Almost Banned from the Bible

This is the second in a series of lectures I presented in the virtual world called Second Life, at the sim called House of Prayer.  This lecture was delivered on July 18, 2013.

I’m Yolanda Ramírez, “YoYo Rez,” and I’d like to welcome you to God’s House of Prayer.  This is the second of four 45-minute lectures I’ll be delivering on how to begin reading the book of Revelation.  If this is your first time at this lecture series on Revelation, great to see you!  Those of you who were here last week … I’m pleased to be present for your personal Second Coming.    As I mentioned last week, this isn’t a study of the Revelation.  We won’t be doing a systematic investigation of each chapter, verse by verse.  Instead, this short lecture series is about the Revelation … tonight, specifically, about how it had such a hard time getting into the Bible, and how the Body of Christ has developed 4 distinct approaches to help us understand what its wild visions and crazy symbols are all about.

This week is Lecture II: ALMOST BANNED FROM THE BIBLE!

And away we go …

Part A: YOLANDA TRANSLATES SOME GREEK

The Revelation is a challenge for us from first word to last.  Most of us can’t even get the title right … for years I threw an –S at the end of the title, until I discovered that absolutely no version of the Bible shows it as anything other than singular, “Revelation.”  So at first, I couldn’t even get the title of the book right.

Then came the problem of the author.  And for that little hurdle, I’d like to tell you a short story from my own life.

Once upon a time, I discovered that the Bible has grammar errors in it.

I was sitting in the back of a dim, dusty University office, working to translate the ancient Greek manuscript provided to me by my equally dusty professor.  Greek is the original language of the New Testament.  The manuscript I worked on was the APOKALUPSIS IOANNOU, the “Revelation of John.”  That manmade title always bothered me, because the first three words of the book are APOKALUPSIS IESOU XRISTOU, the “Revelation of Jesus Christ.”  The book isn’t a revelation from John; it’s a revelation to John, from (of) Jesus.

More accurately, it was, as the first verse says, a revelation from God, about Jesus Christ, sent through an angel to the servant John for the rest of us servants.  No other book in the Bible opens with such a detailed chain of custody of its message.

But, no matter.  I wasn’t worried about that on this day, ten years ago.  I was worried about my translation.  It was not going well.  I had only been studying Greek for a year and a half.  I was not good at it.

The professor saw my frustration.  He waddled over to see why I looked so upset with the translation.

On my tablet, I wrote to him, “I keep messing up my verb conjugations!  It’s like I can’t remember them!”

 “Conjugations” – my SL friend Ghostwitness would call that one of the “BigWordisms” I like to use all the time.  “Conjugation” is just a fancy word for how you make a verb work right.  For example, in English, we don’t say “He are” or “He am” – the correct conjugation is “He is.”  We learn that as children, and we don’t think much about it until someone starts using it incorrectly.

So, “conjugation.” Y’all done gots that?

My professor was a brilliant man, but no one would call him charming.  He looked at my work and crisply announced: “Your Greek’s right.  The author’s wrong.”

That confused me.  The line I was working on used a singular subject with a plural verb – “He are” would be an English example of that kind of mistake.  The Revelation had a number of other grammar issues just like it, and I wasn’t willing to assume it was the Sacred writer and not the noobie Greek student, me.

 “He didn’t know Greek well,” my professor announced.  “It was his second language.  He messes it up sometimes.  Just like you.”

I felt more confused now.  A few weeks back, the professor and I had translated the first few chapters of the Gospel of John, from the same author, and there were no such grammar errors in that piece of writing.  In fact, it was beautiful, elegant, accurate Greek, following all the rules.  Had the Apostle John forgotten how to write Greek?  Had he unlearned a language he knew perfectly well earlier in life?  Had he grown feeble minded?

Then my professor said, “Don’t be a dimwit.  Who told you it was the same John?”

And that was the day I realized that the world has a lot of people named John in it … and that the author of the Revelation never once refers to himself as an Apostle who knew the Lord Jesus Christ personally, in the flesh.  From the viewpoint of the original language, the John who wrote the Revelation used a quality of and style of Greek completely different from the John who wrote the Gospel.

The idea that the John who wrote the Gospel is the same one who wrote the Revelation is a tradition of men.

I’ll say that again, because it’s an important part of the story tonight: the idea that John of Patmos is the same person as John the Evangelist, the Gospel writer, is a non-biblical tradition.

Scripture nowhere says they are the same individual.  And while we modern Christians have a lot of “lives of the Apostles”  stories, most of those stories come from people who lived hundreds of years after the apostles had all died.

Now, wait a second.  Language difference?  Is that really enough evidence to say that the same John didn’t write both books?

Consider: You don’t have to be a language professional to draw similar conclusions from more modern examples.

EXAMPLE 1:  Imagine you are an immigration officer who pulls over one of my 80,000 Ramírez relatives – we Ramírezes are all cousins, you see.  When you check for his Arizona ID, he might say something in his rich, Mexican accent like: “Hallo!  I am call myself John, and I am swear I be born of United States, Mr. Officer!”  Let’s face it: From the style and quality of his language, you know something is up.

EXAMPLE 2: Or let’s imagine you get a text message from your significant other on a Tuesday that reads, “My dearest one: How I have missed you so, and how I long to take you once again in my embrace and share in silence the solitude of two souls joined as one.”  On Wednesday, you get a second text that says, “Yo, waddup shawty?  U still be my HOTNESS, smexy one!  So when we is to get the grope on?  U tell, scrap!”  You know immediately that something is up.  You know that John of the Embrace might not be the same as John of the Hood, and neither of them is Juan of the Barrio.

There are people, Bible scholars, who know the Greek of the New Testament far better than you and I ever will.  Those people see the same kinds of differences, and more, in the style and quality of the languages used in the Gospel of John versus the Revelation of John.  Simply put: The Gospel writer knew Greek well, as a first language.  The Revelation writer did not.

We either have to conclude that John the Evangelist forgot how to write Greek in the years between the Gospel and the Revelation, or that we’ve found ourselves a different John.

Here’s the lesson I took from that new information I got about the Revelation: Always question what I think I know.  Always pay polite attention to what people tell me about the last book of the Bible, and prayerfully consider what they have to say … but verify, verify, verify.  I will never forget that I couldn’t even get past the title and author of Revelation without learning I had major assumptions that were completely wrong.  I continue to tell myself what my professor told me that day: “Yolanda, don’t be a dimwit.”

Part B: WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHO WROTE IT?

Maybe you’re thinking, “So what?  It doesn’t matter if John the apostle wrote the Revelation, just as it doesn’t matter whether Paul the apostle wrote Hebrews.  The Holy Spirit inspired both.  They’re both in the Bible, so they’re part of my faith.”  And I’m with you on that – I believe as you do, that it is part of the canon of Scripture.

“Canon,”  another BigWordism, despite only having five letters in it.  It’s a regulation or law declared by a church council – and the “canon of Scripture” is the list of books declared legitimately part of the Bible we use today. 

To explain what that has to do with the Revelation, I’ll tell you another story.

Once upon another time … much, much longer ago than my University days … there were a bunch of Christians scattered throughout the Roman Empire who did not have a Bible.  All they had were letters and scrolls and writings that were of special importance to them.  Some were writings from Apostles like Paul and Matthew and Peter.  Some were from non-apostles like Clement and Ignatius and Polycarp.  A small church congregation was lucky to have even a single copy of one of these letters, and there was no such thing as a “whole Bible.”  No one had officially picked which ones should be in, and which ones should be out.

How do you assemble a Bible?  How do you know which books to put in?  I won’t get overly detailed on the process, because frankly, most Christians approach this topic the way they approach their favorite sausages.  Yes, I said their favorite sausages … we’re happy with the end product, but we really don’t want to see how it was made.  It’s messy.  We don’t want to know what almost got in there.  Leave that little secret to the sausage makers.

Rather than toss around names like “Eusebius” and “Athanasius,” allow me to give you the Reader’s Digest version:

·         Some dudes wrote up lists of what they wanted in a final, official book.

·         Some other dudes wrote up other lists.

·         These “dudes” were called church fathers.

·         Their lists didn’t always agree.

·         They argued.  They argued a lot.  It got ugly, uglier than modern debates over who will bring what to next Sunday’s pot luck church dinner.

·         And in the middle of the 300s C.E., a Catholic council finalized the list.  We had a New Testament.  The end.

Just so you get a perspective on how long that took: Imagine, those of you in America, that our founding fathers had sat down to create the U.S. Constitution, and that it had taken as long as it took the church fathers to agree on the contents of the New Testament.  Finishing and approving our Constitution would have taken from the late 1700s until the end of the 21st century.  Our grandchildren would be the first to have a finished version.  The discussions and debates over what belonged in the New Testament took that long.

One of the books most under debate – on many of the early lists, kicked off of others – was the Revelation.  Half of the church fathers saw it as a glorious tale of Christ’s ultimate victory over sin and evil.  The other half considered it a lunatic hallucination filled with ranting and delusion.

Obviously, the Revelation got into the Bible at the end.  But … one of the strongest arguments in the book’s favor turns out to be wrong.  Many of the list makers argued that the Revelation was written by the Apostle John.  For that reason, they said, the book deserved to be in the Bible.

Others argued that the book was too insane, and that the Greek was too poor to be the same writing as the Apostle John’s.  They feared the crazy symbolism of the book would be misused by readers and preachers, randomly applied to anything and everything they had a political opposition to.  In time, though, even those who didn’t believe that the Apostle John had written the Revelation began to soften on accepting it.  You didn’t HAVE to be an apostle to be inspired by the Holy Spirit to write for the Bible.  In fact, the man who wrote more words than anyone else for the accepted New Testament wasn’t an apostle at all, and probably not even Jewish –Luke, sidekick to an apostle, author of a gospel and The Acts of the Apostles.

So, these Catholic councils gave a final thumbs-up to 27 books, and the “canon,” the official list, was closed.  The Revelation squeaked by, mostly because a majority of council members mistakenly believed it was written by the Apostle John the Evangelist.  And luckily, since most of the world stayed illiterate for the next millennium, nobody had to worry about too many crazy interpretations from unschooled believers.

But then along came the Reformation and Martin Luther, who started kicking books out of the Bible.  Once more, the Revelation was in danger, and came close to being banned.  Martin Luther looked at it and declared, “ You know what?  I doubt the Apostle John wrote this thing.” 

But for Luther, the issue wasn’t language.  Luther had no love at all for the message of the Revelation.  He felt it was too confusing to be the Word of God, and declared, “I miss more than one thing in this book, and it makes me consider it neither apostolic nor prophetic.”  He doubted that it was inspired by God, declaring, “I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it.”  And in his most powerful dismissal of all, he claimed that the Jesus it portrays was not a Jesus found in the rest of the Bible: “Christ is neither taught nor known in it,” he wrote.

We nearly lost the book of the Revelation at that point.  That’s no exaggeration.  Many books DID depart from the Protestant canon in those days, the early 1500s, including many Old Testament books now found only in the Catholic Bible.  But oddly, eight years after his dismissal of Revelation, Luther did a complete turnabout.  His attitude toward the Revelation changed, because he began to see a very powerful use for the book – it made a great weapon against his Number One Enemy, the Roman Catholic Church.  The Warrior Christ he’d been uncomfortable with earlier in life suddenly made sense to Luther – and the Beast from the Sea was all too obviously, to him, the Roman Church itself.  The Church, for its part, quickly responded by interpreting the rise of a False Prophet to be Luther, raging against the real Kingdom of God.  Lines were drawn, symbols were adopted, and the Revelation of John rested easily, again having a fixed place in the canon, and remaining there to our day.

Printing presses churned out copies of the Bible.  The Word of God became available throughout the world … and, I’m required to point out, the Revelation became widely available to the crazy commentators and interpreters that the ancient church fathers had feared.  The scholar G.K. Chesterton made a wonderful statement about that, saying that although the author John “saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.”

Part C: THE FOUR APPROACHES TO REVELATION

Once upon a time … long before I sat there translating in that University office, and long before Martin Luther changed his mind about the Revelation, and even before the church fathers finalized their list of the books that belonged in the New Testament, a man named John on an island named Patmos sat down to record a vision that would far outlive him, and far outlive even the memories of who he was.  As he wrote his first line about his vision, those “things which must shortly come to pass,” he could not imagine that two thousand years later, people would still be debating about those things he saw.

When I say that the Body of Christ has developed “approaches to interpreting Revelation,” some people might think that I am talking about ideas like, “Will the Rapture occur before or after the tribulation, or will it come right in the middle of it?”  But those matters are mere details that relate only to a single one of the four approaches I want to introduce.  They are details Martin Luther wouldn’t have recognized, since they come from a Futurist approach completely different from his own.

The four approaches I’m introducing are called:

·         Futurism

·         Historicism

·         Preterism

·         Idealism

Before I mention their differences, I would like to point out their similarities: All four of these approaches believe in the literal, physical second coming of Christ in our future, when the world ends and the temporal is replaced by the eternal.  All of them share the belief that fullness of the Kingdom is yet to come.  And most important, all four declare that salvation is through faith in Christ’s redeeming sacrifice alone, the one defining element uniting us, so that one day, a trillion years from now, we can all sit around laughing about how little we knew back in those Old Earth Days.

Here are the approaches.  I’ll hint at strengths and weaknesses in each, but the full examination will come next Thursday.

Approach 1: Futurism

I start with Futurism not because it is the oldest approach to interpreting Revelation… in fact, it might be the newest … but because it is the most popular today.  Futurism holds that Revelation is about activities at the End of Time.  All of its symbols … its two beasts, its Whore of Babylon drunk upon the wine of the blood of the saints, its mark of the beast that will allow buying and selling and damn one to hell … every seal, trumpet, and bowl of plagues is yet to happen, and the signs of the times are hints that it will happen soon.  Futurists tend to see Revelation as a secret code for the headlines of their own times.  If a major earthquake occurs, it is because the End is Near.  If a near-miss asteroid comes by our planet, it’s a reminder that another massive asteroid, Wormwood, is on the verge of slamming into us.  If a Social Security card is issued with three 6’s buried in it, in order, it becomes a reminder of the horrors that are just about to come, and evidence of dark conspiracies lurking just behind the scene.

Futurism is the backbone of the fictional Left Behind series, which has introduced a number of elements into modern Christianity’s expectations of the end times – including the mistaken assumption that the book of Revelation mentions a one-world religion, an Antichrist, and a Rapture.  None of those terms is actually found in the Revelation.

Approach 2: Historicism

Martin Luther was a Historicist, once he finally accepted the Revelation.  So were famed preachers Charles Spurgeon and John Wesley.  To a historicist, the symbols, creatures, and events of Revelation aren’t a collection of things happening in a single era.  Instead, they are a map of all history itself.  The letters to the churches at the beginning are a preview of the ages the Church will go through, and then the main bulk of the vision is all of history after Christ ascended.  The Historicist sees encoded in the Revelation the rise and the fall of the Roman Empire, the sweeping of barbarian hordes through Europe and out of Asia to pave the way for the Middle Ages, the schism of the Roman and Eastern church, followed by the rise of Protestantism and the discovery of the Americas, and perhaps even including Russia, China, and America becoming the dominant powers on the planet.

How these symbols are arranged and counted through history depends on who the historicist is and when he lived.  For Martin Luther, everything culminated in his own age, with the Pope as the Beast of the Sea and the end at hand for everyone being saved from the clutches of Babylon.  For Uriah Smith, author of the 1897 book Daniel and Revelation, it all culminates in his own time, once you count Daniel’s “weeks” as “years” and realize that the invention of the telegraph and dirigibles is most certainly a sign of the end within a generation.

Approach 3: Preterism

A number of the early church fathers, and a number of modern preachers, fall into the category of “preterist,” Eusibius being one of the earliest (he was one of those “dudes” I mentioned who created lists of what books should be in the Bible).  Calvinist theologian R.C. Sproul is a more recent prominent example.  Preterists hold to the idea that most of the book of Revelation … in fact, everything up through chapter 19 … was fulfilled in the generation following the resurrection of Christ, culminating in the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.  The generation did not pass away until the fulfillment of the Day of the Lord, which is not the same as the Final Coming of Jesus.

Preterists distinguish between the End of the Age (when Israel came to final judgment) and the End of the World (when Christ will physically return to earth).  The Son of Man coming in clouds, seen by those who pierced him, becomes, in Preterist ideas, a different event from the Final coming of Christ.  The Old Testament spoke various times of God “coming in the clouds” as a way of indicating God was leveling Israel’s enemies.  This final “coming in the clouds” was the judgment of Christ himself, executed through the Romans, marking the end of the age of Israel and the beginning of the New Israel, the church.  Horrible tribulation befell Israel, worse than any judgment ever on any nation.  We now live in the Kingdom Age, awaiting the final establishment of Christ’s throne as we unceasingly work to increase His Kingdom upon the earth.

Approach 4: Idealism

The three previous approaches suffer from one common shortcoming that’s resolved by the final approach.  The Futurist, Historicist, and Preterist approaches all require that the majority of the book of Revelation have nothing to do with the vast majority of Christians throughout the church’s history.  The Futurist says, Sorry, 2,000 years of believers, this is our secret book for our age, and you only get to wonder why it was in your Bible.  The Historicist says, Hey, there we are on page 23; the rest has nothing to do with us directly.  The Preterist says, It’s all fulfilled except the last part, so Revelation is pretty much a history book.

Idealism makes Revelation relevant, regardless of era or geography.  Idealism says that the book of Revelation is not a code about any single age – it is, instead, a collection of symbols that can and do relate to any era or crisis the church passes through.  There is always a “Beast” who rises to oppose us, be he Hitler, or Caesar, or Tariq ibn-Ziyad of the Moorish hordes conquering Christian Hispania.  Every age has oppression, and every age shows the evidence of God’s people enduring, and God acting to help us overcome trials and ultimately to punish those who defy the will of the Lord.  To the Idealist, “ Who is the Antichrist?”  is a meaningless question, better asked as “ What is the spirit of Antichrist?”   The Revelation is not one Christian Age – it is all Christian Ages, with the Two Witnesses of the Old and New Testaments standing as proof against evil until that final age when Christ’s Kingdom comes, unexpected as a thief, in its fulfillment.

This was the approach embraced by the renown St. Augustine … and it might surprise you to learn that it was the normal, majority approach to Revelation for over a thousand years.

CONCLUSION

Obviously, there’s a lot to say about each of those possible approaches.  That was a lot to take in, especially if you belong to a faith tradition that only discusses one of the four approaches.  Next week, I’ll take an in-depth look at the strengths and weaknesses of each one – without taking sides, since I am here to lecture on the teaching of others, not to directly teach by myself.

And so … I yield the alphabet.  Any comments and insights you have are now welcome.

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx (YoYo Rez)