If there is one thing that Christians know about their religion, it is that it is not Judaism. If there is one thing that Jews know about their religion, it is that it is not Christianity. If there is one thing that both groups know about this double not, it is that Christians believe in the Trinity and the incarnation of Christ (the Greek word for Messiah) and that Jews don’t, that Jews keep kosher and Christians don’t. If only things were this simple.
Reading Revelation as a Jewish Text
Let us begin by establishing Revelation as a Jewish text. Contrary to popular opinion, the notion that the Apocalypse shares affinities with ancient Judaism is nothing new. I will explain this in four main points. First: language. As biblicists often note, Revelation is written in Greek, but the writing style indicates that its author’s first language was either Hebrew or AramaicFootnote 2 – that is, a language spoken by many Jews. Furthermore, while many biblical and extrabiblical sources were anonymously or pseudonymously written, Revelation’s author self-identifies as Iōannes (Rev. 1:1, 4, 9; 22:8),Footnote 3 the Greek version of yōchanan (i.e., “John”), four times within the text. Iōannes was a popular Jewish name in antiquity, and it would have registered as Jewish in the minds of ancient readers/listeners regardless of whether it was written in its Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek versions. What we can gather from this is that John – regardless of whether he was actually born a “John,” and regardless of whether his Greek was actually better than his writing illustrates – wanted to be read as taking part in Jewish culture.
Such a reading becomes heightened when taking into consideration the second point, which has been championed in large part by David Frankfurter: Revelation’s halakhically oriented theology.Footnote 4 Already in chapter 2, for instance, John accuses those at the church in Pergamum of following the teachings of BalaamFootnote 5 over and against those of the Israelite God: “But I have a few things against you. You have some there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the people of Israel, so that they would eat food sacrificed to idols and engage in improper sex acts” (Rev. 2:14). The impropriety alluded to here is, at base, a response to faulty ideals – at least in the eyes of John. This becomes clear when reading verse 14 alongside its most obvious intertext: Numbers 22–31. There, Balaam is depicted as a non-Israelite prophet who was so blind to YHWH’s commands that even his she-ass could understand his desires better than he did. And even though Balaam does eventually bless the Israelites as YHWH commands, his blessings backfire quickly. In Numbers 25, the Israelites begin to intermarry, worship false gods, and eat food sacrificed to idols, thus making it seem as if Balaam’s blessings are really curses. Balaam, in turn, is blamed for the Israelites’ wrongdoings – i.e., their non-halakhic practices – and he is put to death for leading the Israelites astray (Num. 31:8, 16). Thus, by referring to these Numbers passages in his critique of Christ-followers at Pergamum, John makes it clear that implied readers must abide by the Jewish commandment to honor the God of Israel – to eat food dedicated to that God, and not to fornicate with – that is, worship – others’ Gods (cf. 1 Cor. 8).
In the third place – and this is paramount – John reveals a persistent concern with Jewish nationalism. Throughout the text, we learn that 144,000 law-abiding (i.e., halakhically oriented) Jews from every tribe of IsraelFootnote 6 will be sealed in the end times, and that, in addition to the 144,000, “a great multitude … from every nation” will also be sealed (Rev. 7:9). While it is clear that this sealing gives the 144,000 access to the New Jerusalem (14:3–4) and also marks those who are sealed as having priestly status (5:9–10), it appears less clear to which ethnic group(s) “the great multitude” belong. The traditional view is that the great multitude signifies a Gentile population, as the Greek term for “nation” (ethnos) is often thought to designate a Gentile populace. Of course, if the book of Revelation is read as a Jewish text for halakhically oriented followers of Christ, as I am suggesting here, it might appear jarring that a great multitude of Gentiles are sealed alongside 144,000 law-abiding Jews. The notion, however, that all nations – that is, Jews and Gentiles – will enter the kingdom of heaven in the end of days still reflects a first-century, Jewish worldview and an expansionist vision of Jewish nationalism centered on the messianic expectation that emerged from post-exilic prophetic literature (Isa. 60; Jer. 3:15; Tob. 13:11; Zech. 14; Mic. 4:2–4). While Jews in the first century internalized the messianic expectation in different ways, the general understanding of it was that a messiah/anointed one, often viewed as being in the line of King David,Footnote 7 would come to overthrow the powers that be and establish a new kingdom in which the God of Israel would be the God of all people. Although recognizing the nuance within the meaning of “all,” Amy-Jill Levine nevertheless summarizes:
The coming of the messiah meant that there would be a manifest difference in the world …. The messianic age, or the “world to come,” was the time of proclaiming “release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind” – not just some captives, but all; not just some who are blind, but all.Footnote 8
Pamela Eisenbaum is helpful on this, too, as she stresses even more the inclusion of both Jews and Gentiles in the coming world. In her work on Paul, for instance, she concludes that Paul’s request for Gentile Christ-followers to stay Gentile is for the specific purpose of inaugurating the messianic age. In her words:
Paul … believes his mission is to help inaugurate this event by drawing the Gentiles in – not literally going to Jerusalem but turning them from their worship of idols to a recognition of the one, true God, and thus integrating them into the family of God. Furthermore, Paul believes that the ingathering of the nations constitutes the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham that all the nations would be blessed through him (Gen. 12:3; 18:18). In order to achieve the realization of this promise, Gentiles cannot become Jews. Undergoing circumcision, which is the signature mark of Jewish identity, would effectively turn Gentiles into Jews, and would not, therefore, constitute a fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham and the prophetic vision of the ingathering of the nations.Footnote 9
The point for Eisenbaum, then, is that even though God-believing Gentiles are included in the end-times, such an age still operates within a specifically Jewish framework and with the God of Israel serving as ruler over all peoples.
This gets us back to Revelation. For if we put these views in conversation with John’s Apocalypse, we discover that Revelation might indeed include Gentiles in the New Jerusalem as a product of its Jewishness. In John’s text, it is Jesus who fulfills the role of messiah. He is the Davidic King who will establish a new world order in which he and the Israelite God will rule over all believing Jews and Gentiles in the New Zion. This New Zion, moreover, functions for John as a bigger and better Jewish Temple; it is the “Holy of Holies,” matching the exact measurements of the Temple sanctuary outlined in 1 Kings 6:20.Footnote 10
Finally, by way of this contextualization: Of the text’s 404 verses, at least 278 of them allude to stories or images within traditional Jewish texts that require no explanation.Footnote 11 The lack of background information implies that summary was unnecessary for his intended audience. Its apocalyptic associations also position it within a larger body of visionary literature that was well steeped in ancient Judaism, “reach[ing] back to Isaiah 6, the books of Ezekiel and Daniel, 1 and 2 Enoch, and forward to the various apocalypses in ‘John’s’ own time composed under the names of Ezra and Baruch.”Footnote 12
So, What’s the Problem?
Despite these oft-noted affinities with ancient Judaism (some more than others), Revelation is more commonly labeled a Christian text. To date, John W. Marshall’s Parables of War: Reading John’s Jewish Apocalypse is the only monograph that deals extensively with the Jewishness of Revelation.Footnote 13 A primary reason for this, I suggest, is because the field of biblical studies has a long history of misguided – and often times even anti-Semitic – interpretations of ancient Christ-centered texts. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, biblicists contended regularly that Judaism became a sterile entity after Jesus’ death, and that Christianity advanced through Jesus’ resurrection as not only the right tradition, but also a fully developed one. Some even described the Judaism of the Second Temple period as “late Judaism,” which implied that it was, to use the words of Shaye Cohen, “a sterile, lifeless organism, waiting in vain for the infusion of spirituality that only Christianity could provide.”Footnote 14 As such, Judaism was seen as the obsolete “parent” of a grace-filled child.
Interpretations of Revelation 2:9 and 3:9 have stood at the forefront of this view. In these verses, John displays apparent animosity toward ioudaioiFootnote 15 (“I know the slander on the part of those who say that they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan” [2:9]; “I will make those of the synagogue of Satan who say that they are Jews and are not, but are lying – I will make them come and bow down before your feet” [3:9]), which has led scholars to assume that the text is setting itself apart from Judaism and must therefore be Christian, or, at the very least, Christian-like.Footnote 16 Traditional interpretations of these passages – and, by extension, Revelation writ large – are epitomized in Philip Mayo’s 2006 evaluation, which, although not inherently anti-Semitic, illustrates the field’s misguided tendencies. In his words, Revelation
is a decidedly Christian text written by a Jewish Christian author to likely predominantly Gentile churches. John, who is an ethnic Jew, seems to deny the very name “Jew” to his ethnic kin while accusing them of belonging to Satan (2.9; 3.9). Nevertheless, he does not abandon his own Jewish background and theology…. It is John’s mix of Jewish imagery with a Christian message that may provide some insight into his perspective on the relationship between these two increasingly polarized sects.Footnote 17
On Mayo’s reading, John is clearly interested in Jewish things, but neither he nor his text can actually be Jewish fully, as John and Revelation recognize Jesus as the Christ, all while calling “Jews” in Revelation 2:9 and 3:9 followers of Satan. Despite the fact that John never says that these Jews – let alone all Jews – are synagogues of Satan (they only say they are Jews), Mayo reads these lines as indicative of Judaism and Christianity becoming distinct entities by the time John wrote his apocalypse. John comes from a Jewish background, on Mayo’s reading, but in Revelation he is preaching something different.
Historical Considerations
It is important to keep in mind, however, that Jewishness in the first century was neither uniform nor static. As noted in the Introduction, Judaism was marked by many sects and subsects, which contributed to the expansion of a variety of Jewish views and practices. It was so varied, in fact, that some scholars have considered it more appropriate to rely on the plural “Judaisms” as opposed to the singular “Judaism.” Jacob Neusner is known in particular for championing such a view. In his words, “The issue, how to define Judaism, is now settled: We do not.” Instead, he adds, “We define Judaisms …. There never was, in real, social terms, that single Judaism, there were only the infinite and diverse Judaic systems, as various social entities gave expression to their way of life, worldview, and theory of the social entity they formed.”Footnote 18 Not all scholars have agreed with this, however. For example, as Philip R. Davies asserts, a reliance on “Judaisms” still begs the question of a singular Judaism. He explains: “The replacement of the concept of ‘Judaism’ by the concept of ‘Judaisms’ solves one problem only to create another, perhaps even more fundamental one – namely what it was that made any ‘Judaism’ a Judaism …. The plural ‘Judaisms’ requires some definition of ‘Judaism’ in the singular, in order itself to have any meaning.”Footnote 19 Others, however, approach Jewish diversity by using the concept of ancient Jewish sectarianism. According to Seth Schwartz, for instance, while Jewishness was constructed in and around the Jewish God, Temple, and Torah,Footnote 20 subgroups developed with differing views of this tripartite system. Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots, and Jesus-followers are but a few.Footnote 21 It is also important to note that, while self-identifying, self-constructingFootnote 22 Jews in the early centuries BCE and CE debated regularly about their God, Temple, and Torah – such as how best to interpret the Torah’s halakhic codes or how best to understand the messianic expectation – these debates were to the mutual end of determining how best to practice Judaism. Difference, in other words, did not eliminate sameness. By extension, to believe that Jesus was the Christ – that he fulfilled the messianic expectation – was not a point of difference from Judaism, but rather functioned as another nuanced view within Judaism. Revelation’s Christology does not differentiate it from a Jewish context, but rather situates it that much more within one. John cares deeply about his Jewishness. And he cares deeply that Jesus is a part of it.
Of course, one may argue here that the categories such as “Jewish-Christian” or “Christian-Jewish” are appropriate for Revelation, so long as we recognize “Christian” as another subgroup of ancient Jewish sectarianism. As Daniel Boyarin writes on the matter, “[W]hether or not there were Christianity and Judaism [as separate religions], there were, it seems, at least some Christians who were not Jews, and, of course, many Jews who were not Christians.”Footnote 23 This implies that there were, in turn, some Christians who were Jews, and some Jews who were Christians – perhaps even “Christian Jews” and “Jewish Christians.” Ancient writers seem to support this view, at least in part. Already in the early second century, Roman historians referred to Christ-followers as Christiani (e.g., Suetonius Nero 16:2) – or Chrestiani, a likely misspelling of Christiani (e.g., Tacitus Annals 15) – which may lead some to question: Should we, like them, implement Christian vocabulary, or even iudaeus-christus vocabulary, when talking about the Apocalypse’s Christ-centered orientation?
I think it is wise to avoid Christian language in reference to Revelation. Not only does the term “Christian” not appear in John’s own vernacular, but it assumes too quickly separation from Jewishness in the first century. A major reason for this comes down to our own modern assumptions. Because the term “Christian” in contemporary discourse refers regularly to something “other” than Judaism, it becomes all too easy to render Christians as different from Jews in the ancient world. We see evidence of this in our own terminology. If “Christian” registered in our minds the same way that “Pharisee,” “Sadducee,” or “Essene” do, we would likely not need the Jewish qualifier aside the term “Christian” in order to stress that we are, indeed, talking about Jews. We do not employ “Jewish Pharisee” or “Jewish Sadducee,” precisely because we do not assume that being a Pharisee or Sadducee was a point of binary difference within Judaism. As Boyarin himself adds, while “[t]he distinctions of identity/identification [between Jews and Christians] would, ultimately, make a difference … they hadn’t yet.”Footnote 24 In short, the many characteristics and traditions we see today as inherently “Jewish” or “Christian” were not distinguishable in the early centuries CE.
Here is an example: Although it is a common belief today that Christianity is fundamentally different from Judaism in its reverence for a multiplistic godhead (i.e., God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit), this idea fit well within the parameters of ancient Jewish theology. In antiquity, prior to constructions of the triune, most deists were polytheists or henotheists, contending that there were many gods exuding power over many territories. Even the ancient Israelites believed that the God of Israel was but one god among many; the proclamation “Hear O Israel, Yahweh is our God, Yahweh alone” was not a monotheistic one historically, but rather a henotheistic one. Yahweh was viewed as the God of the Israelites, but not the god of all. Why? Because other people had other gods. The Deuteronomistic declaration “Yahweh alone” did not eliminate the notion of multiple existing deities, but rather highlighted the import of Yahweh specifically for the Israelite people.
By the time of the first century, most Jews did adhere to a monotheistic theology, but nevertheless understood God’s divine realm as having space for other divine entities. Rather than attesting to the existence of multiple godheads for multiple peoples, Jews began focusing on the existence of their God – and the existence of their God’s divine helpers – over and against the existence of others. The infamous “Son of Man” passage in Daniel 7 is particularly indicative of such Jewish-centered multiplicity. Here, Daniel envisions an angelic being – “one like a son of man” – arriving on the clouds of heaven (Dan. 7:13). Daniel is then told (by another divine being, no less) that the Son of Man will eventually be given reign over the earth. So while the Jewish God sits on high, that God is nevertheless surrounded by, and even assisted by, other divine beings. Ancient conceptions of the Logos are also indicative of this. According to the prominent first-century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, for instance, God created the world through the Logos. Because the world was too material for an immaterial God to come in contact with, Philo believed that God used the Logos – often conceptualized as God’s wisdom and word, aspects connected yet nevertheless separate from God proper – as an intermediary. Views to Genesis 1 illustrate this notion well; in the beginning, Elohim (a plural enunciation of the Israelite God) spoke the world into existence: “va-yomer Elohim (God(s) said), let there be light, and there was light.”Footnote 25 By extension, to view Jesus as the messiah, as a deity, or even as a hypostasis of God was unique solely in the sense that Jesus was the one fulfilling such a role. As the fourth evangelist states: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and God was the Logos …. All things were created through him …. [Jesus too] was in the world, and the world was created by him [as the Logos]” (John 1:1,10; see also 1:14). The difference, in other words, between a Christ-centered implied Self (the Jesus-follower) and the Christ-centered implied Other (the non-Jesus-follower) is not the belief in a multiplistic godhead, but the particularity of the role of Jesus within it.Footnote 26 Moreover, while negotiations of Self and Other took place between and across groups (as evidenced already in Revelation’s claims of halakhic Christ-following as the right following; more on this below), such discussions do not demand fixed borders. On the contrary, they allude to the multiplicity that was vibrant in Jewish discourse prior to Jesus of Nazareth’s life, and also centuries beyond his death.
Revelation and the “Parting of the Ways” Debate
My position here is shaped in large part by the “Parting of the Ways” debate. According to the traditional Parting narrative, Judaism and Christianity not only “parted ways” in the wake of the fall of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE (and then even more after the failed Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE), but they, in doing so, became “conflicting and categorically different.”Footnote 27 While this Parting model assumes that the Jesus movement was still negotiating its place within the ever-complex terrain of Second Temple Judaism for most of the first century CE – as difference and debate permeated the Jewish landscape at this time – it nevertheless claims that the destruction of the Temple and subsequent events/conflicts led the traditions to “institutionaliz[e] their differences.”Footnote 28 Interpreters more recently, however, have debated about the date of such a parting (e.g., was the effective cause really the Temple’s destruction?),Footnote 29 or if there really was a moment that necessitated a definitive split (e.g., was there really an exact moment in which Judaism and Christianity became or even started to become “categorically different”?). Some have even questioned whether a parting ever took place at all.Footnote 30 As is well known, Judaism today maintains a cultural fluidity not unlike that of the early centuries BCE and CE (one here might recall the motto: two Jews, three opinions). But Christianity, too – the non-Jewish, non-halakhic version many of us recognize today – emerged out of the same set of negotiations. Alongside Jews arguing about how best to be Jewish – including whether that “best” should center around Jesus as the Christ – there were Gentile Christ-followers assessing who Jesus was, what Jesus was, how best to follow him, how best to worship him, how best to write about him, and even how best to read about him. These debates also often included views on Jewishness. For example, because Jesus was a Jew, Gentile Christ-followers questioned how they could join the Jesus movement without being Jews themselves. Some asked: Should we convert? Should we stay Gentile? If we stay Gentile, should we read Jewish scripture? If so, in what way(s)? How do we distinguish ourselves from Jews who are reading the same texts?
In many instances, the answers to these questions were not just to be taken seriously, but in dialogue actually the very core of early Christianity. As Gentile Christ-followers expressed their ideas verbally, various groups (e.g., proto-Orthodox, Valentinians, Sethians, Arians, Marcionites, Montanists, etc.) became products of simultaneous convergence and divergence.Footnote 31 Their crisscrossing ideologies, moreover, made it so Gentile Christ-followers, alongside Jews (both Christ-followers and not), were part of the same discursive system. The very core of Christianity, in sum, is nothing short of multivocal; there is no coherent story of nascent Christianity other than one that illuminates the many. Even the winning “strand” of Christianity that is reflected in the theology of the Nicene Creed maintained coherence with other Christ-following groups and early Judaism.
Revelation, in fact, offers us insight into this complex give-and-take. The Apocalypse is, in a manner of speaking, textual evidence of the variability of Christ-followingness as an identity and the nascent stages of movements that would eventually establish themselves as “Rabbinic Judaism” and “Christianity.” To put it otherwise, Revelation bespeaks the multiplicity inhering in Jewishness and a broader Christ-followingness within the first century, as well as the negotiation of a particular type of Jewishness and Christ-followingness within its imaginary. Throughout the Apocalypse, John combats both Gentiles who do not follow Jesus and other Jewish sects (perhaps those mentioned in Revelation 2:9 and 3:9?Footnote 32) who do not subscribe to his particular understanding of what it means to be Jewish. For John, it is the halakhically oriented Christ-followers – the Jewish Christ-followers – who are rewarded most. This reliance on halakhic ideals, attachment to Jewish scripture, and a Christ-centered worldview is evidenced not only through the glorification of such combination, but also, if not more so, through the text’s subversions of those who do not share the same orientation. For example, in addition to forcing the “synagogue(s) of Satan” to bow down and worship in the ways John desires, Revelation also tortures Jezebel, the text’s local whore, for her unlawful sex acts and eating practices. Babylon, the text’s global whore, is similarly admonished for eating foods unclean – the “blood of the saints and martyrs” – and for leading the world astray through her own non-halakhic, non-Christ following ideals and practices. Again, the words “Christian” and “Christianity” are nowhere to be found in Revelation, whereas notions of “Israel” and, furthermore, “true Israel” are alluded to repeatedly with regards to its implied community of readers (see especially Rev. 2 and 7). It is precisely those who abide by John’s halakhically oriented theology who are established as God’s true Israel, and who are, in turn, granted entrance into God’s New Kingdom. Despite sharing views and referents with other Jews and Gentile Christ-followers, Jews who do not follow Jesus as their Christ are not included in John’s end times. Neither are Gentile Christ-followers who bypass Jewish law and scripture.
Such crisscrossing aside, though, and perhaps even more to the point, when John wrote Revelation, there was no “winning” strand of Christianity or Judaism for him to rely on. There was no Nicene Creed, no New Testament, no Mishnah, no Talmud – indeed, no Judaism or Christianity in the sense that we might think of today. In other words, even if we agree that the constructions of Judaism and Christianity as separate yet ongoingly related traditions are products of the types of discursivities mentioned here, we do not see the emergence of them as such until centuries after John penned his apocalypse. And, even if they did emerge sooner, John certainly would not have wanted to abide by either one of them. His version of a Jewish community – let alone a Christ-following community – is not in line with either “winning” movement.
It is also important to remember that, when applying the term “Jewish Christian” or “Christian Jewish” to ancient texts and groups, modern scholarship has all too often marginalized the “Jewish” in favor of a more monolithic Christian Self.Footnote 33 To render Revelation as “Jewish-Christian” conflates too quickly, in my view, representations of Jesus-following Jews with prior – and still lingering – supersessionist understandings of ancient Jewish–Christian relations. The origins of reading Revelation as a “Jewish-Christian” text, for instance, do not stem from more recent approaches to Jewish–Christian relations or history, but rather from the misguided and oftentimes anti-Jewish renderings of ancient Jewish–Christian relations mentioned above. Because Revelation was written by a halakhically oriented author and contains developed Christology (Jesus is the Christ, Jesus is divine, Jesus saves believers from their sins, etc.), many interpreters have contended that Revelation was in the process of “progressing” from Judaism to Christianity. For those who set the tone for reading Revelation as a Jewish-Christian text (e.g. F. C. Baur; R. H. Charles),Footnote 34 John’s name, Semitizing Greek, and appeal to Jewish texts and traditions has indicated that he was born Jewish (again, the notion that Revelation shares affinities with ancient Judaism is not a new concept). John’s focus on Jesus as the Christ, however, indicates he was “better than” his Jewish counterparts – and that his Apocalypse was “better than” other Jewish texts – so much so that neither John nor his text could possibly be “fully” Jewish. Thus, the theory goes: Revelation, and Revelation’s John, are on their way to understanding something “better” – something “Christian” – and so therefore are best read as “Jewish-Christian.”
Revelation and Ethnic Difference
Ethnicity does, however, play an important role in this discussion. Whereas some followers of the Jesus movement identified as Jews ethnically (perhaps Boyarin’s “Jews who were Christians”), others did not (perhaps Boyarin’s “Christians who were not Jews”). In other words, as Frankfurter notes above, Gentiles, too, came to regard Jesus as their Christ, and non-Jewishness is one of the most oft-used descriptors for this group. What are we to make of this?
I propose that the construction of Jewishness in the first century and the boundaries such construction necessitated are key to answering this question. As Cohen observes in The Beginnings of Jewishness, individual Jews were not necessarily distinctive from Gentiles in ways that were obvious and unambiguous, but rather imagined themselves as Jewish – as members of an imagined Jewish community.Footnote 35 He writes, “Sociologists agree that ethnic or national identity is imagined; it exists because certain persons want it to exist and believe that it exists. It can be willed into and out of existence.”Footnote 36 It does this, he explains, by the boundaries it creates and “the ‘cultural stuff’ enclosed by the boundary.”Footnote 37 Many Jews in the ancient world carried their Jewishness ethnically through the observance of Jewish law and ritual, and the use or awareness of particular Jewish referents.Footnote 38 Observance included believing in the Israelite God, recognizing the importance of the Jerusalem Temple, and adhering to halakhic codes. If we consider Judaism an umbrella term for this “cultural stuff,” as Cohen phrases it, then Revelation and its implied readers are operating within it.
Of course, given the degree to which proper Jewish practice was debated in the first century, certain self-identifying Jewish groups who did not render Jesus the Christ might have considered those who did to be non-Jews. In reverse, certain non-halakhically observant Christ-followers, too, might have rendered themselves the true Jews, as opposed to all others. The point here is that Revelation appears in every which way to operate within an ethnically Jewish conversation – it identifies and imagines and constructs a storytelling community as ethnically Jewish and righteous Jewish followers of Christ, regardless of whether other self-identifying Jews disagreed with its claims.Footnote 39 The Jewishness of Revelation is demonstrated by John’s self-designations, as well as the text’s literary heritage, halakhic worldview, nationalistic orientation, and focus on Jesus as the Christ.Footnote 40
Reading Revelation as a Posttraumatic Anti-Imperial Text
This leads us to a second starting point of this project: Revelation’s subversions – its undoings of local and global adversaries – are responses to Jewish trauma under Empire. My focus on trauma should not be surprising. The apocalypse genre is, after all, often associated with literature of the dejected. In the words of Harry O. Maier, “apocalypses generally are composed against a backdrop of human suffering.”Footnote 41 The same goes for John’s Apocalypse. Revelation, by and large, deploys an affect of suffering countered by a series of hope-filled self-assurances, including the inception of a New Jerusalem.Footnote 42 Internal evidence, in other words, suggests that the Apocalypse “feels”Footnote 43 the need to identify with those who have experienced emotional persecution and cultural disintegration.Footnote 44 Such affectivity is evident in both John’s letters (1:9–11:19) and his larger cycle of visions (12:1–22:5). The following passages can serve as examples of this:
I know where you live, where Satan’s throne is. Yet you are holding fast to my [Christ’s] name, and you did not deny your faith in me [Christ] even in the days of Antipas, my faithful witness, who was killed among you where Satan lives.
When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls who had been slaughtered because of the word of God and because of the witness they gave. They cried with a loud voice, “How long, Oh Master, holy and true, will it be until you judge and avenge our blood, which was shed by the Inhabitants of the Earth?” They were each given a white robe and told to rest a little more, until the number of their fellow slaves and of their brothers and sisters, who were about to be killed as they had been killed.
Then [Satan] went to make war … on those who keep the commandments of God [i.e., Mosaic law].
Based on these internal cues, the question for many, then, is to which “backdrop of human suffering” Revelation most acutely responds. Is there a particular “when and where,” to match the world that Revelation so vividly depicts?
Local and Global Conflict
Because Revelation confronts problems within various Jesus-following communities and then attacks more universal forces of evil throughout its larger vision cycle (e.g., 2:20; cf. 17:1–2), many assert that this backdrop is grounded in both local and global conflict. A common assumption on the local front is that Revelation seeks to condemn Jesus-followers who are sympathetic to emperor worship and the Roman imperial court. As Shanell Smith notes:
A major polemical target in Revelation was the institution and observance of emperor worship, as evidenced by the prominence of the imperial cult in the text. John’s contentious views about these imperial practices reflect the fact that the majority of the cities in Asia Minor [and members of churches therein] were devoted to [the cult’s] advancements.Footnote 45
In fact, according to some, countering Roman sympathizers is the entire point of the narrative. “Revelation’s preoccupation,” writes Harry O. Maier, is “to challenge [Christ-followers] who are too enthusiastic supporters of the economic and military might of the Roman Empire.”Footnote 46
On the global front – which is indeed a more complicated conversation – older exegesis typically concludes that Revelation responds to an Empire-wide persecution of Christ-followers. Until the mid-twentieth century, it was generally agreed that Revelation responded to persecution under Domitian. This assumption is based largely on Irenaeus’ dating of John’s vision to the latter years of Domitian’s reign (Adv. Haer. 5.30.3), paired with Eusebius’ portrayal of Domitian as a cold-hearted emperor who annihilated Christ-followers (Hist. Eccl. 3.17). This assumption has been supported by a counting of the seven kings that renders Domitian the one “who is,”Footnote 47 as well as the ancient belief that Domitian was like a “New Nero” during his reign (Juvenal, Sat. 4.38; Pliny, Paneg. 53.3–4). This latter point is perhaps most crucial of all, as it seems to evoke not only Domitian’s own tyranny, but also the potentiality of a “second persecution” of Jesus-followers.Footnote 48
Recent studies have shown, however, that Eusebius’ portrait of Domitian is not historically defensible. There is no evidence to support the claim that Domitian systematically persecuted Christ-followers across the Empire. For this reason, scholars have suggested that we position Revelation against a different backdrop. According to John A. T. Robinson, for instance, Revelation’s internal evidence parallels the Neronian persecution of Jesus-followers in the 60s CE:
That violent persecution has already taken place and cries aloud for vengeance is an inescapable inference from such texts as 6:9f.; 16:6; 17:6; 18:20; 24; 19:2; and 20:4. They presuppose that the blood of apostles and prophets and countless [Christ-followers] … had saturated the streets of the capital itself …. The impact of the Neronian terror, already cited from Tacitus andFootnote 49 Clement immediately comes to mind, and one is tempted to ask what further need we have of witnesses.
According to Robinson, John did not pen his apocalypse at the end of the first century, but rather in the mid-first century as a vengeful response to Neronian terror. This notion is supported by interpretations that render the king who “is” in Revelation 17 as the emperor Nero,Footnote 50 and that the number of the Beast in Revelation 13:18 symbolizes Nero via Jewish gematria (see Chapter 4).Footnote 51
Still, there are problems. As research has also indicated, there is in fact little evidence for mass, systematic persecutions which singled out Christ-followers across the Empire under either Nero or Domitian. For this reason, Steven J. Friesen argues that “Revelation studies should focus less on alleged excesses in imperial cult under Nero and Domitian and more on the normative character of imperial cult activity.”Footnote 52 Some even go as far as to suggest that Revelation does not respond to global hardship at all. On Leonard Thompson’s reading, Revelation’s internal evidence of global crisis does not share external support: “[T]he conflict and crisis in the Book of Revelation between [a Christ-following] commitment and the social order derive from John’s perspective [and personal evaluation of] Roman society rather than from significant hostilities in the social environment.Footnote 53 In this regard the Book of Revelation fits the genre to which it belongs.”Footnote 54 The persecutions in Revelation are simply a product of the topos of unrest intrinsic to the apocalypse genre.
While I agree with Thompson that we cannot link Revelation’s urgency around the issue of persecution to any one, specific instance of global communal trauma, we can associate that urgency with an array of known adversities. In other words, rather than emphasize a single, external crisis, I suggest that by focusing “more on the normative character of imperial cult activity,” as Friesen so aptly phrases it, we discover that traumatization under Rome happened over time, in both extreme and subtle ways.
Life Under Empire
Much of the collective trauma endured by Jesus-followers was caused by the colonial conditions of life under Empire. For in addition to their “frequent struggles with sickness, starvation, and loss,”Footnote 55 Jews, who, like Revelation’s John, deployed narrative as a means to communal consolidation, were colonized subjects of imperial Rome. As S. R. F. Price notes, “The civilized, complex cities [of Roman Asia], with their ideals of autonomy and freedom, had to accept subjection to an authority which … was external to the traditional structures of the city.”Footnote 56 This meant that they “had to make sense of the [cultural instabilities] that they inhabit[ed]; the emperor, who they had never seen and would never see, had absolute power.”Footnote 57 As with other subjugated peoples and cities throughout the Empire, Jews in Roman Asia (and elsewhere) were perpetually vulnerable to the Roman gaze, which, in addition to the Roman army, was a prominent method of imperial domination.Footnote 58 Such a gaze, we must note,
implies a viewer with an elevated vantage point, it suggests the power to process and understand that which is seen, and it objectifies and interpellates the colonized subject in a way that fixes its identity in relation to the surveyor …. [T]he imperial gaze defines the identity of the subject, objectifies it within the identifying system of power relations and confirms its subalterneity and powerlessness.Footnote 59
I suggest that the effects of Roman imperialism alone give us reason to suspect that there is an external cause for Revelation’s dominant affect – its “feel[ings]” of oppression.Footnote 60 The Roman eye was always watching, contributing to the production of Roman imperial colonization and molding its subjects into deeper subalternity.Footnote 61 This external imperial-colonial situation mirrors Revelation’s imaginary. Its narrativizing of persecution, abandonment, and a hope for a better future is animated by this repeated imperial subjugation. And its Othering of those who are sympathetic to non-Jewish, non-Christ-following orientations illustrates its attempt to survive the dominant transcripts – the non-halakhic transcripts – that characterize John’s implied, Jewish Christ-following audiences as “Other than.”
A Postcolonial Intervention
Revelation’s imperial-colonial positionality, including its adoptions of (anti-)imperial Othering, calls for a postcolonial intervention.Footnote 62 While postcolonial critics can differ widely in their understanding of the term “postcolonial,” including their understanding of a “postcolonial optic,”Footnote 63 scholars do, generally speaking, agree that a postcolonial lens does have several functions. R. S. Sugirtharajah’s threefold paradigm works well in this regard. A postcolonial lens, in his words: “(a) examines and explains especially social, cultural, and political conditions such as nationality, ethnicity, race, and gender both before and after colonialism; (b) it interrogates the often one-sided history of nations, cultures, and peoples; and (c) it engages in a critical revision of how the ‘other’ is represented.”Footnote 64 Interrogations of Empire and imperialism are inherently connected with these functions. Because Empire is that which exudes control over vast nations, cultures, and peoples – and imperialism, the process by which an Empire comes to maintain that control – anticolonial struggles are often packaged as anti-Empire/anti-imperial ones. Postcolonial critics recognize this relationship, and often read postcolonial narratives as that which interrogate and/or mourn the effects of Empire and imperialism.Footnote 65 Anti-imperial projects, including postcolonial narratives, thus work “to create new and powerful identities for colonized peoples” through writing back to the systems of oppression that have deemed them “Other than,” while at the same time putting words to the affect and experience of the colonized.Footnote 66
The Bible and Postcolonialism
Biblicists have found that the Bible expresses similar hostility toward imperial interventions.Footnote 67 Norman K. Gottwald, in fact, has gone as far as to say that “[e]arly Israel was born as an anti-imperial resistance movement.”Footnote 68 Rather than adhering to the rules and regulations of such centralized states as Egypt, Canaan, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Rome, ancient Israelites and later Jews, Gottwald asserts, aspired to create their own self-regulating communities.Footnote 69 Indeed, the Bible is replete with counter-imperial language and imagery, texts that highlight the narrative construction of the Israelites’ and early Jews’ self-governance and illustrate the reversal of center/periphery, colonizer/colonized binary formations. The book of Exodus, as Musa Dube has argued, is rooted in an “anti-conquest ideology,” with the phrase “Let my people go” operating as its primary theme.Footnote 70 Warren Carter has argued similarly on the Gospel of Matthew. He posits that Matthew is “a counternarrative” and “a work of resistance” written for Jews, which “stands and/or speaks over against’ the status quo dominated by Roman imperial power and synagogal control. It resists these cultural structures.”Footnote 71 As ex-centric texts, Exodus and Matthew seek to deconstruct center/periphery, Self/Other bifurcations, so as to expose their constructedness, and also offer new “centers of discourse, new subject positions, and new loci of freedom and power.”Footnote 72
I recognize, of course, that some may refute such an emphasis on imperial colonization in relation to biblical texts by stating that colonialism’s roots are in modern European expansionist history, and therefore should not be retrospectively superimposed onto earlier contexts.Footnote 73 While I do not want to insinuate a difference-leveling comparison between the ancient and the modern, I do think it wise to recall that subjects under the Roman Empire were susceptible to a variety of systems of oppression endorsed by an imperial center. In the first centuries CE, Rome dominated the Mediterranean Basin, and in so doing exerted its values, policies, and power over its many territories. I am not alone in this assertion. As Stephen Moore has shown, despite colonialism’s heights in the modern period – as well as its modern foundations in capitalism – “many earlier Empires, not least those of the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean Basin, also engaged in colonization.”Footnote 74 Historian David J. Mattingly
has arrived at a similar conclusion, stating that, while some commentators have argued that the imperium Romanum was quite distinct from the modern [imperialisms]…. [T]he nature of Rome as a cosmopolis or metropolis [developing coloniaeFootnote 75] fits more readily into analysis of imperial systems than of other ancient cities.Footnote 76
If we understand imperialism more broadly as the means by which a centralized power-system (e.g., an Empire) exerts influence and control over other groups and territories, and colonialism as a common effect of such exertions (including, but not limited to, control of others’ lands, goods, and general wellbeing), then I think it justifiable to recognize Rome as an imperial power-center engaging in pre-capitalist modes of colonization. Thus, like Mattingly, I “believe that there are issues relating to the exercise of power and the responses that power evokes, where it is legitimate to draw comparisons as well as contrasts between ancient and modern.”Footnote 77
More than this, however, it is the indeterminable effects and affects of both ancient and modern imperialism and colonization – indeed, the trauma shared across and between the two – which lead me to identify the book of Revelation as a “postcolonial” text. For despite the term’s inclusion of the word “post,” postcolonial need not assume separation from a colonial atmosphere. Instead, as elucidated above, it refers in large part to discursive strategies that are “ex-centric”Footnote 78 – that deconstruct center/periphery, Self/Other bifurcations, so as to expose and oppose their constructedness, as well as offer new “centers of discourse, new subject positions, and new loci of freedom and power.”Footnote 79 Postcolonial narratives are thus often defined as those which “emerge out of a concrete social reality and history of colonization and domination.”Footnote 80 Literary theorist John Clement Ball says it well when he writes:
Two of the chief distinguishing features of postcolonial texts, as theorized in the emergent discourse of postcolonialism, are oppositionality and referentiality. Oppositionality is variously articulated as resistance, subversion, counter-discourse, contestatory narrative, writing back, and critique. Referentiality … is related to the concepts of agency, materiality, and historicality, through which specific local or national contexts and subjects for writing are privileged.Footnote 81
The “postcoloniality” of postcolonial narrative thus pairs a historical positionality with an oppositional framework.Footnote 82
John’s Apocalypse, although technically pre-colonial and pre-postcolonial,Footnote 83 bears witness to a history of colonial oppression that subtends its cultural and psychological existence while imaginatively bringing into being a “postcolonial” (form of) community. This postcolonial reimagining is demonstrated not only in Revelation’s claims of trauma and the value of a Jewish cultural self in the face of that trauma – integral parts of postcolonial-posttraumatic repair, as we will see – but also in its subversion of the imperial transcript(s) that have deemed Jews “Other than.” In other words, although the book’s postcoloniality is not marked by what some might consider “postcolonialism proper,”Footnote 84 it still reflects elements of this modern formulation. According to Sugirtharajah, in fact, modern biblical scholarship has all too often made readers “for[get] the initial and primary tasks of postcolonialism [which are] ‘writing back’ [to Empire] and ‘listening again’ [to Other voices].”Footnote 85 It is in this sense – this writing back to and bearing witness to colonial imperialism – that Revelation can be viewed as a postcolonial text.Footnote 86
At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that the new subject positions constructed in postcolonial narrative can also often appear similar to older ones. In other words, while postcolonial narrative often works to illustrate anti-imperial resistance – and can even create new self-governing communities – it also often does so in ways that are themselves imperialistic. As Ania Loomba explicates on the postcolonial state’s response to Empire, “[It] often uses an anti-imperialistic rhetoric of nationalism to consolidate its own power.”Footnote 87 Dube, among others, agrees. On her reading, even in their resistance, both the Exodus and Matthew narratives absorb, appropriate, and inscribe an imperialist agenda. While Exodus, for example, eventually highlights the Israelites’ pursuit to conquer land outside of Egypt, Matthew comes to posit its own imperialist gaze upon intra-Jewish rivals.Footnote 88 In both cases, then, there is a “deflect[ion] … from the root cause of oppression, the imperialists, and [a] focu[s] instead on other victims.”Footnote 89
It is the inherent ambivalence within the postcolonial condition that characterizes the discourse and, therefore, the discipline that is postcolonial studies. Firmly rooted in deconstruction, postcolonial studies exists under the umbrella of poststructuralism, focusing, as it does, on the multiple and contradictory tides of signification. By unmasking internal contradictions and inconsistences within texts, postcolonial thinkers – akin to poststructuralists such as Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva – bring to the forefront the notion that words and texts are not bound to any one signifier, context, or discourse; texts evade concretization, given the weight of signification and intertextual cues in any given word or phrase – past, present, or otherwise.Footnote 90 Even if postcolonial narratives work to respond to particular historical or political moments, they are still enmeshed in dynamic and dialogical modes of communication.
Postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha has been especially influential in this regard, in particular through his various representations of the give-and-take between colonizers and colonized that manifests as both resistance and reduplication in postcolonial writings.Footnote 91 In fact, three of the central terms Bhabha developed to signify this process – hybridity, mimicry, and ambivalence – have become common parlance in postcolonial theory.Footnote 92 Hybridity refers to the complex that is the flow of power, culture, and ideas within the postcolonial situation (e.g., the cross-fertilization of ideas between the ideologies of an imperial/colonizing center and the ideologies of those on the margins) which, in turn, undoes the very notion of a monolithic central system. Bhabha’s notions of colonial mimicry and ambivalence are inextricably linked to this phenomenon. Colonial mimicry can occur in the hybrid space between colonizer and colonized. It is often exhibited in the imitation of the colonizer by the colonized, who, as Moore phrases it, have been “coerce[d],” into “internalizing and replicating” the colonizer’s culture.Footnote 93 The affective result upon the colonized subject manifests itself, according to Bhabha, in a psychic state of deep ambivalence; the colonized depict the desire to, on the one hand, be like the colonizers, but on the other hand, to discount them entirely.Footnote 94
At the same time, hybridity, mimicry, and ambivalence are not entirely sites of/for deconstruction. In Bhabha’s view, they can actually contribute to and/or construct larger discourses and productions of knowledge.Footnote 95 Utilizing Renée Green’s image of the stairwell, Bhabha argues that liminal spaces initiate new meaning. He quotes Green:
I used architecture literally as a reference, using the attic, the boiler room, and the stairwell to make associations between certain binary divisions such as higher and lower and heaven and hell. The stairwell became a liminal space, a pathway between the upper and lower areas, each of which was annotated with plaques referring to blackness or whiteness.Footnote 96
To which Bhabha responds:
The stairwell as liminal space, in-between the designations of identity, becomes the process of symbolic interaction, the connective tissue that constructs the difference between upper and lower, black and white. The hither and thither of the stairwell, the temporal movement and passage that it allows, prevents identities at either end of it from settling into primordial polarities. This interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.Footnote 97
In Bhabha’s view, then, it is precisely these “hither and thither” moments – in the “in-between” – that instantiate (opportunity for) the construction of new subjectivities. These spaces become the very grounds for developing “strategies of selfhood – singular and communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.”Footnote 98 In sum, there is a give-and-take between colonizers and colonized that can come out simultaneously as resistance, reduplication, and resignification in postcolonial writings.
Revelation and Postcolonialism
The Bible expresses similar modes of resistance and reduplication. To quote Moore, yet again, biblical texts can often, “insidiously reinscribe imperial and colonial ideologies even while appearing to resist them.”Footnote 99 Empire-critical and postcolonial readings of Revelation have tended to highlight this issue. According to Allen Dwight Callahan, for example, John of Revelation writes in Greek so as to subvert the master’s language.Footnote 100 Greg Carey furthers this argument by stating that John’s Greek functions as a “symptom of resistance.”Footnote 101 In “demanding disidentification from the larger society,”Footnote 102 Carey suggests, John of Revelation takes on a “discursive hybridization.”Footnote 103 The seer’s negotiation between decolonization and comprehensibility thus becomes one of heres and theres; “[o]n the one hand, his language had to be close enough to the language of conventional discourse that [it] could be understood; on the other, he had to coin an idiolect sufficiently deviant to privilege.”Footnote 104
Others, however, go beyond these assertions to suggest that Revelation does not merely adopt Roman ideologies as a means by which to resist Rome, but also as a means by which to become the new Rome. In the words of Robert Royalty, “Opposition to the dominant culture in the Apocalypse is not an attempt to redeem that culture but rather an attempt to replace it with a [Christ-centered] version of the same thing.”Footnote 105 Or, as Moore adds, “Revelation’s anticolonial discourse, its resistance to Roman omnipotence, is infected with the imitation compulsion, and hence with ambivalence, it contains the seeds of its own eventual absorption by that which it ostensibly opposes.”Footnote 106 In other words, by countering the language of Empire with its own language of Empire, Revelation, the argument goes, is less about undoing Rome than it is about outdoing Rome.
It is precisely in the call to read Revelation as a postcolonial text that we recognize the ways in which Revelation, even in its resistance, subsumes a new imperial role. Whereas John’s violence against Rome illustrates an anti-Roman agenda, the means by which he destroys and eventually replaces Rome mimics imperial force and conquest. By mocking, torturing, and eventually burning alive those who do not worship Christ or abide by John’s strict halakhic worldview (17:16; 19:19–20; 20:10), Revelation appears seduced by Roman standards. As Moore notes on Revelation’s most targeted adversary, “Not for nothing is Rome figured in Revelation as a prostitute – indeed, as ‘the mother of whores’ (hē meter tōn pornōn, 17:5): what better embodiment, for the seer, of seductive repulsiveness, of repulsive seductiveness.”Footnote 107 As God and Christ become the new overlords of the New Jerusalem, we are haunted by images of the Roman past. Just as Rome was secured via war, rape, and conquest, so too is Christ’s New Kingdom.Footnote 108
Reading Revelation in Dialogue
Finally, reading Revelation as a Jewish postcolonial text does not imply that the Apocalypse, its author, or its implied audience occupied an exceptional space, separate from the larger cultural milieu of the Greco-Roman world. Jewish antiquity was so enmeshed with Hellenism,Footnote 109 in fact, that by the first century BCE, there were Jews who “knew no Hebrew, spoke no Aramaic … [and] heard their Bible in a special form of Greek.”Footnote 110 And while the Greeks and Romans often commented on the distinct differences they perceived in the traits of non-Roman or non-Greek peoples (i.e., their hairstyle or the cut of their beard, their size, skin tone, even the texture of their skin), there remains no commentary on the “look” of Jews.Footnote 111
Jewishness and Hellenism in Dialogue
A major reason for this has to do with the sheer success of Hellenization. With the Greeks’ fifth-century BCE defeat of the Persians, Hellenistic culture saturated the Mediterranean like a deluge, and by the fourth century BCE, Palestine was bombarded by Greekness.Footnote 112 Such bombardment deepened when Alexander the Great transformed every newly conquered province into a mirror of Athenian public life. The prestige associated with these New Greek cities led others to want to adopt the Greek life also.Footnote 113 Thus Jews, like others, were culturally constituted within the Hellenistic milieu. While many chose to live in smaller Jewish communities,Footnote 114 as a means of support and by which to maintain their Jewish identity, they did not, to quote Erich Gruen, “huddle in enclaves.”Footnote 115 Even in Palestine, where Jews were arguably less exposed to Hellenization than their diasporic counterparts (a debated contention in its own right), they, too, did not live in isolation.
Internal evidence suggests that Revelation does not huddle and hide, either. The text’s beasts, for instance, are commonly noted as being crafted within a shared Jewish-Greco-Roman framework. Whereas the image of the dragon in Revelation 12, for example, bears a likeness to the mythic monsters of the Hebrew Bible (Ps. 74:13–14; Job 40:25; Dan. 7:2–8), his rivalry with the woman clothed with the Sun (Rev. 12:1–9) mirrors popular Greco-Roman myths.Footnote 116 And while older scholarship has traditionally focused on a particular myth with which to compare these passages, interpreters have more recently articulated the means by which myth is often remembered and transcribed without consistency in form or meaning.Footnote 117 In the words of Craig Koester:
[The] origins of mythic images do not determine their meanings. Authors could shape the mythic images to make different, even contradictory, points in different contexts …. myths are characterized by variety rather than uniformity. Mythic patterns share certain typical elements while exhibiting variations in detail. Sometimes, ancient plotlines were combined.Footnote 118
Although not identical to any one story from any one culture, it is clear that Revelation borrows elements from multiple contexts.Footnote 119
Bakhtinian Dialogism
That ancient plotlines were combined leads me to my third starting point: that Revelation is, and as hinted to above, a product of dialogism. Coined by Mikhail Bakhtin, the term “dialogism” refers to the cross-pollination of meaning (and meaning making).Footnote 120 To understand an utterance – to give meaning to it – Bakhtin explains, is to dive into its web of interactive relationalities.Footnote 121 Echoing Saussurean semiotics, dialogism assumes that there is no inherent relationship between the things we name and the names we assign them (there is no inherent relationship, for instance, between the letters T-R-E-E and the arborous plant under which my six-year-old dog insists on storing his favorite toys).Footnote 122 Any given utterance – whether from a live speech-act or literary work – carries with it an infinite number of cultural cues and syntactical scripts that make sense only when put into conversation with those particular cues and scripts. These utterances, in turn, shape the social world in which they are contextualized.Footnote 123 We use them “to not just represent reality, but to constitute it and construct it.”Footnote 124 Utterances create worlds, and worlds create utterances.
At the same time, however, dialogism shows that there is no direct relationship – no one-to-one set of meanings – between the words that float betwixt a given speaker and listener, author and character, story and reader, and so forth. Even the sound of one’s voice can generate multiple and multivalent understandings pertaining to multiple and multivalent ideas, lending to multidimensional interpretations. The same is true of author and text. The idea of authorial intent gives the illusion of unity, as does the seeming stability of words on a page. Any form of discourse – whether living or otherwise – constantly carries with it a complex web of textual and contextual associations that escape any one-to-one system of meaning. While an utterance “requires a context and structure in order to communicate meaning,”Footnote 125 that context and structure is complex, non-homogenous, and multivalent. As Graham Allen puts it, “The word in language is [always at least] half someone else’s [i.e., double-voiced].”Footnote 126 Even when a text attempts to “deny the dialogic nature of existence and attempt to be the only and final word,”Footnote 127 it is “always already permeated with traces of other words, other uses.”Footnote 128 In this way, all utterances are also unfinalizable. A story’s ending is only seemingly an ending. An Empire’s authority is only seemingly absolute. They are never actually fixed, but rather infer and intersect with a complex web of infinite dialogism, which can, in turn, be subverted by that very dialogism. Because totalitarian regimes, such as Empires, implicitly and explicitly endeavor to govern speech and thought through the monolog, David Valetta asserts, “all instances of dialogism in literature serve to undermine controlling authorities and voices.”Footnote 129 In this way, utterances not only gain meaning contextually, but also signify beyond word/phrase/speech to contribute to the production of knowledge and the discursive contextualities in which such utterances gain meaning.Footnote 130 According to Bakhtin, in fact, texts that intentionally set out to undermine monologic discourse, which “attempt[t] to be the only and final word,” represent a more sophisticated and liberating form of discourse.Footnote 131
These concepts are akin to Julia Kristeva’s poststructuralist conception of intertextuality, a term employed to destabilize meaning (as monologic) within and across texts. Utilizing Bakhtinian theory, Kristeva writes that “whatever the semantic content of a text, its condition as a signifying practice presupposes the existence of other discourses …. This is to say that every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it.”Footnote 132 This does not negate entirely a text’s situatedness, however. Again, texts come to life via social contextualization, whatever that may be. Peter D. Miscall writes:
From the perspective of intertextuality, textual authority and status are always in question since texts are interdependent and use each other. No text is an island. Displacement and decentering, rather than replacement and chaos, are two terms and concepts that attempt to express the questioning of authority and status and not the complete loss of either. The text is not undone and replaced. It may have moved elsewhere but it is still somewhere. It does not disappear. To destroy a text’s center is to reduce it to chaos; to decenter it is to move the center elsewhere, an elsewhere that is no longer an absolutely controlling and dominating site. Textual authority and status are in question because the original text no longer has the necessary site and center to exercise its previous authority. But the authority and status are “in question” and are not totally removed or denied.Footnote 133
In a similar vein, Bakhtinian dialogism highlights the cross-pollination of meaning betwixt and between discursive formations. While dialogism recognizes the displacement and decentering of utterances, the questions of authority, status, and situatedness are at the same time “not totally removed or denied.” Where Kristeva and Bakhtin differ, however, is in their focus. While Bakhtin considers specific historical, cultural, and social encounters interacting within the dialogic encounter, Kristeva utilizes more general terms, such as “text” and “intertext,” in favor of a more unstable textual model. For this reason, some scholars have questioned whether Kristeva implements Bakhtinian theory into her semiotic construct appropriately. She seems to lose, according to Simon Dentith, the importance of the “historical location” of the “dialogic encounter.”Footnote 134
Despite this scholarly quandary, Kristeva does share with Bakhtin “an insistence that texts cannot be separated from the larger cultural or social textuality out of which they are constructed.”Footnote 135 In other words, while Bakhtin foregrounds the specificity of context, Kristeva understands context to function within a complex textual-intertextual signifying system. In the exegetical chapters to follow, I use both Bakhtinian dialogism and Kristevan intertextuality to highlight the interactions between Revelation and other texts. I privilege dialogism, however, due to my particular interest in and emphasis upon the sociohistorical milieu in which Revelation was written, the traumatic ramifications of Empire upon its implied author and community, and my reading of the text’s own Jewish-Greco-Roman situatedness.
A historical predilection strengthens dialogical analysis also. As noted above, the Roman world was a product of cultural hybridization, a cultural effect of various dialogical associations – none more prominent than Greece.Footnote 136 We might even say that ancient authors were trained in the art of dialogism. Using paraphrasis, rhetoricians were trained to revise, transform, improve – indeed dialogue with – other literary texts, genres, themes, and styles. According to Austin Busch, in fact, literary dialogism was so pervasive in the ancient Greco-Roman world that writers ultimately engaged in “an act of assimilative amalgamation rather than cataloging.”Footnote 137 He cites Seneca, who wrote: “We too ought to imitate these bees …. [W]e are out to conflate the various things we have extracted … so that it may still appear to be something other than its source, even if from where it was obtained will be apparent” (Ep. 84.5).Footnote 138
Revelation and Dialogism
We saw earlier that Revelation’s extraction of Jewish and Greco-Roman texts is perhaps most evident in its wild mixing of Jewish scriptural and Greek mythological elements in the tale of the woman clothed with the Sun. But as Busch, and Seneca, point out, intertextualities can be minimalist and difficult to identify. Revelation’s use of humor is at times dependent on a more subtle dialogism, one that includes broad literary and cultural resonances without direct citation or quotation, nevertheless maintaining a similar form and style to those of its Jewish and Greco-Roman intertexts. Even if these subtleties are only referential for the modern reader, their/this referentiality indicates in and of itself a framework worth considering, all the more so when we are reading an ancient text whose author and audience would have been particularly attuned to such literary devices and linguistic modalities. Busch continues:
[W]e must conclude that [ancient writers and readers] would have been far more sensitive to subtle invocations of pagan Greek texts than most readers are today. If a plausible case can be made for even faint echoes of these writings in New Testament narratives, and if it can be demonstrated that their recognition deepens our understanding of the texts in which they appear, we ought to acknowledge that we have belatedly hit upon a semiotic complex that largely ceased to be recognized.Footnote 139
A dialogical reading thus does not preclude a culturally or historically sensitive reading of the text, but rather supports the historical-critical project while allowing for and highlighting (textual) fluidity and instability, regardless of whether that instability is subtle or overt.
Although not identical to any one story from any one culture, it is clear that Revelation borrows elements from multiple texts and contexts.Footnote 140 This does not position Greco-Roman-ness and Jewishness at odds with each other, but rather acknowledges the mutual exchange that occurred between these cultures at the same time. Whereas a monologic reading of Revelation might interpret the book, as its author, establishing authority and identity over and against Roman power and culture (right down to John’s self-identification as Jewish in name, language, and ideology), internal and external evidence suggest that John and his text were undoubtedly impacted, indeed fashioned, by the larger Greco-Roman world. It is significant that, even though John writes against the Greco-Roman power system and against his contemporaries immersed in that system, he does so with recourse to Greco-Roman story and, as with stories of Judah Maccabee, in Greek. As Busch might phrase it, were his a reading of Revelation, the book “encompasses [Judaism’s] expansion beyond Judea into the wider Greco-Roman world, a larger canvas that benefits from the full palate of literary colors [it] employs, including questions and echoes of classical Greek writings scattered throughout [its volume].”Footnote 141
But therein lies the rub. For just as reading Revelation within a Jewish context does not negate its Greco-Romanness, Revelation’s immersion in Greco-Romanness does not negate its reflections of Jewish trauma under Empire. As Rajak explains of Jewish–Hellenist relations, ethnic boundaries were still drawn, and tensions were still raised.Footnote 142 Although many Jews “got by,” “blended in,” or “passed” and, in so doing, “enjoyed the benefits of Roman commerce … and Hellenistic culture,”Footnote 143 they still languished under a colonial regime of dehumanization, destitution, exploitation, and enslavement.Footnote 144 Rajak adds:
While there is good reason to view the distinctions as activated only intermittently, we may suspect that, in the group memory, the rare occasions of tension may have loomed as large as the links; for those moments when Jews saw themselves as diametrically opposed to what Greeks [and Romans] stood for, in the broadest sense, were indeed defining moments. At such moments physical violence often accompanied ideological conflict and this will have left a lasting mark which justifies their prominent place in the historian’s reckoning.Footnote 145
The epitome of hybridity, Revelation’s emotive rhetoric unequivocally indicates Jewish opposition to all that the Greeks and Romans represented and, yet, is itself representative of (the immense influence of) Empire. The book’s tensions loom as large as the links and appear, indeed, to be defining moments.
The overarching scheme of Revelation is thus one of both/and. There is adaptation, and there is opposition. There is assimilation, and there is trauma. Indeed, assimilation in itself can sit alongside trauma. It is precisely this both/and – the conflict and the conjunction – with which Revelation strives and struggles, and as such, it is the lens through which I propose we read the Apocalypse.Footnote 146 Revelation’s author, put simply, combines elements of the world around him, and in so doing (unwittingly?), he constructs his own hybrid world(view). This “world” consists of Jewishness and Greco-Romanness, assimilation and antagonism. In the words of Shanell Smith, this is “John’s revelation, and his side of the story.”Footnote 147 Though not all of his readers were suffering, John makes clear that he identifies absolutely with those who are afflicted.Footnote 148
Looking Forward
As a referential text that both exposes subjugation under Empire and unveils an ambivalent opposition/attraction to the Roman imperial system, Revelation, despite its ancient context, functions as a postcolonial narrative. It exudes an anticolonial sentiment by “interrogating [its] colonial past” and present.Footnote 149 It exposes the construction of Roman hegemony by envisioning an alternative mode of being. Its postcoloniality is expressed not in the sense of being written post colonial-imperialism, but as Sam Durrant puts it, in the “performative sense.” Revelation “bear[s] witness to the various histories of [colonized] oppression that underwrite local, national, and international privilege and continue to inform, if not determine, cultural and psychological existence in the hope that their literary witnessing will bring into being a truly postcolonial form of community.”Footnote 150 To put it differently, Revelation is as posttraumatic as it is postcolonial, and as we will see next chapter, posttraumatic signification does not imply the termination of trauma – regardless of whether the traumatic “event” proper has passed or still lingers (such as in cases of repeated assault, ongoing systems of oppression, and ongoing imperial colonization) – but rather attests to traumatic events (past or present) and various remaining psycho-social responses. Revelation, through the serious, even somber, use of humorous storytelling, “writ[es] back” to Empire, and encourages readers to respond/“liste[n] again.”Footnote 151
