“Indeed, no biblical book –perhaps no religious book– has been so simultaneously revered and reviled as Revelation.”
Only recently did I discover the wonderful series put out by Princeton University Press entitled the Lives of Great Religious Books. While we often think of people when we see the word biography, this series presents us with biographies of iconic religious books throughout history.
Volumes in the series –which concern texts as distinct as Augustine’s Confessions, Thomas Jefferson’s Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, etc.– set out to “examine the historical origins of texts from the great religious traditions, and trace how their reception, interpretation, and influence have changed—often radically—over time.” Luckily included within this series is a volume devoted to the Book of Revelation, the final book in modern Bibles which has stupefied interpreters since its initial “publication.”
What I appreciated so much upon reading this volume was the author’s (Timothy Beal) attention to the living nature of what we call “the book of Revelation.” The description of the series sums this up quite well: “As these stories of translation, adaptation, appropriation, and inspiration dramatically remind us, all great religious books are living things whose careers in the world can take the most unexpected turns.” Nowhere is this more obvious than in the “career” of Revelation.
Timothy Beal, Professor of Religion at Case Western Reserve University, takes us on an exhilarating journey tracing the birth, early life, and later transformations of the book of Revelation. As he states in the preface, “Biographies are never comprehensive, but instead always selective… My selections are driven by an interest in attending to awakenings of new life for Revelation in a variety of cultural contexts and media environments.”
He begins, therefore, with a chapter on origins, discussing the “birth context” of the book of Revelation. He then proceeds through the rest of the volume, tracing varied receptions of the text in the writings of Augustine of Hippo, Hildegard of Bingen, Martin Luther, Cyrus Scofield, Tim Lahaye, Jerry Jenkins, and others.
Beal’s hope in this biography is to reveal the text’s “remarkable, shape-shifting, contagious vitality, for better and for worse, and with no end in sight.”
Now, perhaps some may react negatively to the term “shape-shifting” included above. You might say, “Revelation is God’s Word, the meaning of which is secure and unchanging. By no means then is it shape-shifting.” What Beal means is that the book of Revelation has been received, explained, and appropriated by human beings in a bewildering diversity of ways. “Indeed, no biblical book –perhaps no religious book– has been so simultaneously revered and reviled as Revelation,” he quips.
From the 1st to the 16th century, Revelation’s place within the Christian canon was uncertain. As early as the third century, when bishops began discussing the notion of canon, Dionysius of Alexandria declared that many Christians rejected the book. The famous church historian Eusebius of Caesarea (writing in the fourth century) notes that the book was “undisputed for some but disputed for others.” Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, includes it in his famous list of canonical books in 367 AD, but his contemporary Cyril of Jerusalem does not. Even in Martin Luther’s 1522 edition of the New Testament, the great reformer wrote that “he saw no evidence of its inspiration, that no one knows what it means, and that there are many far better books for us to keep” (!).
Beal goes on to note that, “Debates over the social and theological value of Revelation have chased it through history and continue to this day… Despite its great host of critics, however, the book of Revelation has not only survived, but thrived.”
Along these lines, I’d like to draw attention to one particular section of Beal’s volume. Revelation is often referred to as a “book” of the Christian Bible or perhaps a “scroll” in its original context. However, Beal attempts to problematize this description.
“My approach to this biography is that of a cultural historian,” he writes. “In the field of biblical studies, cultural history explores how biblical words, images, things, and ideas take particular meaningful forms in particular cultural contexts.” He goes on to say: “A cultural-historical approach begins with the fact that there is no singular, fixed, original “Bible” or “book of the Bible” to be received across history. Rather, there are multiple productions of the Bible –that is, biblical media– that are generated and generative in different cultural contexts.” Let’s stop here.
Many of you may be troubled by these words. Those in evangelical settings tend to think of the books of the Bible existing at their beginning in some fixed, original form. They then imagine that through the process of copying, transmitting, and/or translating such “books,” we moved away from their original form (albeit slightly) and now rely on textual critics and scholars to help reconstruct it. What Beal is saying is that for Revelation at least such a narrative is not evident in our sources.
While there must have been a “first draft” of Revelation that was conceived, written down, read, heard, and later transmitted and translated, what we possess today are an incredibly diverse set of manuscript witnesses, from different times and locations, in different languages, with different aims and apparent uses even. Beyond this you can trace various theological, artistic, and media-driven receptions of Revelation, which take it far beyond what it was originally in the first century AD.
In the eyes of a cultural historian then, “the ‘book’ of Revelation is not a self-evident, original literary thing created once and for all in the past and then incarnated in various interpretations throughout history. It constantly changes, forever being made and remade in different cultural productions of meaning.”
In a way, this is basic and true of all books of the Bible: We have a “text” that emerged originally in some form. This text is then received by a community of readers who interpret it and pattern their lives according to its shape. But as time goes on and as those communities (those “users”) become more distant and diverse, the various receptions and uses of that singular text become wildly diverse and unique.
My aim in this post is not to give an evaluative judgment of this phenomenon (to answer the question: “Is this right or wrong?”). All I will say on this point is that some uses of Scripture are more or less aligned with Christian use (throughout history) than others. In other words, these books have historically functioned as Scripture –a set of texts which works to norm the lives of its readers– for Christians in various times and settings. Scripture’s use today is most historically and traditionally consistent when it is forming real Christians into the image of Jesus Christ.
For now, I wish to observe that the book of Revelation has been subject to receptions and uses more diverse than any other book in our Christian Bible. “Whether or not you have [even] read the text,” Beal writes, “you are probably familiar with many of its scenes, characters, and images”: i.e., the seven seals, the four horsemen, the red dragon, the grapes of wrath, the mark of the beast, the last judgment, the book of life, etc.
While “there is a text tradition that we call the “book” of Revelation, strings of written words, heard and read, etc.… Even that text tradition has lived as many different media” throughout history. “From early Christians reading aloud to handwritten scrolls to codices to illuminated manuscripts to print books to audio recordings,” and now fiction books, whiteboard charts, and movies; the words of Revelation “keep pulling away from each other into new literary and verbal contexts… combining with other images, music, spaces, and things” with no end in sight.
Many are aware of the book of Revelation and the swirl of images, phrases, and ideas which allegedly emerge from it. My fear, however, is that in today’s day and age there are few who take the time to return to the text of Revelation –at least the text that we have– to ascertain how many of these “popular ideas” actually derive from it.
In sum, the book of Revelation has arrested the attention and imagination of countless persons, only some of whom view the book as Scripture intended to form them into the image of Christ.
As we continue to journey through the book of Revelation on Sunday mornings, my hope is that we would reckon with the many uses and receptions of Revelation in popular culture, and that we would take the time as Spirit-filled followers of Jesus, to trace exactly what is said in the text we have.
The book of Revelation is amazing, in the fullest sense of the term, but it is my contention that it is best received by a community of believers intent on having it form them further into the image of Christ.
Jonah Bissell
Pastor