Chamblee54

When a new book about religion comes out, the author inevitably pays tribute to mammon. The text must be promoted. Talk shows, print interviews, bookstore appearances… it is part of the game. You render unto Caesar, even when you  say Julius is one of the seven beasts. Which is  what Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation says.
Elaine Pagels is a professor at Princeton University. She appeared on “Fresh Air”, an NPR show hosted by Terry Gross. The web broadcast of the interview is sponsored by America’s Natural Gas Alliance. The listener is encouraged to go to a website, and hear the good news about fracking.
As you might guess from the title, the book is about Revelations. The last book in the New Testament, Revelations is a favorite of those who claim to see the future. According to Dr. Pagels, the book is about the past. .
GROSS:So what do we know about who wrote Revelation and when it was written?
PAGELS:(spell check suggestions:PANELS, PAGERS, BAGELS) Most people who look at this history think that the author – he calls himself John of Patmos, that’s his name – that John was a refugee from the Jewish war that had just destroyed his homeland, Judea. And the center of that whole territory, which was Jerusalem, the Temple of Jerusalem, had been utterly leveled by the Romans in response to a Jewish rebellion against the Roman Empire. So I don’t think we understand this book until we realize that it’s wartime literature. It comes out of that war, and it comes out of people who have been destroyed by war.
As you might imagine, John of Patmos is not fond of the Romans. They sent 60,000 soldiers to his home, and tore up the place.
GROSS: You consider the book of Revelation anti-Roman propaganda. Would you explain why?
PAGELS: Yes, the book of Revelation speaks about the great scarlet beast with seven heads and seven crowns, but it’s a very thinly disguised metaphor or image for the ruling power of Rome, and probably the seven heads of the beast, most people think, represent the emperors from the dynasty of Julius Caesar, Augustus and Tiberius, Claudius and so forth, up to the time John was writing at the end of the first century. So this is – on one level it’s anti-Roman propaganda that’s drawn from the language of Israel’s prophets to say that God is going to  avenge the nations that destroy his people.
GROSS: So 666, the name of the beast – many scholars, including you, think that that refers to Nero, the emperor, the Roman emperor. What would the connection be?
PAGELS: Yes, John says that the beast, whose identity he doesn’t say explicitly, perhaps because it’s quite dangerous to speak openly against Rome, he says the beast has a human number, and the number is 666. And this is a reference to the technique of calculating numbers and letters so that you can take anyone’s name and you have a numerical value of each letter. You add those up, or you multiply them in complicated ways, and you find out what the name is that’s represented by that mysterious number. Many people have worked it out that it could well be the imperial name of Nero, who was notoriously thought of as the worst emperor. Or it could be the name of Domitian, who was actually ruling when John was writing. John would have wanted his readers to understand that – that that number, which is couched in that kind of mysterious code, would be understood to his readers as the name of one of those emperors who had destroyed his people.
John of Patmos has other issues. In the early days of Christianity, there were disputes about the direction of the new religion. (Arguably, Christianity did not exist when Revelations was written.) Some wanted to new movement to stay within Judaism, and follow the laws of that religion. Others wanted to spread the “good news” to gentiles, and not be picky about what they ate. John of Patmos seems to be in the Jews only camp. This might explain some of his stories. 
The book of Revelations  included in the Bible was controversial. As the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, some of the prophecies were thought to have not taken place. As Dr. Pagels tells the story, an influential cleric liked Revelations. The decision was made to include it in the Bible, and to leave other books of prophecy out.
PAGELS: The Revelation of Zostrianos talks about a young man who is in despair because he can’t find any understanding of reality, he can’t make any sense of the world. He goes into depression and despair, decides to kill himself, and goes out to do it. And suddenly a divine being, a blazing light appears and says, have you gone crazy? And then he says he received internally a revelation. He says that I realized that the light within me was greater than the darkness.
Dr. Pagels has one possible explanation for the continued popularity of Revelations.
GROSS: So no matter what you’re doing, you can see yourself as the force of good and your opponent as the force of evil.
PAGELS:` Of course, because if you read it as John intended you to read it, you think God is on our side, we of course are on the side of good. Now, we could be, say, Lutherans fighting against the Catholic Church, we could be Catholics fighting against Lutherans. This is, you know, 1,500 years later. It could be people fighting against Muslims. It could be Muslims contending against, you know, the great Satan of the West. Those images have proved enormously powerful. What I found so remarkable, Terry, is the way that people on both sides of a conflict could read that same book against each other. For example, in the Civil War, people in the North were reading John’s prophecies, they’re reading the Civil War with the terrible destruction of that war as God’s judgment for America’s sin of slavery. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” resounds with all of those imageries of the book of Revelation. People on the South, in the Confederacy, were also using the book of Revelation, seeing the war as the battle of Armageddon at the end time and using it against the North. And that’s the way it was read in World War II. That’s the way it was read even in the war in Iraq.
Jesus has inspired both sides in many conflicts. Joseph Kony and Invisible Children both draw inspiration from Jesus, who is probably embarrassed.
Dr. Pagels says Christians frequently think she is misguided. One example of this would be saintbubba. (spell check suggestion:paintbrush) He wrote his amazon book review after hearing the NPR interview.
Just heard her on NPR, March 7, 2012 saintbubba
I just finished listening to the author on NPR discussing this book, for a person who is a professor of religious studies I don’t know if she has even read or understood any of the new testament…in her discussion she stated that it was the apostle Paul that came up with the idea of preaching and accepting non-Jews (gentiles) to the church…Jesus clearly preaches and accepts the woman at the well who was not a professing Jew…and was by her own admission living outside of the will of God…she pushes the idea that there was a Gospel according to Paul, a Gospel according to John and a Gospel according to Jesus…the fact is that all of the Gospels and the people who wrote them agree with one another…which is amazing because they were written at different times and locations….if the opinions of the author were true the Bible would have been refuted a thousand years ago…on the subject of the book of revelation I think there is much to be learned and discussed about it…but I don’t see the value of reading something with such a difficult topic when the author doesn’t seem to even have a clear understanding of the basics of the Bible..too bad because the subject manner is interesting…
Pictures today are from ” The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”