The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

  There was nothing romantic about John’s imprisonment on Patmos. This was a penal settlement, a mini Devil’s Island—a craggy contorted volcanic rock honeycombed with tiny caves that had been converted into prison cells. There was no escape except by sea. Water had to be brought in by boat. One scholar surmises that John may not even have had writing utensils and wrote the Book of Revelation from memory after his release, likely in AD 97, on the death of the emperor Diocletian.

  Historian Will Durant wrote in 1944: “It seems incredible that the Apocalypse and the Fourth Gospel should have come from the same hand.”8 In fact, we know today that they did not. The author of Revelation was not the John, son of Zebedee and apostle of Christ, who wrote the Fourth Gospel (though the apostle John apparently lived long enough to do so; Sir Isaac repeats the ancient scuttlebutt that “in his old age he [the apostle] was so infirm as to be carried to church, dying above 90 years”9).

  Today we know that the apostles were illiterate and that the apostle John didn’t even write the Gospel that bears his name. This was penned by an unknown scribe, probably in Rome in 100 BC. This anonymous author didn’t write the Book of Revelation either. Princeton’s Harrington Spear Paine and Professor of Religion Elaine Pagels tells us that as early as the third century AD Bishop Dionysius concluded that the author of Revelation couldn’t have been the author of the Gospel of Saint John. Pagels writes:

  He [Dionysius] points out differences that literary critics have noted ever since; for example, that John of Patmos often mentions his own name but never claims to be an apostle; that the tone of his writing, the style, and the language, which is “not really Greek” but uses “barbarous idioms,” are distinctly different from those of the fourth gospel.10

  Though we know little about John, we can surmise that he was an extremely angry man. After all, he had seen the Romans trample on everything Jewish and Christian. They had killed Jesus (perhaps John’s parents had told the story to the young boy). They had demolished the Temple of Jerusalem (Newton thought John must have been a soldier in the Jewish-Roman war). In the seven cities in which John carried out his ministry he had watched with mounting rage as the Romans raised up huge temples decorated with frescoes celebrating the Roman victory over the Jews.11

  Rage dominates almost every part of the Book of Revelation. Pagels calls the book “wartime literature” and describes its contents as “not stories and moral teaching but visions, dreams, and nightmares.”12 She tells us that it “speaks to something deep in human nature.”13

  That “something deep” is our terror of the unknown. John of Patmos is (among many other things) the Donald Trump of the first century BC. He terrifies us with his images of bloody wars to come even as he promises that if we are patient Christ will rescue us.

  All the images in the Book of Revelation are surrealistic. Fury, hatred, and violence twist them into ever more grotesque samples of surrealism. As the book opens, Satan has lost a battle wth God in heaven and now leads Rome in an attack on Christianity (or that is how the earliest readers of Revelation saw it). Monstrous beasts made up of pieces of other animals stamp, howl, bite, and destroy. Many-headed and multi-horned, they claw their way out of bottomless pits or stalk ashore from the sea like Godzilla. Around their feet, armies as vast as the sea, stained with blood, attack under pitch-black skies shot through with thunder and lightning; they crash together like ocean waves, subside, attack again. Stars fall; the sun goes out; angels scatter poison from the skies.

  The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse stream by furiously; then comes the Whore of Babylon, astride a red dragon, gorgeously and garishly attired. A woman clothed in the sun appears and gives birth to—the Christ child? Is normalcy entering? No; a dragon rears up before her, so gigantic he has to flick one-third of the stars from the sky with his tail to have room to stand; the woman flees in terror. As these hallucinatory images streak by, our Earth staggers in agony, is turned upside down and consumed by fire; fissures open; mountains are drowned, and evil triumphs.

  The black fury of Revelation troubled British novelist D. H. Lawrence, who believed the soul of John of Patmos must be “ruled not by love but by that dangerous psychic poison diagnosed unsparingly by Nietzsche and known by its French word ressentiment.”14 Classics scholar Michael Grosso agrees, adding that “Tacitus, the Roman writer, may have had this resentful side of primitive Christianity in mind when he said of the new cult that it was based on ‘hatred of the human race.’ . . . One thing is clear: you cannot fault John for inconsistency; vindictive rage reigns supreme until the last verses of his text.”15

  Carl Jung wondered why the Christ of Revelation was not the Christ of sweetness and light of the Gospels and decided that the beautiful world of Jesus as presented in the New Testament was all the time repressing the part of life that was bound up with evil. The pendulum had to swing back, in Revelation, to a God that (as in the Old Testament) could aggressively combat sin, sinners, and evil-doers, making sure that they were all properly punished. The God of Revelation was the dark side of God—his anima, so to speak. (Jung believed that Revelation was not the last word, because the Holy Spirit would eventually manifest as a new incarnation called the Paraclete.)16

  The Book of Revelation proclaims, writes Grosso, “the coming of a supernatural overturning of the existing order, a cosmic cataclysm [that] would generate a new heaven and new earth.”17 Good emerges from the cataclysm as John beholds the Heavenly City of Jerusalem and witnesses the Second Coming of Christ and the resurrection of the 144,000 who have remained faithful to the Word of God.

  These are universal apocalyptic themes, but Revelation often sounds startlingly topical: demon-angels turn the sea “into blood like a dead man’s,” “every living thing in the sea will die”; and the heat of the Earth will be unleashed upon the wicked as earthquakes rumble and giant hailstones fall. If John is describing global warming, then the Koch brothers are the Antichrist.

  Earlier ages also found Revelation topical. Its first readers identified the Roman emperor Nero (AD 37–68) as John’s Antichrist. Nero accused the Christians of setting the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64 and had many of them tortured to death. (The emperor was loved, feared, and hated by his subjects. Some things stuck out, like his having murdered his own mother, and a hundred years after his death people still feared he would somehow come back and persecute them.)

  When violent schisms shook the early Catholic Church, some decided the Antichrist was Athanasius, the fourth-century Catholic archbishop who upheld the doctrine of the Trinity; others singled out the heretic Arius as God’s ultimate enemy. When the Protestant Reformation came, many raged against its leader, Martin Luther, as the Antichrist. The finest thinkers of seventeenth-century England regarded the pope as God’s archenemy and excoriated the Catholic Church with a raw vitriol that amazes us today, seeing as it comes from the lips of men of unusual erudition and eloquence. (Newton himself was no shrinking violet when it came to lambasting the Vatican with barracks-room invective.) The centuries rolled on, and the Antichrist became Napoleon, then Adolf Hitler, then Franklin D. Roosevelt (for introducing the Social Security Act), then communism, then the World Bank, then the Federal Reserve—it seems as if the list will go on forever.

  Many of the books promoting these ideas were lightweight, with little hard thinking and less scholarship. Most were confined to fundamentalist and evangelical circles; these were big circles, but, by and large, in the twentieth century the Antichrist, the Apocalypse, and John’s Revelation seemed to drop below the radar of the average fairly well-educated citizen.

  Then, in 1997, a book came along that aroused worldwide interest in the prophetic books of the Bible. This was The Bible Code by American journalist Michael Drosnin, which became a runaway global bestseller. It used computers as a search tool, which accounted for some of its popularity. But it was clear that man’s age-old anxiety to know the future was still there and that anyone who knew how to provoke it could attract a lot of attention and ma
ke a lot of money.

  Drosnin’s Bible Code came under withering fire from the critics. Its promoters hastily ransacked history to find a way of giving the book respectability. They retrieved from the dustbins of the past Isaac Newton’s Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John. Look, they told the critics, Isaac Newton invented a Bible code. If this towering genius did this, isn’t that a good enough reason for taking Michael Drosnin’s Bible code seriously?

  But in fact it wasn’t. Critics who went out and bought Newton’s volume discovered that the great mathematician’s “Bible code” was so much more complex and sophisticated than Drosnin’s Revelation-inspired computer-game text that it put the latter to shame. In fact, Newton’s book wasn’t a Bible code at all. Working with painstaking care over many years, Newton had used layer upon layer of diverse quasi-scientific methodologies to arrive at his complex conclusions. But, while admiring his book, modern-day prophecy mavens decided it was just too much work to get through. Interest in Newton’s Observations dried up even as sales of Drosnin’s Bible Code soared.

  But the world had rediscovered Newton’s learned and beguiling text. Many now saw that interpreting the Book of Revelation was a serious matter, requiring a scientific approach, and that the easy technology-enhanced ways of modern times had gotten in the way of that truth.

  Let’s briefly examine Drosnin’s The Bible Code (which was followed by two sequels: Bible Code II: The Countdown, in 2003, and Bible Code III: Saving the World, in 2010, both of them also remarkably successful). That will help us see all the more clearly, when we broach the subject farther on in this chapter, the unique qualities that Newton’s Observations possesses.

  When the U.S.S.R. invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, a young mathematician named Eliyahu Rips sat down in a public square in Riga, Latvia, and set himself on fire to protest the Soviet Union’s act of aggression.

  He was rescued by a crowd and sent to a Soviet psychiatric hospital, where he spent much of his time solving the “dimension subject conjecture,” a problem that had bedeviled mathematicians for decades.

  Out after two years, Rips immigrated to Israel, arriving with a reputation as a man of unshakable integrity and as a brilliant theoretical mathematician specializing in “group theory.” This was why his colleagues took him seriously when, in 1991 and now a professor of mathematics at Hebrew University, he announced he had discovered a code in the Hebrew Bible describing events that took place hundreds of years after the Bible was written.

  Rips’s “Bible code” was based on the assumption that God had dictated to Moses on Mount Sinai the first five books of the Old Testament—the Torah—in a single string of 304,805 uninterrupted letters.

  Rips believed—as had many eminent rabbis of the Middle Ages, including the great sage R. Moses ben Nahman, aka Ramban or Nahmanides (ca. AD 1195–1270)—that not a word of the Torah had been changed since Moses’s time.

  Words and messages had anciently been encrypted in the Torah using what Rips called equidistant letter sequencing (ELS); that is, if we decide, say, on the number three, and read the letters of the Torah consistently skipping two letters, we will spell out prophetic messages. We can’t do this with the Torah per se; we have to do it when the Torah is installed on a computer in such a way as to leave out all spaces, including the spaces for vowel sounds.

  This mathematician Rips did; and, searching the Book of Genesis for the names of post-Torah rabbis, he came up with thirty-two. Rips also discovered the birth dates of the rabbis embedded in the text around them.

  Rips came up with “future”—that is, post-Mosaic—events predicted for our time. The Hebrew words for Sadat, president, shot, gunfire, murder, and parade, all lying in one sequence, were, he decided, a prediction of the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981. Then he came across the name of General Norman Schwartzkopf, the American who commanded the coalition forces in the 1991 Gulf War.

  In 1994, Rips’s findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Statistical Science. The journal decided that his conclusions were a “challenging puzzle,” not a proven fact. Some claimed Rips et al. had changed the spellings of the rabbis’ names ex post facto to effect more matchups with the birth dates, others that he had exaggerated the odds against discovering the rabbis’ names and matching them with birth dates.

  In 1995, the American journalist Michael Drosnin appropriated Rips’s computerized Torah/ELS program and almost immediately came up with words predicting the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in a year; Rabin was in fact assassinated a year later. Drosnin capitalized on this experience with The Bible Code, which published in 1997, skyrocketed to number one on the bestseller list. This book inspired a host of imitators and competing Torah/ELS software programs; “doing” the Bible code became all the rage. In 2002, Drosnin published The Bible Code II. Though its predictions were completely off target and it was badly reviewed, it too became a bestseller.

  Many objections can and have been raised against the predictive methodology hyped by Drosnin. No one believes any more that the Torah was dictated to Moses by God in one fell swoop; for one thing, it tells of events that took place after Moses died and predicts events that you might have expected Moses would try to forestall. “If they knew what was going to happen, why didn’t the people shape up?” asks mathematician Randall Ingermanson.18 Many more objections were leveled, and these days we hear little about Drosnin’s Bible code.

  Finding out how Isaac Newton cracked the codes of the Book of Revelation is a harsh dousing in reality for biblical-prophecy groupies looking for easy answers. But it is a dousing as instructive as several university courses. Did Newton, using the myriad and intricate methodologies he employed to unseal Revelation, actually lay bare the future history of mankind? The global reaction to the “leaked” apocalypse date of 2060 suggests that people want an answer to that question. And so we will address it. But the seventeenth century was remarkably different from the twenty-first, and it’s necessary to begin by filling in some background.

  The age of John of Patmos was an age of universal belief in God, if not the God of the Jews or Christians, then the gods of the pagan world. People weren’t necessarily better than they are today, but God’s presence was felt, feared, and worshipped.

  Fifteen hundred years later, men and women in general still believed, if often unreflectively, in the existence of God. The human mind hadn’t yet been hardwired to deal with the idea that he didn’t exist; for almost everyone, grappling with such an idea was an impossibility, like talking about what would happen if spring turned into winter.

  If the people of Newton’s time believed in God, that didn’t keep them from being constantly affrighted by the treacherous and unpredictable world in which they lived. In 1642, civil war erupted across Britain; a king was beheaded; the war raged on and off for nine years and brought suffering into many homes. The Great Plague of 1665 killed 70,000 people, half of them Londoners. In 1666, the Great Fire burned to the ground two-thirds of the city and left 200,000 people homeless. Disease was rampant; by midcentury the death rate in London exceeded the birth rate, only the stream of migrants from the countryside making up the loss. The practice of medicine was still largely confined to the precepts laid down by the ancient Roman Galen (AD 130–200), with plenty of astrology, magic, witchcraft, herbal remedies, and spreading of excrement on wounds thrown in. Medicine would only begin to change late in the century when Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood was made known.

  London was a free-for-all of crime. Daring robberies were committed in broad daylight. When families left London for a week they locked up their furniture in upholsterers’ warehouses for security. Thieves stole into balls and snipped jewels off the necks of ladies. One day a felon guilty of thirty murders would be hung; the next, a starving waif who stole sixpence. Men were half-hung and then saw their insides cut out before their eyes. Public whippings, pilloryings, bear baitings, and cock-fights were
standard forms of entertainment. Though crusaders worked for justice, seventeenth-century England tolerated a norm for cruelty that we can scarcely countenance today.

  Many hoped, as much as they feared, that the world was coming to an end; Christ would come and save them. The lower classes despaired of God’s protection. Mostly illiterate, yearning for certainty, they searched for omens, paid for horoscopes, consulted fortune-tellers, ran-sacked their dreams for prophecies, worked out lucky and unlucky days, and tied bundles of talismans to their person.

  It’s not surprising that these troubled times encouraged a belief in millenarianism. This was the notion that the kingdom of Christ would be established on Earth in the very near future, perhaps even tomorrow, and that it would be followed by a thousand years of peace. Christ had told his disciples he would return in their lifetime. Saint Paul wrote a few years later: “The appointed time has grown very short. From now on, those who have wives should live as though they had none . . . and those who buy anything as if they did not own it. . . . For the present shape of the world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7:29–31).

  In the second century AD, the prophet Montanus preached the doctrine of millenarianism so forcefully that, a century after his death, “some believed the New Jerusalem seemed already hovering over the earth in readiness for its descent, and Tertullian records how the soldiers of Severus’ army had seen its walls on the horizon, shining in the light of dawn, for forty days, as they marched through Palestine.”19

  Near the end of the fourth century, when the church had become almost as powerful as the empire, the pope officially repudiated millenarianism. He didn’t want men and women waiting around for Christ to return and tell them what to do; he wanted them to live in accordance with the official strictures of the Roman Catholic Church. Millenarianism went underground and reemerged as a potent force only after Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation effectively challenged the all-encompassing power of the Catholic Church. “Luther and some of the other reformers identified the Pope with Antichrist and attempted to find a prediction of the Reformation in the Apocalypse,” writes Professor Peter Clouse. “The expositors of the seventeenth century further modified their views of the Apocalypse until many of them became millenarian.”20