Pagels’s Take on the Apocalypse of John

There’s a review of Princeton scholar Elaine Pagels’s new book, Revelations at the Washington Post:

Pagels’s new book, “Revelations,” examines a far more familiar text, but it offers revelations of its own for lay readers. Suspiciously slim for such a complex and fraught subject, this five-chapter book whisks us through centuries of religious conflict, ecclesiastical maneuvering and textual scholarship. It’s easy to imagine that Pagels’s obscure academic competitors say mean things about her behind her back — How dare she be so accessible! — but she’s one of those rare scholars who can speak fluently to other professors or to curious people who decide on a whim to learn something about the Bible. Forty-six pages — the longest section of her book — are given over to footnotes that direct students to more technical explorations of these issues. Lay readers, meanwhile, will take this book and eat it up.

Her central point is that this most famous story about The End is a window on the beginnings of Christianity. Those origins were far more dynamic, circumstantial and political than most people realize, and the Book of Revelation played a peculiar role.

Without openly contradicting anyone’s faith in divine writ, Pagels emphasizes that the Book of Revelation was written at a particular time and place: a small island off the coast of Turkey, probably around 90 C.E. after the Romans had burned down the Great Temple and left Jerusalem in ruins. “We begin to understand what he wrote,” she says, “only when we see that his book is wartime literature.” In other words, much of the fiery destruction portrayed early in John’s narrative is not so much prophetic as historical, a florid depiction of the incomprehensible horrors that had left Jews stunned, scattered and frightened. In the wake of Rome’s brutal repression and the flourishing of its empire, John wrote cryptic “anti-Roman propaganda that drew its imagery from Israel’s prophetic traditions.” His “Revelation,” then, was a way of acknowledging recent defeats while knitting them neatly into a narrative of future victory.

Later years saw the Apocalypse of John (as it’s called in my Greek New Testament) make a transition from Jewish anti-Roman propaganda to interpretations against divergent forms of Christianity, a necessity in a church which had become Rome’s official faith.

I may need to buy a copy of the book. I’m actually more interested in how the Apocalypse of John fits into the Jewish apocalyptic tradition and I wonder if the lengthy section the reviewer refers to without comment may be of more interest to me. I know of half a dozen or more non-canonical apocalypses among the Hebrew Bible pseudepigrapha: the Apocalypses of Abraham, Adam, Daniel, Elijah, and so on. The Ethiopian Apocalypse of Enoch, also known as 1 Enoch, was probably written before the Apocalypse of John; the Apocalypse of Elijah probably afterwards. There’s a rich Jewish tradition of apocalyptic literature but many of them had polytheistic overtones and, as Judaism became increasingly monotheistic, they became increasingly suppressed.