Revelation

A coloured Moslem American President will turn against Israel. He will be wounded in the head like the other charismatic twentieth-century American leaders. But he will recover and all gentile nations will worship him. The apocalypse will now happen in Armageddon, in northern Israel. The remnants of Israel will surrender to the love of Jesus Christ and the Christian temple in Jerusalem.

Judaism is happy to exploit Christian Zionism. But they are distinctly unhappy about Jesus Christ’s final eternal reign on earth. Their orthodox and ultra-orthodox believe that is the role of their still-awaited Messiah and the Jewish temple in Jerusalem.

Jesus said,
Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings will spring prophecy.

The Judaic Talmud rules that prophecy after the Hebrew prophets will only be found in babies and madmen. They sound alike.

But the connotations are as far apart as the imagery of the rainbow and blowflies. Eccentrics and the childlike have been well advised to steer clear of the synagogue since the fall of the second temple. In the Protestant Churches they are the rock or they rock. If an old Church disowns them, they can, with the ease of a Hubbard, start another one.

The apocryphal question is: Is Revelation an authentic word of God or at least a good man or is it the word of Satan or a day-dreaming raver? In the old tradition, Revelation is a gospel of the apostle Saint John. Church Fathers, even in the first centuries, pondered this. It only became established dogma after the Council of Nicaea.

Eusibius, in the fourth century, included Revelation with reluctance in the holy New Testament canon. He only included it because his teacher, whose teacher knew Saint John, had unofficially done so. To do otherwise might transgress God.

In the Book of Genesis, the surviving family of the Great Flood see, over Mount Ararat, the first rainbow. God places his bow over the sky as a covenant between Him and every living creature. All living creatures will be promised life – but the children of Noah will always have dominion. The covenant God made between Himself and Adam is renewed. This life affirming story is renewed after every rainstorm.

Several thousand years earlier, the story had been written in Sumeria. Its guts were taken by the children of Israel to Judaea. In the Sumerian story, God is compared to a hoard of blowflies. They buzz around the sacrifice of the Sumerian Noah and bless his progeny.

Thus a purely tribal story of propitiation to the Gods was elevated to a universal story of divine blessing of the fruits of the earth after every rainfall.

The bible begins with Genesis and ends with Revelation. As Revelation says, From Alpha to Omega (from A to Z). God's spell ends with the end of the alphabet. The Orthodox and Catholic Churches have removed Revelation from any vision of future times.

They are comfortable with integrating a canon book that is like no other in the New Testament into the attic of their Churches. The Protestant Churches, as with all good Protestants, must have clean souls. God has unveiled the future of all life on this earth. A definitive interpretation of Revelation's gorgeous and incredible imagery must be given by every generation. The original Greek name of Revelation was The Apocalypse (Unveiling).

The rationalist Jefferson dismissed Revelation as,
"the fervid lunatic state of the mind in sleep disturbed by incomprehensible dreams."

In this new millennium I surmise some Christian Zionists will be identifying Barak Obama with the anti-Christ.

But even Eusibius in his History of the Church noted the profound differences between the Fourth gospel and Revelation. The Fourth gospel is written in impeccable demotic Greek. Revelation contains quite a number of idiomatic mistakes. He says he doesn't elaborate, "because Revelation is now in the canon."

John was no simple fisherman. His father was in the fishing industry and knew the high priest. John was well-educated but chose the inner-circle of the Jewish Christians instead of the outer business circle of the Pharisees. I am sure Christ's healing love also had a lot to do with his life-transforming choice.

As a Church elder, he was exiled by the emperor Domitian to the Greek island of Patmos. There, reportedly in a cave still shown to tourists, he meditated and wrote the Book of Revelation. We are already moving outside the Jewish Christian tradition where prophecy comes from deserts and mountain tops. A rainbow shines above them. Blowflies abound in caves.

Yet in Revelation, the author calls himself "John". He castigates the seven Churches in Asia for their biblical sins. Then the reader is drawn into the gorgeous world of the Orient. It is no less (maybe even more) brilliant and bizarre than The Thousand and One Nights. What can the reader make of it? Dismiss it easily like Jefferson?

A clue may be found in fundamental Islam as it ruptures itself against the invading West. If a Moslem dies in a Jihad, he will enter eternal paradise, and will be served by a legion of virgins. The ascetic lifestyle in Islam thus receives its carnal reward for its ultimate sacrifice. In the first century the Orient stretched across the Roman Empire to the Atlantic Ocean. An almost forgotten Christian heretic may hold the key. His name was Cerinthus.

Eusibius actually speculated that Cerinthus was the true author of Revelation. In his History of The Church, he writes that the apostle John once met him in a bath house. At the sight of Cerinthus, he fled in terror shouting curses.

The spectre of an apostle in a bath-house at once separates us from the Hellenic Church. Eusibius writes that Cerinthus was a heretic who taught his followers that Christ's return to earth would usher in an eternal age of the faithful, which would be the same as a wedding ceremony that lasted for ever.

A pagan Greek wedding ceremony was a besoted night of drinking bouts and dancing girls. That is more than a shade of a fundamental Moslem's eternity in paradise. The mystery of what actually happens at the Omega of Revelation may now be settled.

The good have now received eternity and the damned have now been thrown in a bottomless pit. Christ's first thousand years of government has concluded. The good now settle down to an eternity of Christ's bridal night. The dancing girls arrive and the water is turned into wine.

For many centuries, Christian pilgrims to the apostle John's city Ephesus were shown the two graves of the two Johns. Was Cerinthus apostle John's imposter?

Imposters remain a familiar figure among celebrities, especially literary ones. Literary celebrities have great influence but rarely political power to end such parasitism. Cerinthus, a Greek imposter, attached himself to the apostle. He aped his writings and even claimed to the unwary that he was the apostle himself. Cerinthus himself was no mean literary stylist. Poets and artists down the ages have drawn from his rich imagery. Great thinkers have speculated about his works. He even takes on the name and habits of his mentor. But he is from humble stock.

While the apostle John takes the language of the middle-class prosperous Christian, his parasite, half-starved with a patchy education, speaks with the cries of the cast-down seer. He sees visions but his eyes are closed shut. His fancies are dredged from the cavern of the hungry, desperate man.