Revelation: My Name on the First Line

At a Glance

Who wrote it: A Christian prophet named John, writing to seven churches in the Roman province of Asia. Later tradition said he was my apostle John. The book never says so, and most scholars think he was someone else.

When: Most likely around AD 95, under the emperor Domitian. Some scholars argue for the late 60s, just after Nero.

Written for: Seven churches in the Roman province of Asia, under social and sometimes official pressure to honor the emperor. It told them that the Lamb, not Rome, rules, and that Rome would not last.

What it remembers of me: Almost nothing of my life on earth. Only that I came from the line of David (5:5), had twelve apostles (21:14), was pierced (1:7), was crucified in the great city (11:8), and rose from the dead (1:5). It pictures me as a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain (5:6).

How close it stays to me: Close on empire and on God’s kingdom coming to earth. Far on enemies.

If you only read three chapters: Revelation 5, Revelation 18 and Revelation 21.

Words to Know

Apocalypse — from the Greek word for uncovering. It is the first word of this book. It is also the name of a whole kind of Jewish writing that talks about empires in code, through beasts, numbers and visions.

Patmos — a small island in the Aegean Sea, off the coast of what is now Turkey, where the writer says he was when he saw his vision.

Babylon — the empire that burned Jerusalem’s first temple. By the time of this book, Jewish and Christian writers used the name as a code word for Rome.

Gematria — counting a name as a number. In Hebrew and Greek, letters were also used as numerals, so every name added up to a sum.

Antichrist — a word that does not appear anywhere in Revelation. It turns up only in the short letters of John.¹

The Book in Brief

John, a Christian prophet, writes to seven churches in Asia. On the island of Patmos he hears a loud voice and turns to see me, standing among seven golden lampstands. I say that I am the first and the last, that I was dead, and that I am alive forever. He is to write down what he sees.

Chapters 2 and 3 are seven short letters, to Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea. Each praises, warns or both, and each ends with a promise to the one who overcomes.

In chapter 4 a door opens in heaven, and John sees a throne with twenty-four elders and four living creatures around it, all worshiping. In chapter 5 the one on the throne holds a scroll sealed with seven seals, and no one is worthy to open it. Then I appear as a Lamb that looks as if it has been slain, and I take it.

In chapters 6 to 8 the seals are opened. Four riders go out, bringing conquest, war, famine and death, and the martyrs cry out for justice. Chapter 7 shows 144,000 sealed from the tribes of Israel, and then a crowd no one can count, from every nation. Seven angels blow seven trumpets in chapters 8 to 11, and disaster after disaster strikes the earth.

Chapters 12 to 14 tell of a woman about to give birth, and a dragon waiting to devour her child. The child is taken up to God, and the dragon is thrown down. He gives his power to a beast from the sea, whose number is 666, and a second beast makes everyone worship the first. I stand on Mount Zion with the 144,000, and an angel announces that Babylon has fallen. In chapters 15 and 16, seven bowls of God’s anger are poured out, and the kings of the earth are gathered at the place that is called in Hebrew Megiddo, or Armageddon.

Chapters 17 and 18 show a woman called Babylon the great, seated on the beast and drunk with the blood of the saints. She falls, and the kings, merchants and sailors who grew rich from her mourn. In chapter 19 heaven celebrates, and a rider on a white horse defeats the beast. Chapter 20 brings a thousand years, a last battle and the judgment of the dead.

In chapters 21 and 22 John sees a new heaven and a new earth, and the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven. God lives with people, and there is no more death or crying. A river runs through the city, and the tree beside it heals the nations. The book ends with my promise that I am coming quickly.

The first word of this book is apokalypsis. The next two are my name.

This is the Revelation of Jesus Christ (Revelation 1:1).

I did not write it.

A man named John wrote it, and he tells you his name four times. He says he was on an island called Patmos “because of God’s Word and the testimony of Jesus Christ” (Revelation 1:9), which most readers take to mean he had been sent there for preaching. He never says he was one of my twelve. When he mentions the twelve apostles, he mentions them the way you talk about people you are not (Revelation 21:14).²

One small thing before we go on, because it tells you who has actually opened the book. It is called Revelation. One revelation. There is no s on the end. When someone tells you what “Revelations” says, ask him to open it to the first page.

It was mail.

Before the beasts and the trumpets, before anything you have seen on a church sign, the book tells you what it is.

It is a letter. It is addressed to seven real congregations in seven real cities in the Roman province of Asia: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea (Revelation 1:4, 1:11). It was meant to be read out loud in their meetings. It even blesses the one who reads it aloud and the ones who hear it (Revelation 1:3).

Chapters 2 and 3 are seven short letters, one to each church, and they are full of local detail.

Laodicea was a rich city. When an earthquake knocked it down around the year 60, the Roman historian Tacitus noted that it rebuilt itself from its own wealth, without help from Rome.³ Now read what the letter says to the church there:

Because you say, “I am rich, and have gotten riches, and have need of nothing;” and don’t know that you are the wretched one, miserable, poor, blind, and naked (Revelation 3:17).

Smyrna got the opposite letter: I know your works, oppression, and your poverty (but you are rich) (Revelation 2:9).

Pergamum is the city “where Satan’s throne is” (Revelation 2:13). Pergamum had one of the first temples in the province built for the worship of Rome and the emperor.⁴ A man named Antipas had already been killed there.

Look at what these seven letters are about. They are not about dates or world events. They are about whether a small congregation would bend to keep its place in town, eat at the guild feasts, keep its head down and get along (Revelation 2:14, 2:20). They are about whether it had grown comfortable.

Most people with charts for this book skip these two chapters. They are the chapters that ask the most of the person reading.

Go deeperLaodicea: money, wool and lukewarm water

The letter to Laodicea has a famous line: So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of my mouth (Revelation 3:16). Preachers often say it was about the city’s water.

Here is the case. Laodicea stood in a valley with no good spring of its own. Across the valley, about six miles north, the hot springs of Hierapolis poured down the white cliffs. Laodicea’s water came by aqueduct from springs to the south, and the remains of the system are thick with limestone. Water that traveled that far would arrive lukewarm and heavy with minerals. A reader could see in that a picture of a church that is neither hot, like healing springs, nor cold, like a drink on a summer day.⁵

I notice that my letter never mentions water. It says, I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot (Revelation 3:15). Hot water and cold water are both useful, and lukewarm is neither. The point may be only that a church can become of no use to anyone.

Either way, the city behind the letter is real. Laodicea was rich enough to rebuild itself after its earthquake without help from Rome.³ The geographer Strabo, writing in my lifetime, praised its sheep and the glossy black wool they gave.⁶ And the church was told, I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, that you may become rich; and white garments, that you may clothe yourself (Revelation 3:18). In a city of money and cloth, the advice was to buy from me.

When it was written

Irenaeus, a bishop writing around 180, said the vision was seen near the end of the reign of the emperor Domitian, which ended in 96. Most scholars accept a date close to that. Some argue for an earlier date, just after Nero, in the late 60s. Either way, it was written somewhere between thirty-five and sixty-five years after I died, by a man living under Rome.⁷

Domitian liked to be addressed as “our Lord and God.”⁸ In the cities of Asia, temples to the emperors stood in the middle of town, and offering incense before the emperor’s image was what a loyal person did. About fifteen years after this book, a Roman governor in the next province over wrote to the emperor Trajan to say he was executing Christians who refused to do it.⁹

Be careful here, because the old story is told bigger than it was. Historians no longer think Domitian ran an empire-wide hunt for Christians. The pressure was local, social and about money. Your trade guild met under a patron god. Your neighbors noticed who stayed home from the festival. Sometimes a governor got involved. That is the world this book is talking to.

Go deeperTemples and guilds in the seven cities

Revelation was written to cities that were proud to honor Rome. The evidence is in the ground and in the old histories.

Pergamum had its temple to Rome and Augustus from 29 BC.⁴ Smyrna won a contest among the cities of Asia in AD 26 for the right to build a temple to the emperor Tiberius, his mother Livia and the Senate.¹⁰ Ephesus, the leading city of the province, built a large temple to the Flavian emperors, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian, dedicated about the year 90, and the city took the proud title temple-warden for it.¹¹

Then there were the guilds. Thyatira, home of the longest of the seven letters, is known from its inscriptions as a city of trade associations: wool-workers, linen-workers, dyers, leatherworkers, potters, bakers and bronze-smiths.¹² Lydia, the seller of purple whom Paul met in Philippi, came from Thyatira (Acts 16:14). A guild met for feasts, and a feast was held under the eye of a patron god.

That is the world behind the charge that a woman in Thyatira, whom the letter calls Jezebel, teaches and seduces my servants to commit sexual immorality, and to eat things sacrificed to idols (Revelation 2:20). A believer who belonged to the bakers’ guild could not easily skip the dinner that began with a prayer to the guild’s god. The pressure was quiet. Refusing might not cost a life. It could cost your trade, your friends and your place in town.

I recognize almost every piece of it.

Revelation is built out of the scriptures I grew up on. It borrows from Daniel, Ezekiel, Zechariah, Isaiah, Exodus and the Psalms on nearly every page. It has hundreds of echoes and not one formal quotation.¹³ Its writer eats a scroll the way Ezekiel did (Ezekiel 3:1–3; Revelation 10:9–10). Its plagues are the plagues of Egypt.

And its beasts come from Daniel.

In Daniel, four beasts rise out of the sea: a lion, a bear, a leopard and a fourth with ten horns. Daniel is told plainly what they are. They are kings. They are empires (Daniel 7:3–8, 7:17).

In Revelation, a beast rises out of the sea with ten horns. It is like a leopard, with feet like a bear’s and a mouth like a lion’s (Revelation 13:1–2). The writer took Daniel’s four empires and rolled them into one.

That is the kind of book this is. It is called apocalyptic, and in my time my people had a whole shelf of it. You write about the empire as a monster because you cannot safely write about the empire by name. Every listener in those seven churches knew that a beast meant a kingdom, because Daniel had told them so.

The code was not hard for them.

The book all but tells you who the beast is.

The woman who rides the beast is seated on seven mountains (Revelation 17:9). Rome was the city on seven hills, and everybody in the empire knew it.

She is “the great city, which reigns over the kings of the earth” (Revelation 17:18). In that century there was exactly one.

Her name is Babylon. Babylon was the empire that burned the first temple in Jerusalem. Rome burned the second one in the year 70. After that, Jewish and Christian writers called Rome “Babylon” in other books too, including the first letter of Peter, which most scholars date after 70 (1 Peter 5:13).¹⁴

Then the number.

He who has understanding, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. His number is six hundred sixty-six (Revelation 13:18).

“Calculate” means exactly that. Hebrew letters were also numbers. Write “Nero Caesar” in Hebrew letters, spelled the way it was spelled in that period, and the letters add up to 666. Spell Nero the Latin way, without the final n, and they add up to 616.

Some of the oldest copies of Revelation say 616. A papyrus fragment from Egypt, copied in the late 200s, reads 616. Irenaeus, around 180, knew of copies that read 616 and thought they were mistakes.¹⁵ The likeliest explanation is that a copyist who knew the riddle changed the number to match the spelling he used.

That does not prove the beast is Nero. It is the answer most scholars find strongest, and nothing else fits as well.

Here is what else fits. Nero had killed Christians in Rome after the great fire of 64. He died in 68, by a blade to his own throat. Afterwards a rumor spread that he was not really dead, or that he would come back, and more than one impostor turned up claiming to be him.¹⁶ Now read the beast. One of its heads had a mortal wound that was healed (Revelation 13:3). It “had the sword wound and lived” (Revelation 13:14). It “was, and is not; and is about to come up out of the abyss” (Revelation 17:8).

The first readers did not need a decoder ring. They were living inside the code.

Go deeperWhen names were numbers

Adding up a name was a game, and not only for scholars. Greek and Hebrew had no separate digits. Every letter was also a number, so every word added up to a sum. The Greeks called the game isopsephy.

It turns up on walls. In Pompeii, a town buried in AD 79, someone scratched a love note that names the girl only by a number.¹⁷ In Nero’s own reign a Greek line went around Rome that said, in effect, “A new calculation: Nero killed his own mother.” The letters of Nero in Greek add up to 1005, and so do the letters of the Greek words for killed his own mother.¹⁸

Christians played too. An early Christian poem in the Sibylline Oracles hides my name in a number. The Greek letters of Iēsous, Jesus, add up to 888.¹⁹

So the first readers of Revelation knew how the game worked. They needed only the name. We have to guess it, and the ancient guessers did not agree. Irenaeus, who knew copies reading 666, did not name Nero. He suggested Lateinos, “the Latin man,” and Teitan, “Titan,” both of which also add up to 666 in Greek, and then said that it was safer to wait than to guess.²⁰ Nero is still the answer most scholars find strongest, because Nero Caesar in Hebrew letters fits and because of the stories of his return. It is a good inference. It is not a proof.

What it actually says

Here is the turn the whole book hangs on.

In chapter 5, a sealed scroll is held out and nobody is worthy to open it, and John weeps. An elder tells him to stop crying, because the Lion who is of the tribe of Judah has overcome.

So John turns to look at the lion.

And he sees a lamb, standing, as though it had been slain (Revelation 5:5–6).

He hears lion. He sees lamb. That is the book. The one who wins is the one who was killed and did not kill back. His followers win the same way. They overcame “because of the Lamb’s blood, and because of the word of their testimony. They didn’t love their life, even to death” (Revelation 12:11).

The same thing happens in chapter 7. John hears a number: 144,000, twelve thousand from each tribe of Israel. Then he looks, and he sees a crowd that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language (Revelation 7:4, 7:9). Many readers have noticed the pattern. What he hears is the old expectation. What he sees is what it turned into.

Even in the battle near the end, the rider on the white horse carries a sword, and it comes out of his mouth (Revelation 19:15, 19:21). His weapon is his word. I once told Peter to put his sword away. The man on Patmos understood that much.

Then read chapter 18, which is almost never preached. Babylon falls, and the people who weep for her are the kings, the merchants and the ship owners, because nobody buys their cargo anymore. Then the writer lists the cargo: gold, silver, jewels, pearls, fine linen, purple, silk, ivory, cinnamon, incense, wine, oil, wheat, sheep, horses, chariots, and, at the very end, people’s bodies and souls (Revelation 18:11–13).

The last item on the list is people.

And here is the instruction the book gives its readers about living in Babylon: Come out of her, my people, that you have no participation in her sins (Revelation 18:4). It does not ask you to read the news for signs. It asks you to stop living off an empire that trades in human beings.

Then look where the book ends. Nobody is carried up and away. The new city comes down, out of heaven, to the earth (Revelation 21:2). “God’s dwelling is with people” (Revelation 21:3). There is no temple in it (Revelation 21:22). Its gates are never shut (Revelation 21:25). The kings of the earth, the same kings who stood with the beast a few chapters earlier, walk in (Revelation 21:24). And the leaves of the tree beside the river are “for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2).

The problem with “soon”

I will be honest about something that cuts against the writer.

He said it was soon. The book opens with “the things which must happen soon” and “the time is at hand” (Revelation 1:1, 1:3). It closes with “Yes, I come quickly” (Revelation 22:20). He meant his own listeners. He was writing to people squeezed by Rome and telling them it would not last.

He was right that Rome would not last. He was not right that the end of everything was near. He wrote that more than nineteen hundred years ago.

When my own friends asked me for the date, I told them that nobody knows the day or the hour, not the angels in heaven, not even me (Mark 13:32). Every person who has pulled a calendar out of this book has had to forget I said that.

There is a second thing I must say plainly. The martyrs under the altar cry out, How long, Master, the holy and true, until you judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth? (Revelation 6:10). When Babylon falls, heaven is told, Rejoice over her (Revelation 18:20). I told my followers to love their enemies and to pray for those who persecute them (Matthew 5:44). The Lamb who wins by dying is close to that. A book that longs to see its enemies fall is far from it.

The church never fully trusted it.

You may assume this book was always at the heart of the Bible. It was not.

Around 250, Dionysius, the bishop of Alexandria, studied its Greek and concluded that the man who wrote it could not be the man who wrote the Gospel of John. The style was too different and the Greek too rough. He did not throw it out. He said honestly that its meaning was beyond him.²¹

For centuries, many churches in the eastern half of the empire left it off their lists. The old Syriac Bible did not include it. To this day, the Orthodox churches do not read from it in their Sunday liturgy. It is the only book of the New Testament left out of that cycle.²²

Martin Luther wrote in 1522 that his spirit could not fit itself into this book, and that Christ was neither taught nor known in it. He softened that later.²³ John Calvin wrote commentaries on nearly every book of the New Testament. He never wrote one on Revelation.²⁴

It is in your Bible. It nearly was not. Some of the most serious readers the church ever had came to it with their guard up.

What people have done with it

The record is long, and every entry ends the same way.

In the 170s a prophet named Montanus renamed a village in Phrygia called Pepuza “Jerusalem,” and his movement came to expect the new Jerusalem to come down there.²⁵ It did not.

In 1534 radical reformers took over the German city of Münster, declared it the New Jerusalem and waited for the end. Their prophet predicted it for Easter. When Easter came and nothing happened, he rode out against the army besieging the city with a handful of men and was killed. Another leader then crowned himself king. The city fell in 1535, and the leaders’ bodies were hung in iron cages from a church tower. The cages are still there.²⁶

In the 1840s thousands of Americans followed William Miller, who worked mainly from the book of Daniel, the book Revelation borrows from. One of his followers fixed the date at October 22, 1844. Some believers left their crops in the field. What followed is still called the Great Disappointment.²⁷

In 1993, in Waco, Texas, David Koresh taught that he was the Lamb who could open the seven seals. When his compound burned at the end of a siege, seventy-six people died, about two dozen of them children.²⁸

In 2011 a radio preacher named Harold Camping paid for billboards announcing that the end would come on May 21. When it did not, he moved the date to October 21.²⁹

And every generation has been handed its beast. First it was Nero. Then the Reformers named the popes. After that came Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, and a long parade of presidents, prime ministers, bar codes and microchips. The name most of them reached for was Antichrist, a word that is not in this book. And the beast has never once turned out to live in the reader’s own house.

Go deeperWays to read Revelation, and the rapture

Readers have taken four main roads through this book.

Preterist, from the Latin word for past, reads most of it as about the writer’s own day, with Rome and its emperors as the beast. The writer said soon, and this road takes him at his word.

Historicist reads it as a map of church history from John’s day to the end. Joachim of Fiore, a monk who died in 1202, read it this way, and so did the Reformers who named the pope as the beast.³⁰

Futurist reads chapters 4 to 22 as events still to come, just before the end.

Idealist reads the visions as pictures of a struggle that repeats in every age, between the Lamb and the powers that rule the world.

Two Spanish Jesuits, Francisco Ribera and Luis de Alcázar, developed the futurist and preterist roads around 1600, partly to answer Protestants who said the pope was the beast.³¹ Most scholarly commentaries today begin with the first readers, though they differ on the rest.³²

The rapture. The idea that believers will be lifted off the earth before a time of great trouble is not in Revelation, and neither is the word. It comes from a verse in Paul: then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air (1 Thessalonians 4:17). In the Latin Bible, caught up is rapiemur. In the 1830s John Nelson Darby, a leader of the Plymouth Brethren, taught that this would happen before the tribulation that Revelation describes. His teaching spread through the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909, Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970, and the Left Behind novels from 1995.³³

Other Christians read the thousand years of chapter 20 differently. Augustine, in the early 400s, taught that they were the age of the church, already under way, and not a future reign.³⁴

Why sensible people lose their heads over it

It is fair to ask why. The people who do this are not foolish in the rest of their lives. They run businesses and raise children and pay their bills on time. So what is it about this book?

It is hard to read, and hard books get handed to experts. The moment you need a man with a chart to explain a letter, the man with the chart matters more than the letter.

It turns bad news into good news. Wars, earthquakes and plagues stop being frightening and start being proof that the plan is on schedule. That is a very comfortable feeling, and it is easy to sell.

It puts you at the end of the story. Nobody wants to live somewhere in the middle. Every generation has believed it was the last chapter, and every generation has been wrong.

It hands you an enemy with a number on him, and he never looks like you. He is always across the border, or in the other party, or in the other church.

It feels like secret knowledge. Working out who the beast is feels like being let in on something. A puzzle is more fun than a letter, especially a letter that calls you lukewarm.

Fear sells. Books, films, radio programs, gold coins and buckets of canned food have all been sold on the back of this book, and the people selling them are rarely the ones waiting on the mountain.

And the last reason is the real one. If the world is about to end, you are excused. You do not have to come out of Babylon, because Babylon is about to fall on its own. You do not have to free anyone, feed anyone or fix anything. You only have to be on the right list.

The man on Patmos would be appalled. He wrote to seven small churches to tell them that the emperor was not God. He told them that the lamb wins and not the lion, that comfort is a danger and poverty is no shame, and that the city of God comes down to earth with its gates open.

He did not write it so you could watch the news with a chart in your lap.

He wrote it so you would stop bowing.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Revelation 1:1–3, then Revelation 22:20.

You will find: “soon” at the beginning and “quickly” at the end, written to people who died more than nineteen hundred years ago.

Then read chapters 2 and 3 straight through. Which of the seven churches sounds most like yours?

The Short Version

• Revelation, one revelation with no s, is a letter to seven real churches in the Roman province of Asia. A man named John, who saw his vision on Patmos, wrote it most likely around 95.
• It belongs to a known kind of Jewish writing that talks about empires in code, and it borrows its beasts from Daniel.
• Babylon is Rome, the seven hills are Rome, and 666 most likely spells Nero, which is why some old copies read 616.
• Its central picture is a slain lamb, not a lion, and its ending brings God’s city down to earth.
• Many early churches doubted it, and everyone who has used it to set a date has been wrong.