Reprising John’s Revelation

Jack asked:

You’ve mentioned that a significant part of John’s Revelation laments the fading of Hebrew influence in church doctrine. Can you please recommend some of the more important sections in Revelations for further study?

In some ways, the Harlot riding the Beast in Revelation 17 is the key passage of the whole book. The reason this isn’t obvious to more church folks is because they come to John’s Revelation with a load of eschatology instead of letting John have his say. Why did John invest so much effort invoking all the OT imagery? Why is the whole thing so mystical and symbolic instead of straightforward?

Consider what John had been doing all this time when he was exiled to Patmos. The Jewish revolts in Jerusalem brought the wrath of Rome and Jews were run out of the city. Christians, remembering the warning Jesus gave about Jerusalem coming under siege, fled to where they knew a strong Christian community could be found. While some headed to Antioch, it seems the majority went to Ephesus. John had recently come to the city and took up the yoke of guiding the extended community inland in Asian Minor. After some years of this, John came to the attention of the authorities. The most likely scenario is that he was challenged by Roman officials to offer incense to the image of Caesar, and refused.

In all of his time there, consider what kinds of problems he encountered. Paul’s letters plus Acts gives us a clue to what sort of nonsense John faced. Pair this with a careful reading of the Christian scholars who wrote shortly after John’s time. The church drifted quickly into the arms of secular concerns and abandoning the otherworldly focus of the New Testament. This was locked in when the church leadership was seduced by Constantine, and become a significant part of Roman politics. This is directly counter to what Jesus taught, carefully avoiding the politics of His own nation. Politics is ostensibly what nailed Jesus to the Cross.

This is how the church became the Harlot riding the Beast. John saw this coming. The whole book of Revelation is a call to return to mysticism. You cannot understand the book as a description of future events; it’s a symbolic declaration of how God does things — present, past and future. You cannot understand Revelation without a Hebrew orientation. The whole book is one long lament of what to expect from God because the Hebrew outlook was tossed aside, when it is inherent in the Word of God.

Not that we must seek to shift our psychology; I doubt that’s possible. Rather, we should become aware of that different outlook and operate by the logic of it. From Boman’s book we learned that Hebrew brains didn’t operate visually, but morally, versus the Greek minds that always formed a visual image of everything. Hebrews didn’t have mental pictures like that. We can scarcely imagine such a thing. But we can learn to suspend our trust in that image-making and trust our convictions bubbling up through our subconscious.

The church leadership who learned from John never picked up on that difference between the Greek and Hebraic style of thinking. They never picked up on the symbolism but walked away from studying the Second Temple literature that informs John’s Revelation. Those “Early Church Fathers” were not good scholars; they neglected a wealth of inputs they desperately needed, and began forming doctrine based on a Hellenistic worldview. This is why they saw no reason to resist the siren song of cooperation with Constantine. They willingly became the Harlot Church because they didn’t understand what John said about it.

The Book of Revelation was confusing without John’s Hebrew background. It was a subtle Hebraic way of warning believers not to leave the Hebrew outlook behind. I cannot point to sections of Revelation that offer a clear warning, because avoiding clarity of that sort was the whole point. It’s the book as a whole in the context that explains this. Sorry, Jack, I can’t offer anything more concrete.