The Theology of the Book of Revelation

by Richard Bauckham

  CHAPTER 6

  The New Jerusalem

  THE CITIES OF REVELATION

  The Christian world of the book of Revelation, like that of much of the New Testament, is a world of cities. The readers to whom the book is addressed lived in seven of the great cities of Asia Minor.1 Most readers to whom it subsequently passed would also have lived in cities. Jewish Christians, like John and many of his readers, lived, both geographically and symbolically, between Jerusalem and Rome. And since this was also a world in which cities were commonly personified as women, Rome appears in Revelation, not as the goddess Roma, the form in which she was worshipped in the cities of Asia, but as ‘the great whore’ (17:1). She is also called Babylon the great city, after the Old Testament city which destroyed Jerusalem and in which Jerusalem’s citizens lived in exile. Babylon is the city of Rome, built on seven hills (17:9), but she also represents the corrupting influence which Rome had on all the cities of her empire. She is ‘Babylon the great, mother of whores’ – who are presumably the other cities, like those of Asia, who share in her luxury and her evil. When she falls, so do ‘the cities of the nations’ (16:19) – presumably including Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum and the rest.

  But if Babylon is the actual city of Rome, Jerusalem is not the actual city which the Romans had captured and sacked some time before Revelation was written. There are, indeed, two Jerusalems in Revelation. There is the New Jerusalem which comes down from heaven in the new creation. Like the harlot Babylon, the New Jerusalem is both a woman and a city: the bride and the wife of the Lamb (19:7; 21:2, 9) and ‘the holy city the New Jerusalem’ (21:2), ‘the city of my God’ (3:12). Babylon and the New Jerusalem are the contrasting pair of women-cities which dominates the later chapters of Revelation. But as well as the New Jerusalem of the future, there is also ‘the holy city’ of 11:2 and the heavenly woman of 12:1–6, 13–17. The city of 11:2 is not the earthly Jerusalem, in which Revelation shows no interest, and 11:1–2 does not allude to the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, when the sanctuary in the temple was certainly not protected from the Roman armies.2 John is here reinterpreting Daniel’s prophecies of the desecration of the temple (Dan. 8:9–14; 11:31; 12:11) and perhaps also the prophecies in the Gospels, dependent on Daniel, which prophesied the fall of Jerusalem (Matt. 24:15; Mark 13:14; Luke 21:20–4). He is reinterpreting them to refer to the persecution of the church in the symbolic three-and-a-half year period of the church’s conflict with the Roman Empire. The holy city trampled by the Gentiles is the faithful church in its suffering and martyrdom at the hands of the beast. The sanctuary with its worshippers is the hidden presence of God to those who worship him in the churches. In the midst of persecution they are kept spiritually safe, just as Christ promised the church at Philadelphia to ‘keep’ them from ‘the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world’ (3:10). They would suffer and die, but be kept spiritually safe. The little prophecy about the temple and the city in 11:1–2 corresponds to the spiritual immunity of the two witnesses (11:5) and their martyrdom (11:7–8). The holy city trampled by the Gentiles is wherever the witnesses lie dead in the street of the great city (11:8).

  For the same period in which the sanctuary is protected, in which the holy city is trampled and the witnesses prophesy (11:1–3), the heavenly woman who has given birth to the Messiah is kept safe in the wilderness (12:6, 13–16), while the dragon, frustrated in his pursuit of her, turns his attacks onto her children (12:13–17). Her refuge in the wilderness is an alternative symbol for the same spiritual safety of the church in persecution as is depicted by the protection of the sanctuary in 11:1–2. She is kept safe while the beast rules and puts her children to death (13:5–7). She is the mother of jesus and of Christians – Eve and Mary, Israel, Zion and the church all combined in an image of the spiritual essence of the covenant people of God.3 She is the female figure corresponding to the holy city of 11:2.

  Thus the New Jerusalem of the future, the bride of the Lamb, has both a forerunner in the present and an opposite in the present. The forerunner is the holy city, mother Zion. The opposite is Babylon, the great whore. But while Babylon is ‘the great city that rules over the kings of the earth’ (17:18), the holy city exists only in hiddenness and contradiction. While it resembles the New Jerusalem in its holiness, it contrasts sharply with the unchallenged glory of the New Jerusalem which the kings of the earth will honour (21:24). And while the New Jerusalem contrasts with Babylon in her evil, she resembles Babylon in splendour and universal dominion.

  Whether they were Jews or Gentiles, most of John’s readers were used to belonging to a city. Most citizens of the great cities of the province of Asia would have thought it possible to be fully human only in the public life of a city. For those of John’s readers who had the social status and affluence sufficient to participate in this public life – and probably many of them did – the most difficult and alien aspect of Christianity would have been the extent to which it required them to dissociate and to distance themselves from this public life, because of the idolatry and immorality bound up with it. There is plenty of evidence in the seven messages to the churches to show how disinclined many of them were to do this. Not only a comfortable life, participating in the prosperity of the cities’ economic life, was at stake, though this was a major factor. There was also the need to belong to the civic community, with its rituals of identity and civic pride. And in the first century AD this was inseparable from the public and official enthusiasm for their connexion with Rome which the cities of Asia displayed. Of course, for the poor among John’s readers belonging to a city and to the Roman Empire would have had more ambivalent, though not always merely negative, connotations.

  Jewish Christians may have felt their identity to depend less on participation in the life of the cities.4 As diaspora Jews they were used to a double loyalty – to their adopted city and to the city they still looked to as their national and religious centre: Jerusalem. As a symbolic centre, a spiritual alternative to Rome, Jerusalem was of great importance to diaspora Jews, even after AD 70. But Jewish Christians at Smyrna and Philadelphia were being disowned by the Jewish community, and in any case, however Jewish Christians felt about Jerusalem before AD 70, most of them probably took the destruction of the temple to mark the end of Jerusalem’s earthly significance. It was a definitive divine judgment. But it deprived them of a city to belong to.

  We recall that part of the strategy of Revelation, in creating a symbolic world for its readers to enter, was to redirect their imaginative response to the world. If they were to dissociate themselves from Babylon and its corrupting influence on their own cities, they needed not only to be shown Roman civilization in a different light from the way its own propaganda portrayed it; they also needed an alternative. If they were – metaphorically – to ‘come out of Babylon (18:4), they needed somewhere to go, another city to belong to. If they were to resist the powerful allurements of Babylon, they needed an alternative and greater attraction. Since Babylon is the great city that rules over the kings of the earth (17:18), even over the earthly Jerusalem, this alternative could belong only to the eschatological future. It is God’s alternative city: the New Jerusalem that comes down from heaven. It belongs to the future, but through John’s vision it exercises its attraction already. On its great high mountain in the future (21:10), it towers above the impressive citadel of Pergamum where Satan had his throne (2:13) and even above the seven mountains on which Babylon was built (17:9). Its radiance, which is the glory of God, already attracts people to it – even, through the church’s witness, the nations and their rulers (21:24). John’s readers may not enter it yet, but they may anticipate a place in it (3:12, 22:14, 19), and belong already to the Bride of the Lamb (19:7–8; 22:17), whose marriage to him will be the city’s arrival on earth (21:2).

  Thus, because their spiritual centre in the present is hidden and contradicted (11:1–2), while the splendour and power of Babylon dominate the world, including the life of their own cities, John’s
readers need the vision of a centre in the eschatological future towards which they may live. It has to be presented as the alternative to Babylon, and so the visions of the harlot city Babylon (17:1–19:10) and the Lamb’s bride the New Jerusalem (21:9–22:9) form a structural pair in the latter part of the book. They both play on the ancient mythic ideal of the city as the place where human community lives in security and prosperity with the divine in its midst. Babylon represents the perversion of this ideal, what it comes to when, instead of the true God, humanity’s self-deification is the heart of the city. All the proud, God-defying, tyrannical and oppressive cities and states of the Old Testament contribute to the picture: Babel, Sodom, Egypt, Tyre, Babylon, Edom. The Babylon of Revelation sums up and surpasses them all. But the echoes of the past are tailored to the reality of the present: John’s readers would recognize well enough contemporary Rome in her true colours. Conversely, the New Jerusalem represents the true fulfilment of the ideal of the city, a city truly worth belonging to. It takes up the ideal to which the earthly Jerusalem aspired but surpasses her in an eschatological excess already to be found in the visions of the Old Testament prophets. The fall of Babylon, which occupies so much of Revelation, is what human opposition to God must come to, but it is not celebrated for its own sake. Babylon must fall so that the New Jerusalem may replace her. Her satanic parody of the ideal of the city must give way to the divine reality. But John hopes that, before this happens, not only his readers but even, through them, the nations, may be won from the deceitful charms of Babylon to the genuine attractions of the New Jerusalem.

  For this reason, the two visions of Babylon and the New Jerusalem are replete with parallels and contrasts between the two.5 A list of some of the major ways in which the New Jerusalem is presented as God’s alternative to Babylon will illustrate the point:

  (1) The chaste bride, the wife of the Lamb (21:2,9)

  v. the harlot with whom the kings of the earth fornicate (17:2)

  (2) Her splendour is the glory of God (21:11–21)

  v. Babylon’s splendour from exploiting her empire (17:4; 18:12–13, 16)

  (3) The nations walk by her light, which is the glory of God (21:24)

  v. Babylon’s corruption and deception of the nations (17:2; 18:3, 23; 19:2)

  (4) The kings of the earth bring their glory into her (i.e. their worship and submission to God: 21:24)

  v. Babylon rules over the kings of the earth (17:18)

  (5) They bring the glory and honour of the nations into her (i.e. glory to God: 21:26)

  v. Babylon’s luxurious wealth extorted from all the world (18:12–17)

  (6) Uncleanness, abomination and falsehood are excluded (21:27)

  v. Babylon’s abominations, impurities, deceptions (17:4, 5; 18:23)

  (7) The water of life and the tree of life for the healing of the nations (21:6; 22:1–2)

  v. Babylon’s wine which makes the nations drunk (14:8; 17:2; 18:3)

  (8) Life and healing (22:1–2)

  v. the blood of slaughter (17:6; 18:24)

  (9) God’s people are called to enter the New Jerusalem (22:14)

  v. God’s people are called to come out of Babylon (18:4).

  THE NEW JERUSALEM AS PLACE

  The description of the New Jerusalem is a remarkable weaving together of many strands of Old Testament tradition into a coherent and richly evocative image of a place in which people live in the immediate presence of God. It can be considered in its three aspects: place, people, presence of God. We shall study each of these in turn, though without being able to avoid frequent reference to the others.

  As a place, the New Jerusalem is at once paradise, holy city and temple. As paradise it is the natural world in its ideal state, rescued from the destroyers of the earth, reconciled with humanity, filled with the presence of God, and mediating the blessings of eschatological life to humanity. As holy city, it fulfils the ideal of the ancient city,6 as the place where heaven and earth meet at the centre of the earth, from which God rules his land and his people, to whose attraction the nations are drawn for enlightenment, and in which people live in ideal theocentric community. As temple, it is the place of God’s immediate presence, where his worshippers see his face.

  The ‘great high mountain’ (21:10) to which the city descends has a long mythological ancestry as well as its immediate derivation from Ezekiel 40:2.7 It is the cosmic mountain where heaven and earth meet, where the gods dwelt, where sacred cities were built with temples at their heart. Paradise was on ‘the holy mountain of God’ (Ezek. 28:14). Mount Zion on which Jerusalem and the temple stood was not in reality so very high, but was mythologically a very high mountain (Ezek. 40:2): ‘his holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth’ (Ps. 48:2). As God’s dwelling, the seat of his rule, ‘the city of the great King’, it was impregnable (Ps. 48). Even if God’s throne was in heaven, Mount Zion was his footstool (Ps. 99). In the last days, it was to be elevated above all other mountains, becoming actually the cosmic mountain with which it was symbolically identified, and the temple on its summit would draw all the nations to it (Isa. 2:2). Moreover, it was to be the site of paradise restored (Isa. 11:9; 65:25). Thus the very site of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21:10 suggests the ideal place. All that the earthly Jerusalem could do no more than symbolize will be reality. Whereas the builders of ancient Babylon (Gen. 11:1–9) sought to join earth to heaven with the self-deifying pride John saw repeated in contemporary Rome, the New Jerusalem which comes from God will truly join heaven to earth.

  The New Jerusalem includes paradise in the form of the water of life (22:1–2; cf. 7:17; 21:6; 22:1; 22:17) and the tree of life (22:2; cf. 2:7; 22:14, 19). Both have multiple Old Testament sources which John has himself combined (cf. for the water of life: Isa. 49:10; 55:1; Ezek. 47:1–12; Zech. 14:8; and for the tree of life: Gen. 2:9; 3:24; Ezek. 47:12). Together they represent the food and drink of eschatological life. As the life belonging to the new creation, this is eternal life, unlike the mortal life sustained by the food and drink obtained from this creation. It comes from God (21:6; 22:1), who is himself the life of the new creation, but the imagery suggests that as God’s gift of mortal life is mediated to us by this creation of which we are part, so eschatological life will be mediated by the new creation.

  Not so obviously, but recognizably to those who were familiar with Jewish traditions, the New Jerusalem is built out of the precious stones and metals of paradise. Havilah, which Jewish interpretation included in paradise, was the source of gold and precious stones (Gen. 2:11–12). Moreover, Ezekiel, in a verse echoed in Revelation 21:19, says to the king of Tyre: ‘You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was your covering’ (Ezek. 28:13). The list of every precious stone which follows in the Massoretic text is identical with the first nine of the list of twelve precious stones on the breastplate of the high priest (Exod. 28:17–20), a list of which John also gives a version, as the stones which adorned the twelve foundations of the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:19–20). From Ezekiel he had learned that this was a list representing all precious stones, all to be found in paradise. Various Jewish traditions claimed that the jewels of the breastplate and other jewels and gold used in the vestments and decoration of the temple came from paradise (the mysterious Parvaim, source of the gold used in Solomon’s temple (2 Chron. 3:6; cf. 1QGen.Apoc. 2:23), was identified with paradise). Moreover, an exegetical tradition before Revelation had already identified the precious stones of which the New Jerusalem was to be built, according to Isaiah 54:11–12, with the jewels on the vestments of the high priest, which were supposed to have been so brilliant that they would serve in place of the sun and the moon to light the New Jerusalem (cf. 4QpIsa.a 1–9; L.A.B. 26:13–15). Thus not only the twelve jewels of Revelation 21:19–20, but also the jewels and the gold of which the rest of the city is built (21:18, 21), characterize the New Jerusalem as a temple-city adorned with all the fabulously radiant precious materials of paradise. When the whole city
is said to have ‘the glory of God and a radiance like a very rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal’ (21:11), we remember that the glory of God himself is ‘like jasper and carnelian’ (4:3) and that the sea of glass before his throne in heaven is translucent like crystal, to reflect his glory (4:6). John probably means that the whole city, with its radiant jewels and its translucent gold (21:18, 21), shines with the reflected glory of God himself (cf. 21:23).

  The paradisal source of the materials of the New Jerusalem means that they are not to be taken as mere allegories for attributes of the people who inhabit it. The fine linen in which the bride of the Lamb dresses herself, in preparation for her wedding, represents the righteous deeds of the saints (19:7–8), done in this life, but the jewels with which she is decked when her wedding-day comes (21:2, 18–21) are the glory given her by God in the new creation. They are the beauty of the new creation, reflecting the glory of God and made into a home for glorified humanity.

  In the beginning God had planted a garden for humanity to live in (Gen. 2:8). In the end he will give them a city. In the New Jerusalem the blessings of paradise will be restored, but the New Jerusalem is more than paradise regained. As a city it fulfils humanity’s desire to build out of nature a human place of human culture and community. True, it is given by God and so comes down from heaven. But this does not mean humanity makes no contribution to it. It consummates human history and culture insofar as these have been dedicated to God (cf. 21:12, 14, 24, 26), while excluding the distortions of history and culture into opposition to God that Babylon represents (cf. 21:8, 27; 22:15). It comes from God in the sense that all good comes from God, and all that is humanly good is best when acknowledged to come from God. But the city that both includes paradise unspoiled (22:1–2) and is adorned with the beauty of paradise (21:19) points to that harmony of nature and human culture to which ancient cities once aspired but which modern cities have increasingly betrayed.