What is Reddit's opinion of Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation?

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No.

You can’t just grab different texts to make sense of another text.

Revelations is about Rome.

https://www.amazon.com/Revelations-Visions-Prophecy-Politics-Revelation/dp/0143121634

If you want to learn more about it.

The authors who wrote Genesis did not believe in Satan, the devil or demons.

I agree that the Jewish people borrow their stories from other places. But it doesn’t change the fact that Genesis is talking about a serpent and not trying to tell you anything other than that.

I suggest that you read the book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy & Politics by Elaine Pagels. It explains the book of Revelation in its historical context.

Amazon link
https://www.amazon.com/Revelations-Visions-Prophecy-Politics-Revelation/dp/0143121634/ref=tmm\_pap\_swatch\_0

It’s better to say Revelations is about Rome.

You gotta understand John (Not John the disciple) writes this when Nero is emperor. It’s something he wrote to inspire other Christians.

https://www.amazon.com/Revelations-Visions-Prophecy-Politics-Revelation/dp/0143121634

If your interested in some scholarly work. I would check out her book.

I see where you’re going with this and agree to an extent.

To me, its basically the same as saying that hylic people don’t ascend to the pleroma because they’re self absorbed and not aware of the greater spiritual aspects of themselves and unaware of gnosis.

The rest of this sounds like a lot of jargon to me.

I’m not really buying it.

I don’t put a lot of stock into Revelations either. Elaine Pagels book Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation sheds some interesting light on the matter.

Did they really have visions? Elaine Pagels argues that John of Patmos was adopting the OT prophetic tradition. IT may be that visions were a literary device rather than a literal event.

"Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six."

It's not about the devil, he just told you that plain as day. He's speaking in code about Emperor Nero and the Roman Empire. The meaning has been prostituted by Christian evangelicals to fit their needs. Here's a really great book on the subject.

https://www.amazon.com/Revelations-Visions-Prophecy-Politics-Revelation/dp/0143121634

https://www.amazon.com/Revelations-Visions-Prophecy-Politics-Revelation/dp/0143121634

Here’s a great book from a Christian academic that talks about t

https://www.amazon.com/Revelations-Visions-Prophecy-Politics-Revelation/dp/0143121634

A book from a great scholar that talks about it. Or you can just ignore it and hold onto what you believe in.

Revelations

Is it political? Overtly. Is it about Rome? Almost certainly. Is it about Nero specifically? Probably not.

Prophesy is a sort of literature with such a consistent set of conventions, symbols, and rhetorical methods that it could arguably be called a genre. Science Fiction has ray guns, Westerns have cowboys, and Prophetic works have physics-defying carnivores whose body parts represent various attributes of Levantine empires. They are produced by nationalists of various sorts, usually believed to be seers and often in exile: men with political and priestly connections to the Powers That Be, who either revile them or use them as mouthpieces. The Eastern Mediterranean's most well-known prophecies appear in the Bible, but there are numerous other such works, all of which feature exhortations, imperial denouncements, and power-to-the-people-type declarations similar to those found in Revelation.

Works of Hebrew prophecy are generally traceable to moments of national crisis involving the encroachment of surrounding armies or external religious influences. The Book of Hosea, which predates the Torah, denounces the Canaanite religions popular in Samaria during the Israel's monolatristic period. Ezekiel wrote Ezekiel in Babylonian captivity. Isaiah's life was lived in the shadow of Assyrian ascendency.

It's important to note that Revelation was written long, long after the Bible's other prophetic works. However, it's impossible that John of Patmos was unaware of the earlier works in his chosen genre, which were similarly packed with unfaithful women, dragons, animal chimeras, and rebukes of earthly nations with a very familiar prosody and symbolic palette. Consider these passages:

“Then the kings of the earth [...] will weep and wail at the sight of the smoke rising from the fire that consumes her. they will stand at a distance and cry out: “Woe, woe to the great city, the mighty city of Babylon!"

-- Revelation 18:10

"How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high [...] But you are brought down to Sheol, to the far reaches of the pit."

--Isaiah 14:12-15

Elsewhere in the prophesies, we find Jeremiah frequently decrying the wickedness of Egypt and Babylon in very similar terms. Note also that Jeremiah wrote Lamentations in direct response to the destruction of Solomon's Temple by the Chaldean Empire in 586 BCE, while John of Patmos wrote Revelation in the decades following the second destruction of Solomon's temple by the Roman Empire 600 years later. It's hardly a stretch to argue that John of Patmos correlated these events and adopted a literary mode which would link them in the minds of his readers as well.

The question of whether Revelation directly references Nero is far more controversial. At the time of Revelation's composition, the emperor was not Nero, but Domitian. Nero was merely one of several Emperors of his era to persecute Christians. The reason Nero is so frequently mentioned in these discussions is due to the controversial theory that the number 666 is some cypher of his name. Whether or not this is the case is far from settled.

Let's look at a similarly controversial, though far less famous passage found a couple of chapters later in the book:

"The beast that you saw—it was, and now is no more, but is about to come up out of the Abyss and go to its destruction. And those who dwell on the earth whose names were not written in the Book of Life from the foundation of the world will marvel when they see the beast that was, and is not, and yet will be. This calls for a mind with wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sits. There are also seven kings. Five have fallen, one is, and the other has not yet come; but when he does come, he must remain for only a little while.…"

--Revelation 17:9

Here the controversy is about whether or not the number seven refers to the seven hills of Rome. Of course, the Greek clearly translates to "mountains," rather than hills. Some say the mountains more generally represent nations which persecuted the Hebrew. And yet... Here's that temptation to answer beyond what we can really say. It feels very, very right to identify these seven "mountains" with the seven "hills" of Rome in a work so clearly pointed against the Roman Empire's persecution of Christians, but what sort of textual evidence would even confirm or disprove the postulations at the center of this controversy? All of this is similar to the Nero / Domitian / Rome-In-General loggerhead in the more famous "Number of the Beast" section of the work. In both cases, I'm of the opinion that the exact details are irresolvable, but that the overwhelming thrust of the evidence is that Revelation is a work consciously written in the style of older Hebrew prophesies in response to Roman persecution.

References:

"Is the Babylon of Revelation Rome or Jerusalem?", G. Biguzzi (2006) https://www.jstor.org/stable/42614689

"The Book of Revelation and the First Years of Nero's Reign", Gonzalo Rojas-Flores (2004), https://www.jstor.org/stable/42614530

Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, Elaine Pagels (2012) https://www.amazon.com/Revelations-Visions-Prophecy-Politics-Revelation/dp/0143121634

"Nero as the Antichrist", James Grout, 2014 https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/gladiators/nero.html

https://www.amazon.com/Revelations-Visions-Prophecy-Politics-Revelation/dp/0143121634

She has a great book if you are ever interested in starting to dive deeper into it

Revelation is not a prophecy about things to come. The overwhelming thrust of the evidence is that Revelation is a work consciously written in the style of older Hebrew prophesies in response to Roman persecution.

References:

"Is the Babylon of Revelation Rome or Jerusalem?", G. Biguzzi (2006) https://www.jstor.org/stable/42614689

"The Book of Revelation and the First Years of Nero's Reign", Gonzalo Rojas-Flores (2004), https://www.jstor.org/stable/42614530

Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, Elaine Pagels (2012) https://www.amazon.com/Revelations-Visions-Prophecy-Politics-Revelation/dp/0143121634

"Nero as the Antichrist", James Grout, 2014 https://penelope.uchicago.edu/\~grout/encyclopaedia\_romana/gladiators/nero.html

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, SCJ helped me to realise that the Bible and the entire Christianity is flawed.

Same as you, brother, one of the main reasons I stop believing in Christianity after leaving SCJ is due to the central line in the New Testament where everyone believes that Jesus's 2nd coming will arrive within their lifetimes. Even Jesus made such a prophesy during his first coming.

A book that I read is https://www.amazon.com/Revelations-Visions-Prophecy-Politics-Revelation/dp/0143121634 which talks about the history of the book of Revelation and how it always get re-interpreted in every generation to refer to their time, ie. every generation keeps believing that Jesus is going to return within their generation!

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Is it political? Overtly. Is it about Rome? Almost certainly. Is it about Nero specifically? Probably not.

Prophesy is a sort of literature with such a consistent set of conventions, symbols, and rhetorical methods that it could arguably be called a genre. Science Fiction has ray guns, Westerns have cowboys, and Prophetic works have physics-defying carnivores whose body parts represent various attributes of Levantine empires. They are produced by nationalists of various sorts, usually believed to be seers and often in exile: men with political and priestly connections to the Powers That Be, who either revile them or use them as mouthpieces. The Eastern Mediterranean's most well-known prophecies appear in the Bible, but there are numerous other such works, all of which feature exhortations, imperial denouncements, and power-to-the-people-type declarations similar to those found in Revelation.

Works of Hebrew prophecy are generally traceable to moments of national crisis involving the encroachment of surrounding armies or external religious influences. The Book of Hosea, which predates the Torah, denounces the Canaanite religions popular in Samaria during the Israel's monolatristic period. Ezekiel wrote Ezekiel in Babylonian captivity. Isaiah's life was lived in the shadow of Assyrian ascendency.

It's important to note that Revelation was written long, long after the Bible's other prophetic works. However, it's impossible that John of Patmos was unaware of the earlier works in his chosen genre, which were similarly packed with unfaithful women, dragons, animal chimeras, and rebukes of earthly nations with a very familiar prosody and symbolic palette. Consider these passages:

“Then the kings of the earth [...] will weep and wail at the sight of the smoke rising from the fire that consumes her. they will stand at a distance and cry out: “Woe, woe to the great city, the mighty city of Babylon!"

-- Revelation 18:10

"How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high [...] But you are brought down to Sheol, to the far reaches of the pit."

--Isaiah 14:12-15

Elsewhere in the prophesies, we find Jeremiah frequently decrying the wickedness of Egypt and Babylon in very similar terms. Note also that Jeremiah wrote Lamentations in direct response to the destruction of Solomon's Temple by the Chaldean Empire in 586 BCE, while John of Patmos wrote Revelation in the decades following the second destruction of Solomon's temple by the Roman Empire 600 years later. It's hardly a stretch to argue that John of Patmos correlated these events and adopted a literary mode which would link them in the minds of his readers as well.

The question of whether Revelation directly references Nero is far more controversial. At the time of Revelation's composition, the emperor was not Nero, but Domitian. Nero was merely one of several Emperors of his era to persecute Christians. The reason Nero is so frequently mentioned in these discussions is due to the controversial theory that the number 666 is some cypher of his name. Whether or not this is the case is far from settled.

Let's look at a similarly controversial, though far less famous passage found a couple of chapters later in the book:

"The beast that you saw—it was, and now is no more, but is about to come up out of the Abyss and go to its destruction. And those who dwell on the earth whose names were not written in the Book of Life from the foundation of the world will marvel when they see the beast that was, and is not, and yet will be. This calls for a mind with wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sits. There are also seven kings. Five have fallen, one is, and the other has not yet come; but when he does come, he must remain for only a little while.…"

--Revelation 17:9

Here the controversy is about whether or not the number seven refers to the seven hills of Rome. Of course, the Greek clearly translates to "mountains," rather than hills. Some say the mountains more generally represent nations which persecuted the Hebrew. And yet... Here's that temptation to answer beyond what we can really say. It feels very, very right to identify these seven "mountains" with the seven "hills" of Rome in a work so clearly pointed against the Roman Empire's persecution of Christians, but what sort of textual evidence would even confirm or disprove the postulations at the center of this controversy? All of this is similar to the Nero / Domitian / Rome-In-General loggerhead in the more famous "Number of the Beast" section of the work. In both cases, I'm of the opinion that the exact details are irresolvable, but that the overwhelming thrust of the evidence is that Revelation is a work consciously written in the style of older Hebrew prophesies in response to Roman persecution.

References:

"Is the Babylon of Revelation Rome or Jerusalem?", G. Biguzzi (2006) https://www.jstor.org/stable/42614689

"The Book of Revelation and the First Years of Nero's Reign", Gonzalo Rojas-Flores (2004), https://www.jstor.org/stable/42614530

Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, Elaine Pagels (2012) https://www.amazon.com/Revelations-Visions-Prophecy-Politics-Revelation/dp/0143121634

"Nero as the Antichrist", James Grout, 2014 https://penelope.uchicago.edu/\~grout/encyclopaedia\_romana/gladiators/nero.html

I'm a broken record on The Revelation topic, but I always recommend Elaine Pagels' book "Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation" and this NPR interview between Pagels and Terry Gross. Great place to start.

tldr: Revelation is anti-roman propaganda likely written in response to the sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans

I'm a broken record on The Revelation topic, but I always recommend Elaine Pagels' book "Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation" and this NPR interview between Pagels and Terry Gross. Great place to start.

Never heard a reference to Neb. I always heard it was Nero or Calligula. Elaine Pagels does a nice job of sorting it out.

https://www.amazon.com/Revelations-Visions-Prophecy-Politics-Revelation/dp/0143121634

You should read some actual scholarship on this - I'm sure you'll roll your eyes at the suggestion, but I promise that if you read Revelation for what it is, another in a long line of apocalyptic texts from ancient Palestine, then you'll gain an appreciation for the context and the audience for which it was written.

I recommend Pagels: https://www.amazon.com/Revelations-Visions-Prophecy-Politics-Revelation/dp/0143121634

Try Elaine Pagels Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation

https://www.amazon.com/Revelations-Visions-Prophecy-Politics-Revelation/dp/0143121634

Pretty much any academic source you look at will suffice. Elaine Pagels' book on Revelation is a good resource.

Elaine Pagel's book Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation.