PREMISE: Clewis,
PLEASE DO
N'T WRITE IN THIS THREAD TO POPULARIZE YOUR STUPID BOOK.
John the Baptist, in the his Judaizing version, was the original author of Revelation 12, of which I will give the original exegesis:
12 A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. 2 She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. 3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. 4 Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. 5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.” And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. 6 The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.
7 Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. 8 But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. 9 The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.
10 Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
“Now have come the salvation and the power
and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down.
11
They triumphed over him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.
12
Therefore rejoice, you heavens
and you who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea,
because the devil has gone down to you!
He is filled with fury,
because he knows that his time is short.”
13 When the dragon saw that he had been hurled to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. 14 The woman was given the two wings of a great eagle, so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the wilderness, where she would be taken care of for a time, times and half a time, out of the serpent’s reach. 15 Then from his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river, to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent. 16 But the earth helped the woman by opening its mouth and swallowing the river that the dragon had spewed out of his mouth. 17 Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring—those who keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus.
As early as 1907, Wellhausen saw in this dragon the Roman army which, from 67 to 70, led against the Jews an implacable war, the Celestial Woman is the community of the pious faithful who fled outside Jerusalem, awaiting their salvation of the coming coming of the Messiah, the "rest of her offspring" are the Zealots, who, relying only on themselves, organized the last resistance against Rome.
The point of the original text of Revelation is that the Messiah will come in the future, but he is not entirely in the future:
the Messiah is already born.
The author said that the Messiah child was ascended immediately to heaven just at his Birth to justify the fact that he is not still revealed in the his power.
Proto-John is the first gospel.
Because three reasons:
- 1) there is no trial before sinedrites, but only before Pilate
- 2) the episode Barabbas is a Judaizing parody just against the Son of Father of Proto-John (therefore proving that Mark comes after proto-John).
- 3) Proto-John is very closely related to the Johannine Apocalypse and particularly to its old part (Revelation 12) because it attributes to the public life of Jesus the duration of three and a half years, it speaks with insistence of the his presumed mother and who also represents for him the community of the faithful to God and of the Messiah, finally proto-John also presents Jesus under the figure of the sheperd.
But proto-John only takes up the apocalyptic tradition of Revelation in order to contrast it. For proto-John, the advent of Christ belongs to the past, the resurrection is currently taking place in every believer, the judgment is realized the same against unbelievers and the kingdom of God is instituted inside souls. All the technical terms of the Required are required, but with a new and entirely spiritual meaning. The shepherd in Revelation beats the nations with a rod of iron: he becomes in proto-John the good shepherd who dies for his sheep. The first will appear in a war triumph, on a white horse, the second also makes a triumphal, but peaceful, entry in Jerusalem on a donkey. One is given as "word" of God, but it is because "from his mouth comes out a sword to strike the nations", that is to say the divine sentence which will exterminate the wicked, the other is identified with the Philonian Logos, that is, the supreme wisdom that enlightens souls.
The Apocalypse exposed a thesis,
proto-John is the antithesis. The Synoptics are presented as a synthesis.
They materialize the evangelical tradition, which first presented itself as a Gnostic novel of a spiritual character, and they give it as a true and well attested story. They make, for example, the mother of Christ, who represents the Judeo-Christian community, the wife of the Northern Israel: Joseph. Carpenter is a misunderstanding of nazarene.