Terry Gross spoke with Elaine Pagels on
Fresh Air yesterday about her new book,
Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, And Politics In The Book Of Revelation. I have been a huge fan of Pagels ever since reading
The Gnostic Gospels back in college
.
In this new book, Pagels reframes the Book of Revelations, the most popular book of the Bible among Christians, within the temporal context in which it was written. She argues that, rather than an apocalyptic vision of the end times, the text was meant to be a wart-time satire and screed against the Romans who had destroyed Jerusalem, but was also influenced by the recent eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
It's likely that the number of the beast, 666, is meant to be a not to subtle numeric symbol for a Roman emperor, probably Nero.
Most importantly, she argues that John (not the John of the Gospel) was not a Christian. In 90 AD, Christianity had not yet been invented, so to speak. All of the writers of the New Testament, save maybe Paul, were Jews who followed Jesus, not Christians.
The Book of Revelation, the final book of the
New Testament, has some of the most dramatic and frightening language in
the Bible.
In her new book Revelations: Visions, Prophecy and Politics in the Book of Revelation,
Princeton University religious professor Elaine Pagels places the Book
of Revelation in its historical context and explores where the book's
apocalyptic vision of the end of the world comes from.
"The
Book of Revelation fascinates me because it's very different than
anything else you find in the New Testament," Pagels tells Fresh Air's
Terry Gross. "There's no moral sermons or ethical ideas or edifying
things. It's all visions. That's why it appeals so much to artists and
musicians and poets throughout the century."
Pagels
says the Book of Revelation's author, who calls himself John, was
likely a refugee whose home in Jerusalem had been leveled by the Romans
in response to a Jewish rebellion against the Roman Empire.
"I
don't think we understand this book until we understand that it's
wartime literature," she says. "It comes out of that war, and it comes
out of people who have been destroyed by war."
Other
images in Revelation — which include bright red beasts with seven
heads, and dragons, monsters and cosmic eruptions — were likely
influenced by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which buried and destroyed
the city of Pompeii, she says.
"Most people
think John was writing at about the year 90 in the first century. That
would be 60 years after the death of Jesus, and the eruption of Vesuvius
happened in the year 79," she says. "Much of what we find in the Book
of Revelation couched in the fantastic imagery are descriptions of
events that for John were very close — the war in Jerusalem, the
eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the Roman Emperors who were ruling at the
time. ... It seems as though [John] reacted to that, saying, 'Jesus is
coming and he is going to destroy all of this.' It was John's conviction
that the destruction of Jerusalem was the beginning of the end of time
that Jesus had predicted."
Many of the images
in the book, she says, are thinly disguised metaphors for images
associated with the ruling powers in Rome. The great scarlet beast with
seven heads and seven crowns, for example, may represent the emperors
from the dynasty of Julius Caesar, says Pagels. And the name of the
beast — which is not named but is represented by the numbers 666 — may
refer to Emperor Nero.
"This is a reference to the technique of
calculating numbers and letters," she says, "so that you can take
anyone's name and have a numerical value of each letter, and you add
them up or multiply them in complicated ways, and you find out what the
name is. ... John would have wanted his readers to understand that that
number, which is couched in a mysterious code, would be understood to
his readers as the name of one of those emperors who destroyed his
people."
Shortly after John wrote the Book of
Revelation, Christians fearing persecution from the Romans seized on
his message, seeing it as a way of deliverance from evil. For the past
2000 years, Christians have been reading Revelation as if it applies to
conflicts and struggles in their own time, says Pagels.
"If
you read it as John intended, you think, 'God is on our side; we of
course are on the side of good,' " she says. "Now we could be Lutherans
fighting against the Catholic Church, we could be Catholics fighting
against Lutherans. ... What I found so remarkable is the way that people
on both sides of a conflict could read that same book against each
other."
In the Civil War, she says, Northerners were reading John's prophecies as God's judgments for America's sins of slavery.
"
'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' resounds with all of those imageries
of the Book of Revelation," she says. "People in the South, in the
Confederacy, were also using the Book of Revelation, seeing the war as
the battle of Armageddon at the end times, and using it against the
North. And that's the way it was read in World War II. That's even the
way it was read in the war in Iraq."
Elaine
Pagels has been called one of the world's most important writers and
thinkers on religion and history. She won the National Book Award for
her book The Gnostic Gospels. She is also the author of Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas.
Interview Highlights
On other books of revelation, now known as the Gnostic Gospels
"One
of the surprises that I found when I started to work on the Book of
Revelation is that there is not only one. That is, most people think
there is one Book of Revelation because there's only one in the canon,
but I discovered that this was one of an outpouring that Jews were
writing; Greeks who followed the Greek gods were writing many books of
revelation. The Book of Ezra, for example, is another revelation written
by a Jewish prophet — not a follower of Jesus — but very similar to
John's in many ways and very grieved about the Roman Empire and
concerned about the question of God's justice."
On why the Book of Revelation has been so controversial
"One
reason why the book is so contested is that people who saw its
prophecies against the Roman Empire suggesting that the empire was going
to be destroyed by God realized that those prophecies had failed. What
happened instead is that the Roman emperors become actually Christians,
and the Roman Empire became a Christian empire — that is, completely
contrary to what the prophecy said. So some people would have said, 'The
prophecy failed, so let's leave that in the dust the way we leave other
prophecies that fail.' Other people said, 'Wait a minute, that is not
what it really means.' If you interpret these images differently, and
they open themselves to a very wide range of reading, then you could
say, 'Well, the prophecies are being fulfilled in a totally different
way.' "
On the Book of Revelation's authorship
"John
apparently was not only a Jewish prophet, but he was a follower of
Jesus of Nazareth, who of course had been crucified about 60 years
earlier. But they say that Jesus had prophesied that the end of the
world was coming, and it seemed as though Jesus' prophecy had simply
failed. What John saw 60 years after the death of Jesus was that the
Roman Empire was going stronger than ever, and I think he responded to
the enormous power of Rome, which you can see in the buildings and the
monuments and the architecture and the armies, which he would have seen
stationed throughout those provinces. ...
"It's
the response of one of the followers of Jesus, who was last seen on
Earth crucified and in a horrible way tortured by the Romans. ... And
his follower John sees that Jesus is enthroned in heaven and returning
as the ruler of the world. It's almost like a perfect retaliation for
what he sees as the execution of Jesus."
On the images in the Book of Revelation
"One
of them is an image of an enormous, bright-red beast with seven heads
with crowns on its head — a violent, threatening, raging monster.
Another is a giant whore called the Whore of Babylon who sits on the
back of one of these dragons with seven heads, and she's drinking from a
golden cup the blood of innocent people who have been killed. Then
there's another image of Jesus coming forth from the sky and starting
the battle of Armageddon, which ends in heaps and heaps of corpses at
the end of the book."
On what the Book of Revelation says about the new world
"It's
striking that the author sees nothing of the present world surviving
except the people who are dead come back to life in this new world. But
the new world as he sees it will be on Earth, will be a new Jerusalem
full of the glory of God."
On the followers of Jesus
"The
earliest followers of Jesus were all Jewish, and they don't seem to
have imagined that they would ever diverge from their adherence to their
tradition. It was just that they had found the Messiah of Israel. It's
the Apostle Paul who decided that Jesus had offered a message for
non-Jews and opened it up for the salvation of the entire world. As
John sees it, yes, gentiles will eventually be included in the blessings
brought by Jesus, just as the Hebrew Bible says all the gentile nations
will be blessed through Abraham, but for John the focus is on Israel
and the Jewish people."
On various interpretations of the Book of Revelation
"Many
Christians assume John is a Christian, he's a follower of Jesus, it's a
Christian book, and when the catastrophic events of the end times
happen, everyone will have to be converted to Christianity. What I
discovered, and it was surprising working on this, was in a sense you
could say Christianity hadn't been invented yet. That is, the idea of a
new movement that was quite separate from Judaism and its obvious
successor the way Christians see it today."
