The Climax of Prophecy: Studies in the Book of Revelation

567 Pages·2009·7.54 MB·English

by  Richard Bauckham

THE CLIMAX OF PROPHECY
Studies on the Book of Revelation
Richard Bauckham
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First Published 1993
British Librar>' Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 567 09620 3
Typeset by Trinity Typesetting, Edinburgh
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd, Surrey
For my molher

Contents
Introduction ix
1. Structure and Composition 1
2. The Use of Apocalyptic Traditions 38
3. Synoptic Parousia Parables and the Apocalypse 92
4. The Worship of Jesus 118
5. The Role of the Spirit 150
6. The Lion, the Lamb and the Dragon 174
7. The Eschatological Earthquake 199
8. The Apocalypse as a Christian War Scroll 210
9. The Conversion of the Nations 238
10. The Economic Critique of Rome in
Revelation 18 338
11. Nero and the Beast 384
Abbreviations 453
Bibliography 463
Indexes 493
vii

Introduction
The Apocalypse of John is a work of immense learning,
astonishingly meticulous literary artistry, remarkable creative
imagination, radical political critique, and profound theology.
Yet, among the major works of early Christianity included in
the New Testament, it remains the Cinderella. It has received
only a fraction of the amount of scholarly attention which has
been lavished on the Gospels and the major Pauline letters.
The present volume is a contribution to remedying this neglect.'
The essays in this volume are products of my own fascination
with and study of the Apocalypse over a period of twenty years.
Some have been published before, in various journals and
volumes, and are here collected and re-published in revised (in
most cases very thoroughly revised) form. About two-thirds of
the contents of the volume have not been previously published.
Each chapter can be read as a self-contained essay, but they are
also interconnected (and cross-references help the reader to
make the connexions). They belong to a single sustained
enterprise of understanding both the form and the message of
the Apocalypse in its literary and historical contexts. While
writing the previously unpublished essays in this volume, over
the past two years, I was also writing a shorter, systematic
account of the theology of the Apocalypse.^ Many of the lines
of interpretation advanced in the latter are explored and
justified in much greater detail in the present volume. While
'For surveys of recent research on Revelation, see Vanni (1980); Schussler
Fiorenza (1985) chapter 1; Bocher (1988).
''Bauckham (1993).
IX
X The Climax of Prophecy
the other volume focuses on the theology of the Apocalypse,
the present volume, though not neglecting theology, devotes
more attention to the literary and historical questions which
are in the end inseparable from the Apocalypse's theological
message. Thus the two volumes are complementary.
The approach to understanding the Apocalypse which unites
the essays in this volume has at least four major aspects. In the
first place, close attention to the literary composition of the
work is essential. Revelation has been composed with such
meticulous attention to the detail of language and structure
that scarcely a word can have been chosen without deliberate
reflection on its relationship to the work as an integrated,
interconnected whole. The source-critics of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, who divided Revelation into a
number of disparate sources incompetently combined by an
editor, could do so only by crass failure to appreciate the
specific literary integrity of the work as it stands. This has been
widely recognized in more recent study, which has stressed the
literary and ideological unity of the book. But there has still
been littie enough investigation of the distinctive literary
techniques by which Revelation conveys meaning. Here the
insights of modern literary criticism are of limited use, since
they have been developed with reference to very different
kinds of literature. The literary features of Revelation are to
some extent indebted to the techniques of contemporary
Jewish exegesis and apocalyptic writing, to some extent the
distinctive contribution of the author's own literary genius.
Revelation demands literary appreciation in its own terms.
Again and again in these essays we shall find that close attention
to literary composition opens up a remarkable density of
meaning in the text, which has been so crafted as to be capable
of yielding its full meaning only to repeated reading and
appropriate study.
Secondly, Revelation's use of the Old Testament scriptures
is an essential key to its understanding. The pattern of almost
continuous allusion to the Old Testament throughout the
book is not a haphazard use of Old Testament language by a
writer so soaked in the Old Testament that he naturally uses its
language, as some scholars have mistakenly thought. It is a
Introduction xi
pattern of disciplined and deliberate allusion to specific Old
Testament texts. Reference to and interpretation of these texts
is an extremely important part of the meaning of the text of the
Apocalypse. It is a book designed to be read in constant
intertextual relationship with the Old Testament. John was
writing what he understood to be a work of prophetic scripture,
the climax of prophetic revelation, which gathered up the
prophetic meaning of the Old Testament scriptures and
disclosed the way in which it was being and was to be fulfilled
in the last days. His work therefore presupposes and conveys an
extensive interpretation of large parts of Old Testament
prophecy. Allusions are meant to recall the Old Testament
context, which thereby becomes part of the meaning the
Apocalypse conveys, and to build up, sometimes by a network
of allusion to the same Old Testament passage in various parts
of the Apocalypse, an interpretation of whole passages of Old
Testament prophecy. The interpretation is highly disciplined,
employing contemporary methods ofjewish exegesis, especially
the technique of gezerdsdwd, by which passages sharing common
words or phrases are interpreted in relation to each other.
Frequently in these essays we shall find that obscure passages
in Revelation become clear and that passages regularly
misunderstood by the commentators can be correctly
understood when the Old Testament allusions are identified
andjohn's interpretation of the Old Testament reconstructed
in terms ofjewish exegetical practice.
Thirdly, Revelation is an apocalypse, whose primary literary
context is the tradition ofjewish and Christian apocalypses.
Both in form and in content it is heavily indebted to this
tradition. Its relation to the non-canonical apocalypses is
different from its relation to the Old Testament. The latter
forms a body of literature which John expects his readers to
know and explicitiy to recall in detail while reading his own
work. Frequent specific reference to it is integral to his literary
strategy. In the case of the non-canonical apocalypses, on the
other hand, the relationship is such that we cannot be sure that
John knew any particular apocalypse or expected his readers to
do so. The traditions he shares with many of them cannot be
pinned down to specific texts to which he makes allusion. Yet