Fr. Stephen De Young: The Revelation of St. John: a completely non-controversial book that I’m sure we will breeze right through. We may finish— Let’s just do it tonight! [Laughter] So we’ll go ahead and segue into doing the introduction to the book of Revelation, and that’ll be it for to night, but that’s going to take a little bit. So strap in. [Laughter] So we’re going to start.

I’ll start with genre. The book of Revelation, or the Apocalypse, which is the Greek title—the Apocalypse of St. John. “Apocalypse” literally means to reveal something or to uncover something, hence the translation: “Revelation.” “Apocalypse” does not mean the end of the world. [Laughter] I know we’re used to, like, “zombie apocalypse” or “nuclear apocalypse,” but that’s a different— That’s a derivative use that comes from one interpretation of the book of Revelation that’s kind of popular in the United States, that the book of Revelation is about the end of the world. So this is a good place to start. The book of Revelation is not about the end of the world, at least not most of it. A little bit at the end, but most of it is not about the end of the world.

It is revealing something. Something was revealed to St. John; he has written it down and is making it known to us. But apocalyptic literature or revelatory literature if you want to call it that, is a genre of literature. There’s other literature like this. There’s other literature like this in the Bible. So a big chunk of Daniel is apocalyptic literature. The book of Zephaniah is apocalyptic literature. I know the book of Zephaniah is everyone’s favorite book of the Bible. [Laughter] But not only is it apocalyptic literature, but it has four chariots pulled by different-colored horses. So there are direct parallels. It’s not just that these are kind similar in genre, but there are direct parallels between other biblical apocalypses and the Apocalypse of St. John.

There are also apocalypses that are not in the Bible but are sort of Bible-adjacent. One of those is the book of Enoch, or 1 Enoch. We talked about that a little, back when we were in the general epistles, because 1 Peter and 2 Peter and Jude reference it. Jude straight up quotes it at one point. It’s also referenced a lot in St. Matthew’s gospel, but that’s a ways back. But it is also going to be referenced directly in the book of Revelation; some of the imagery and things are going to be sort of borrowed and changed a little. The changes are important, are as important as the borrowing when we get to those things and we talk about them.

There are also other New Testament apocalypses that are Bible-adjacent. The most major one of those is the Apocalypse of St. Peter, which was actually read as Scripture in some early churches in the second and even into the beginning of the third century before they all kind of stopped reading it as Scripture, but they still had it around. It was still copied. It was sort of one of those second-rank books. The Apocalypse of St. Peter actually had a great literary career, because it inspired a lot of later literature, like Dante’s Inferno. [Laughter]

So essentially what makes all of these things a genre, or makes all of these books apocalypse, is that there are certain features, the most major of which is that there is some person who is the receiver of the revelation. It’s going to be St. John here in the Apocalypse of St. John, but it’s generally whoever the book is named after, so: Daniel or Zephaniah or Enoch in the book of Enoch, or St. Peter in the Apocalypse of St. Peter. That person encounters some kind of spiritual beings, usually angelic beings. Those angelic beings then take that person on a journey through the spiritual world, and often in going on that journey through the spiritual world, that includes a journey through the material world, because the two kind of overlap.

So the way apocalyptic literature looks at the world is sort of like—and I hope— I know we’ve got young people here, so I hope everybody still knows what an overhead projector is, because I haven’t come up with a better metaphor. You’re looking at me like you don’t. You don’t? [Laughter] Okay! So back in the before-time, when we still used telegraphs, and before we had the projector that you plug into your laptop to put your PowerPoint presentation on the wall, there were these things called overhead projectors, which was sort of a box that had a glass surface. A light shined up out of the glass surface— Okay, now you know what I’m talking about. Then they had— It had like an arm with the overhead part of the overhead projector. It had two lenses in it and a mirror, so the light would shine up from the bottom, go through the lenses, go through the mirror, and then get projected on the wall.

Then to project something, you’d have to get these clear plastic sheets. But then those clear plastic sheets were sort of dry-erase, like you could write on them, you could draw on them, you could print or type on them, when we had typewriters in the long-ago time… And you would project them that way. One of the neat things you could do with them—we thought it was neat at the time, at least—was you could get multiple transparencies and sort of layer them. So you could draw one thing, and then sort of overlay another thing.

Now that I’ve spent all this time explaining what an overhead projector is, I probably need to find a better metaphor because that took longer than just explaining the thing. But that’s kind of how apocalyptic literature views the material and spiritual world. There’s the material world, and then there’s a sort of other transparency overlaid over it that’s the spiritual world. We don’t necessarily always, as non-saints and non-prophets, encounter or perceive the spiritual elements of the world directly. So what is revealed in apocalyptic literature, in revelatory literature, is that second transparency, is the spiritual world.

So think about, for example, Balaam and his donkey in the story in Numbers, another favorite book of everyone, the book of Numbers. He’s riding his donkey. He’s been paid to go curse Israel, and the donkey keeps turning aside and doesn’t want to keep going down the road. Balaam can’t see anything. So finally he’s beating the donkey, trying to get it to keep going because he thinks the donkey’s just being stubborn, and finally it’s revealed to him the angel of the Lord is standing there, just getting ready to smite Balaam. [Laughter] So that’s why the donkey had stopped. The idea here is that the donkey is a better prophet than Balaam, because the donkey sees what: the spiritual reality that Balaam can’t see. So that’s the idea. The angel of the Lord is there, but Balaam can’t see him.

Or there’s the story of Elisha in 2 Kings (or 4 Kingdoms) and his servant Gehazi, where there’s armies coming. They’re coming after Elisha. Gehazi, his servant, is super scared because there’s all these armies coming. Elisha is not scared; Gehazi’s like: Why aren’t you scared? And so Elisha prays, and Gehazi’s eyes are opened and so he sees all the angels all around on the battlefield. He says, “Oh! That’s why you’re not scared!” because he can see this other layer. Elisha as a prophet can see this.

That’s the idea. The idea is that the spiritual reality is always there; most people don’t see it. It’s revealed to someone, and then that person then is usually commanded to write it down, to pass it on to those of us who don’t see it normally, to give us a perspective, this perspective of what’s going on in the spiritual world that underlies and is interacting with the things that we see physically and materially, with our material senses.

So that’s the core idea of apocalyptic literature. That’s what is going to happen now with St. John. There are elements of apocalyptic— This is one of those things, if you need to publish a journal article… I don’t know, the fad may be over now. In the aughts—back in the aughts—the big fad, if you wanted to publish books and journal articles about the Bible, was to write “Apocalyptic in fill-in-the-blank.” Like you’d go through St. Paul’s epistles and try to find apocalyptic elements; you go through some book of the Old Testament trying to find apocalyptic elements—because there are elements of that all through the Scriptures, obviously. People are constantly— Prophets and other biblical figures, Christ himself, are always talking about the spiritual reality that sort of underlies things that people don’t necessarily see. But apocalyptic literature is very deliberately that. It’s very deliberately “I’m going to take you on a tour of the cosmos so that you can see how it all works.” [Laughter]

So in particular, in the Apocalypse of St. John— I said it’s not about the end of the world. It is this kind of apocalypse; it is this kind of revelatory literature. So the purpose guiding this is going to be related to when it’s written. So now I’m going to go into when it was written and by whom. Who wrote the book of Revelation and when it was written is actually the most certain of any book of the New Testament, because St. Irenaeus literally told us exactly when. [Laughter] And St. Irenaeus of Lyons in the second century was a disciple of St. Polycarp, who was a disciple of St. John. So St. Irenaeus is a spiritual grandson of St. John the Apostle, so: direct. He would know if anybody does. Though he’s the only one who gives the exact date, he’s joined in saying St. John wrote it by Papias at the end of the first or beginning of the second century, by St. Justin the Philosopher, St. Justin Martyr: pretty much everyone of that era in the second century, the Fathers of that era in the second century, who pretty much all studied in the area around Ephesus.

As we talked about before in the second century, Ephesus was probably the most major center of the Church. So they all studied there. That’s where St. John was. As we’re going to see, the letters—the sort of cover letters to the book of Revelation—are all written to the Church of Ephesus and other churches around Ephesus, other Christian communities and towns and stuff around Ephesus. This is where it comes from; this is where St. John was. All the Fathers in the second century, who are one and two generations removed from St. John—Papias knew him directly—say he wrote it.

St. Irenaeus out of them tells us exactly when, because he tells us that it was written— Well, he tells us that St. John receives the vision, I should say, in 95: AD 95. You will usually then, based on that, get a “written in 95 or 96,” because some people will say, “Well, if he had the vision in 95, he probably didn’t have it all written down until 96,” but somewhere in there.

And this is preserved in the Church’s iconographic tradition. All of the depictions of St. John writing, he’s actually dictating to a scribe and he’s an old man. All the depictions of St. John, going all the way back, with Christ he’s always a very young man. And we have all the other traditions considering St. John. He’s the only one of the apostles that wasn’t martyred. He lived to a ripe old age. And that—there’s an allusion to that tradition, of course, at the end of St. John’s gospel, the whole thing between him and St. Peter, where Christ predicts that St. Peter’s going to be martyred by crucifixion and then St. Peter’s like, “Well, what about that guy!?” [Laughter] And Christ says, “Well, if it’s my will that he lives until I come again, what’s that to you?” And then there’s sort of the parenthetical note from St. John. He says, “Because Jesus said that, the rumor spread around that that apostle was never going to die, but that’s not what he said; he just said, ‘What’s that to you?’ ” [Laughter] But for that rumor to come around, he must have lived a lot longer than the other ones or that wouldn’t have been a rumor!

So this is very clear in the second century that St. John wrote it. He wrote it at that time. That it’s the same St. John who wrote the gospel of St. John, at least the first epistle of St. John—we won’t go into all that again—that this is all the same guy. Second century, totally clear. Then everything goes haywire. [Laughter] Because… Whom to blame for it? What happens is that there’s a teaching that gets started called chiliasm, which was the teaching that when Christ returned he was going to establish a physical kingdom on earth for Christians that would last a thousand years, and then the end of the world would come. You may be thinking that sounds kind of like pre-millennialism in Evangelical churches. It’s similar, but it’s not the same. For dispensational pre-millennialists especially, they believe that the purpose of that thousand-year kingdom for Jesus is actually for the Jewish people: for non-Christian Jewish people. And this is about fulfilling Old Testament prophecies about ethnic Jews, as if that was a concept of the Old Testament—but I show my bias.

Chiliasts did not teach that; it was Christians. Chiliasts also taught that that thousand years was going to be sort of this wonderful cornucopia of plenty, paradise on earth, you crush one grape and get a thousand gallons of wine out of it; those kind of analogies are literally used. So it’s this sort of earthly paradise. It has nothing to do with rebuilding the Temple; it has nothing to do with all those other things that are associated with sort of Protestant pre-millennialism. So these are really two different things; they’re similar, but not the same.

And chiliasm then has its own unique problems, like having this earthly paradise, that somehow Christians are rewarded, and especially martyrs were supposed to come alive and enjoy this thousand years on earth where they eat sumptuously every night and have all these material pleasures to make up for them having died. So that’s very problematic from a spiritual perspective, because it’s like… All that stuff is sort of secondary, right? New heavens, new earth—why? [Laughter] Some of the writings from those traditions end up getting incorporated, interestingly, into the Quran. If you look at the way heaven and paradise are talked about in the Quran, they draw on a lot of that literature, and a lot of the images are very sort of earthly paradise-type images that you find there, because they’re drawing on some of this literature.

So this view was seen as problematic, obviously. They said, “You’re taking these things too literally.” Worse than that, certain heretical groups—groups that were heretical for other reasons, other than this—were also chiliasts. That was sort of low on the list of their heretical beliefs, but it was still there. In particular, the Montanists—which has nothing to do with the state of Montana—were— Chiliasm was a huge part of their belief system. People started calling Montanism, because it emerged in Pontus, which happens to be where all these cities are—they called Montanism the Pontic heresy, and they were chiliasts. So Montanism, the core of Montanism was there was this fellow, Montanus, whom it’s named after, who traveled around with two female “prophetesses”—not sus at all—and claimed that he was the promised paraclete, that when Christ promised that another comforter would come after he departed, he didn’t mean the Holy Spirit at Pentecost; he meant Montanus! [Laughter] That’s whom he was talking about.

And apparently they did a lot of— I’m trying to figure out how to do this without sounding pejorative again to our Protestant friends, but they did a lot of things related to speaking in tongues and things like that that are associated now with the charismatic movement. Obviously the two prophetesses claimed to be legit prophets, and he claimed to be this special being. They were incredibly morally rigorous, and this is what attracted a lot of people. This is something— A lot of times we look at, when we talk about the ancient world in this Bible study, we see that very few things have changed. This is definitely something that has changed, and I think it’s because of Freud. [Laughter] But in the ancient world, especially the Roman world, the stricter and even more brutal your asceticism was in your religion, the more people were into it. People had a super rigorous way of life, they were like: “Oh, we’re it.” St. Augustine even comments on this. He’s like: “Man, when it comes to fasting, we got nothing on the Manichees,” because they would virtually starve themselves to death. They’d be walking around pale and wasted looking. [Laughter] And that attracted converts in the Roman world! Nowadays, that won’t fly, man. Nowadays you go and try to evangelize people… I don’t know how the Mormons get people to give up coffee. We were talking about this earlier. You try and suggest, “Hey, you’re going to have to flagellate yourself three times a day,” people are going to be like: “Yeah, I’m out.” [Laughter] Not so much.

But that attracted a lot of people, including Tertullian, which is why Tertullian—you may have heard of him as an early Christian writer in the third century—he left the Church to become a Montanist because of that. It was because he thought the regular, run-of-the-mill Christians were too wishy-washy. They weren’t austere and ascetical enough for him. Some of them would go to chariot races and stuff. Eugh! [Laughter] So he went and became a Montanist; that’s why he’s not St. Tertullian, because he left the Church and joined this other group. They, of course, died out, but that’s who the Montanists were. They were chiliasts, and they were heretics associated with this part of the world.

And when people tried to debate them about chiliasm, what do you think they pointed to? Revelation of St. John, chapter 20. They said, “Oh no, see? St. John the Apostle was a chiliast. Look at this. Look at this.” Now, when we get there eventually—it’s going to take us a while, but when we get there eventually in St. John’s apocalypse, we’re going to see he’s not a chiliast; that’s not what he’s talking about. But they were pointing at that.

And add to that, there were a number of churches that had not received the Revelation of St. John. So it was very commonly read in Pontus, this area, what’s now Asia Minor, what’s now Turkey, basically; in Alexandria it was very popular—but that was mostly it. So these other churches that hadn’t heard of it, the first thing they’re hearing about it is: it teaches chiliasm, and those crazy Montanists like it. [Laughter] So they were suspicious of it, and there were a lot of people who wanted to reject it because of that. Well, they had a problem, because we have all—they had even more than we do—all these second-century Church Fathers. So if you’re in the third and fourth century, you have all these people closer to the apostles than you, who are all saying, “Oh, yeah, St. John wrote it!” Same author and all this. So how do you get around that?

First you just got a blanket “Oh no, he didn’t write it.” I mean, you can just deny everything, but when you get to someone like Eusebius of Caesarea… Eusebius of Caesarea was the one who wrote the history of the Church up to the fourth century, wrote the biography of St. Constantine. He was a little more serious than that. He was a scholar of the day in the fourth century, so if he’s going to write the history of the Christian Church, he can’t just hand-wave away all of these second-century writers who are telling him that St. John wrote it. So he had to try to find a way to separate the book of Revelation from St. John’s gospel and the epistles of St. John which he accepted, because he wants to reject Revelation. He’s got to make daylight. And he does this by inventing an imaginary friend. I bring this up because you will still see people citing Eusebius on this and arguing this to this day.

Eusebius wants to do this. So this is his motivation. He’s motivated here. He’s not unbiased. He’s tried to get this daylight there. And so he finds this passage in Papias, who as we said was writing, knew St. John and his writing, at the end of the first, beginning of the second century. We’ve lost the bigger text that this is from, but Eusebius quotes it. Just working from Eusebius’s quote, we can see that this is an imaginary friend, but— So in one sense, Papias refers to the apostles he had met. He lists them. “I met this apostle, this apostle, met John…” Then in the next sentence he says, “And I’ve passed down all the teachings I’ve received from—” and then he lists a bunch of other people, but the first person he lists in that other-people list is John the Elder, John the Presbyter.

Eusebius jumps on this and says, “Aha! There are two different people named John. So this second guy, this John the Elder, he’s the one who wrote the book of Revelation.” Now, Papias did not say that this second person wrote the book of Revelation; he’s not talking about the book of Revelation, at all. So even if Papias was talking about two different people named John—and it’s not like it was a super uncommon name, so there could’ve been two different people named John—that has nothing to do with who wrote Revelation. But Eusebius just sort of crafts this John the Elder, author of Revelation, out of whole cloth to solve his problem. “No, this was written by this other guy, and we don’t know anything about this other guy. We don’t trust him; he’s not an apostle, so get rid of that, keep the gospel, keep the epistles.”

I telegraphed this before, but here’s one problem with it. Remember how 2 and 3 John are addressed from the elder, presbyter? So we know this is a title that St. John—because Eusebius accepts these two letters as being from St. John the Apostle. So that’s a problem.

There’s also the problem that Papias doesn’t even say these are two different people. He says, “Here are the apostles I met”: end of sentence, period. “I have passed down everything I was taught by—John the Elder, these other people.” So it’s entirely possible—indeed, rather likely, I think, based on the testimony of all those other Church Fathers—that this is the same person; that St. John is both one of the apostles that Papias met, but, unlike those other apostles he met, St. John was his teacher, whom he spent time with. He didn’t just meet him in passing.

Nevertheless, people for the last 150 years or so, starting mainly with our German friends in the 19th century, have seized on this in Eusebius to try and say, “Oh, Revelation was written by somebody else,” because journal articles have to be published, books have to be written, dissertations… But that’s all based on nothing.

So what happens with the book of Revelation, then, later in Church history? Well, the book of Revelation ends up becoming canonical based on plagiarism.

Q1: Based on whom?

Fr. Stephen: Plagiarism!

Q1: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Quite literally, in both West and East, two acts of plagiarism. St. Jerome was rather fond of it and translated it into Latin, and so he picked up—this is fifth century—a commentary of the book of Revelation written by a chiliast, took it, stripped out all the chiliasm, edited out all the chiliasm, republished it under his own name, and that is how the West started to accept the book, the Western Church came to accept the book of Revelation: on St. Jerome’s authority, based on his commentary. It happened in the West a little earlier, and we shouldn’t think St. Jerome published that and everybody’s instantly like: “Oh, good! I’m good with Revelation. Put it in the Bible.” It happened over time, but that was sort of the turning point.

Same thing in the East, but even later. In the sixth century, St. Andrew of Caesarea found this commentary by a Greek fellow named Oecumenius, who also was a chiliast and wrote a commentary on the book of Revelation, and St. Andrew ripped out all the chiliasm, republished it under his own name. [Laughter] And it started to gain acceptance, and so then gradually over time again—that was the turning point in the sixth century. Churches started signing on to the book of Revelation.

Now, it took a long time in the East, because, for example, in the ninth century, beginning of the ninth century, so the beginning of the 800s AD, St. Nikephoros the Confessor of Constantinople, who suffered under the iconoclast emperors—that’s why he’s the Confessor—he was the patriarch of Constantinople, and he wrote a list of the books that were canonical, authoritative, Old and New Testament, and also the books that were sort of Bible-adjacent, like some of the books we were talking about earlier. He says these aren’t read publicly in the Church, but they’re read privately. And, by the way, that’s where the word “apocrypha” comes from. The word “apocrypha” you’ve probably heard means hidden or secret. That’s kind of overtranslated, because these books are not hidden or secret. Like, you could go read them. It’s private as opposed to public. You don’t read them out in the church; you read them privately, apocryphally. [Laughter]

But he lists those books, and when he lists the Old and New Testament books, he lists: “Here’s all the books that all the churches agree about. Here’s the ones that they disagree about.” And they’re pretty much the ones you— Like with the Old Testament, it’s pretty much the ones you’d expect. He’s like: “Okay, some churches aren’t using 3 Maccabees, and some aren’t using 4 Ezra.” Those kind of things are in the “some people and not others.” He still includes the Apocalypse of St. John in those books accepted by some and not others, in the ninth century still. So it took a long time.

But this is why you’ll hear a lot of folk explanations as to why we don’t read the book of Revelation, like in the regular liturgy in the Orthodox Church. This is the actual reason. It wasn’t really accepted until very late. So by the time it was really accepted, our lectionary had kind of taken its form. So that’s why, if you follow the readings, the daily readings, for the New Testament in the Orthodox Church, you’ll read through the whole New Testament every year except the book of Revelation! [Laughter] Because it was just accepted by everyone too late to gain sort of universal acceptance. It is now universally accepted in the Orthodox Church. That’s why it’s in the Orthodox Study Bible.

Q2: Is it read in the Roman Church at all, in the services?

Fr. Stephen: I think— There are some exceptions in the Orthodox Church, too. Now, we’re not in communion with the Copts, but the Coptic Church reads the whole thing on Pascha night.

Participants: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: All the way through. Yeah, you think our services are long… [Laughter] The Copts, just, I don’t know— Maybe they save on rent by just living in the church? [Laughter] But they have some long services!

And it’s read on a certain feast day on the isle of Patmos, where St. John received the vision. There are a few places in the Orthodox Church where it’s read. I think it’s in the Western lectionary somewhere, or at least parts of it. I don’t think all of it is. Like, I don’t think they have a day where they read about the beast from the earth and the beast from the sea and stuff, but I think some of the stuff like the letters to the seven churches and some of that is in the—

I’m not going to be able to say, “Sorry, Calvinists,” as much, going through this book, because John Calvin, like, wrote commentary on the first seven chapters and then threw his hands up in the air. It’s the only book of the Bible he didn’t write a commentary on, and he literally said after the first seven chapters, “I don’t know what to do with the rest of this!” [Laughter] It would be— I’d be guessing, so I’m not even going to bother.

Q3: What is it in the funeral liturgy? “God will wipe away the tears from their eyes…”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there are references to it. Yeah, yeah. But we never have: “The reading is from the Revelation of St. John” in the regular cycle. [Laughter]

So that’s sort of— It has this long road to becoming canonical, which is kind of peculiar. If you really want to nerd out on this, the magisterial source on this is Dr. Jeannie Constantinou, who has the show for Ancient Faith Radio: her doctoral dissertation was on this, the reception history of the book of Revelation in the East. And it’s been published. It’s published in paperback as—Guiding to a Blessed Endis the title, but I understand it’s one of those academic books that’s very expensive in paperback. [Laughter] And kind of prohibitively so. So maybe interlibrary loan or something, if you super want to nerd out about this. But she has— I mean, it’s a doctoral dissertation, so it’s all there. And as part of that, she did a new translation of St. Andrew of Caesarea’s commentary, that was published in the “Fathers of the Church” series that Catholic University Press does. So, yeah. If you want more on that bit…

But so, despite all that—that’s all sort of historical circumstance—the case, if we just go back to the second century and the people who knew, the people directly connected to St. John, it’s very clear when and where and by whom it was written, when we go back that far.

So, with that being the genre of literature, that being the time when it’s written, the place, as we just mentioned, was the isle of Patmos, which is a place to which St. John was exiled.

Q4: So it’s not written in Ephesus.

Fr. Stephen: Right. He was exiled there by the Romans. The Romans had a salt mine there. [Laughter] So it was sort of a prison work colony, and St. John was sent into exile there for a period of years during one of the periodic persecutions of Christians, and that’s where he receives this vision. You can go there. There is a monastery there. You can go to the cave where St. John had his vision on Patmos to this day.

When you take all that together, where is this going if it’s not talking about the end of the world? And if you think about it, that doesn’t make sense anyway. Why would St. John have a vision of something that was going to happen minimally 2,000 years in the future, as we now know, and send it with cover letters to a bunch of churches in Asia Minor that weren’t going to live anywhere near it? “Hey, guys, I just want to send you a bunch of riddles that you won’t be able understand until Jack Van Impe is born and can explain them to you.” Right? [Laughter] Or fill in the blank: Hal Lindsey, whomever you’d like to use. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. I don’t think it makes a lick of sense, but—

So this is something he’s writing to them, we actually have to say: to people alive at the time. What’s being revealed is the spiritual reality behind what is happening at the time, but not only at the time, because in the same way that I said someone like St. John in one of these visions would be taken on this sort of tour of the cosmos, that’s also not limited to a snapshot in terms of time.

If you read the book of Enoch, Enoch doesn’t just get: “Hey, this is what things are like three generations before the flood” or whatever. [Laughter] Enoch gets taken on this tour. He also sees history. He sees the history going back to Adam and Eve. He sees the history of Israel going into the future in what’s called the Animal Apocalypse, which is not, like, a meat factory or something; it’s not me at a barbecue buffet. The Animal Apocalypse is— There are animals that represent different historical figures. But in there it’s the whole history of Israel up to the birth of the Messiah. This is cross-temporal, too.

So we have people like St. John—St. John is a leader in these communities centered around Ephesus. They’re facing persecution. Their leader, St. John, has been sent into exile by the Romans. Things look bad! The Romans are oppressing them; they’re martyring people. They’re trying to live this Christian life. They’ve been told Christ is going to return and establish justice in the world. They’re not seeing a lot of justice in the world. This hasn’t happened yet.

Q3: [Inaudible] is the emperor, right?

Fr. Stephen: Um, there’s debate. Probably Domitian. So they’re facing all this, and St. John receives this vision, and this vision shows him how— this spiritual element of how the world functions that includes some of the past, regarding Christ; that includes some of the future—but it’s centered on what’s going on right then. But, we’re also going to see, St. John writes this book the same way he wrote his other books, meaning he loops and he cycles. So we’re going to see these cycles, like of sevens. There’s seven trumpets, and then when the seventh trumpet blows, they wheel out seven bowls, and then they pour out the seven bowls, and then there’s seven seals. These things just keep looping and looping and looping around, because the idea is, just like St. John said in 1 John, “You’ve heard an antichrist is coming and already antichrists (plural) have come,” sort of come in that spirit.

St. John is going to talk about: Yes, there are these things at the end of the world—there is an end of the world; there’s an ultimate end of the world—but these things are already playing out now. They have been, and they will be, until that time comes. So it’s: This is how the world works in this age.

We’ve talked beefore about how, in this New Testament theology, the coming of Christ—his death, his resurrection, his ascension—begins what they called beforehand the messianic age. And they were waiting for a messiah to come; the messiah was going to inaugurate a messianic age. That’s sort of the last age before the end. We talked about that’s why they referred to it as the last days, that this is the last age before the end. So St. John has revealed to him: Here’s how this age works. Here’s what’s going on backstage, behind what you’re seeing play out. So that when the people who are facing persecution, trials, and struggles, see what’s going on behind the scenes and where it’s going to end up, they can take heart, be comforted, remain steadfast in their faithfulness at the time.

So if that’s the original function, if this vision is given to St. John so that he can write it down, so that these people can receive it in that way, then that has to guide how we interpret it, that it’s given to us for a similar reason. It’s not given to us to predict the future; it’s not given to us so we can figure out when Jesus is coming back; play “pin the tail on the antichrist”—“Oh! It’s Juan Carlos, King of Spain! Oops, he died. Uhh… Someone else in the EU…” [Laughter] That’s not why. It’s for that same purpose: so that we, when we’re facing struggles, when we’re facing oppression, when we see sort of horror unfolding in the world, economic distress unfolding in the world—when we see these things unfolding in the world and afflicting us, we can know what’s going on behind the scenes and where this all ends up, so that we can take heart and we can become more steadfast in our faithfulness. That’s what this is aimed at, and that’s sort of the interpretive key for what I’m going to be doing all the way through in terms of how we interpret and apply this.

We’re going to begin, when we start next time—we’re going to see the beginning of the vision. I don’t know how long this is going to take. I have a feeling this is going to move pretty slow to explain things. [Laughter] But after that, after the sort of initiation of the vision, we’ll get into the letters to the seven churches. Those probably were not all originally attached together; those probably— We’ll talk more about this, but those probably were each attached as a cover letter when a copy of this was sent to each church. So when it was later gathered together to all circulate as a whole, all seven letters were included, sort of in the whole. But we’ll get more into all those things as we go. I won’t do those now.

I think that’s it for our introduction. There will be plenty more stuff once we dive in next time.