It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758) by Roberts, Adam (reading in the dark .TXT) 📗

rivers to blood; the fourth brings drought; the fifth a choking fog that darkens the whole world; and the sixth dries up the Euphrates and initiates the ‘Battle of Armageddon’.

After the seven seals and the seven trumpets, we empty the last of the seven little bottles and finally reach the world’s coup de grâce. The whole earth convulses and the sky collapses in great chunks, each fragment weighing a talent – about 25 kilograms in modern terms. Every island sinks into the sea and every mountain collapses – the world is dead.

But I spoke too soon, because John’s vision continues and so does the world – although how anyone has survived the previous blizzard of world-ending disasters is something of a puzzle. A great city, personified as a sexually promiscuous woman saddled on a gigantic monster, is destroyed. God and the Beast continue to battle; a dragon is released, and once again there is a world-ending war, and another defeat for the Beast. Finally, John sees the replacement of the old heaven and the old earth with a new heaven and earth in which there is no more suffering, death or sin, and where God lives with humanity forever. Phew!

There has been more interpretation of Revelation than all the other books of the Bible put together. I do not propose to add to that great heap, but there are a few things worth drawing out of this account.

The context in which Revelation was written is crucial to our understanding of it. It was created at a time when Christianity was a sect of Judaism, and John was a Jew who believed that Christ was the messiah promised by Jewish scriptures. He may or may not have believed that Christ also came to non-Jews, but it was the fate of his fellow Jews that concerned John most closely.

There’s nothing else like Revelation in the New Testament or in the Apocrypha, and while it’s true that much of the specific detail of John’s vision tends to strike us today as bizarre or incomprehensible, it makes more sense in the context of Jewish prophetic writing, a discourse that has its own symbolic idiom. In the words of the Bible scholar Géza Vermes, ‘Revelation, unlike the Gospel, is a typical Jewish apocalypse in which a belligerent Christ, wearing the warrior’s bloodstained robe, exterminates all the enemies of God before being transformed into a heavenly bridegroom.’* But even the old Hebrew prophets, though they do sometimes pronounce doom on us miserable sinners, don’t lay out the intricate specificity of details about the end of the world in the way that John does. That hadn’t been the Jewish way before, but by the time he came to write his book towards the end of the first century, something profound had changed in the world of the Jews.

In 66 CE the Jewish people staged a prolonged and bloody uprising against Roman rule and the Romans spent the next few years brutally suppressing it. The general in charge, Vespasian, crushed Jewish resistance in the north of Judea and then marched south to lay siege to Jerusalem, where he left the army under the command of his son, Titus. After a seven-month siege, Titus finally broke through Jerusalem’s city walls, the occupants of which were all either killed or enslaved, and most of the city was burnt or torn down. Most terrible of all, so far as the Jews were concerned, Titus broke into the inner sanctum of Judaism: he marched his soldiers through the seven entrances of the great Temple, the heart of Jewish religious praxis, and tore it down.

Jews today still mourn this disaster. The only piece of the temple still standing, a small fragment of the Western Wall, is a place of pilgrimage to modern Jews, known as the Wailing Wall on account of the public lamentation devout Jews make at that place. Before 70 CE, the Jews lived in Judea, centred around their great Temple in Jerusalem, which was presided over by a high priest. After 70 CE the Jews became a diasporic people scattered all over the world among hostile nations, in an environment poisoned by defeat, oppression and prejudice, setting up synagogues wherever they happened to be staying, with their religious life tended by rabbis, or ‘teachers’, rather than priests. I am always struck by the way that Passover, the most important religious ritual in Judaism, ends with the claim, pitched somewhere between yearning and that blithe invocation of impossibility that characterises human resilience, that wherever we celebrate this year, next year we will celebrate in Jerusalem.

It was in the immediate aftermath of this catastrophe that John wrote his apocalypse. In fact, the word ‘armageddon’ has a grand and global sound to it, although John’s usage was more parochial: ‘ar’ means hill and ‘Megiddo’ is a town in northern Israel, once important as a walled city guarding the trade routes from Egypt to Syria and Turkey. Therefore armageddon means ‘the battle of Megiddo hill’. While John talks about the whole world, he is fixated on a small stretch of land: modern-day Israel, going no further south than Jerusalem, no further north than the Euphrates (which rises in Turkey and flows through Syria), no further east than Babylon (near modern-day Baghdad) and no further west than Rome. We have taken John’s localised world’s end and turned it into a cosmic drama, just as we do with our individual mortalities: magnifying them into a collective disaster.

So, by the time John was writing his book, the world had already suffered its terminal catastrophe, and he was writing in the ruins of the disaster. Something integral to Jewish religious practice had been destroyed, never to return. And though it wasn’t the end of absolutely everything, it certainly felt like it was to a dispossessed Jew and a persecuted follower of the self-declared Jewish messiah Jesus Christ. The coming of the messiah was supposed to signal the end of times, but instead Christ was crucified and history had