What about apocalyptic literature as a genre? Where does that come from, and why does it seem so bizarre? In this series so far, we have talked about the structure of prophecy, how in the Hebrew tradition, the prophetic voice is not about fortune telling or future predicting. It is about telling the consequences of the path that we're on, calling for change, and trusting with this optimistic view that the world can head in a different direction when truth is spoken in the right moment at the right time to the right person. When we speak truth to power, we can change the outcome of history.

We can head in a better direction toward the kingdom of God. That's what Hebrew prophecy is all about. And the book of Revelation is structured very much on the model of the prophet Isaiah with this same optimistic hope that if we can be transformed by the story of Jesus, if we can understand that story and all of its implications in the world, we can be part of the transformation of the world. Okay. What about apocalyptic literature as a genre?

Where does that come from, and why does it seem so bizarre? Well, one of the things you have to understand about apocalypticism as a genre is that it comes out of a very particular historical and cultural moment. The Jewish people have always had this profound hope in the ability of truth to redirect human history, but that isn't working out the way they hoped. They've been conquered by the Assyrians, and then the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and now the Romans, and cynicism is starting to set in. Maybe our righteousness is not as powerful as we hoped.

Maybe our commitment to the story of God can't direct history the way that we thought. Maybe the best that we can hope for is to call out to God and ask God to show up in power to crush our enemies and to set the world right, God's self. And so really, apocalypticism comes out of this frustration and this cynicism with the way that history is going, this falling away of the optimism of the prophetic tradition and this giving away to pessimism. And the early Christian community was falling prey to something very similar. They had hoped that after the resurrection of Jesus, he would return and set up his kingdom pretty quickly.

And that hasn't happened, and they're starting to wonder about the same things. Maybe it's not going to go the way that we hoped. Maybe the best that we can hope for is a vengeful retribute of Jesus who will smite our enemies and change the story wholesale. And that's the context that John is writing in, this same kind of cynical, pessimistic view of the world that is very popular around this time. He, however, wants to smuggle in the prophetic optimism of the Hebrew tradition.

I firmly believe that that's what Revelation is about. Not the destruction of the world, but the time to destroy that which destroys God's creation. It's about the end of everything that tears at God's good creation, including the human story. That's the heart of Revelation. But John understands that there is a particular genre that has grabbed a lot of purchase in the popular imagination.

People like hearing apocalypses, just like we do today. I mean, I'm a pacifist. I firmly believe in the goodness of God, but I'll admit, I enjoyed Mad Max Fury Road. I like a good apocalyptic tale from time to time, even a sad one like The Road. There's just something about these types of stories that speaks cathartically to our frustration with the world and our hope for what could be better.

John capitalizes on that. He learns and understands the tropes of the genre that are going around. Revelation is by no means the only apocalypse in the first century. There are a ton of these types of books, both Christian and Jewish, around this time, and he uses that to lead us back toward a hope that's more rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures, This idea that we can play a part in shaping the world toward where God imagines it going. So what does the apocalyptic genre look like?

Well, as we've said, it's very cynical. It really does tell stories about how God is going to come, smite our enemies, crush wrongdoers, and set up a new world for those of us who are left. But there's also this sort of scaling up of imagery that happens in apocalyptic literature. You don't get stories about emperors or kings or politics. You get stories about beasts and monsters and dragons and all the types of things that we see in the book of Revelation.

So why? I mean, why not just come out and speak clearly about the things that you want to? Well, there's a couple reasons for that. One is because in some level, apocalyptic literature is coded literature. It's dangerous to come out and speak poorly of the politicians that are in power over you.

Remember, these are not democracies. These are very much theocratic monarchies, cults and kingdoms, empires, where the leaders are not to be questioned. And so doing this encoded language, which was very clear to the people at the time but had a plausible deniability to it, afforded a level of safety. But also, the the truth was at this time, everybody lived in a particular world just like we do now, where the downsides were largely hidden from the populace. For the most part, the emperor did a good job of looking after the masses.

There were certainly people that suffered, religious minorities, the Jewish community for one and the Christian community for another. But generally, a lot of the population thought that for the most part, the empire and the emperor was doing a good job, keeping the border secure, keeping raiders away, making trade and commerce possible. Who really cares if that comes at the expense of a few people on the margins? The truth is that's very much like our world today. And so apocalypses were about taking the world as it existed, but shifting it just enough so that we could see it in a new light, and maybe we could see some of the predatory downsides that we hadn't really noticed when we weren't looking closely.

That's what good art does. It shows you your world twisted just enough that you can see it from a new perspective. That's what apocalyptic literature is doing. It's taking our politics, it's taking our nations, it's taking our economics and our religious systems, and showing them to us in a new light so that we can critique them fairly. But it's not like these images were inscrutable to the people who were reading them because there was a particular language game that people existed within and that people talked, about all the time.

So today, if you picked up a paper and you read an article about the bears destroying the eagles, you could pretty quickly, without a lot of not a lot of mental gymnastics, situate that within a sports world where we're probably talking about an NFL game and not an outbreak of anthropomorphized violence at the local zoo. You just know that eagles and bears are used within a particular framework to talk about sports. Same thing when we talk about the stock market. We can talk about the Bulls and the Bears and the arguments that they're having, and we understand that because this is coming from CNBC, it's probably talking about those who have an optimistic view of the, current stock market and those who have a more pessimistic view debating about the relative merits of the particular moment. We we don't think that this is an outbreak of animalistic violence on Wall Street.

We understand that this is a philosophical or economic debate. Those language games don't need to be explained to us. Every time it comes up on a financial news network, they don't explain to you what bears and bulls are. Every time you hear a conversation in pop culture about the NFL, nobody takes the time to explain what mascots mean to you. We just know from the surrounding context of the conversation where those words fit and what's most appropriate in our interpretation of them.

Same thing is happening in the first century world. A lot of the images in Revelation, and we'll get to that in future videos in this series, but a lot of those images are not really that hard to understand once you can place them in their first century context. People knew what they meant. They were just coded language that shifted the world just enough to give you new perspective and afforded a certain amount of plausible deniability when it came to critiquing those in power. And so for these two reasons, apocalypticism relies on understanding the language game of the first century.

Here's an example of how we know some of these images were so obviously clear to the people in the first century. There's one section where the writer is talking about the mark of the beast, and he talks about this person. He says the number of the beast is six six six. It's a very famous passage. Probably most of us have heard this.

And for millennia, people have, tried to figure out what the six six six means and who this is referring to, and there's all kinds of speculation. There has been for hundreds and thousands of years about who might be this person because of this number. Well, irony is the original readers knew exactly who this was. It was a reference to Nero. Now, that does not mean that Nero is the beast from the book of Revelation.

In fact, there was an entire legend about Nero called the Nero revividus legend, which was the idea that Nero had not died by suicide but had gone into hiding and was going to return to claim his throne. There was at least two people who showed up in Rome after the death of Nero claiming to be Nero returned. And so there was this popular myth that was going around that I I don't know that a lot of people really believe. Nobody took these Nero impersonators seriously at the time, but it was out there in the public consciousness. And so John talks about a beast with seven heads, and one of those heads has received a fatal wound, and yet it just keeps coming back.

His point here is that the Roman Empire doesn't depend on a particular emperor like Nero. You can chop off that head and kill it, and another will rise to take its place because the beast represents the Roman Empire. More than that, it represents human empires and the way they impose themselves on us. But what's really interesting about this six sixty six number is that different manuscripts of Revelation actually give it as two different numbers. Some say six sixty six, some of our earliest manuscripts actually say six sixteen.

And both of those point to Nero, two different spellings: Kaiser Nero, Kaiser Nerohn. They add up differently in Hebrew Gematria to either six sixty six or six sixteen. What that tells us is that scribes knew exactly what the story was about it was a reference to Nero and a reference to the way that the particular leader of Rome didn't matter nearly as much as the cult of empire that kept, itself alive regardless of the succession of leaders, and they were simply changing the number to reflect the audience that they were speaking to. If an audience would have been more familiar with a Greek spelling, we got six sixteen if they were more familiar with a Hebrew spelling, we got six sixty six, but they both add up to Kaiser Nero. And it's an example of how, what seems like an inscrutable riddle to us two thousand years later was very obvious to the original readers at the time.

And that's important when you're reading Revelation. Things are not being hidden from you. That's not the point of the book. Things are being laid out in front of you in a way to shift your world, to get you to see it in new ways. And for those of us coming along two thousand years later, we have to read it like art historians who are going to try to figure out the original context of these images, the original setting that they were used, and how John is employing them both to subvert and to lean into the expectations of his audience.

That's all part of the apocalyptic genre in the way that John is using it.