial until our Lord returns. We can see this from internal evidence in the text and from comparison with similar apocalyptic passages in Scripture and non-canonical works of the same genre.

From the text, just look at the seven letters in chapter 2 and chapter 3. From comparison with other writings in Scripture, we can see that the most similar book in the Old Testament is Daniel, another apocalyptic book, the purpose of which is strengthening God’s people to endure persecution. There are apocalyptic elements in many other Old Testament Prophets, too, notably Ezekiel, who lived during the Babylonian Exile. Finally, outside of the canon of Scripture there are many apocryphal “Apocalypse” books. Unlike the apocalyptic literature in the Bible, these works were not produced under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, but they are similar in style and content. They tended to be produced during persecutions to encourage the people of God to stand fast. The common thread of persecution in these three sources suggests that the point of the Book of Revelation is to show each of us in the Church on earth how to take up our Cross and follow him.

The last fundamental question to ask is, “How?” How will these things come about? The answer is: “By the providential ordering of God.” The fact that God guides all things to their end might not be apparent in the world when his enemies seem to have the ascendancy. But the Book of Revelation draws back the veil to reveal by prophecy not only the future but also the invisible realities of God’s providence in history and the present, before they are made manifest at the Last Judgment.

The basic structure of the Book of Revelation is threefold:
1. God’s people suffer for a time at the hands of God’s enemies
2. God comes and gives judgment
3. God’s people share in His triumph

A slightly more specific outline that attends to the images of the book would be:
1. Prologue and Letters to 7 Churches
2. God and the Lamb in Heaven
3. 7 Angels with Trumpets
4. The Woman vs. the Dragon
5. 7 Plagues
6. Condemnation of the Harlot
7. The New Jerusalem, the Bride of the Lamb

To many people Revelation seems like nothing but bad, scary stuff, and there certainly is a lot of that. But if that’s all we see, or the main thing, we have missed the goal of the book that appears at the end (#3 on the first outline, #7 on the second). Revelation’s telos and consummation is the New Jerusalem, the everlasting joy and triumph that the elect enjoy in God when everything has been accomplished. When reading the book, we should always keep in mind the One Who is the beginning and the end of the book and all throughout: Jesus. The devil and the wicked are important cast members, but they are not the Alpha and the Omega—that’s Jesus.

Regarding the manner in which we will interpret the book, we have seen evidence from all over the Scriptures that the author of Revelation intends us to exercise prophetic interpretation in the same manner as Joseph and Daniel and the other prophets. The Book of Revelation itself also confirms our interpretative strategy with internal evidence. In chapter 17 an angel comes and gives St. John interpretations of exactly the sort we have come to expect:

The angel said to me… Here is a clue for one who has wisdom. The [beast's] seven heads represent seven hills upon which the woman sits. They also represent seven kings.

The beast… is an eighth king. The ten horns that you saw represent ten kings.

The waters that you saw where the harlot lives represent large numbers of peoples, nations, and tongues.

The woman whom you saw represents the great city that has sovereignty over the kings of the earth.”
—from Revelation 17

Without further ado, let’s get started reading the Book of Revelation. Here is a link to Revelation chapter 1. I suggest you have a Bible at hand to follow along or read the text on the computer since it is too much text to reproduce conveniently here.

As the book begins, we see a priest (just like Ezekiel, but belonging to the New Covenant) in exile (just like Ezekiel), whose account begins with a heavenly vision (just like Ezekiel). This suggests that we should be thinking of the vision of Ezekiel, in which he saw God. John sees Jesus, the “Son of Man,” occupying that place, and his appearance should also remind us of the “Son of Man” and “Ancient of Days” from the vision in Daniel 7.

St. John’s account teems with parallels to Ezekiel and Daniel in order to give his readers cues to understand his vision. He is neither seeking to copy their books nor to create something wholly new; not novelty but continuity with the tradition of divine revelation is what authenticates his experience. By emphasizing details that are similar to those prophets, St. John tells us that he saw what they saw and that understanding their books will help us understand his.

 
Image: Moravian Tile Works, Alpha and Omega

This post and those that follow will be a little tour of the Book of Revelation. I say “tour” rather than “commentary” because it will not be exhaustive, but a selection of some of the most famous sites along the way. I will not be giving my own opinions as authoritative, either—instead we will see how the principles gained from a close reading of Scripture in the light of the Church’s faith allow us greater access to the Book’s mysteries.

I will also make use of the commentary of the Venerable Bede, Saint and Doctor of the Church, who has written what must be the finest commentary on the Book of Revelation. The reason I did not just start giving St. Bede’s opinions in the beginning, or just translating his commentary, is that unless you already knew most everything in the last fourteen posts, it probably wouldn’t have made any sense to you.
I remember that many years ago when I read the Book of Revelation and didn’t understand it, the first thing I did was look to see if there were any commentaries on it. I found St. Bede’s, or at least the first few chapters that are translated into English, and it didn’t make any sense to me. It sounded entirely arbitrary and forced, like he was just making it up as he went along. Why did he say one thing rather than any old thing? It did not seem like wisdom at all.

Then sometime later I had a sort of crisis of Biblical interpretation. How was I to know who were reliable interpreters of the Scriptures? The Fathers had the weight of Church tradition, but didn’t seem to make much sense. Modern scholars used methods easily accessible to reason, but their results often seemed disconnected from the spiritual and liturgical life of the Church. Seeking for some sure foothold, I recalled something I had long known but not pursued systematically: Jesus, St. Paul, and others in the Scriptures themselves often quote a passage of the Old Testament and give an interpretation of it. Since the Scriptures are the word of God, I decided, these interpretations would be my reference point and the criteria by which I would judge all other interpreters whose word is not the word of God. To make sure I was being systematic and not selective, I read through the New Testament, writing down all such passages and comparing them with the Old Testament passages they quote. I highly recommend this exercise. It is one thing to be vaguely aware of this or take someone’s word for it, and quite another to see it for yourself.

I found that after doing this, I understood the Fathers of the Church. Not that I saw the sense in every last detail of all their interpretations. But I saw that the way they interpret Scripture is just the same way that Jesus and the Apostles do.

Since I also saw how Jesus and the New Testament authors saw multiple senses in the text, the historical approach of modern scholars no longer seemed to be at odds with the Fathers’ approach. Except, that is, insofar as some of them sometimes incorporate unacceptable assumptions into the principles from which they reason, like refusal to believe in God or his providence.

Then I returned to the Old Testament and read it through, armed with my new knowledge. There I found the Scriptural sources of many traditions scoffed at by those who have never bothered to read the Bible Jesus’ way. Then I re-read St. Bede, and found his commentary on Revelation riveting. I have kept my eyes open since and tried to learn all I can about the Scriptures. I have also had many excellent classes at the Dominican House of Studies, which have been very profitable intellectually and spiritually.

The main points of interpretation that I learned from Jesus, St. Paul, St. Matthew, and the rest I have presented in brief form in previous posts. We began with the basic principles of the Catholic faith concerning the Scriptures as enunciated in Vatican II, then read the Scriptures in light of them, with special attention to places where a Scriptural authority gives a clearer interpretation of a more obscure passage.

I hope you agree that it was worth the time, because being able to read the Bible like that will be of much greater benefit than just receiving an “answer key” of sorts that doesn’t explaining the reasoning that makes the answers make sense.

I have presented all this in talks before, and I find it takes me about an hour to an hour and a half to explain thoroughly. This is probably why most priests do not find suitable opportunities to expound the Book of Revelation to their parishioners, because they cannot assume their hearers have this background, and there is no way they can give it in the eight or so minutes they usually have in a Sunday homily.

In the upcoming posts when I say now and then, “St. Bede says that…,” I am not asking you merely to take what he says as an ipse dixit that you should not question. We owe him a certain amount of reverence as a saint and a Doctor of the Church, to be sure, and he doubtless had many more spiritual gifts of wisdom and discernment than I do. But his theological conclusions—what he decided by reasoning from what he believed in faith—are not of the same weight as what the Church proposes authoritatively. I hope you will think through the text using the principles from the previous posts to see if you find his interpretation as enlightening as I do.

Now, back to the Book itself!

 
Image: Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus

In the beginning of the Book of Revelation, there is a vision of heaven. What are the blessed are doing in heaven? Worshipping God, of course. That means liturgy.

We read in Vatican II’s Constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, that

the liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; at the same time it is the font from which all her power flows (§ 10). In the earthly liturgy we take part in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the holy city of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God, a minister of the holies and of the true tabernacle (§8).

What is the most basic, unalterable outline of the Mass? The word of God, followed by the sacrifice of Jesus, the Lamb of God. This is the very first thing we see in the Book of Revelation, in Chapters 1-5: Jesus gives St. John seven letters for the Churches, and then the Lamb of Sacrifice appears, slain.

The more we know the liturgy of the Church, the more connections we will see. There is the acclamation “Holy, Holy, Holy;” also, in the Communicantes section of the Roman Canon there are twelve Apostles and twelve martyrs, for a total of twenty-four “elders;” there are seven readings in the Easter Vigil, corresponding to the seven letters; the altars, incense, sacred vessels, vestments, and intercessory prayer likewise have analogues in Revelation.

The outward signs of the Mass resemble the signs of the heavenly liturgy in the Book of Revelation for a very important reason: to show that the invisible spiritual realities they signify are the same. The Mass on earth is a foretaste of and participation in the liturgy of heaven (For more information on the topic, see Scott Hahn’s fine and very accessible book The Lamb’s Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth).

In chapter 1 of the Book of Revelation, Jesus appears to St. John, and his appearance is similar to the Transfiguration in the Gospel and the Son of Man theophany in Daniel. In addition St. John sees in the vision a “sharp two-edged sword” coming out of Jesus’ mouth. The traditional interpretation of this symbolic image is that the sword represents the word of God. Keeping in mind what we have learned from the Old Testament prophets about the symbolic nature of prophetic visions, is there a Scriptural passage we can look to in order to see that this is not an arbitrary interpretation forced on the text?

Yes, but we probably won’t recognize it unless we know Scripture quite well. In Judges 3 we read,

Ehud made himself a two-edged dagger a foot long, and strapped it under his clothes on his right thigh… Ehud went in to [Eglon the king of Moab] where he sat alone in his cool upper room. Ehud said, “I have a word from God for you.” So the king rose from his throne. Then Ehud with his left hand drew the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into Eglon’s belly.
—Judges 3:16, 20-21

A word from God—in the Hebrew of this passage, literally a “word of God” (דְּבַר־אֱלֹהִים). In the New Testament, Hebrews 4:12 uses a similar image. The Book of Revelation is full of signals like this for those who can read and interpret them.

Notice that the book tells us right up front that the images in it have “secret meanings” (this is the NABRE’s interpretation of “mysterium”—Gr. μυστήριον). It’s not that we keep “secrets” because we’re mean or exclusive. It’s rather that the mysteries themselves only admit those who are able to enter into them, those who participate in the mind of God through the grace of faith, and who know the Scriptures in light of that faith. With this graced knowledge, we can exercise the prophetic discernment needed to understand the mysteries of the Book of Revelation.

The traditional interpretation of Revelation 1:20 is that the “angels of the seven churches” means the pastors, or the bishops of the seven churches. This is not a symbolic interpretation, as though angel-spirits symbolically stand for human priests, but the plain-language explanation of the image. Because the word we translate as “angel” means “messenger” in both Greek and Hebrew, the Scriptures in those languages use their words for “angel” to signify messenger-humans and messenger-spirits alike without distinction. In addition, ecclesiastical authors from the Fathers to the present day have called priests “angels,” often citing Malachi 2:7. This is how St. Bede interprets this passage. The old Catholic Encyclopedia and the Haydock commentary take this as uncontroversial. For other examples of priests being called angels, see for example St. Ambrose On the Mysteries Chapter 2, St. John Chrysostom On the Priesthood Book III Chapter 4, St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae III, q. 22, a. 1 ad 1, who cites Pseudo-Dionysius (Coel. Hier. 9), and Pope Leo XIII Encyclical on the Clergy in Brazil 1894.

Now let’s look at one of the letters.

To the angel of the church in Pergamum, write this:
“The one with the sharp two-edged sword says this: ‘I know that you live where Satan’s throne is, and yet you hold fast to my name and have not denied your faith in me, not even in the days of Antipas, my faithful witness, who was martyred among you, where Satan lives. Yet I have a few things against you. You have some people there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who instructed Balak to put a stumbling block before the Israelites: to eat food sacrificed to idols and to play the harlot. Likewise, you also have some people who hold to the teaching of [the] Nicolaitans. Therefore, repent. Otherwise, I will come to you quickly and wage war against them with the sword of my mouth.
Whoever has ears ought to hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the victor I shall give some of the hidden manna; I shall also give a white amulet upon which is inscribed a new name, which no one knows except the one who receives it.’ ”
—Revelation 2:12-17

Who are the Nicolaitans? The way it’s worded in the above translation it sounds like the teaching of the Nicolaitans is something separate from the teaching of Balaam. That is one way to read the Greek. But verse 15 might just as well be read: “Thus you, too, have some who hold…,” identifying Nicolaitanism with Balaamism, as I think the traditional reading likes to do. This is a reasonable reading because it has St. John describing current events in terms of Scripture, as he does everywhere else in the book, instead of making ordinary descriptions that just anyone could know.

Either way, Nicolaitanism is a perverse doctrine, of the kind covered in Post IX: Balaam shows how sexual immorality, besides being a sin in itself, both symbolizes and leads to abandonment of God for false gods. Thus sexual holiness is the front line of spiritual warfare, the visible part of a vast and high-stakes war between heaven and hell—a war that in this life is invisible except when the veil is drawn back, as in the Book of Revelation. This is why the principal focus of the Angelic Warfare Confraternity is chastity.

At the end of each letter Jesus says, “To the victor… I will give…” and then names several enigmatic gifts. St. Bede says that each of these is a symbolic way of Jesus saying that he will give his very self. This makes sense, both because the gifts are all symbols or prophecies of Christ in the Scriptures, and because we know from faith that the great reward of Christianity—the “hundredfold”—is Jesus himself.

 
Image: Jeff Geerling, Statue of Paul with Sword at St. Paul Outside the Walls

In this post, we will cover some of the more famous images in the first half of the Book of Revelation.

Chapter 5—The Lamb and the Living Creatures

The Lamb that is the focal point of this chapter has seven horns and seven eyes. These are symbolic numbers, of course. Seven means fullness, perfection. The horn in the Old Testament is a standard symbol of power. “Lamb” is a typically Johannine name for Jesus. The “living creatures” around the Lamb should remind us of the Books of Ezekiel and Isaiah. Revelation doesn’t say the creatures are angels, but their descriptions have some of the same elements as the previous prophets’ angels: six wings, crying “Holy Holy Holy” (Isaiah), and the four lion, ox, man, and eagle creatures (Ezekiel).
The context for the vision of the sealed scroll that cannot be read in Revelation 5:1-10 is Isaiah 29:11-14. Isaiah says that the vision he reports is like a sealed scroll that cannot be read, both because it is sealed and because the knowledge to read it is lacking. In Revelation, Jesus the Lamb is the one who can break open the seal and read the scroll. St. Bede here recalls the words of Matthew 13:17, where Jesus says that many prophets and righteous men longed to see what the Apostles see. St. John’s vision symbolically says that Jesus is the fulfillment of the mysteries of Isaiah and all the prophets.

Chapter 6—The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

As the first four seals of the scroll are opened, four horsemen appear riding horses of different colors. This evokes the apocalyptic prophecies of Zechariah 1, where the riders “are they whom the Lord has sent to patrol the earth.” They represent the might of God, which reaches over the whole earth. In the Bible horses are always associated with war; divine judgment is at hand. St. Bede sees the seven seals (of which the horsemen correspond to four) as a sort of condensed symbol of salvation history in the era of the Church. The white horse is the Church, the next three the powers God allows to afflict the Church, the fifth the glory of the triumphant, the sixth the time of the Antichrist, and the seventh the beginning of eternal peace.

As the further seals are opened, there is an earthquake, darkening of the sun, reddening of the moon, falling of the stars, and other calamities. It is certainly fitting that the Day of the Lord be attended by cosmic upheavals. But in the Book of Revelation the Lord is not primarily trying to warn us about the danger of dying in an earthquake; we have seen that Jesus says not to fear that which can kill the body, and we have seen that the images in the visions of the Old Testament prophets were generally about spiritual realities. Therefore we are on good ground if we interpret these worldly calamities in John’s prophetic vision as signs of spiritual calamities, such as persecutions and an increase in evildoing. This is how St. Bede sees it. In Jesus’ apocalyptic discourse of Matthew 24, he promises both earthquakes and a multiplication of wickedness as signs of “the close of the age.” We have already seen how this saying of Jesus’ can be read with reference to the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, the persecutions of the Church in John’s time, and many other events through history. We should also remember that it has been the “end times” ever since the Ascension of Christ (see CCC 673).

Chapter 7—The One Hundred Forty-Four Thousand

The servants of God are sealed on their foreheads with the seal of God, recalling the vision from Ezekiel 8-9. Remember that the forehead mark in Ezekiel’s vision was a symbol for the spiritual state of the people, indicating whether they were faithful to God or whether they were guilty of wickedness and idolatry. Therefore we should expect that St. John’s equivalent is symbolic in the same way. In St. John’s vision the number of those sealed is “144,000.” Writing it with digits is a bit deceptive, because it is not the mathematical, quantitative value that is important, but the symbolic value of the number. Everything else in this vision is a symbol, so we should not be deceived into thinking that fewer than 144,001 people will be saved. Symbolic numbers are often composed by multiplication, as when Jesus says that forgiveness should be “seventy times seven” (imagine the absurdity of saying, “Sorry, bro—that’s 491. You used ‘em all up.”). The number 144,000 is 12 x 12 x 1,000. In the language of Biblical symbolism, this means “Israel, Israel, very very large.” The following vision, Rev 7:9-17, is a re-presentation of the same thing in different terms, as often happens in prophetic visions. There the elect are “a great multitude which no one could count” (Rev 7:9). The elect are the Church, Israel of the New Covenant.

Chapters 8 & 9—More Calamities

As we have seen with reference to Old Testament prophecies, it is best to interpret these calamities as symbols of spiritual realities, of spiritual crises. This is how St. Bede interprets all these things. The Church seems to agree that this is the main focus of the text, for the Catechism does not warn that we should beware of earthquakes in the end times, but it testifies that the Church expects a “final trial” (CCC 675), the Antichrist (with a capital A, CCC 676), and a “final unleashing of evil” (CCC 677). The idea of spiritual struggle also helps us interpret images like “hail and fire mixed with blood,” “the star called wormwood,” and so forth.

Chapter 9—The Scorpion-Locusts

St. Bede interprets the scorpion-locust creatures that afflict people in chapter 9 as heretics who afflict people spiritually by teaching them false doctrine. The first time I read this I thought, “St. Bede, with you everything’s heretics!” Indeed, he does interpret many of the calamities in St. John’s vision as spiritual calamities caused by those who spread false doctrine. But given what we have learned about prophetic interpretation, this is not as unreasonable as it might seem at first glance. He makes a particularly good case for it in this passage.

He notices that the locusts in the vision don’t attack plants as real locusts are wont to do, but men. This is a tip-off that the locusts stand for a kind of men. Remember also that we have learned from Daniel to expect the monsters in prophetic visions to represent spiritual villains. In Daniel all the spiritual monsters were wicked men, though we will see that in Revelation the devil is also represented as a monster, a dragon. Another clue is that the locusts don’t hurt everyone, but only those who don’t have the seal of God on their foreheads. This tells us that their attack must symbolize some kind of sin contrary to God, because it does not happen to those who belong to God.

 
Image: Albrecht Durer, The Revelation of St John 4: The Four Riders of the Apocalypse

Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant could be seen in the temple. There were flashes of lightning, rumblings, and peals of thunder, an earthquake, and a violent hailstorm. A great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.
—Revelation 11:19-12:1

In Chapter 12 appears the vision of the woman and the dragon. It is probably best to see this as the start of another vision within the book, wherein salvation history is presented over again in a different way. This vision contains the rebellion of the devil and his angels, and it wouldn’t do to say that happened chronologically after all the things seen up to this point in the Book of Revelation.

The woman symbolically represents the People of God, namely Israel or the Church. Note that this is one continuous people, as the righteous of the Old Covenant were part of the Church, and the Church is what Israel has become.

Though of course we recognize the strong likeness to Our Lady because she stands alone as the most excellent exemplar of the Church, the primary referent of the symbol of the woman is the Church. St. Bede actually makes no mention of Mary in commenting on this passage; he says simply that the woman symbolizes the Church. Nevertheless, it is certainly fitting that popular piety sees this image as applicable to Our Lady, symbolically taking the “labor pains” to mean the suffering she experienced spiritually on Jesus’ behalf. Outside St. John’s vision, we see that when the Blessed Mother appears to saints such as Juan Diego it pleases God that she apply this imagery to herself.

The dragon that attacks the woman is explained in the text as “the ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan.” This is as explicit an identification as we could want, and it also identifies the serpent of Genesis 3 as the Devil. St. Bede notes a similarity between the dragon and the scorpion-locust monsters in chapter 9—they both attack using their tails. He thinks this unseemly mode of attack is fitting for monsters that symbolize wicked persons who achieve their goals by means of fraud and falsehood.

We can note in passing that even though the dragon “swept away a third of the stars in the sky” in this vision, St. Thomas Aquinas does not want to commit to saying 33 1/3% of the angels followed Satan in his rebellion. Without speculating on proportions, he restricts himself to saying that it is fitting to suppose that “more angels stayed firm than sinned.”

Chapter 13 – The Beasts

Here the famous Beasts make their appearance. Remember that the beasts in Daniel are wicked kings who persecute God’s people and cause them to sin. The first beast in Revelation, then, is a wicked ruler who serves the devil and does his will. We can see from its position as the lieutenant of the dragon and from the supreme religious deception it practices that this beast must signify the one who is called the Antichrist.

One important thing to notice about the deception of the Beast in the vision is how it constantly mocks God, imitating him in a perverse parody. It fulfills both senses of what the prefix “anti-” means in Greek. The first meaning, of course, is that it opposes Christ. The second is that it is a sort of ersatz Christ. Think of the word “antipope,” which is used of someone who pretends to be the pope, but isn’t. The Beast mocks the praise given to God in the name of his nemesis, Michael. “Michael” in Hebrew means “Who is like God”; the Beast says “Who is like the Beast,” putting himself in God’s place. The beast wears many crowns (diadems), which belong in truth to Christ, and rules over “every tribe, people, tongue, and nation.” Imitating God, it also commands a second beast (Rev 13:11-18) who acts as the false prophet of the false messiah. This second beast partly resembles a lamb, in its horns, but it “speaks like a dragon.” It stamps people with the infamous “mark of the beast,” a demonic mockery of the seal of God we saw instituted in Chapter 7.

This ersatz Christ deceives multitudes into worshipping him, but those who are among the elect are not deceived. Think about what we have learned about how the Book of Revelation works. The ones who are able to enter into its mysteries are not those who can solve complicated mathematical puzzles or are learned in worldly wisdom. Although learning and the study of history can serve us well if they are at the service of our faith, it is faith and knowledge of God that grant us access.

In the vision the multitudes are deceived by a beast that does not look very much at all like the Lamb! It only has horns like a lamb, though it speaks like a dragon. If they knew the Lamb well at all, they wouldn’t be fooled for one minute. Compare it to fake versions of things you know. Suppose you loved coffee and drank it every day. No one could pass off ersatz coffee on you. You’d notice it instantly. But suppose you never drank coffee but had only seen it from a distance, or you had only tasted it once or twice (If you are a coffee fan, did you even like it the first time you tried it?). In that case, someone could put any warm brown bilgewater in front of you and tell you it’s coffee, and there’s a good chance you’d believe him. And if all the cool people were drinking it, and all the people you wanted to impress, you might well be moved to choke it down, even if it was disgusting.

It’s the same thing with Christ versus the fake Christ. If we know Christ and his Church well, and are intimate with them, then the difference between the genuine article and the diabolic fake will be apparent. The powerful signs and wonders that Jesus says the false messiahs and false prophets will work (Matthew 24:24, Mark 13:22) will not deceive us. But if we can’t be bothered with Christ and his Church, or only know fake and imitation versions to begin with, then we might just fall for the Antichrist and his assembly.

 
Image: Frans Floris, The Fall of the Rebellious Angels

Now for the question you’ve all had in your minds, I’m sure: Who is the Antichrist?

Let us use our accustomed method of looking to the other parts of Scripture to see if we can find any plain-language authoritative interpretations of “antichrist” to ground our interpretation of the word in Revelation.

There are several passages that can help us. Remember that the letters of St. Paul and St. John are great sources for straight talk about the end times. There are three very important texts on this topic:

Children, it is the last hour; and just as you heard that the antichrist was coming, so now many antichrists have appeared. Thus we know this is the last hour… Who is the liar? Whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ. Whoever denies the Father and the Son, this is the antichrist.
—I John 2:18, 22

This is how you can know the Spirit of God: every spirit that acknowledges Jesus Christ come in the flesh belongs to God, and every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus does not belong to God. This is the spirit of the antichrist that, as you heard, is to come, but in fact is already in the world.
—I John 4:2-3

We ask you, brothers, with regard to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our assembling with him, not to be shaken out of your minds suddenly, or to be alarmed either by a “spirit,” or by an oral statement, or by a letter allegedly from us to the effect that the day of the Lord is at hand. Let no one deceive you in any way. For unless the apostasy comes first and the lawless one is revealed, the one doomed to perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god and object of worship, so as to seat himself in the temple of God, claiming that he is a god—do you not recall that while I was still with you I told you these things?
—II Thessalonians 2:1-5

In the first passage St. John tells us some things that might be a little startling, yet should not come as that much of a surprise after all our study of Biblical prophecy and its interpretation. First, now is the “last hour,” and it has been so ever since the time of the Apostles. This is a Scriptural source of what we saw in the Catechism: that it has been the “end times” ever since Jesus’ Ascension. Second, there is not just one antichrist, but many. Indeed, even by the time St. John wrote, “many” antichrists had already appeared. This is only what we expect after studying the Old Testament prophecies, however—a prophetic vision should have at least one immediate historical referent as well as subsequent fulfillments in the future.

In the second passage St. John lets us know how we can identify an antichrist. It’s not rocket science, either (which doesn’t mean it’s not important or worthwhile). If you have the faith of the Church, you’ll be able to tell a fake Christ from the real one, so you’ll be able to tell who’s denying the real one. The kingdom of God and its mysteries, as we saw, do not belong primarily to those who are advanced in subtle speculation or good archaeology. Although those things can be of great service to faith, it is receiving the grace of faith, hope, and charity that is the crux of the matter. Again we see that “the spirit of antichrist is already in the world,” even in the time of the Apostles.

In the third passage we have the authority of St. Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, saying that we should not be alarmed by statements from whatever source that the Day of the Lord is allegedly at hand. The readiness we are to have for the day of the Lord is a spiritual readiness. If we are living the Christian life in its fullness, then we are by that fact ready for the Second Coming, no matter what activity we are engaged in when our Lord actually does come back.

But we also see that before the end there has to be an apostasy and one particular man, whom St. Paul considers a unique “man of sin,” a “son of perdition,” who exalts himself as God. So although there are many antichrists, there is a Scriptural basis for speaking about “The” Antichrist.

As we investigate who that might be according to the Book of Revelation, it will be helpful to keep in mind our scriptural criteria for the identifying marks of an antichrist: denying that Jesus is the Christ (I Jn 2:22); not acknowledging Jesus Christ come in the flesh (or he would belong to God—I Jn 4:2); and exalting himself above God and claiming to be a god.

There is a passage in the Book of Revelation that might help us identify at least one important antichrist by name. Revelation 13:18-19 tells us that there is a number that stands for the beast’s name: “Wisdom is needed here; one who understands can calculate the number of the beast, for it is a number that stands for a person. His number is six hundred and sixty-six.” There is a particular kind of traditional Jewish number-symbolism that may be of interest here. In Hebrew, every letter traditionally has a number value—like Roman numerals, but more complete. Suppose we take “the number of a man” to mean the sum of the name of a man. Are there any historic persecutors of Christians who add up?

In fact there is at least one. “Nero Caesar” spelled in Hebrew is נרון קסר. Added numberwise according to the most common traditional system, this is 50 + 200 + 6 + 50 + 100 + 60 + 200 = 666. Nero was a vicious persecutor of Christians in the time of St. John, and as a pagan emperor, there was no way he confessed Jesus as Christ. Moreover, the Roman emperors demanded to be worshipped as gods—so he seems to meet the criteria to be an antichrist.

But those aren’t the only indications. If you have sharp eyes you noticed that the Hebrew spelling of “Caesar Nero” given above is a Hebrew adaptation of the Greek, with a terminal “n” (“Neron”). Suppose you spelled it Latin-style and left off the n; the sum would be 616, which is the reading of a few ancient manuscripts. That would seem to mean that some copyists were surer about the name than the number. This part is all educated guess-work, of course. But it looks like too good a fit to be a coincidence, which suggests that we are on pretty good ground to think that this is the immediate historical fulfillment of St. John’s vision. That the symbolic number 666 points in this way to Nero is the consensus among modern scholars.

The immediate historical referent of the tribulations signified in the Book of Revelation is the persecution of the early Church by the pagan Romans. This is why the Book of Revelation was helpful to the early Christians in encouraging them to stand fast in the faith. Historical research can do a lot to fill in the details of this layer of meaning. From our faith-filled study of Biblical prophecies and their interpretations, however, we also know that there are many other fulfillments to this prophecy throughout history, which will be visible to those who can read the book with a faith that seeks understanding. I surmise, however, that for all the other fulfillments besides Nero, the number 666 most likely carries a general, symbolic meaning, rather than this specific kind of number-symbolism, though perhaps both kinds of symbolism will be involved. Perhaps we will only know in heaven. In any event, our salvation will come by perseverance in God’s grace, not by skill in number-puzzles.

So now we have one specific name for the antichrist, found in the Book of Revelation itself. I cannot, of course, tell you the name of “The” Antichrist—and neither can anyone else but God. But I can tell you that, like all antichrists, he will meet the Scriptural criteria given above by St. John and St. Paul: he will deny Jesus, deny the Father and the Son, and exalt himself over the true God. Also, according to Daniel and St. John he will be a wicked king of some sort. But ultimately our Christian lives do not depend on cracking some secret code so that we can flee the Antichrist before everyone else. If we hold fast to the Church’s faith, we are sure not to be deceived into exchanging the glory of God for a worthless imitation.

 
Image: Illustration Showing the Emperor Nero

[The second beast] forced all the people, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to be given a stamped image on their right hands or their foreheads, so that no one could buy or sell except one who had the stamped image of the beast’s name or the number that stood for its name.
—Revelation 13:16-17

This is of course the famous “Mark of the Beast” passage. Just as God in the vision marks his elect with his seal, so the beast, mocking God, marks his followers with a mark of his own. Many people are deceived in their speculations about what this might be because they are looking for something bodily and temporal, whereas the images of the Book of Revelation chiefly serve to make spiritual realities visible.

This is in accord with St. Thomas Aquinas’ interpretation of marks or ‘characters’:

A character distinguishes one from another, in relation to some particular end, to which he who receives the character is ordained: as has been stated concerning the military character by which a soldier of the king is distinguished from the enemy’s soldier in relation to the battle. In like manner the character of the faithful is that by which the faithful of Christ are distinguished from the servants of the devil, either in relation to eternal life, or in relation to the worship of the Church that now is. Of these the former is the result of charity and grace; while the latter results from the sacramental character. Wherefore the “character of the beast” may be understood by opposition, to mean either the obstinate malice for which some are assigned to eternal punishment, or the profession of an unlawful form of worship.

Chapter 14—The 144,000 Virgins in Heaven

In contrast to those who accept the mark of the beast are the 144,000 sealed by God, a number that represents all of God’s elect, as we saw earlier. Here the symbolic number appears again, and they are men who are “virgins,” “not defiled with women.” Even though St. Bede devotes considerable space in his commentary indicating that this shows how honorable virginity for the sake of the kingdom of heaven is, he says that the virgins in this vision represent not the celibate only but the whole Church, whom St. Paul says is the virgin bride of Christ (II Corinthians 11:2). Therefore we should acknowledge that the virginity, just like the number, is symbolic of spiritual realities. If being married shut us out of heaven, the Church and the world would look rather different. Here especially we should remember what we learned about the symbolic force of chastity and harlotry in prophetic visions.

Chapter 16—The Seven Bowls of Wrath

I heard a loud voice speaking from the temple to the seven angels, “Go and pour out the seven bowls of God’s fury upon the earth.” The first angel went and poured out his bowl on the earth. Festering and ugly sores broke out on those who had the mark of the beast or worshiped its image.
—Revelation 16:1-2

Notice that the plagues only afflict those who accepted the mark of the beast. It is perfectly within God’s power to make bodily plagues selectively afflict some people and not others, as he did in Egypt in the Exodus; but we should always remember that the Old Testament events of salvation history are bodily prefigurements of the spiritual realities of the New Testament (see I Cor 10). When we consider that sin only has power over those who consent to it, it becomes apparent that these plagues must be chiefly spiritual realities, signifying the destruction that sin wreaks in the life of the unrepentant sinner.

 
Image: Giuseppe Maria Crespi, The Blessed Bernardo Tolomeo’s Intercession for the End of the Plague in Siena

Revelation 17—The Woman and the Beast

Then he said to me, “The waters that you saw where the harlot lives represent large numbers of peoples, nations, and tongues… The woman whom you saw represents the great city that has sovereignty over the kings of the earth.”
—Revelation 17:15, 18

We have seen that the immediate historical fulfillment of the wickedness and persecution prophesied in the Book of Revelation is pagan Rome. This is shown by many details accessible to historical inquiry. The footnotes of the NABRE are very good for these. The notes also give some of the symbolic meanings, but of course do not engage in a full explanation of how it all works.

Readers who have been following the NABRE notes or another modern commentary may have noticed how hesitant they are to pronounce on the mechanics of how the revelation to St. John took place. For instance, the NABRE introduction to the Apocalypse says that the symbolic language of the book draws extensively on the Old Testament and adds: “Whether or not these visions were real experiences of the author or simply literary conventions employed by him is an open question.” This may sound startling, as though they were contradicting what we know in faith, that the Book of Revelation is real revelation from God and not merely a literary expression of a man’s religious feelings, aspirations, or personal reflections on history.

But wondering about the way St. John received the apocalyptic revelation is not as bizarre as it sounds. Medieval interpreters such as Peter Lombard and St. Thomas Aquinas considered that, in the highest sort of prophecy, the prophet had his intellect enlightened by God without needing to have words, pictures, or images of the imagination to manifest the revelation. Moses seems to have enjoyed some privileged encounter with God analogous to the medieval idea of an image-less vision; as the Book of Numbers says,

The LORD said: Now listen to my words: If there are prophets among you, in visions I reveal myself to them, in dreams I speak to them; Not so with my servant Moses! Throughout my house he is worthy of trust: face to face I speak to him, plainly and not in riddles. The likeness of the LORD he beholds.
—Numbers 12:6-8

St. Thomas Aquinas considered that Moses and St. Paul (see II Cor 12:1-10) at times actually beheld God in his very essence as the blessed do in heaven, in addition to receiving the most excellent sort of image-based prophetic visions at other times. He says that David also had purely intellectual visions nearly as excellent as Moses’.

The editors of the New American Bible are open to the possibility (though they cautiously hold back from deciding the matter) that the Book of Revelation is the fruit of this sort of most excellent prophetic vision. According to this view, St. John received a purely intellectual and image-less vision of God and was charged with conveying its content to the Church, after which he used the language of Old Testament imagery to symbolize the ineffable truth of God under the guiding inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

I think it is more probable that St. John actually saw the images as well as receiving the intellectual enlightenment, however. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, an image-vision where one sees an image of God as the revealer is the highest kind of image-vision. St. John saw Jesus, the most excellent image of God.

Returning to the image of the city with which we began, we can see many layers of meaning in the great city if we look with the eyes of faith. In these further fulfillments, it is less profitable to look for a geographical city than to realize that the Book is making spiritual realities visible.

The great city is called Babylon, but also “Sodom,” “Egypt,” and the city “where indeed their lord was crucified” (Rev 11:8, and see note). In other words, it is all the wicked together, viewed as one “great city.” It is this, contrasted with the one great New Jerusalem, that is the source of St. Augustine’s doctrine of the “two cities.” Augustine developed these ideas in his massive work The City of God, in which he explains how the world is divided into two spiritual “cities,” one of the wicked and one of the good. Because these are spiritual states and not physical cities, no one can tell who belongs to which “city;” the just and the unjust alike live mixed together everywhere in the world. Only at the Last Judgment will they be sorted out, forever. The prefigurement of this in the Old Testament is the departure of God’s people from Babylon, where they had been living among the Babylonians as exiles from the holy land, as prophesied in Isaiah 52.

Thus when God says, “Depart from her” (18:4), meaning the wicked city, he is not commanding an evacuation from a geographical location but separation from sinners.

The wicked city is the city that “has sovereignty over the kings of the earth.” The servants of Christ cannot expect to conquer the world except by the victory of Christ. That victory in the New Jerusalem of God is the final goal and consummation of the Book.

 
Image: Carlo Dolci, Moses

Chapter 20—Salvation History Re-presented

The revelation to St. John continues with a vision of Satan being bound by an angel. The saints then reign with Christ for a thousand years, after which Satan is released for a final battle in which he and his supporters are definitively defeated. Then comes the judgment.

The question that faces the alert reader is whether this material is to be read as a continuation of the visions in the preceding chapters or as a recapitulation, where a new vision starts over and presents the same thing again in a different way. The best answer is, “It depends on how you interpret it.”

Not every interpretation is a true interpretation, but we have seen in previous posts how Jesus and other authoritative interpreters within Scripture show us how Scriptural texts can have multiple true interpretations. It might seem strange to say that the way the images ought to be divided into distinct visions depends on which interpretation one is considering. But it is just like the prophecies of the Old Testament, where the way sentences ought to be divided into distinct clauses depends on which interpretation one is considering.

Here’s an example. Remember that the Bible predates punctuation marks. Editors of various editions have long put punctuation in to help readers, but it is not part of the inspired text. So Isaiah 40:3 says, “A voice cries out in the wilderness prepare a way for the Lord”. Which way are you supposed to read it? Is the voice in the wilderness or is the way for the Lord in the wilderness? From the way we usually like to speak in English, it might seem like the former is more likely. But if you consider the original historical context of the prophecy, which is to encourage the people to return to the Holy Land from their exile in Babylon, the more fitting interpretation is: “A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare a way for the Lord.’” Between Babylon and the land of Israel is the vast Arabian desert, and it is not practical to march across it. To go between the two, one ordinarily has to journey north, then east-west, then south again. But the Lord is so determined to go back that he is going straight through the wilderness – so the people had better get moving!

But the original historical context is not the only sense of the prophecy. The Evangelists are inspired by God to say that this passage was fulfilled in St. John the Baptist. Since John was in the desert, and the way of the Lord that he is calling for is in the people’s souls, then for his situation the interpretation “A voice cries out in the desert: “Prepare a way for the Lord” makes more sense. This other division of the sentence is just as true, although it is applicable to a different situation. The editors of the NABRE are attentive to this, and so they punctuate it one way in the Old Testament and the other in the New Testament, as in Mark 1:3.

Likewise the prophetic visions of the Book of Revelation, as we have seen, can be read rightly as applying to events in St. John’s time or as applying to later events. If we are reading it according to its meaning for the Church in St. John’s time, then in Chapters 17-19 Babylon represents pagan Rome and the Beast is the antichrist Caesar Nero. But if we read it according to its eschatological sense, then Babylon represents the wicked considered all together as one “city” opposed to the city of God, and the Beast represents the Antichrist whom the Church teaches will come at the end (CCC 675). In either interpretation the reign of Christ with the saints refers to the Church, which consists of Jesus’ holy ones on earth and in heaven. As we saw in Post X, wherever Christ is, there is his kingdom; the Church is the body of Christ. The life of a member of the Body of Christ, that is, being a baptized Christian, is an intrinsically priestly and royal life (I Peter 2:5, 9), and a resurrection (Colossians 3:1). Satan’s “binding” for a thousand years means that God will never allow him to afflict the entire Church on earth so thoroughly that she is reduced to the state of the early Church under the Roman persecution.

Therefore if we are considering the Book according to the historical interpretation, then we should probably interpret Chapter 20 as a continuation of what came before, because in that interpretation it makes sense for the thousand-year reign to come after the fall of Babylon. But if we are interpreting it according to its meaning of prophesying events future to St. John’s time, then we should interpret it as a recapitulation, a new vision that presents the same thing again in a different way, as happens in many prophetic visions in Scripture. Since St. Bede’s commentary is chiefly about the latter interpretation, he interprets Chapter 20 as a recapitulation.

Although with Isaiah 40:3 we might be able to make a pretty good case for applying either reading in some sense to either the return from exile or St. John the Baptist, with Revelation 20 we get in trouble if we try to mix the two. If one interprets it according to the eschatological meaning and interprets Chapter 20 not as a recapitulation but as a continuation, then the error of “millenarianism” results (or “chiliasm,” depending on whether you prefer Latin or Greek), which supposes that at the end of the world there will be an earthly kingdom of Christ which lasts for numerically 1,000 years. The people most susceptible to this mistake are those who do not understand the Church well enough to see how the language of the thousand-year reign refers to her, and those who are not well attuned to the interpretation of prophecy in Scripture we have been reviewing in these posts.

We saw from the Old Testament prophecies that what God has done he will do again, and in a similar way. There has already been a historical fulfillment of the judgment of Babylon the great city (pagan Rome) proximate to St. John. But its fall did not mean simple annihilation. Isaiah and the Psalms prophesy that Egypt and Babylon will be converted to the Lord:

The LORD shall make himself known to Egypt, and the Egyptians shall know the LORD in that day; they shall offer sacrifices and oblations, make vows to the LORD and fulfill them. Although the LORD shall smite Egypt severely, he shall heal them… On that day Israel shall be a third party with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, when the LORD of hosts gives this blessing: Blessed be my people Egypt, and the work of my hands Assyria, and my heritage Israel.
—Isaiah 19:21-22, 24-25

Rahab and Babylon I count among those who know me.
—Ps. 87:4

Pagan Rome fell—and it was taken over by Christians and subjected to Christ. Imagine how wondrous that must have seemed to those who knew the full horror and brutality of its persecution. So shall the world be in the new creation, and more wondrous still when the Day of the Lord that is yet to be comes to pass.

Chapter 21—The New Creation

It is not incorrect to say that the Book of Revelation is about the “end of the world.” But if it is an end, it is an end that is really a beginning, like commencement speakers are fond of saying at college graduations—a beginning of something better and more lasting. Heaven and earth are renewed. We are told, among other things, that “the sea was no more.” We can speculate about the geography of the new creation, but remember that the primary purpose of the visions of the Book of Revelation is to make spiritual realities visible. In the Bible the sea represents chaos and the untamable destructiveness of nature in a fallen world that makes it inhospitable to man. That aspect of creation symbolized by the sea will be no more. The way is clear for the everlasting joy and triumph of the elect in the New Jerusalem.

 
Image: Street Artist, Miniature City

I also saw the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will always be with them (as their God)… It gleamed with the splendor of God. Its radiance was like that of a precious stone, like jasper, clear as crystal. It had a massive, high wall, with twelve gates where twelve angels were stationed and on which names were inscribed, (the names) of the twelve tribes of the Israelites. There were three gates facing east, three north, three south, and three west. The wall of the city had twelve courses of stones as its foundation, on which were inscribed the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. The one who spoke to me held a gold measuring rod to measure the city, its gates, and its wall. The city was square, its length the same as its width. He measured the city with the rod and found it fifteen hundred miles in length and width and height. He also measured its wall: one hundred and forty-four cubits according to the standard unit of measurement the angel used. The wall was constructed of jasper, while the city was pure gold, clear as glass.
—Revelation 21:2-3, 11-18

At last in Chapter 21 the Bride of the Lamb makes her appearance, the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven.

The chief reward of heaven is of course God himself: nothing could ever be so marvelous or wonderful as Happiness, Love, Beatitude, Being, and Goodness Himself.

The description of the city as seen in the vision is packed with symbolic detail. The precious stones symbolize not only its excellence and preciousness, but its sacredness and its scale—encompassing of all Israel. The Church is Israel in the New Covenant. The passage evokes, among other things, the breastplate of decision in Exodus 28, on which were twelve precious stones. Twelves are everywhere, symbolizing all Israel, and also the Twelve Apostles who are its foundations. Measuring the city with the rod should remind us of the vision of the perfect Jerusalem towards the end of Ezekiel. The ideal Israel and Temple and worship of God that Ezekiel could only see from far off and yearn for is fulfilled beyond all expectations in the heavenly city.

The detail that the city is the same in length and width and height may seem odd—who ever makes a cubical city? But the attentive reader of the Old Testament will recall that this is a reference to the Holy of Holies of Solomon’s Temple (I Kings 6). The account of the old Temple has many prophetic details when we go back to it and see it with the prophetic knowledge we have learned from the Book of Revelation.

There is no Temple in the City because it is a temple—the whole thing is the Holy of Holies, or so its architecture tells us. We are also told the Temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb. This would seem to be an identification—not pantheism, but perhaps we should say the Lamb becoming one flesh with his Bride.

The dimensions are made up of twelves and thousands, meaning “Israel” and “very large.” It is not that Israel is done away with and replaced by the Church. Rather, there is a continuity of the People of God from the Old Testament to the New as the gentiles are grafted onto the olive tree of Israel (Romans 11:11-24). The Church includes all those who have sanctifying grace and ultimately all those brought by God’s grace to the glory of heaven.

In chapter 22, the river flowing from the throne and the trees recall the vision in the latter part of Ezekiel. There the water flowing from the Temple corresponds to the blood and water flowing from the side of Christ on the Cross. Examine both the Ezekiel passage and a typical crucifix, and you will see that the wound matches the position in Ezekiel’s description—Jesus is the Temple.

One last question that one may ask about the New Jerusalem in Chapter 21 and 22: “Where are all the people?”

The answer is that we just read the description of them. The buildings of the city are a symbol, as we should know by now! As St. Peter says,

Come to him, a living stone, rejected by human beings but chosen and precious in the sight of God, and, like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
—I Peter 2:4-5

Finally, we have no better way of closing our tour of the Book of Revelation than the joyous plea of love with which the Book itself ends:

The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” Let the hearer say, “Come.”
The one who gives this testimony says, “Yes, I am coming soon.”
Amen! Come, Lord Jesus!

 
Image: Fra Angelico, Last Judgment