The Genre of Revelation
... Revelation, in view of its audience, must also be set in the context of Greco-Roman prophecy ...
Hebrew protoapocalyptic and apocalyptic literature was highly synthetic in character; indeed it was rather like a vortex taking in materials from all directions, including from Greco-Roman sources from the Hellenistic era onward ... Certain social factors affected the development of apocalyptic literature, the chief of which seems to have been the social dislocation caused first by the exile, then by life under occupation in the Holy Land, by the loss of the Jewish war in the A.D. sixties, and perhaps lastly by the loss of the Bar Kokhba rebellion ...
The Society of Biblical Literature definition, arising out of its Seminar on Apocalyptic Literature...says that an apocalypse is “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world”.91 Present, mundane reality is interpreted in light of both the supernatural world and the future. For the book of Revelation this entails beginning with the present experiences of the churches and trying to help them interpret and endure those experiences given John’s visions of what is above and beyond. This is clearly minority literature written in a somewhat coded way for persons enduring some sort of crisis.
... Apocalyptic then is primarily a matter of the use of a distinctive form – visions with often bizarre and hyperbolic metaphors and images. Some apocalypses focus almost entirely on otherworldly journeys without saying much about the end of human history. In other words historical apocalypses are not the pattern for the whole genre.
The very heart of apocalyptic is the unveiling of secrets and truths about God’s perspective on a variety of subjects, including justice and the problem of evil, and what God proposes to do about such matters. This literature is the dominant form of prophecy in Jewish contexts from the second century B.C. to the second century A.D., and it reflects the authors’ belief that they lived in the age when earlier prophecies were being fulfilled, and, therefore, it was right to contemplate what God’s final answer and solution would be to the human dilemma. This dominance of apocalyptic also reflects the deeply held conviction that God’s people lived in dark times when God’s hand in matters and God’s will for believers were not perfectly evident. God’s plan had to be revealed like a secret for matters in human history were mysterious and complex.
It is my view that the major cause of the shift from traditional prophecy to apocalyptic during the era mentioned was not the absence of traditional-style oracular and sign prophets abroad (eg. John the Baptist) but the conviction that God’s people were living at the dawn of or actually in the eschatological age. The final things had already been set in motion, and under such circumstances it was appropriate to talk about the end of the end times. It is no accident that the historical apocalypses begin to disappear from Jewish literature after A.D. 70 ...
When one delves into Greek and Roman literature, one quickly learns that there was a widespread belief in the pagan world that dreams and visions were real means by which gods and demigods could reveal truths to and instruct human beings. But not just dreams and visions are pertinent to the discussion of how John’s audience would hear Revelation. There is also the oracular tradition in the Greco-Roman world about the succession of emperors and empires. We find this sort of material in the Sibylline Oracles. One example will suffice from the Eighth Sibylline Oracle, which seems to see the terminus of things in the reign of Hadrian and so comes from within twenty years of the date of Revelation:
When the sixth generation of Latin kings will complete its last life and leave its scepter, another king of this race will reign, who will rule over the entire earth, and hold power over the scepter; and he will rule well in accord with the command of the great god; the children and generation of children of this man will be safe from violation according to the prophecy of the cyclic time of years.
When there will have been fifteen kings of Egypt, then, when the phoenix of the fifth span of years will have come ... there will arise a race of destructive people, a race without laws, the race of the Hebrews. Then Ares will plunder Ares, and he will destroy the insolent boast of the Romans, for at time the luxuriant rule of the Romans will be destroyed, ancient queen over conquered cities. The plain of fertile Rome will no longer be victorious when rising to power from Asia, together with Ares, he comes. He will arise arranging all these things in the city from top to bottom. You will fill out three times three hundreds and forty and eight cycling years when an evil, violent, fate will come upon you, filling out your name
Sib. Or. 8.131–150; trans. D. Potter, Prophets and Emperors, p.104.
The sixth generation of Latin kings in all likelihood refers to the Flavians, with Nero being the sixth Caesar, who is in turn a part of the sixth generation (cf. the number 666 of the Neronian anti-Christ figure in Revelation). I refer to this example to show that the character of Revelation would not necessarily have seemed so foreign to the Gentile mind, which was well familiar with the notions of revelatory dreams, visions, and oracles about human history. A detailed knowledge of the Jewish practice of gematria would not be required to realize that various of the numbers in Revelation had symbolic significance. Jewish apocalyptic imagery offered a new twist, but the story was still about political matters and the rise and fall of rulers and realms and their times and seasons. This larger Greco-Roman context also makes clear that it would be unlikely for John’s audience to see his work as not historically referential. Rather, it would be viewed as some sort of symbolic but nonetheless prophetic material involving the history of the period leading into the final future of humankind, unveiling the overarching and underlying supernatural forces involved in the human drama.
One of the major points I have made in my earlier study of prophecy is that it is important to distinguish between prophetic experience, prophetic expression, and prophetic tradition. The book of Revelation is certainly not simply a transcript of a prophetic experience, as its epistolary framework makes clear. Rather the seer has incorporated into a complex literary whole a report of his vision or visions reflected upon in light of the Hebrew Scriptures and a variety of other sources. John had visions and then fashioned an apocalyptic prophetic work to express not merely what he had seen but what bearing that vision had on his audiences. This means we might well not have an apocalypse at all had John not been some distance from his audiences. Rather he might have just shared most of the visions orally with his churches as they came, without resorting to a literary creation.
We probably should not imagine John on Patmos poring over Hebrew Scripture scrolls and then creating a literary patchwork quilt. The visions that came to John came to a Scripture-saturated mind and to a mind well acquainted with popular and mythical images of the larger Greco-Roman world. What John heard he may have transcribed almost verbatim, but what he saw he had to describe and thus draw on his existing mental resources. When one sees images and symbols in odd combinations, one must grope for analogies to describe the experience (hence the repeated use of the phrase “it was like ...”). One must resort to aspective, metaphorical, mythological, and sometimes multivalent language. One must turn to somewhat universal symbols, which explains why such works have been able to communicate across time and helps explain why these works were preserved. But paradoxically it is also true that apocalyptic prophecy always requires interpretation or explanation. It is indeed a somewhat coded form of language, and those not knowing that universe of discourse will be in the dark.
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Apocalyptic literature is basically minority literature, and often even sectarian literature, the product of a subset of a subculture in the Greco-Roman world. While it is not always true that such literature is written in a time of crisis or for a people experiencing crisis or persecution at that specific point, it is certainly written for people who feel vulnerable in a world that largely does not concur with their own worldview. In the case of Revelation, there is probably enough internal evidence to suggest that there had been some persecution and even martyrdom and more was expected.
It is not surprising then that apocalyptic prophecy often has a political dimension, dealing with the dominant human powers that appear to be shaping the destiny of God’s people. Whether it is Revelation portraying Rome as a modern-day Babylon or Daniel portraying a succession of beastly empires, there is frequent discussion of these matters in such literature but always under the veil of apocalyptic symbols and images. One must be an insider to sense the referents and the drift of the polemic and promises. This aspect of apocalyptic literature grows directly out of the classical Jewish prophetic material in which nations and rulers, including Israel’s, are critiqued, but here the critique is by “outsiders” (those who do not have controlling access to the political process) using “insiders” language.
It is not just the loss of the monarchy that changed Jewish prophecy and prophets, but its replacement by a hostile and anti-Semitic foreign power ...
There is a great fascination in apocalyptic literature with symbolic numbers and so something more must be said about gematria. There are, of course, the oft repeated numbers of four, seven, ten, twelve, and their multiples. Knowing that seven means completion or perfection helps one to understand not only why there are the number of seals that one has in Revelation (a complete and comprehensive set of judgments) but also why...666...signifies chaos and incompletion. There is also a tendency in this literature to speak of time elusively or elliptically – such as Daniel’s “a time, a time and a half, and a time” or his famous interpretation of Jeremiah’s seventy weeks ...
Apocalyptic literature, especially apocalyptic prophecy, often attempts to deal with theodicy. For instance, Revelation reassures the saints not only about personal individual vindication in the afterlife but about justice for God’s people in the end. Indeed it is at the point where cosmology and history meet, when heaven comes down to earth in the form of the Messiah and the New Jerusalem, that there is finally both resolution and reward for the saints, and a solution to the human dilemma caused by suffering and evil. Suffering and death are overcome by resurrection and everlasting life, and evil is overcome by the last judgment. The persuasiveness of this schema depends on the audience’s belief in not only a transcendent world but also a God who cares enough to intervene in human history and set things right once and for all.
Ben Worthington, Revelation, New Cambridge Bible Commentary, CUP, 2003: pp.33-9
91 J. J. Collins, ed., Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre, Semeia 14 (1979), p. 9. To this definition D. Helholm added that it is literature intended for a group in crisis with the intent of exhortation or consolation by means of divine authority.
My personal motto: "Often wrong; never in doubt!"