Revelation

A Commentary

Brian K. Blount

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781611643954
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

The book of Revelation is one of the most complicated in the New Testament. The book calls for a prophetic reaction to the world and uses some of the most violent language of the entire Bible. Brian Blount's commentary provides a sure and confident guide through these difficult and sometimes troubling passages, seeing Revelation as a prophetic intervention and at the same time an awe-inspiring swirl of frightening violence and breathtaking hope.

The New Testament Library offers authoritative ommentary on every book and major aspect of the New Testament, as well as classic volumes of scholarship. The commentaries in this series provide fresh translations based on the best available ancient manuscripts, offer critical portrayals of the historical world in which the books were created, pay careful attention to their literary esign, and present a theologically perceptive exposition of the text.

REVELATION

1:1–8 Prologue and Letter Opening

John’s opening chapter establishes the seer’s primary theme: witness. His entire work is a witness to the revelation that God has disclosed: God, working through the historical expression of Jesus as the Christ, is Lord. John relays this testimony with a purpose. His hearers and readers must witness to others the truth that John reveals to them, no matter the cost.

1:1–3 Prologue: A Chain of Witness

1 This is^a the Revelation proclaimed by Jesus Christ,^b which God gave to him to reveal to his servants what must happen soon; he made it known by sending his messenger to his servant John, 2 who witnessed to all that he saw: the word of God, which is^c the witness proclaimed by Jesus Christ.^d 3 Blessed is the one who reads and those who hear the words of the prophecy and keep^e what has been written in it,^f for the time is near.

a. Because the Greek does not have a verb, one is supplied.

b. The genitive (“of Jesus Christ”) is treated here as subjective. That the revelation was something controlled by Jesus is confirmed by the following relative clause, which assumes that Jesus first received it and then passed it along.

c. The kai (and) is epexegetical rather than correlative; the second clause clarifies the first.

d. A subjective genitive (see note b above).

e. The plural participle refers back to both the one who reads and those who hear.

f. One might expect that the pronoun here would be plural and masculine, since the structure of the sentence suggests that John should be referring back to “the words,” since “prophecy” modifies “the words” and not the other way around. Theologically, though, it is the concept of prophecy that John wants uppermost in the minds of his reader and hearers. For this reason, he forces a gender and number match between the feminine “prophecy” and the feminine form of the pronoun.

[1:1–2] John’s single and graphic deployment of the term apokalypsis (revelation) conveys the word’s abiding narrative importance. Using this ancient word, which would have made his readers think about the disrobing, the revealing of a vulnerable virgin on her wedding night, he declares that his work is all about the stripping of Jesus Christ (Keller 1). It is a sexist image that puts a strong man in the position of dominating a powerless woman. And yet, by connecting it to Jesus and making Jesus the subject rather than the object of the action, John tries to redeem it. The revealing of Jesus conjures up the image of his crucifixion, where he was stripped naked and hung out to die. As God’s intervening resurrection made clear, however, this revelation ultimately was not something someone did to Jesus; it was what Jesus revealed to everyone else. While being humiliated by hostile authorities and executed on the cross, Jesus stripped world history and human reality bare by clarifying something that was heretofore apparently obscure: his own lordship.

Basing this part of his work on Dan 2:28–47, where King Nebuchadnezzar realizes that God can use humans to reveal even the mysteries of the dream world, John sets up Jesus as the messianic middleman, who takes the stripping (of world history and human reality) that God has given him and passes it on to an angel, who in turn passes it on to John. In v. 2, this chain of transmission (see the commentary on 22:6, 16) develops a functional equivalence between the concepts “word of God” and “witness of Jesus Christ,” both of which refer back to “revelation.” John is actually defining revelation by connecting it narratively to one clarifying object, not two. The word of God is the witness of Jesus Christ. The kai (and) that connects the two is epexegetical; that is, the second formulation clarifies and develops the first. In four key places in his text, John dramatically connects “word” and “witness” in this way: 1:2, 9; 6:9; 20:4. The intended clarification actually causes an interpretive problem. John has defined his book of prophecy as the Revelation of Jesus Christ, and has in turn defined that revelation by the formula “word of God, which is the witness of Jesus Christ.” The formula is unclear because the defining component is itself undefined. What exactly is the witness of Jesus Christ?¹

In the phrase “witness of Jesus Christ,” the genitive noun is subjective; when John speaks of the “witness of,” he means “the witness proclaimed by.” So the revelation of Jesus as John defines it in this transmission chain is the revelation—the witness—proclaimed by Jesus Christ.

In the twenty-first century, martys, the Greek term for “witness,” means something quite different than it did for John and his hearers and readers. The confusion is contextual. When contemporary interpreters transliterate the Greek letters of martys into their corresponding Roman letters, we see and hear the word martyr. H. Strathmann testifies that for John and his hearers, “The proper sphere of ma/rtuv is the legal, where it denotes one who can and does speak from personal experience about actions in which he took part and which happened to him, or about persons and relations known to him” (Strathmann, TDNT 4:476). Allison Trites offers corroboration: “The idea of witness in the Apocalypse is very much a live metaphor and is to be understood in terms of Christians actually bearing witness before Roman courts of law” (72). It is a word of provocative testimony and therefore active engagement, not sacrificial passivity. Martyr language, as John introduces (martyreō, testify, 1:2; martyria, testimony, 1:2, 9; martys, witness, 1:5) and develops it, is language preoccupied not with dying, but declaration.

John identifies the kind of witness he encourages through key characterizations. At 1:5, he identifies Jesus, by name, as the faithful witness. At 3:14, as witness, Jesus is both faithful and true. Whatever else he might appear to be to his followers (e.g., Lamb), Jesus Christ is first and foremost God’s prime witness. Every other characterization must be interpreted in that light, and not the other way around. The question we are narratively driven to ask, then, is this: how are we to understand the spilling of Jesus’ blood (1:5) and ultimate killing (5:9) in the light of his role as God’s faithful witness? What is it about his witness that connects with and perhaps even causes his killing? The implication from the context of Asia Minor at the end of the first century is suggestive; Jesus, the prophetic witness figure, apparently testified to (proclaimed) a truth. He faithfully adhered to that testimony even under the direst of circumstances, at the cost of his own life. As Trites notes, “From the context of the Apocalypse as a whole, it seems probable that the witness of Jesus (hē marturia Iēsou) in these passages refers primarily to Christ’s passion, where he witnessed ‘the good confession’ before Pontius Pilate (cf. I Tim. vi 13)” (76). What else could that confession be in the narrative of John’s Revelation other than the proclamation of cosmic and human lordship that follows directly upon the rhetorical heels of Jesus’ introduction as the faithful witness (1:4–8)?

According to v. 1, God reveals this deadly testimony to God’s servants. According to 1:4, however, the final stop for the revelation was the seven churches of Asia Minor. Did John intend that the servants would be understood as equivalent to the churches, or did he intend a separate group of servants who would then, having received the revelation from John, relay it to John’s churches? A relevant passage in Amos 3:7 indicates that God does nothing without first revealing divine intent to God’s servants, the prophets. John has a similar way of talking about God’s servants as prophets (see 10:7; 11:3, 18; 22:16; cf. 22:6, 9). Servant-prophets (e.g., Jezebel, 2:20–23; Balaam, 2:14) worked as interpretive links between God and God’s churches. John sees himself and even God’s angelic messengers as such servant-prophets (22:9; cf. 19:10). The servants, then, are prophetic colleagues to whom John reports his revelatory visions. They in turn are expected to broadcast, that is, witness the report to the churches.

Two other stages in the transmission chain also warrant individual reflection. God does not operate directly with humans, but through appropriately designated intermediaries. That presence is symbolized here by the unidentified angel. He bridges the gap between the divine and human so that God’s revelation can make its necessary move.

John is another matter. He identifies himself as a link in the revelatory chain because he wants his hearers and readers to recognize his place of authority in their communal lives. John self-identifies on three other occasions: 1:4, 9; 22:8. At both 1:4 and 22:8, the self-references establish John as the writer of the text. Was he the same John identified as the son of Zebedee, one of the twelve apostles of the historical Jesus? Most likely not. Having given himself the prime literary opportunity to lay claim to such an identity and the authority that would go with it, John tellingly demurs. He claims not the authority of a Jesus apostle for his revelation, which would be powerful indeed, but that of a collegial servant-prophet working among other servant-prophets. When he challenges the prophetic work of Balaam and Jezebel in chapter 2, he does not do so on the basis of his personal relationship with the historical Jesus and the knowledge and authority he would have derived from it. Instead, he bases his argument on the truth of the prophetic revelation he has received. In fact, in his single reference to Jesus’ historical apostles (21:14; cf. 2:2; 18:20), he speaks of them as though they are historical figures with whom he has had no direct contact. Further, the dramatic difference between the realized eschatology that predominates in the Gospel traditionally attributed to Zebedee’s son and the future eschatology of the Apocalypse suggest that this John and the author of the Fourth Gospel come from dramatically different places in theology as well as time.

There are obvious structural parallels between this portion of the prologue and the epilogue (22:10–21). Though it leaves out the transmitting role played by Jesus, 22:6 explains how God sent God’s angel to God’s servants to “reveal” what must happen soon (see the comment on 22:1). At 22:16, John reinserts Jesus into the chain so that there is no mistaking that Jesus has conveyed the revelation to the angel. Though John uses a noun form ([en] tachei) to express imminence only here (1:1) and at the 22:6 parallel (see the comment on 22:6; cf. Dan 2:28), he does express an adverbial sense of imminence throughout (see the comment on 3:11). The expectation of an imminent arrival of God’s judgment fits the exhortative mood of the book. Since God is on the way, and right soon, one should act in the ethical manner that the book demands (e.g., see the discussion of the macarism in v. 3, below). These two opening verses already describe that ethic in terms of witness language. The implication is clear: the transmission of God’s revelation must not stop with the servants but must carry on to the churches (1:4) and from the churches to the world (see the comments on 6:11 and 12:11).

The theme of necessity is as potent here as the theme of imminence. When John speaks of what “must” take place, he talks in terms of apocalyptic necessity rather than fatalistic determinism. Given the conflict that has developed between God’s forces and the draconian forces of empire, which have demanded cultic and political allegiance to its lordship (see chs. 12–13), both the persecution coming to those who testified exclusively to the lordship of God and Christ and God’s responding judgment of the imperial forces and saving of Christ-believers are inevitable.

[3] Beatitudes, or macarisms, are formulaic expressions initiated with the word makarios (blessed). They exist in two forms: wisdom (e.g., Ps 1: “Happy/Blessed are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers”) and apocalyptic (e.g., Dan 12:12–13: “Happy are those who persevere and attain the thousand three hundred thirty-five days. But you, go your way, and rest; you shall rise for your reward at the end of the days”). That the beatitude form is important to John is clear from the fact that he has exactly seven of them (1:3; 14:13; 16:15; 19:9; 20:6; 22:7, 14). Operating from an Old Testament sensibility, where it represents wholeness and completion, the number “seven” is as theological for John as it is numerical.² His first beatitude, like the six that follow, is apocalyptic, as are those that occur in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount.

In fact, the forty-four New Testament beatitudes are most often found in the apocalyptic mode. Both modes (wisdom and apocalyptic) recognize that the person who seeks to do God’s will is blessed. In that sense they have both indicative and imperative potential. As an indicative statement, the macarism describes the participant who is in right relationship with God. There are also clear indications, however, that makarios formulations have an imperative sense. As the Dan 12:12–13 passage demonstrates, the person who performs a particular activity is considered blessed and is subsequently rewarded. By envisioning a proleptic reward, the macarism encourages what is considered to be positive, “salvific” behavior.

By nature, beatitudes are comparative. In the indicative mode, secular blessings are relegated to a position inferior to the joys associated with the reign of God. In the imperative, while some behaviors are considered makarios, others are not. What is blessed behavior in 1:1–3? The blessed person is the one who witnesses to what Jesus himself testified. The person who reads this witness aloud so that others may hear it and the persons who hear this witness and keep it are also those whom John considers blessed. The implicit ethic is so important that before he closes, he will pronounce the commendation again in the epilogue at 22:7: “See, I am coming soon! Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book” (cf. Luke 11:28). John encourages his hearers and readers to realize the importance of this “keeping” (see comments on 3:3, 10; 12:17; cf. 3:8; 14:12; 16:15; 22:9); he promises eschatological victory to those who do (2:26–29; 3:10). (On the connection between “hearing” and “keeping” as an ethical combination in Revelation, see the comment on 22:17.)

When John describes his own work as a word of prophecy (see the comment on 22:6), he has a particular point in mind. A prophet is a servant who witnesses to the lordship of God and Christ, even in imperial circumstances where government representatives seek either to co-opt or to annihilate that testimony. The primary objective of prophecy, then, is not to foretell the future, but to model and thereby incite present witnessing behavior that resists imperial attempts to hijack the lordship that belongs exclusively to God and Christ. It is his prophetic exhortation to this kind of witnessing that John wants his people to hear and keep.

John urges Christ-believers to witness because the time (of God’s movement for judgment and salvation) is near. In the epilogue, at 22:10, John hears an angel make the same claim. Was John wrong? ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Introduction
• Commentary
• 1:1–8 Prologue and Letter Opening
• 5:1–5 Who Is Worthy?
• 9:1–21 Judgment as Good News
• 12:18–13:18 Resistance Is Futile
• 17:1–19:10 The Implications of God’s Wrath: The Judgment of Babylon
• 21:1–8 A New Creation
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Index of Subjects