maddog

About as well as Tom Sawyer, who named the first two disciples as "David and Goliath!"

#2294

Gawen

This is all well and good, but people have to READ the damn thing...

ChristMyth

That's absurd!! Everybody knows that those were the two guards at the tomb!

Garnet

Heh. I was raised on hearing about Revelation and the end times. When I finally read it, the phrase, "This is just nuts," kept going through my head. I know it's a mistake to put a modern mind set on an ancient writing. Nevertheless, I'm absolutely incapable of believing that Revelation was intended to be taken literally. From what little I've studied about it, Revelation was a polemic against Rome written for a certain audience and using apocryphal style to get points across without the author ending up dancing on the end of a Roman spear.

Steven Carr

Of course Revelation is not intended to be taken literally, except if you are the Bishop of Durham, NT Wright.

'The sea is both a great, dark power in its own literal right.....'

'It is only at the very end, in Revelation 21, when God has made all things new, that there is ‘no more sea’. The great surging, nightmarish force has gone, gone from the world, gone from within us. That is the eventual promise.'

Revelation 'promises' there will be no more sea?

http://meam-commemorationem.blogspot...monroe-la.html

show_no_mercy

Revelation is interesting -- at least from a BC&H point of view -- because it seems to be the only NT book that was written by someone who wasn't very fluent in Greek. At least, the Greek in the epistles and gospel of John are more refined than the Greek in the Revelation of John.

Zenaphobe

Isn't the sea a residual effect of The Flood™?

Who needs an ocean when you can fly through the universe using resurrected bodies powered by Jesus Magic?

Large bodies of salty water would be very boring in the new heaven and new earth.

davidbach

I did the same thing when I was about 10 years of age, a chapter a night. I was so looking forward to Revelation after all the months of tough and conflicting reading. Finally, all would be revealed!

What a let-down. All that anticipation for the ravings of a loony! I am (half-heartedly) runnunig a campaign to have Revelation replaced by King Lear.

David.

Garnet

Yeah, good point. Taken literally really wasn't the correct phrase. I was raised to view Revelation as a real prophecy of the end times. What I should have said is that I couldn't take it seriously at all that even before I did any amount of extra-biblical research about it. Does that make more sense?

Toto

Jonathan Kirsch in A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization (or via: amazon.co.uk) discusses the language issue around p 64. It appears that the author of Revelation originally spoke a Semitic language, and preserved the grammar of his first tongue. But in addition, his "ghetto" Greek could be a deliberate protest against the Hellenization fostered by the Roman Empire.