A History of the End of the World Read Online Free Page A

antiquity, Revelation suddenly seemed less relevant than, say, the Gospel of Mark: “But when you hear of wars and rumors of war, do not be troubled,” Jesus is shown to sensibly caution his followers, “for such things must happen, but the end is not yet.” 42
    Still, more than a few readers of Revelation in every age, including our own, have thrilled at the idea that the end is near. Indeed, they are perfectly willing to overlook the plain fact that the world has not ended as predicted, and they persist in poring over the text of Revelation in a fresh attempt to figure out the precise date when it will. They have always been wrong, too, of course, but nothing has discouraged the so-called date setters who study the text, crunch the numbers, and come up with dates when the world must end. Not a single century has passed since the ink dried on the first copy of Revelation without some new prediction of the precise date when its prophecies will finally come to pass.
     
     
     
    Above all else, the author of Revelation is a good hater, and he embraces the simple principle that anyone who is not with him is against him. He rails against his rival preachers, condemning them as fornicators and false prophets. He heaps abuse on those of his fellow Christians whom he regards as insufficiently zealous for the Lamb of God. He offers the ultimate insult to Jews who do not embrace Jesus as the Messiah by insisting that Christians are the only authentic Jews. He reserves special contempt for anyone who indulges in carnal pleasure and, especially, the getting of goods. And, in a gesture of rhetorical overkill that is the hallmark of Revelation, he condemns his adversaries as not merely wrong, not merely sinful or criminal, but wholly corrupted by “the deep things of Satan.” 43
    The black-or-white morality of Revelation—everyone and everything in the world is either all good or all bad—is artfully expressed in the author’s insistent pairing of opposites. The Great Whore is the evil twin of “the woman clothed with the sun,” the Beast is a vile parody of the Lamb of God, and the destruction of Babylon, Mother of Harlots, is followed by the creation of the New Jerusalem, a construction of crystal and precious stone that floats down from heaven. Here we find a particularly heartless theology of exclusion: the saints and martyrs will be granted eternal life, as the author of Revelation sees it, and the rest of humanity will burn in hell. Indeed, the book of Revelation fairly sizzles with the deferred pleasure of revenge.
    Thus the author of Revelation, like Jesus as depicted in the Gospels, is a radical remaker of Judaism—but each moves in the opposite direction from the other. “Thou shalt love thy neighbor,” commands God in the Hebrew Bible (and not only one’s neighbor but even “the stranger that sojourneth with you”). Jesus cites the traditional Jewish commandment and then intensifies it: “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” 44 By contrast, the author of Revelation unambiguously promises his readers and hearers that God will avenge himself on their enemies and persecutors in a spasm of divine violence that can only be described as a holocaust.
    “The second half of the Apocalypse is flamboyant hate and simple lust…for the end of the world,” writes novelist D. H. Lawrence, who was so appalled by what he found in Revelation that he was moved to write a commentary of his own. By his lights, the author of Revelation had devised “a grandiose scheme for wiping out and annihilating everybody who wasn’t of the elect [and] of climbing up himself right on to the throne of God.” 45
    Thus, for example, the final destruction of “Babylon the Great, Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth”—the author’s symbol for pagan Rome in particular and all human sinfulness in general—betrays the lust for revenge that Lawrence discerns in the text. “Therefore shall