I was reading this article/blog post and wondered what other people thought. I've never before heard the idea that Revelations was about the destruction of Jerusalem and the various factions of early Christianity. It does make a lot more sense from that perspective though. And the hijacking of Revelations and it's true meaning being warped and discarded for political reasons again makes a lot of sense.
Her points #1 and #2 are largely correct. Revelation (aka Apocalypse) is primarily and predominantly about the first century. There's just a little bit in the end about heaven. This is not a new idea at all. It's an old idea that unfortunately got covered up by showman preachers' hype. But she's confused about the author. The Apostle John who accompanied Jesus and wrote a gospel and three New Testament epistles was later a mystic exiled on Patmos, and yes, he wrote it. Points #3 and #4 are garbage. To make an analogy, that's the scholarship equivalent of ki bunnies pretending that they're doing real martial arts. That's the scholarship equivalent of our "Bad M.A. Videos" thread here on MAP. You know, some people will never learn no matter how many opportunities you give them.
Naked, blatant, unashamed, unrepentant, closed-minded, "I've already made up my mind" bias. It's very tiresome and childish.
There's really no solid evidence that this is true, and there's a LOT of debate about it among historians and Biblical scholars. In fact, the same can be said of the Gospel of John itself. As for my take on the article, points 1 and 2 are pretty widely accepted. Point 3 is interesting, and certainly plausible. The text of Revelation presents a very different image of Jesus from that of the Gospels and the epistles. The writer of the blog decides to use the most incendiary wording and claim that the writer wasn't a Christian, but those aren't Pagels' words. What Pagel says is that the writer of Revelation isn't necessarily what we would call a Christian today, probably wasn't familiar with the Gospels, and disagreed with other groups of Christians, all of which make perfect sense considering when Revelation was written. Point 4 has been done to death. Yes, there are plenty of writings from the first couple centuries of Christianity that didn't make it into the Bible. If the Bible was a comprehensive catalogue of all Christian writings to that point, it would be the largest book ever written, spanning dozens of volumes. This isn't a great discovery and shouldn't surprise anyone.
The problem is that when you're a Christian there's been so much of this stuff since The Da Vinci Code (which has made everyone think they're an expert on early church history) that it DOES get incredibly tiresome. Fundamentally Revelation represents the cut-off point chronologically for the Bible. Most of the so called "gnostic gospels" are 60+ years younger than it, and typically show influences of other religions and ideas (gnosticism itself not being an entirely Christian concept).
^^ That. And it even precedes the DaVinci Code. "There's nothing new under the sun" concept. It would be analogous to the anti-evolution arguments. Haven't you heard the same thing a hundred times already, and dealt with it? What happens then when someone brings forth the same argument for the 101st time? Sure there is. Like with the poorly-named "synoptic problem," if you begin with silly premises you'll reach one conclusion, and if you begin with rational premises you'll reach another conclusion. It's all on where you start.
Anti-evolution arguments are easy to deal with. One simply points to the overwhelming body of evidence. Job done in time for tea and crumpets. You can't force people to believe. You can only offer your side of the argument.
As a non believer but someone who is fascinated by language and imagery, can one of the more knowledgeable people here explain a little of the background of religious thought on Revelations? I'm not sure I ever had any religious instruction on what any of it means, whereas parables etc were covered in great detail. Mitch
That's because it's a crazy book. It's weird, bizarre, and everything strange. This here section of the CCC summarizes a traditional view of Revelation, and if you want to know why I would say that when "The Book of Revelation" is not mentioned in those paragraphs, you'll find it in this forum, along with a whole bunch of other Roman Catholic resources. A more explicit Roman Catholic commentary is given here. Here's an Eastern Orthodox book about Revelation.
This is something that really can't be done on an internet forum as a 400 page book probably wouldn't be enough. Revelation is the single most divisive book in the Bible, and you can see why some people wanted it left out of the canon. There huge debates about single aspects of Revelation, and different church groups have very different beliefs. Of the main issues, millennialism is probably the biggest divide. Post-millennialism teaches that the events in Revelation describe the Roman purge of Israel in AD 70(ish) and the subsequent persecution of Christians, and the millennium rule refers to the golden age of church expansion that happened afterwards. A-millennialism teaches that Revelation contains some historical information and some allegorical information, and that the millennial kingdom is ongoing. Pre-millennialism teaches that the events of revelation are yet to happen. Amongst pre-millennialists there are then further splits over issues such as rapture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennialism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preterism
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An American history lesson. And it didn't help your cause that no one thinks you know what you're talking about on that subject.
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