SALON Book Review: Hallucinogenic and ominous, the Book of Revelation has inflamed the Western imagination for over 1,500 years, inspiring everything from cheesy horror movies to panics over bar codes (the Number of the Beast!). By citing the final book of the New Testament, doomsaying Christian cranks have blamed hurricanes on sex and labeled President Obama the Antichrist, but they’re only the book’s most extreme fans. Revelation, the preeminent apocalyptic prophecy of the Abrahamic tradition, has, according to Mathew Barrett Gross and Mel Gilles, set the tenor of our times. Not bad for a text that almost didn’t make it into the Bible in the first place and that some Christians still refuse to acknowledge as scripture.
Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton best known for her hugely popular 1979 book, “The Gnostic Gospels,” singles out this controversial text for extended scrutiny in her new book, “Revelations: Visions, Prophecy and Politics in the Book of Revelation.” Although not as (ahem) revelatory as that career-making early work, “Revelations” is an elegant, sensitive effort to place the Book of Revelation in its mystical, historical and — above all — political context…
The Book of Revelation was written at a time when the significance of Jesus’ legacy was furiously contested, and that’s one reason why it gets hauled out so readily at times of similar discord. Presented as a divinely bestowed vision, filled with rains of fire, burning mountains, seas turned to blood and angels with swords flying from their mouths, as well as costarring the ever-popular Four Horsemen, the Whore of Babylon and, of course, the Beast, the text is essentially an over-the-top cry of “You’re doing it wrong.” John of Patmos felt that his religion was being threatened by purported faithful who had assimilated into the dominant culture of the Roman Empire (eating meat from pagan temple sacrifices was a big issue for him), and he wanted to remind them of the hideous fate awaiting that evil empire and anyone who had gotten too cozy with it… (more)
