Revealing Revelation

Dan McClellan Some of the features of Jewish apocalyptic texts. This is usually a revelation given to somebody, to a human, from some kind of divine being, an angel, or some kind of psychopomp, is the pedantic word- Wait, I'm sorry, some kind of what?

Dan Beecher Psychopomp. If that's not a German EDM group, I don't know what's happening.

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are the vibes today, Dan?

Dan Beecher It's the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine.

Dan McClellan Yeah. That's the way it goes. Leonard Bernstein, right?

Dan Beecher Yes. I think so. Irving Berlin, I'm not sure.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Lenny Bruce is not afraid. At some point, we will be responsible for paying for... You probably have to sing them.

Dan Beecher I don't know.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Don't tell the royalties people that we quote things. I think you can quote a little bit.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Hopefully. Yeah, but it is the end of the world that we're talking about, or is it, Dan?

Dan McClellan Dun, dun, dun.

Dan Beecher Because we're doing a chapter and verse that perhaps we should just call book.

Dan McClellan Book, yeah. My job is book. And that book is the Book of Revelation, or Revelations, if you don't know what you're talking about.

Dan Beecher Right. Or if you've just been taught wrong your whole life.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Which is totally understandable, because everybody says Revelations. Everybody pluralizes it. And in fairness to them, there are many revelations in this book called Revelation. There are several of them.

Dan McClellan Well, the very first verse starts off, "The Revelation of Jesus Christ." But yeah, the Society of Biblical Literature, they sell T-shirts. It says Revelations, and then there's a red X over the S- Uh-huh ... just as a little tongue in cheek reference to that.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So, I think what we're learning is, if you want to drive a Bible scholar crazy- ... just keep bringing up Revelations. It'll work like a charm.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Or if you want to let them know, this is probably going to be a waste of time for me to engage in this.

Dan Beecher Right. Yeah, exactly. But that's today's whole episode. We're doing a deep dive, baby.

Dan McClellan Going all in- Yeah ... on the apocalypse, as it is known in more Orthodox-ish traditions, and Revelation in more Protestanty traditions.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan We're going to talk about some manuscripts. We're going to talk about dates. We're going to talk about authors. We're going to cover what the text is about. And we already have a whole show on the mark of the beast, so we'll address that, but we're not going to get stuck in the weeds there.

Dan Beecher That beast got marked.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher We marked it.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher So.

Dan McClellan But I wanted to start, yeah, with where we get this Book of Revelation from. A lot of people don't know, this book was probably the least popular book of the Bible in early Christianity. But we do have some manuscripts of it that dates to the 2nd century CE. Our earliest manuscripts are probably, I'm going to rattle off some numbers that aren't going to mean much to people, but we have one called Papyrus 47, which is from the Chester Beatty collection, and it's actually the majority of chapter nine through chapter 16. That's probably third quarter of the 2nd century CE. We got a little fragment called Papyrus 98 that is just a tiny little bit of a few verses in chapter one. We've got Papyrus 15, which is a bunch of little fragments scattered all the way from chapter one to chapter 14. We cannot reconstruct the entire Book of Revelation, every last verse, until the middle of the 4th century CE- Oh, wow ... when we finally have Codex Sinaiticus, which is considered the earliest of what are called the Great Uncial manuscripts. An uncial is a pedantic way to say capital letter. Because it is a manuscript where it is written entirely in capital or majuscule Greek letters, and there are no spaces or anything. It's all just jammed together.

Dan Beecher God, that's a nightmare. That sounds like literally the worst thing to read in the world.

Dan McClellan It is a challenge. And we have three of these that have all of Revelation. Codex Alexandrinus is the next, and then Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus is the third one, and that one, we're getting into the 5th century. And that one, it's called Rescriptus because it's what's called a palimpsest. Mm-hmm. Which means that someone took this text and scraped the ink off of the vellum or whatever they were using, and then turned it 90 degrees and then wrote another text on it. And somebody one day was like, "I think I see lettering under this." And using infrared lights, we're able to discover that we have an entire manuscript of the whole Bible.

Dan Beecher It's like when they find that Picasso painted over another painting- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan for this thing, and there's- Which surprisingly, seems like everybody's had something painted over or something like that.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Or they make a mistake, or they don't like something, and they cover it up.

Dan Beecher They reused the canvas.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Listen, paper back then was expensive.

Dan McClellan You got to- Yeah. So we have to wait until the 4th century CE. Now, quotations from the early Christian authors, we call them the Patristic authors, the church fathers, with quotations from them that begin in the 2nd century, we can fill in most of it, but still probably about a little less than 10% of the text is absent until we get down to Codex Sinaiticus in the middle of the 4th century CE. So, there's a lot of stuff that could be different. And even those manuscripts that predate Sinaiticus, those fragmentary manuscripts, where we have two different manuscripts that cover the same passages, they don't always agree. There are differences from what we have reconstructed as the authoritative text of the New Testament in every single one of those manuscripts. So, if you want to dig into textual criticism, that is a whole thing, and I find it fascinating, but I think we better move on before everybody turns this off.

Dan Beecher Yeah, get to the good stuff. I want some beasts and dragons.

Dan McClellan Yeah, well, it's loaded with beasts and dragons. The text most scholars think was probably written around the early 90s CE. Now, for a time, people interpreted this intense persecution as probably happening under Domitian because there was a tradition that that was a period of intense persecution in the early 90s. Scholars these days are like, "Eh, it probably wasn't that intense."

Dan Beecher Intense persecution, we're talking specifically of the followers of Jesus.

Dan McClellan Correct, on the part of the Roman Empire. And now scholars are like, "Eh, it's probably more sporadic, probably reactionary to things, probably pretty isolated." And so, that means that that period of the reign of Domitian is not as handy an anchor for dating the text. But most scholars think it's probably right around there.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan There is a small minority of scholars who think it predates 70 CE, that it predates the destruction of the temple. But the folks who like to argue this are folks who are in the preterist camp, for the most part. And preterism is the idea that all these prophecies about the end times were actually about the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple- Okay ... at the hand of the Romans in 70 CE.

Dan Beecher I see. So, they're saying that all of these predictions and bad things culminated in the destruction of the temple. Got it.

Dan McClellan Right. And for that to be the case, the text has to have been written before 70 CE.

Dan Beecher Right. It's bad prophesying if you just prophesy backwards.

Dan McClellan Well, yeah. Well, an awful lot of prophesying is prophesying backwards.

Dan Beecher Yeah, exactly.

Dan McClellan Ex eventu prophecy, as it's known.

Dan Beecher Yeah, you're going to have higher accuracy.

Dan McClellan Oh, yeah.

Dan Beecher Wait. But less usefulness.

Dan McClellan Hopefully.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Sometimes it's not as high, and that's embarrassing. So, the very first verse of the Book of Revelation identifies the genre of this text, apocalypse. And apocalypse is a Jewish genre. We see it a little bit in Ezekiel. Daniel is kind of one of the main apocalypses, as we talked about in our episode on the Book of Daniel.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Some of the features of Jewish apocalyptic texts. This is usually a revelation given to somebody, to a human, from some kind of divine being, an angel, or some kind of psychopomp, is the pedantic word for that.

Dan Beecher Wait, I'm sorry, some kind of what?

Dan McClellan Psychopomp.

Dan Beecher This is a- If that's not a German EDM group, I don't know what's happening.

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher What is a psychopomp? I don't know what that is.

Dan McClellan That is a kind of divine guide in ascent and descent and apocalyptic- Oh my gosh.

Dan Beecher Okay ...

Dan McClellan visions and journeys.

Dan Beecher So- Somebody make a rock group out of Psychopomp, please.

Dan McClellan That would be a pretty cool one. But it would need to be EDM, too, or something in that- Right.

Dan Beecher Yeah ...

Dan McClellan some proximity to that- There you go ... or it just doesn't work.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So, the revelation is usually given within a narrative framework. Somebody's telling a story. It's mediated by this otherworldly being. Some kind of transcendent reality is communicated that reflects on temporal affairs and often climaxes with the eschaton, which is the pedantic word for the end times.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So, something going on now is the catalyst for this text, and frequently it has to do with persecution, oppression, things like that. And frequently, it is kind of a fantasy about God peeling back the fabric of reality to show us that God is really in control and that ultimately everything's going to be okay. As the great poet once said, "Don't worry about a ting, because every little thing is going to be all right."

Dan Beecher Yeah. Although the road to everything being all right in this particular eschatology is long- Yes ... and crazy.

Dan McClellan And as another poet said, "If you're going through hell, keep on going." And that's what we're doing in a lot of this book. Revelation takes the shape of visions and journeys and things like that. Sometimes it's on Earth, sometimes you're flying through the heavens, an ascent motif. And the goal is usually to bring some kind of comfort to the persecuted and/or exhort them to faithfulness in the face of suffering. And also, engage in boundary maintenance, to say- The good ones, the ones who are on our side, need to be doing this. You need to be staying away from these bad folks over here. So, it can serve a handful of different functions, as we will see in this Book of Revelation. So, we have an introduction and a conclusion, and then it's usually divided into six different segments. And, the introduction is the first eight verses, and we'll talk a little bit about that in a second. But, the first section is these letters that Jesus tells John to write to the angels of the seven churches.

Dan Beecher And- And this is not John- Oh, yeah.

Dan McClellan We need to talk about that ...

Dan Beecher that we've met before.

Dan McClellan So, the text just identifies the author as John, and we have no reason to think that the author of this text was not some dude named John, but there is absolutely nothing in the text that suggests this is a John we know from- Right ... previous Christian literature.

Dan Beecher Former Johns need not apply.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And the Greek of the Book of Revelation is famously awful.

Dan Beecher Oh, really?

Dan McClellan Like unsophisticated, awkward. There are grammatical errors and things like that.

Dan Beecher And- Well, this surprises me because my understanding is that this is the one book that was actually written in Greece. Wasn't it?

Dan McClellan No. Wasn't he John of Padmos, on- Patmos.

Dan Beecher Patmos?

Dan McClellan Off the western coast of modern-day Turkey.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan But yeah, I don't know if that island is part of Greece right now. But, no, there were other books that were written in Greece. But yeah, this is not someone who is a skilled writer.

Dan Beecher Okay. Good to know.

Dan McClellan It is not nearly as sophisticated as the Gospel of John or the Epistles of John.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan The first person to actually suggest, "Hey, what if this is the same John who wrote the gospel?" was Justin Martyr, about 150 CE. And there were debates. There were a lot of people who were like, "Yeah, no." And then there were other people who thought, "Hey, that makes sense. Let's go with that."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So, most scholars would say there is little chance that this was actually written by the same John. So yeah, we got the authorship question there. It starts with the appearance of this individual to John, and he's in the Spirit on the Lord's Day, which is probably a reference to some kind of ecstatic trance or some kind of early Christian concept of being in the Spirit. And, the Lord's day is, hē hemera kyriaki, which is still the word for Sunday, in Greek, or it's one of the words that is used in Greek today. Kyriaki is the other word for Sunday. And, he gives this little introduction that lasts the first eight verses, and ends with, "Look, he's coming with the clouds. Every eye will see him, even those who pierced him. And on his account, all the tribes of the earth will wail. So it is to be.

Dan Beecher Amen."

Dan McClellan And then we hear, "I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. So, this is not a reference right here to Jesus. This is a reference to God.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But then, he has a vision of Jesus, and he says he heard a loud voice like a trumpet behind him, telling him to write what you see and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus, to Smyrna, to Pergamum, to Thyatira, to Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. And if you look where these churches are, they're all in western Anatolia, and they actually start with the city that is closest to Patmos on the western shore, and then goes clockwise around. Anatolia is- Modern-day Turkey ...

Dan Beecher modern-day Turkey.

Dan McClellan Okay. And here's an interesting part. He sees seven golden candlesticks, and in the midst of the seven candlesticks, saw one like the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest. And it says, his head and his hair were white as wool, white as snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire. His feet were like bronze burning in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters. This is actually taking two different figures that we saw in the Book of Daniel and putting them together. This is actually Daniel 7:9 describes the Ancient of Days as having clothing as white as snow, hair of his head like pure wool, throne was fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire. So, this is the Ancient of Days. But, the author of Revelation also says, looked like the Son of Man. One like the Son of Man, which is the description of the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven. But they're the same individual, and there's a reason for this. In Daniel 7:13, we have this statement that, "I saw one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven, and he came to the Ancient of Days." And in Greek, the preposition there is eis.

Dan Beecher Unto.

Dan McClellan There is a very old manuscript, the old Greek tradition of Daniel, that does not have eis, but it has hos, which is one letter different, but says that the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven came as the Ancient of Days, and would suggest that the Son of Man, in some way, is to be identified with the Ancient of Days, is manifesting the presence of the Ancient of Days.

Dan Beecher Those are two different things.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan And so, the author of Revelation is picking up that tradition And is combining the imagery of the Ancient of Days with the imagery of the Son of Man.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And seven stars out of his mouth, one a sharp two-edged sword. We've heard about all this before.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Everybody knows about the sword in Jesus' mouth. We can just blow right past it.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Now, you'll recall at the end of the introduction, the Lord God Almighty said, "I am Alpha and Omega." Now Jesus here says, "I am the first and the last," which is not the same title, but it's leaning into that title.

Dan Beecher Yeah. It seems to be indicating sort of the same thing, but a different way of saying it.

Dan McClellan But it's not quite there. It's not till toward the end of the Book of Revelation that Jesus will say, "I am the Alpha and the Omega."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so we're slow-playing part of this- Okay ... this idea that Jesus manifests the presence of God.

Dan Beecher And just to be clear, for those who don't know their Greek alphabet, Alpha is the first letter in the Greek alphabet, and Omega is the last, right?

Dan McClellan That is correct.

Dan Beecher It's literally just as simple as that.

Dan McClellan Yep.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan The beginning and the end, the first and the last, the author and the finisher. It's all the same idea. Beginning to end, and it's what's called a merism, which means you identify the beginning point and the endpoint of a spectrum as a way to refer to those points and everything in between.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So the first and the last, and everything in between. I am everything. So, John gets these instructions to write these letters to the churches in Asia, and these letters, some of them praise the churches, some of them also say there's a little bit of a finger-wagging going on. But they all end with this promise to those who overcome are going to get some kind of blessing. And these blessings are associated with concepts of deification, of theosis. Somehow they're going to be united with God in a very unique way. For instance, in Revelation 3:21 says, "To him that overcomes," is victorious, "I will give to sit down in my throne with me, just as I have sat down in the throne of my Father." We have another part where it talks about the synagogue of Satan, which, by the way, I see this passage used, there are two passages here that talk about the synagogue of Satan, people who claim that they are Jews but are not. This passage gets deployed in a lot of phenomenally antisemitic ways.

Dan Beecher Yeah. You can see that coming. Just the phrase itself is just can we not?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Can we retranslate that or something, please? Because I see the danger instantly.

Dan McClellan Yeah. There's actually debate about what exactly is going on here. Some people think that the author is criticizing Christians who think that they're better Christians because they are not converts from the Gentile community, but are Jewish. That's one reading of what's going on here. There are other readings. But basically, if you feel the need to try to accuse Jews of being the synagogue of Satan, just don't.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Just don't.

Dan Beecher Wrong.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And you have other promises to him that overcomes, they'll get a new name. And names, and particularly names written on foreheads, are going to come up, and that's going to be interesting.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But a couple of interesting things. We get these condemnations of Balaam and Jezebel, which seem to be encoded references to a movement or a group or some influential individual within some of these communities. And there's an actual argument that's been made. It's not a consensus view, but it's one of the main theories, is that this is a coded reference to Paul.

Dan Beecher Because- Which one?

Dan McClellan Both of them.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan Because what they're accused of doing is causing people to eat food sacrificed to idols- Okay ... and then sexual immorality. Now, here's the thing. Paul was the one who said, "An idol is nothing in the world, and it doesn't matter. Eating food sacrificed to idols doesn't mean anything." But if you're around weak Christians who might get scandalized, then don't do it. Just when in Rome.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan And so this would've been understood as allowing the consumption of food sacrificed to idols. Now, in the Book of Acts, after the Jerusalem Council, that was one of the things they explicitly said. They basically decided converts from the Gentile community don't have to keep the law of Moses, except for four things. Stay away from sexual immorality, stay away from things polluted by idols, and so part of that is a reference to food sacrificed to idols. Don't eat blood, don't eat things that were strangled.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And Paul rejects two and a half of those things, because Paul says it doesn't matter what you eat. So the food sacrificed to idols, that could arguably fit with what Paul's doing. Sexual immorality, Paul argues that it's not a big deal for a believer to be married to a non-believer, that perhaps this is how you are going to save the non-believer. This was something that some early Christians said was sexually immoral, that this was wrong. And so Based on those two arguments, there are folks like Elaine Pagels and others who argue that this may be a coded reference to Paul, that the author of Revelation really didn't like Paul going around telling people these things are cool when he thought they were not.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So yeah, it would be really fascinating if that were the case, that we have the Book of Revelation coming out swinging against Paul when- Against Paul.

Dan Beecher Especially considering how many modern-day pastors and stuff use that term Jezebel.

Dan McClellan Well, and also, evangelical Christianity today is basically Paul plus Revelation.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so, it would be really hilarious if- Yeah, exactly ... Revelation was like, "That Paul!"

Dan Beecher And- You're in a fight with yourself, you guys.

Dan McClellan Yeah, condemning him as a Balaam and a Jezebel and... But I don't think that's a question we'll ever get answered confidently.

Dan Beecher So those- So somebody go back in time and tell us, will you?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Oh, yeah. Figure it out.

Dan McClellan I get that question every now and then, "If you could go meet any historical figure from the past, who would it be?" And it's like, who wouldn't it be?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So many cool stuff.

Dan Beecher I'd be pretty excited to meet anybody.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Really, really horrible part of one of these letters is in Revelation 2. I'm looking for a...

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan The NRSV, I think, has a decent translation here. "This Jezebel, I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her fornication. Beware, I am throwing her on a bed, and those who commit adultery with her I am throwing into great distress, unless they repent of their doings, and I will strike her children dead. And all the churches will know that I am the one who searches minds and hearts, and I will give to each of you as your works deserve." Some people say, "I will cast her onto a sick bed." The idea being, I will make her sick.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But no, this is sexual violence.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan This is framing this personified figure as a sex worker and then saying, "This is how we punish sex workers. We sexually violate them, and then going to kill their kids." And then their customers, it just says, "I'm throwing them into great distress."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan The kids are dying. The woman is going to be sexually assaulted. And then the ones who were actually engaged in the main part of the sin, because they're dudes- Yeah ... they get a slap on the wrist of some kind.

Dan Beecher Yeah. "You guys are naughty."

Dan McClellan Yeah. "Don't do it again."

Dan Beecher "Cut it out."

Dan McClellan Yeah. This is framing God as a sexual predator, as someone who is engaging in sexual violence against- Yeah.

Dan Beecher That's a lot.

Dan McClellan Yeah. That's kind of nuts. It's a lot, and people go to all kinds of lengths to try to excuse this rhetoric. And I think the most parsimonious way to approach this is to just acknowledge that this is the author using the threat of sexual violence for rhetorical purposes, and that is awful.

Dan Beecher And- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan don't do that.

Dan Beecher So. Fortunately, that's the only not okay part of Revelation.

Dan McClellan But this is one of the reasons that a lot of early Christians didn't like the Book of Revelation. They come from, and we talked about this with Bart Ehrman, they come from the loving Jesus of the Gospels, the love your neighbor, the meek shall inherit the Earth, those who live by the sword will die by the sword. All of these things to get to Revelation, and this is grotesque fantasy about this God who's going to sexually assault a sex worker, who is going to bathe their sword in the blood of their enemies that runs up to their ankles. It's just this grotesquely violent revenge fantasy, really- Right ... that also includes the outcome, the blessings, everything on the other side of all of this tribulation is we get all of the gold, and we get all of the goods, and we get all of the land, and we get all this abundance and everything like that. And that didn't mesh well with the asceticism of early Christianity as well. So people saw that text and were like, "Yeah, I don't really like what's going on here."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "That's not the Jesus I know." And here's a, Dionysius of Alexandria was a writer, I want to say somewhere around between 200 and 300 CE. I don't remember off the top of my head. But he has this to say, "Some before us have set aside and rejected the book altogether, criticizing it chapter by chapter and pronouncing it without sense or argument and maintaining the title is fraudulent. For they say that it is not the work of John, nor is it a revelation, because it is covered thickly and densely by a veil of obscurity, and they affirm that none of the apostles and none of the saints, nor anyone in the church, is its author." So, yeah, Revelation, not the most popular book, until Athanasius of Alexandria, which we'll get to.

Dan Beecher Okay. Can't wait for the Athanasius stuff.

Dan McClellan Yeah, that's the juicy part. So we have these letters to the seven churches, and then we get this. We're going through a door. We're starting on this journey of these visions that the three main things are seven seals, and then out of the seventh seal comes seven trumpets, and then out of the seventh trumpet, we also have seven bowls.

Dan Beecher And in between- Do we know what a seal is in this case?

Dan McClellan Yes. So imagine you have a rolled-up document, and everybody's seen those Victorian-era movies where somebody drips some wax on something and then- Sure ... pushes their thing into it. It's something like that, although it probably more frequently was clay. And the idea is, as long as this is intact, this was your, I forget what they call it. If you have a letter that is sealed, that can function legally to show, and you have the dates or something like that on there, that can function legally to show that this was from before that time period. The idea is this is sealed, so this is valid. Whatever authority is on that seal, this is under their authority kind of thing.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so to break the seal is to say, "We no longer need this. We are now going to deploy or use whatever is inside here." So you have God sitting on their throne, 24 elders, all kinds of weird crap, and God has in their hand a, it says a book in most translations. This is a scroll, and it is sealed with seven of these seals, probably clay.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And, as these seals are opened, all kinds of crazy stuff is going on, and this is all very rich symbolism. And some of it is explained, and some of it isn't, where they'll say- Now, by symbolism, I assume you mean literally true things.

Dan Beecher Literally meant to be taken as literal, actual drawings.

Dan McClellan What's actually going to happen.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And one of the reasons you probably shouldn't take that approach with the Book of Revelation is because you've got places where it's like, "And then the sun fell out of the sky, and the stars all went dark." And then, like four chapters later, it's like, "And then the sun went dark." It's like, "Didn't this already happen?" And some people will argue, "No, it's all cyclical. It's the same series of events told in different ways and through different perspectives." And there's an argument for the cyclical nature of this, but trying to read this linearly, trying to say, "This comes first, and this comes after, and then we're going to go back, and then we're going to do it all over again so that we can line certain things up," I think is a fool's errand. Because one of the things about explaining some of the imagery and then not explaining the others is that it's kind of teasing the audience.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan It's saying, "I'm going to explain this imagery here," and that makes them think everything has an explanation, and we're just withholding it from you, and that the key to unlocking this is to interpret all of the other imagery. Kind of like that old-- Maybe you don't remember this. There's an old Gary Larson Far Side cartoon- Uh-huh ... where it's called Cow Tools. And it was just a cow standing there in front of a table with a bunch of just bizarre-looking instruments on it. And one of them looked kind of like a saw. And Gary Larson explained that he made the mistake of making one of them look like a saw, which led his readers to believe that the key to understanding this cartoon was figuring out what all the tools represented. Uh-huh.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Since one of them obviously was supposed to be a saw. And so in a very similar way, we go into Revelation, and they explain one symbol, and then you're like, "The key is to find the interpretation of all of the symbols." And a lot of it is just trying to evoke an emotional response.

Dan Beecher Right. I remember, to your point, I remember being told as a young believer that the flying locust, I don't know. I don't even remember what it is. It's got the scorpion's tail and the blah, blah, blah.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And that's actually attack helicopters- Oh, gosh ... that have been predicted from our time. So we know that now's the time because they describe it's got the face of a man, and that's the guy, that's the pilot. And then it's got the scorpion tail is just, they didn't know what-- He was seeing this- ...

Dan McClellan spinning- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher tail rotor and just thought, "Oh, yeah, it's a scorpion," or...

Dan McClellan Yeah. We see that an awful lot, particularly with, so that's where the four angels that are bound at the Euphrates River are going to be released, and then they're going to go kill one-third of humanity, and they're going to be supported by a cavalry of 200 million mounted soldiers.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And their horses have the heads of lions, and they breathe fire and sulfur, and they have the tails of scorpions, and the soldiers have multicolored, shiny breastplates. And people are trying to figure this out.

Dan Beecher It's obviously tanks. What are you talking about? That is a perfect description of an Abrams tank.

Dan McClellan And people are like, "Well, back then, they wouldn't have known how to describe it."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And it's like, well, they knew what a siege engine was. Uh-huh. They would've described a tank as a siege engine. We have bas reliefs and descriptions of siege engines. That's what they would've described it as, not this. This is not just an encoded reference to something that's going to happen in the future. This is just a dude going, "Yeah, and they had the head of a lion and was breathing fire." And it is intended to evoke an emotional response. People going, "Whoa, that's crazy. This is intense."

Dan Beecher That's the- Right ...

Dan McClellan the whole point there.

Dan Beecher Yeah. By the way, siege engine is also a great name for a band. I'm just going to throw that out there. Probably a Swedish death metal sort of thing.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Definitely not the title of a sex tape.

Dan Beecher All right. Keep going.

Dan McClellan Not psychopomp either.

Dan Beecher Just roll right through it.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Okay. Just roll your siege engine onward, please.

Dan McClellan But separating the seven trumpets from the seven bowls, we have the story of the dragon, the beasts, and the faithful. And this is what an awful lot of people like to focus on because they think that understanding what the beast was is going to help them to predict the geopolitical future.

Dan Beecher Right. And the beast we know is Hunter Biden.

Dan McClellan Hunter Biden's laptop, actually.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan Yep. So yeah. As we discussed previously, there are two beasts, actually. The dragon is Satan.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan There are two beasts. One beast is Rome, the second beast is Nero. And this is just encoding this in a way that reminds people of these things, but also kind of throws it off into the future and is kind of like this nothing is new under the sun. The things that have happened before are going to happen again. We're going to squint at them so the edges get blurry and turn it into this story about these beasts and all that kind of stuff.

Dan Beecher And yeah. If you want to hear more about that, our thing about "The Mark of the Beast," we talk all about Nero and- Yep ... how 666 or 616- Mm ... are references to him.

Dan McClellan And yeah. "The Mark of the Best" was- Yes ... the title of that one.

Dan Beecher That's right.

Dan McClellan And one interesting thing to note here, the dragon here, a lot of people say there's a part where it identifies, I think it's in chapter 12, it refers to the dragon, that ancient serpent, and a lot of people suggest that this is a reference to the serpent from the Garden of Eden.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And it is 100% not.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Because the serpent from the Garden of Eden was not identified as Satan until after the New Testament. And so, the serpent here is actually Leviathan.

Dan Beecher So it- Oh ... refers to this- I was pretty sure you were going to say Joe Biden now. Because he's ancient.

Dan McClellan There are ancienter- Okay ... people out there.

Dan Beecher Yes, indeed.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Including Leviathan.

Dan McClellan So it talks about the ancient serpent and the dragon, and Leviathan is the primeval, prehistoric chaos monster associated with the sea, who in Isaiah 27:1, in the Greek translation, is referred to as both a dragon and a serpent.

Dan Beecher And- Okay ...

Dan McClellan it talks about the dragon that lives in the sea at the end of Isaiah 27:1. This passage is actually quoting a tradition that is also quoted in a Ugaritic text from 500 years earlier, where it talks about the wriggling serpent, the twisting serpent, exactly as Isaiah does. And then it says, "The dragon with seven heads."

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan The dragon in Revelation has seven heads, and Isaiah 27:1 doesn't say the dragon has seven heads, but there's a part in Psalm 74 where it talks about Adonai crushing the heads, plural, of Leviathan. So, it's very clearly a reference to Leviathan. It is not a reference to the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Anything else you think we need to treat on the dragon and the beasts?

Dan Beecher They cause a lot of ruckus.

Dan McClellan They do ruck things up.

Dan Beecher So their purpose in the sort of eschatology of the Book of Revelation is, what is it? They're out there. They're wreaking havoc, but- Yeah.

Dan McClellan They are the avatar of everyone who is persecuting Christians. It's because the serpent is empowering them, empowering Rome, and empowering the emperors. They are the villain in the story- Right ... that we want to really, really hate, and that we're going to be excited to see thrown into the lake of fire later on in the story. One thing I want to point out here is that when you'll recall that at the beginning, John was told to write the things you see.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But you frequently see a contrast between what John hears, and then it'll usually say, "And I turned and looked and saw."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But what he sees is always different from what he hears. So, for instance, when he hears the lion of the tribe of Judah has conquered, he turns and he looks, and he sees a slain lamb. When he hears about there are 144,000 are sealed, 12,000 from each of the 12 tribes of Israel, he turns and looks, and it says he sees a numberless concourse of people from all nations, kindreds, tongues, and peoples. And so one- That's interesting.

Dan Beecher I've never caught that.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I've never thought about that. So, the 144,000 could be seen as a red herring or a misnomer.

Dan McClellan It's a more traditional, going back to the Hebrew Bible, expectation about the Messiah and deliverance, where God is the lion of the house of Judah who roars and conquers. But then when he turns and sees, it's the Lamb of God who conquers through their own self-sacrifice. And then the 144,000 is salvation is just for the tribes of Israel. But when he turns and sees, cannot number the people, they're from every nation, kindred, tongue, and people. And so one way to read this is to say that they're overturning expectations, that this is what we hear about, but John is writing what he sees, and it is actually different.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan Now, that causes some interpretive issues because it's kind of trying to suggest that maybe this author was a little more enlightened than it seems, but it conflicts with a lot of other representations of God as this vengeful, violent, ruthless deity. So, that's just something to think about. As you're negotiating with the text- ... that's something to think about. And then you also have there's a song that's being sung, and then they sing a new song, and it's different. And so, it is an interesting little thing to notice.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Let me find myself in the narrative. We talked about the mark. I don't think we need to worry about that anymore. Toward the end of the book, we get the four horsemen- Mm ... which a lot of people think there's a lot to be unpacked from the symbolism there. I'm not personally fascinated by that issue. If you want to go see what has been proposed, a really good text is the Anchor Bible Commentary on Revelation, by an author named Craig, and it could be Koester, K-O-E-S-T-E-R. I apologize, I don't know how to pronounce the scholar's last name, but it's a phenomenal discussion of all this imagery and what people have proposed this means. So go check that out if you're wanting to hear more about that. Toward the end, we have the culmination of all of this. Oh, and the woman who brings forth the child, that has the crown and the sun on her clothes and all that kind of stuff. It's not a constellation.

Dan Beecher How dare you?

Dan McClellan What? Holy cow.

Dan Beecher You're blowing our minds.

Dan McClellan I think back in September, was it September when everybody was like, "September 22nd is going to be-- some star or planet is going to be in the womb of Virgo," or I don't know, one of the constellations.

Dan Beecher It's all very exciting.

Dan McClellan I didn't think so. But- You can go look in the Anchor Bible Commentary if you want a good discussion of that symbolism as well. It's a very thorough discussion. But basically, God is saying, "Things are going to go bad. You're going to have a bad time," to the dragon. And we have in Revelation 20, "The sea gave up the dead that were in it. Death and Hades," Hades here being one of the words that is used to refer to hell in the New Testament, frequently translated hell. The other one is Gehenna. Gehenna does not occur in Revelation, only Hades. "Death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and all were judged according to what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire." Now, when we think of hell, we think of the lake of fire as a constituent element of hell.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan As a region in hell. According to Revelation, the lake of fire is where hell goes to be destroyed.

Dan Beecher So it's kind of an annihilationist take here that- Are we talking about-- When you say Death and Hades are thrown into the lake of fire- Mm-hmm ... I picture, because I know Hades is a Greek- Right ... personified god.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher I'm picturing two beings being chucked into the-- Is there any chance that these are beings? I think that's- The figures, the sort of demigods of death and hell, or...

Dan McClellan So, I think that that lends some color to the imagery, but it also says, "Death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them." So it also seems to be the abode of the dead.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And it says, "Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire."

Dan Beecher Huh.

Dan McClellan Which I think we'd notch a point on the side of annihilationism or temporary torment followed by annihilationism. Because if we understand Hades in the Book of Revelation as a personification, as an agent rather than a location, then there's no hell in the Book of Revelation.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan There's just this lake of fire, which seems to be where things go to be annihilated.

Dan Beecher So- Or there's a hell that is eventually then destroyed.

Dan McClellan Yeah. You don't get our modern concept of hell- Of eternal hell ... until you bring in all of the other passages that discuss Gehenna from a bunch of different perspectives, and then you try to impose some kind of unifying framework and say, "Okay, so because of over here, it says this, and over here it says this, so we're going to put those together and we're going to bring this thing over here, and we're going to interpret it this way." And you're constructing a conceptual package based on the idea that all of these different texts are just presenting different-- It's the blind man feeling the elephant.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan You're assuming there's an elephant there, instead of just a bunch of authors who are describing something that is totally unrelated to the other things.

Dan Beecher Right. So- Different ideas of the afterlife- Yeah.

Dan McClellan Of what's going to happen ...

Dan Beecher or the end, or as you say, annihilationism is the end of life.

Dan McClellan Yeah, of existence for the wicked, and that's something that we find elsewhere in the New Testament, and something that we find elsewhere in early Jewish literature. And then we have Revelation 21:5-6. "There was one seated on the throne, says, 'See, I am making all things new.' And then he said, 'Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.' Then he said to me, 'It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.'" So this is Jesus who has started off saying, "I am the First and the Last," and then once Jesus has sat on the throne, Jesus says, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End," which suggests that Jesus achieves some kind of unity or identification with God once all of this is over.