Kosh

Mushrooms. It was all about a bad batch of mushrooms.

DropOut

"Mushrooms.It was all about a bad batch of mushrooms."
...in regards to John's hallucinations, or mine?

Dean Anderson

I asked about Revelation a while back and someone directed me to Bernard Muller's excellent webpage on it.

If I recall correctly - and I am sure someone will correct me if I am misrepresenting Bernard's argument here, he argues (quite convincingly in my opinion) that Revelation was written just after the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans. It is a midrash (cool - I learned a new word!) of earlier 'prophetic' dreams - with characters and images taken mainly from Daniel, Ezekiel and Isiah.

According to this theory, Revelation was supposed to have been Jewish propaganda. Although actually written after the fall of Jerusalem, it was supposed to have been recently 'discovered' and written before the fall of Jerusalem. Thus when it talks about Jerusalem's fall it can claim to be fulfilled prophecy.

Since a piece of writing telling the Jews that their messiah would turn up and they would get their revenge on Rome would not go down too well with the Roman authorities, the messages were hidden behind analogy and metaphor - for example the beast symbolically represents Rome. It comes from the sea (Rome is the great naval power) and has 7 heads (the 7 hills of Rome) and 10 crowns (the 10 Emperors) and the 666 number is gematric for NERO CEASAR (the current Emperor at the time of the fall of Jerusalem).

The book was then altered and 'Christianised' later, with some of the figures from Jewish myth (the Son of Man, the Lamb of God, etc.) being explicitly identified with Jesus. The Jewish propaganda about current events then became Christian prophecy about future events and the 'Coming of the Messiah' to rescue the Jews from Rome was changed to the 'Second Coming of Jesus' to rescue Christians from the world.

It is worth noting that two main features of Christian Fundamentalist belief about the 'End Times' are completely absent from Revelation. There is no mention of 'The Antichrist' (the only mention of 'antichrists' in the bible is in 1 John and 2 John - which describe all atheists as antichrists, rather than mentioning a single one that will turn up to herald the end of the world). There is also no mention of 'The Rapture' (which is only mentioned in 2 Thessalonians chapter 4 - which says nothing about the end of the world, only that at Christ's second coming all his followers - both alive and dead - will physically be lifted into the clouds and the air. Hopefully the dead ones won't have rotted too much by then or bits will fall of inconveniencing passers by!)

I can't remember the URL for Bernard's page, but I'm sure someone here (Bernard?) can point you in the right direction...

Dean Anderson

DOH! I just noticed after posting that someone has already provided a link to Bernard's article...

Oh well, you can easily see if my summary is accurate or not, now!