In one of his Tudor crime novels, CJ Sansom has his hero Matthew Shardlake on the trail of a serial killer inspired by the book of Revelation. He says in a note that it would have been better if Revelation had never been included in the canon of scripture at all, given the damage it's done.
It's a heavy charge, and it has to be admitted that weird interpretations of Revelation have been responsible for a great deal of harm. This ranges from violent revolution to establish the Kingdom of God on earth (like the Fifth Monarchy Men in the Civil War) to the sheer waste of time and effort involved in crazy schemes to establish a timetable for the End Times (like Sir Isaac Newton). More subtly, the pre-millenial dispensationalism of many American evangelicals has been held to have serious political implications for a US government that relies on them so heavily: what's the point in doing anything about climate change if Jesus is soon going to rapture Christians away?
But in spite of CJ Sansom, we've got Revelation. For Christians, the choice isn't between reading it and not reading it; it's between reading it badly and reading it well. And if there's one lesson from history, it's that we no longer know enough to be able to read it with an instinctive understanding of what John meant. We don't speak his language any more – not just his New Testament Greek, but the whole thought-world in which he lived and moved is alien to us. His first hearers would have seen his 'visions' – not literally what he saw, but finely-crafted poetical representations of spiritual reality – in a way that we can't, at least not without help.
This is where a book like Ian Paul's new commentary on Revelation in the Tyndale NT Commentary series comes in. It takes Revelation seriously as Scripture, and interprets it for today. It has an eye on how it can be preached, and its comments on individual passages and texts are invariably insightful.
Here's what he says on 13: 16-18 after reflecting on why the 'number of the beast' is Nero: 'Whatever the other benefits of Roman rule, and whatever the virtues of individual emperors, if one wants to understand the "spirit" of the empire, one has to look at Nero – someone who tortured and murdered the people of God. This is what Christians would experience in the coming two centuries. And this is what God's people consistently experience whenever any human leaders make the totalitarian claims to be the things that only God can be, offer the things (peace and prosperity) that only God can provide, and demand the absolute loyalty that only God can require.'
This is a theme running throughout the book: Revelation is designed to speak to us today in and through what it said to its first readers. But in order for us to hear what it says to us, we have to understand what it said to them.
There's a wealth of thinking in the introduction, which maps the territory admirably. Paul makes big claims: Revelation is 'the most remarkable text you will ever read' (true, thinking about it); it's shaped the world through interpreters like JN Darby with his dispensational premillenialism and Luther's battle with Rome (the Catholic Church was the great prostitute of Revelation 7). It identifies Jesus and God unequivocally – a huge contribution to Christian theology.
Yet, he says, it's widely neglected – unsurprisingly, given how difficult it is: 'Revelation is the book that above all others tests our ability to read Scripture well.'
The key question here is, 'What kind of text is Revelation?' So, Ian Paul says:
'The stars will fall from heaven, the sun will cease its shining;
the moon will be turned to blood, and fire and hail will fall from heaven.
The rest of the country will have sunny intervals with scattered showers.'
Genre is all-important: we'll read Revelation, if we are wise, completely differently than if we were reading a weather report. John's genre is 'apocalyptic'. He writes about the supernatural using a particular set of images and ideas. There are lots of metaphors and symbols. He uses numbers, Old Testament references, contemporary events and projections into the future. It all means something tremendous, but it isn't always easy to say what.
For a book like this we need a guide, or we'll be lost in the trackless wastes of The Late Great Planet Earth and Left Behind. Ian Paul's commentary is a very useful one to have in the backpack.
'Revelation' by Ian Paul is published by IVP.
