The drama of the Apocalypse : in relation to the literary and political circumstances of its time

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Preface . . . . r vii

CHAPTER

Preface

The following Study of the Apocalypse is intended to be not so much a critical examination as an appreciation. It does not aim to be a commentary, a museum of research, nor an embodiment of decisions upon the many scholastic questions involved. It endeavors rather to invite, and to smooth the way before the ordinary reader. There is lying ready much piety which would gladly find fresh food, much literary appreciation which w r ould welcome a new masterpiece, much poetic sensibility waiting to test fire by itself. Too often when one of these has approached the Book of the Revelation it has been repelled by language it could not understand. But for all these classes the Book is peculiarly an inheritance. It needs but a little to put them in possession of their own. That little this Essay is ambitious to accomplish.

One of the first principles of the Biblical Study of our day is that we cannot know

vii viii

Preface what the Bible means for us until we know something of what it meant for those to whom it was uttered. It is in accordance with this principle that in coming to the Apocalypse we seek first to find what it meant to the Christian of the latter half of the first century. Its value for us may not be the same as for him, but it will be on the same lines. The spiritual lessons will be similar, though the circumstances through w r hich they are taught may be different. It is this conviction of the necessity of penetrating through its outer circumstances to a knowledge of the mind of the time, that has led to the present Study of the Apocalypse.

F. P.

Andover, Mass.

"And the Apocalypse of St. John is the majestic image of a high and stately tragedy, shutting up and intermingling her solemn scenes and acts with a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies."

— John Milton, " The Reason of Church Government."

"The soul has said.. 'I do not know what all these emblems, in which angels and devils and beasts with heads and horns are introduced, may exactly signify, but I do see that all brute-power will be overcome by holy love; I do see that all vain cunning will be proved to be vain by holy wisdom; I do see that the Lord of the great heavens will, governing here as well as on high, and managing His transactions according to great preparations made in the invisible scene, bear down with helpful powers upon the earth, and make the changes below correspond to the changes above. 5 " — Frederick D. Maurice, " Lectures on the Apocalypse."

ix

THE

DRAMA OF THE APOCALYPSE

Chapter I The Dramatic Character Of The Apocalypse

THE Revelation of St. John is probably one of the least read and least valued of the books of the New Testament. The second and third chapters, the last, and parts of the twentieth and twenty-first stand, it is true, on a different plane in the mind of the ordinary reader, from the other parts of the Book. These speak a language as easily understood as that of the Gospels. The chapters which are supposed to be a description of Heaven have furnished a precious basis for the devout imagination in all ages. But the greater part of the Book is to most readers of the Bible a confused mass,

B I into which angels and dragons and beasts with heads and horns, vials and trumpets, are introduced in no order and with no perceptible plan. And the ordinary reader is in one respect right. He can find what is better adapted to his purpose much more readily elsewhere. The value of the Book does not lie where he is accustomed to look for value, in texts, short quotable passages full of comfort or guidance or wisdom. It is a poetic value, requiring some power of literary appreciation to apprehend it. But when one comes to it with some degree of such capacity, the Book is found to be full of unity and force, of gorgeous coloring and majestic movement, full of those qualities of imagination which, when joined with the insight and judgment of a spiritual nature, give the power of inspiration. In many respects the Apocalypse is like that poem which owes so much to it, " Paradise Lost " ; the excellences of both are to be sought in the same direction.

It is not a commentary, but a study of materials, which is here aimed at in regard to the Apocalypse. What were the conditions of the mind of the time? What imprint was given to those conditions by the special characteristics of the author ? What were the circumstances of the age which made a background for the writer's imagination? What the terms of time and place in which he set forth the eternal processes of the Kingdom of Heaven ? Such a consideration of elements does not eliminate, but exhibits, the directly spiritual qualities — the power of reaching men's souls and bringing them into direct contact with the spirit of God — which the age contemporary with the Apocalypse recognized abundantly in it, which gave it a place in the Canon, and which have also been recognized, to some degree at least, by the ages since.

Like all Hebrew prophecy, the Apocalypse was designed by its author for the times in which he wrote, and had no intended application to future ages. Indeed, he did not contemplate the possibility that the world would last to future ages, for it was the object of his book to assure the Christian community that the end of the world would come in a very short time, a few years at the utmost. But like all Hebrew prophecy too, the author was dealing with facts and principles which were universal, and the words he uttered were too large to fit the immediate circum- I stances only. The future is really the same as the present ; it is enfolded within it, and is governed by the same laws ; and so what is true of the universal elements of the present, is true without limitation of time. This was expressed and strengthened to the mind of a Hebrew by the fact that his language had but two tenses, one for an action regarded as complete, whether present or past, the other for an action still incomplete, whether past, present, or future. A prophecy then which was true for its own time, was, because it dealt with universal elements, true for all time ; but the form of it was that of its own day and conditions. It was uttered to meet present needs, and those present needs must be taken into account if the prophecy is to be understood either in its temporary or its permanent form.

The aim of the Apocalypse was to comfort and encourage the Christians of the latter part of the first century with the thought of the speedy end of the world and the establishment of the kingdom of their Lord. The clouds which for the present concealed Him from them were soon to roll back and He would be seen coming in glory, raising the dead, bringing punishment to the wicked and rewards to His faithful. The wonderful events which had been happening in the world of Nature and in that of politics were signs that His coming was at hand. There was apparently no part of the Christian belief which took so strong a hold on the imagination of those who had it, as this of the visible coming of Jesus to set up His kingdom in Jerusalem. His disciples were planning for it while they were with Him. Their first thought after His resurrection was that now it was to be accomplished.

We can trace the development of this belief in the mind of St. Paul. His earliest Epistle is partly an answer to questions about which the Thessalonian Church had apparently written to him. It indicates how little the doctrine of the resurrection was understood, that their difficulty was profound and widespread. The question was, Since the reward of the faithful would be to share in the kingdom Christ would establish, how about those who died before the establishment of the kingdom ? Their fate seemed hard, for they would be debarred from their reward. But St. Paul says (i Thess. iv. 1 3 f .) that he and the rest of them who will witness the coming of the Lord will have no advantage over those who had fallen asleep, for there will be a sudden shout by an archangel, and Jesus will descend from the sky and sit upon the clouds, and then the faithful who are dead will rise from their graves and be joined by the faithful who remain alive, and all together will ascend into the air and be forever with the Lord. And this great event may occur at any moment. This intelligence not unnaturally produced confusion in the Thessalonian Church. If the coming of the Lord might take place at any time, what was the use of carrying on longer one's ordinary business ? It could not be needed if the world was to pass away soon. And so the members of the church fell into that disorder and antinomianism which the prospect of a speedy end of all things has always tended to produce. St. Paul therefore writes them again (2 Thess. ii. 3), telling them that the conditions of the Parousia are not fully ripe, and that whenever it may come, soon or late, they must abstain from lawlessness and anarchy and meet it walking soberly in the paths of ordinary life. But it is true, he assures them, the Lord will descend from Heaven with His mighty angels in flaming fire, bringing judgment and glory.

When now we turn to those Epistles of his which hold a middle place in date, we find that the details of the Lord's coming bear a less prominent part in them. The

S The Drama of the Apocalypse

time is short, and one must not be entangled with the affairs of this life (i Cor. vii. 29). The night is far spent ; it is time to awake, for the day is at hand, and their salvation is nearer than when they entered the faith (Rom. xiii. 11, 12). They are to wait and keep blameless until the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ (1 Cor. i. 7, S). But the reward of the faithful is now regarded not so much as rising into the sky to meet the Lord, as a spiritual change progressively into the likeness of Christ (2 Cor. iii. iS). And when we come to his latest Epistles we find that the circumstances of the Parousia are hardly mentioned, while its spiritual significance is brought still more fully into prominence. Our lower natures will be fashioned like the glorious body of Christ (Phil. iii. 20, 21). We shall be delivered from the power of darkness and made partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light (Col. i. 12, 13). Belief in the great fact of the coming of Christ still remains; "The Lord is at hand " (Phil. iv. 5); but its material dress has become of no importance. And at last the apostle sits in prison, an old man, having given up the expectation of himself beholding the coming of the Lord, but knowing that he shall depart and be with Christ, which after all is far better (2 Tim. iv. 6; Phil. i. 23).

This idea of the visible coming of the Lord entered most deeply into the mental atmosphere of Christian believers of the first century. It was to them what the conviction of the superiority of good over evil is to us, the centre of their faith, the source of their consolation and courage. Many centuries have shown the spiritual character of a belief in which to those who held it first, there was no separation between spiritual and material. And so it has come to pass that while to us the life of Christ marks the beginning of an era, to the early Christians it marked the end of one. This then was the aim of the Apocalypse, to assure them that their belief was correct; their triumph was sure and was at hand.

The Book is in the form of a drama. It could hardly have had any other form, for the events it has to deal with are essentially dramatic, events which step by step inevitably bring about a final denotement. It is interesting to compare it with the other two dramas of classic Hebrew literature, the Book of Job and Solomon's Song; if, indeed, the Book of Job is Hebraic and not Idumean. Unlike Solomon's Song, which not improbably has been often represented at the marriages and feasts of the kings and nobles of Northern Israel, the Apocalypse can never have been intended for representation. Yet its stages or acts are marked by much greater precision than those of the older drama. When compared with the Book of Job, the changes which time had been working can be plainly seen. The Book of Job is an example of the meditative tendency of the Hebrew mind. The Greek mind delighted to consider events in their relations, one event as necessarily leading on another; and so a series of events, in which there was unity, formed, when that unity was exhibited, a drama. The Hebrew mind, on the other hand, is idyllic. It loves to pore over a thought, examining it from many points of view, stating and restating it, brooding upon it, seeing in it not so much a problem to be solved as a theme to be meditatively dwelt upon. The genius of its language is opposed to structural unity. It has no conception of a sentence formed otherwise than by addition ; its only conjunction is " and." Of clauses main and subordinate, relative and causal, it knows nothing.

It therefore rarely attempts to advance by steps to a conclusion. So the Book of Job, while we may call it dramatic because of its various stages and conclusion, yet has really no progress in it. It ends where it began, with the problem of the suffering of the righteous still unsolved, the voice of the Almighty silencing questions, but not answering them. So Jesus gave no systematized constitution of His kingdom, but He illustrated many aspects of it : " The kingdom of heaven is like . . In the centuries however between the Book of Job and the Apocalypse the influence of Greek thought had been affecting the Hebrew mind, and the form of the Apocalyptic drama is therefore far more Greek than Hebrew. But it shows its Oriental birth in its use of concrete symbols instead of abstract thoughts. The Western mind strips off from an idea all that is circumstantial and special and uses the abstract result as a term to think with. The Oriental mind will have nothing to do with abstractions, but must embody its thought in a concrete form. We are inclined, in trying to think in this way, to limit our thoughts either to the special image or to its significance. For the Oriental this breach does not exist, but the symbol and what it connotes are the same. This is why apocalyptic works, such as the books of Daniel and Enoch, abound in visions of horses and dragons and various beasts. It was not that the writer saw these very creatures, but that he translated his thought into these concrete terms, just as modern metaphysicians translate theirs into abstract terms, neither set expressing fully the conception of the writer, and the nomenclature in each case having to be learned before he can be understood. There may have been another reason also why the ideas of an apocalyptic writer should have been expressed not too plainly. Apocalypses always spring from a dissatisfaction with the state of things as they are, and the downfall of the existing government therefore has usually a prominent place in them. In the Apocalypse of St. John the fall of the Roman Empire is announced as near at hand. If it had been uttered too plainly, it would have attracted too much attention in official quarters. Apocalyptic literature must always speak chiefly to the initiated.

Ancient drama, unlike the modern, had no formal divisions into acts and scenes. Objection may therefore be raised to the imposition of this apparently modern form upon the Book of the Revelation ; and exception may perhaps especially be taken to the dividing line here made between the fourth and fifth acts. But the particular points of division which may be adopted are of little importance. The main thing to be recognized is that the poem proceeds by four or five great steps, and that in developing each of these, subordinate ideas or motifs are introduced. Call these acts and scenes, or call them divisions and subdivisions, it matters little, so long as the skeleton of the work is felt as a sustaining power to its various members, and a guide to the understanding of their functions, individually and collectively.

It is interesting to note the difference of attitude toward the Roman Empire exhibited in the Apocalypse from that in St. Paul's Epistles. To St. Paul, proud of his Roman citizenship, the State was a friend, which the Christian should respect and obey. It saved him from a Jewish mob at Jerusalem (Acts xxi. 30-34), and its magic name delivered him from torture (Acts xxii. 25-30). It is to him God's vicegerent (Rom. xiii. 1 ; Tit. iii. 1), embodying His authority (Rom. xiii. 4). He never came in contact with the practice of compelling the Christians as a test of their Christianity to burn incense to the statue of the Emperor, the personification of the State. This custom belongs to a succeeding reign. A change took place in the policy of the Empire toward the Christians. Before the year 64 a.d. a Christian was not put to death as such, but proof was required that he had been guilty of some act prejudicial to society. After this, however, it was assumed that all Christians were guilty of such hostility, and might be at once condemned on confession of the Name. 1 It was the latter policy which prevailed when the author of the Apocalypse wrote. He had seen the glare of burning Rome in the year 64, and the ghastly tortures of the Christians there and throughout the provinces. The martyrs of Smyrna, of Pergamos (ii. 10-13), and of the whole Christian world (vi. 9-12) stood before him, clamoring for vengeance on their oppressor, and making faithfulness to the cause seem

*Cf."The Church in the Roman Empire; 1 Prof. W. H. Ramsay, p. 243.

the one climactic virtue (ii. 7, et al.). His attitude therefore toward the State is that of determined hostility. The Church is now persecuted by the State (Ch. xiL); but her enemy — and what other name can the enemy have than that of the ancient arch-enemy, Babylon? — will be overthrown and destroyed (Ch. xviii.). He interrupts his narrative of the catastrophe with a burst of exultation over her downfall, which recalls the fierce denunciations of the Imprecatory Psalms : " Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye saints, apostles, and prophets, for God hath avenged you on her ! " ( xviii. 20).

The date of the Book of the Revelation is probably the latter half of the year 68 a.d. The author knew of the great fire at Rome in the year 64 (Ch. xviii.), and he shows apparently no acquaintance with the fall of Jerusalem, which took place in the year 70. Whether he was the Apostle John has been much discussed. The epithet " The Divine," in the title of the Book, is not in any early manuscript. This name was applied to the

Apostle John during the Arian controversy of the fourth century, in the belief that he was the author, by those who wished to emphasize the authority of the Book against the Arians. It is a name, not an adjective ; meaning not " holy " but " theologian." Whoever the author was, he was probably a Jewish Christian, one, that is, who regarded Christianity as a reform of Judaism, not a successor to it. To us, with our eyes guided by history, it seems plain from the first that Judaism had been superseded by Christianity; but to the men of the apostolic age this was by no means evident. There were many of them who regarded Jesus as the Messiah, who saw no reason why they should not observe the Law and carry their sacrifices to the Temple as they had always done. It was Paul who first saw clearly that the dominance of the new meant the subsidence of the old ; and it was largely on this account that he was distrusted and opposed, not only by Jews but by his fellow-Christians of Jewish descent. One of these latter was probably

c the author of the Apocalypse. He sees the Messiah's kingdom, its king, the inhabitants of it, and the punishment of its enemies, from a Jewish point of view. When the nations of the earth are saved, they are still regarded as over against the twelve tribes of Israel (vii. 9). 1 The wedding -garment of the Church is the righteousness of the saints (xix. 8), that is, the prescribed acts of obedience to the Law. The new Jerusalem has but twelve gates, and each of these bears the name of one of the tribes (xxi. 12). Jesus is for the author preeminently the Jewish Messiah, the Son of David (v. 5). St. Paul is either denounced throughout the Book or at least ignored. He has no place among the twelve apostles of the Lamb, which are the only basis of the Church of God (xxi. 14). The Church of Ephesus established by St. Paul is especially praised because it has " tried them which say they are apostles and are not, and hast found them liars " (ii. 2), words which cannot but recall the almost

2 Cf. also "oi fALKpoc" (xix. 5).

identical language St. Paul himself uses of his opponents of the Jewish-Christian party (Gal. ii. 6, 9; 2 Cor. xii. 11), The doctrines of the Nicolaitanes and Balaamites (ii. 14, 15) are a distortion of those ascribed to St. Paul, and of the side which he took when the question of Gentile conformity was brought before the Church at Jerusalem (Acts xv. 29, cf. also 1 Cor. viii. and ix. 5). To the mind of the author throughout there is but one Church, the old Church of Judaism, which remains unshaken by recent heresies, and which is to develop a purified Jerusalem, where all who are saved of all nations are to find their home. Such is the theological position of the author in regard to party.

The setting, so to call it, of his vision comes very largely from the books of Ezekiel and Daniel. Daniel's mystic numbers with much of his Persian angelology and demonology reappear. Assyria, which for lack of quarries was compelled to import its stone, and which thus had slabs cut in relief rather than statues, probably showed to Ezekiel its human-headed winged bulls, such as are now preserved in our museums, and furnished him with the imaginative basis for his visions of wheels and cherubim (Ezek. i. and x.). Through him these impressed themselves upon later apocalyptic literature, and gave birth to the strange beasts that appear in the Book of the Revelation.

The author's mind is filled with the literature of his nation, and it is hard to tell whether its tone is more Jewish or Christian. The Book shows us, in fact, the union, so far as union is possible, of Judaism and Christianity. In the Old Testament we see Judaism. In St. Paul's Epistles we see the most distinctive features of Christianity. In the Gospels we see the two streams flowing side by side. But in the Revelation we see them mingled, with no consciousness on the part of the author that the result is not homogeneous.

The apocalypse was the ancient form of what we now call the philosophy of history. It aimed to classify events, to point out their laws and significance, to show their connection with the received scheme of the universe and their reach into the future, and to forecast that future in its necessary mould. And so the Apocalypse of St. John, dramatic as it is in form, stands as the great Epic of the Church, the first Philosophy of Christian History.

Chapter II

THE philosophy of history as a science may be claimed as a modern discovery, but the belief that history has a philosophy was even more common in ancient times than in modern, the belief that events were part of a plan and were a prelude to something greater than themselves. This, which might almost be said to constitute the Hebrew conception of history, would of course become more prominent in the popular mind at certain times ; at those times when, as we say, a great crisis seems imminent. Such a crisis, foreseen by the prophets, was called in their language a " day of the Lord," and a frequent burden of their prophetic work was to announce that the "day" was at hand.

Such a time was the middle of the sixth century B.C., when the Jewish nation had been for thirty years in captivity at Babylon, the time which produced among other works the second half of the Book of Isaiah. Such a time was the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, which gave birth to the Maccabean struggle and to the Book of Daniel. And such a time was this in the year 68 a.d., which produced the Apocalypse of St. John.

Together with the belief in the speedy coming of the Lord already mentioned was the belief that His advent was to be preceded by signs. Wars, civil commotions, wonders occurring in the sky and on the earth, pestilences and earthquakes, these were, according to the prophets (cf. Joel ii. 10, 30, 31 ; iii. 1 5 ; Isa. xiii. 9, 10), the precursors of the coming of the great Day of the Lord. And if ever the course of events seemed to justify a belief that the end of the world was at hand, certainly it was in the middle of the first century. In the year 64 occurred the great fire at Rome, which lasted for nine days.

24 I he Drama of the Apocalypse

Whatever may have been the belief of Nero or of the people in general as to the connection of the Christians with it, it was the occasion for a bloody massacre of them. Their Master had told them they should be as lights {Xvxyoi) in the world. They became such literally, as many of them, clothed in shirts of pitch and bound each to a stake, were burned to satisfy the mob and light the Emperor home. This was the first of that series of persecutions which w r as to make the early centuries the heroic age of the Church. The Empire had long been showing signs of the inherent weakness of Nero's government, and in March 68 an unmistakable sign w r as given by the revolt of the army in Gaul under Vindex. This was followed in April by the revolt of Galba in Spain. The great Roman Empire, whose stability men had felt to be bound up with that of the world, seemed breaking up. In June the army at Rome joined the revolt and proclaimed Galba Emperor. Then the Senate declared Nero a public enemy and condemned him to death. When he saw that all was lost he escaped to the villa of Phaon, one of his freedmen, and here, after begging the few who still remained with him to kill him, he was at last stabbed in the throat by Epaphroditus, just in time to save him from being taken alive by the centurion despatched by the Senate. But exaggeration of value grew after death even in the case of Nero. He had always been popular with the crowd, who were fond of games, liked his buffoonery, and did not dislike his cruelty.

And now men began to wish him back again. Then it began to be whispered that after all he was not dead ; that the wound in his throat had been healed, and that at the instigation of the Parthian ambassador at Rome he had taken refuge in Parthia at the court of the Arsacidae. It is not surprising that doubts of his death should have seemed reasonable. There had been only four persons present at the time, and the body had been cared for and buried privately by three of the women who were still devoted to him. To realize the death of one who is well known without having seen him dead, is difficult even for those who are intelligent and imaginative, while for those who are not imaginative and not intelligent such realization is almost impossible. So it is not strange that a firm belief sprang up that Nero was still alive in some quarter of the East, and that he would soon return at the head of an Eastern army to overthrow his enemies and unite opposing factions. And with this belief there was a party of his friends strong enough to set up again his statues and to issue edicts over his signature (cf. xiii. 11-18). For eighteen months no one of the generals of the legions in revolt could succeed in putting down his rivals and making good his own claim to priority. It was no wonder that the world trembled. For all the nations which made up the complex mass known as the Roman Empire, however much they might wish certain conditions of life under it to be different, were yet united in wishing it in the main to be preserved. All except Judaea; for the death of Nero, and the anarchy prevalent through the rest of the world, made a pause in the Roman preparations for the coming siege of Jerusalem, and gave the Jews hope of liberty once more. To them the fall of Rome would be indeed the beginning of the longed-for Messianic kingdom. It was no wonder, too, that with such a belief in the existence of Nero and his return, false Neros should appear here and there throughout the Empire, personating the Emperor, and that these should intensify in the public mind the conviction which had made their rise possible.