In our own time, this ancient myth is the central plot element of the Star Wars movies: the battle between good and evil symbolized in the conflict between Jedi knights wielding light-sabers against an empire of darkness whose most vivid representative is Lord Darth Vader, commander of the “Death Star.” The popularity of the Star Wars saga is due not simply to the stunning special effects, but also to the re-presentation of this ancient story. The series taps into something deep within human memory and consciousness: the awareness of conflict between good and evil and the yearning that good will triumph. Thus Revelation and Star Wars are powerful for the same reason.
The myth was also well known in Greco-Roman culture. Its most common form in that context was the story of the god Apollo (son of Zeus and thus son of god) and Python, the ancient monster. When Apollo’s mother, Leto, was about to give birth to her child, Python looked for his chance to devour the infant. Apollo was delivered safely, however; and after he had grown up, he battled and killed Python. It is the same story, appearing again and again.
John of Patmos obviously knew this version of the ancient myth, and it shapes much of the Apocalypse.35 Now the battle is between, on one side, God and “the Lamb that was slain,” and, on the other, the dragon, the ancient serpent, the beast from the abyss, who is also Satan and the devil. Like ancient Tiamat and Leviathan, the beast of Revelation 13 has seven heads. The battle climaxes with an army dressed in white defeating the armies of the beast and Satan cast into a bottomless pit and then into a lake of fire. John is telling one of the most powerful stories known.
Revelation and Empire
But it is John’s identification of the dragon that gives to the Apocalypse a stunning political dimension. John is not simply speaking about a mythological battle between gods in primordial time; he is also talking about a conflict going on in his own time. For John, the present incarnation of the dragon is the Roman Empire. As already noted, the identification of the beast with the Roman Empire is most clearly made in chapters thirteen and seventeen.
Moreover, John pointedly reverses the Roman Empire’s version of the story of Apollo and Python. Both Caesar Augustus and Nero styled themselves as Apollo, the son of a god and himself the god of light, who had brought in a golden age of order and peace by slaying Python, the mythical power of disorder, darkness, and death.
John echoes the story of Apollo’s birth and reverses the imperial version of it in the vision found in Revelation 12.
There a woman is about to give birth to a son who will rule the nations. A great dragon waits to devour the son, but the child is delivered by being taken up to the throne of God. For John, the child is Jesus, of course. Then we are shown a scene in heaven in which Michael and his angels fight against the dragon and defeat him. Though the war occurs in heaven, the means of the dragon’s defeat is an event that happened on earth: he has been conquered “by the blood of the Lamb”—that is, by the death of Jesus. The result: the dragon is cast down to earth and gives his authority, power, and throne to the seven-headed “beast from the sea” who appears at the beginning of Revelation 13.
This is a remarkable subversion of the Roman story of Apollo’s birth. Jesus, not Caesar, is Apollo, the light of the world who brings in the true golden age of peace on earth. Caesar and the Roman Empire are not Apollo, slaying the beast; they are the incarnation of the dragon, the beast, the ancient serpent. Rome is the opposite of what it claimed to be: the empire that claimed to bring peace on earth, and whose emperors were spoken of as lord, savior, son of god, and even god, was in fact the incarnation of disorder, violence, and death.
What’s Wrong with Rome?
That the book of Revelation indicts the Roman Empire in the strongest terms is thus clear. But why? What was wrong with Rome? Why did John call it “the beast”?
An earlier generation of scholars identified the reason as Roman persecution of Christians. In particular, these scholars thought that John’s communities were facing a major outbreak of persecution ordered by the emperor Domitian around the year 95. According to this earlier view, Domitian demanded that he be acknowledged as “lord” and “god” in temples to the emperor. Refusal to do so meant possible arrest and even execution.
More recently, however, scholars have concluded that there is little historical evidence to support the claim that there was major persecution in the time of Domitian. While some scholars argue that there was no persecution and others argue that there was only minor, limited persecution, most agree that there was no massive persecution of Christians at that time.36
What John says in his letters to the seven churches is consistent with minor rather than massive persecution. He mentions only one martyr in the communities to which he writes—a person named Antipas; and though he does warn of persecutions and trials to come, it is not clear that these have begun.37 In the body of the book, he mentions martyrs several times, but these may well be martyrs from the time of Nero some thirty years earlier.
Why does the level of persecution matter? It affects our perception of why John called Rome “the beast.” If there was massive Roman persecution of Christians in John’s day, then Rome was “the beast” because of what it was doing to Christians. This was why Rome faced God’s wrath and destruction. John’s message would be, in effect, “Rome has been giving us a hard time, so God’s going to destroy her.”
Seeing the issue this way has an important corollary. It implies that if Caesar had not called himself “lord” and “god,” if he had not demanded worship in imperial shrines, if he had left Christians alone, then Caesar would have been okay and imperial Rome would have been okay. In short, this reading makes the issue narrowly religious, domesticating John’s indictment of Rome. It suggests that if Rome had allowed “religious freedom” to Christians, then Christians would have had no issue with Rome.
The persecution of Christians cannot be eliminated from the passion that drives the Apocalypse. Nevertheless, there are clear indications that it is not simply Rome-as-persecutor but Rome-as-empire that accounts for John’s indictment of Rome as the incarnation of the dragon, the ancient seven-headed monster that plunges the world into chaos.
Recent scholarship has moved in this direction. It sees the book of Revelation as a powerful indictment of the Roman Empire not simply because of its persecution of Christians, but also because that empire was the then-contemporary incarnation of the “domination system” that has marked so much of human history.38
The Indictment of Empire
Earlier in this book, the ancient domination system was described as a web of political oppression, economic exploitation, and religious legitimation.39 Elites of power and wealth controlled societies in their own interests and declared the order they imposed to be the will of God. In his indictment of the Roman Empire, John names all of these features.40
Political Oppression Rome controlled the world of the first century through a combination of seduction, intimidation, and violence. The Roman Empire personified itself as a woman in the form of the goddess Roma. So also John personifies Rome as a woman, but as “the great whore” dressed in finery, the appealing seductress “with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication.”41 She practices not only seduction but sorcery, bewitching the inhabitants of earth to follow the ways of empire.42
Rome is not only a seductive sorceress; it is also a ferocious beast ruling through intimidation and violence. The inhabitants of “the whole earth followed the beast,” for they said, “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?”43 When intimidation was not adequate, the empire used brutal violence. John knew of Rome’s reconquest of the Jewish homeland some twenty-five years earlier, the mass crucifixions, and the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. John knew also of Rome’s execution of Christian martyrs, including Peter and Paul. But the beast incarnate in the empire of John’s day is the slayer not only of Christian martyrs but also of prophets and countless others: “In you was found the blood of prophets and saints,
and of all who have been slaughtered on earth.”44 Above all, John knew of the murderous power of the empire in its killing of Jesus, “the Lamb.” In its execution of Jesus, the empire exposed itself as the beast as well as sealed its doom, for God had vindicated “the Lamb that was slain” against the power of empire.
Economic Exploitation It is striking how much of John’s picture of “Roma” personified as “the great whore” and “Babylon the Great” emphasizes the wealth of Rome. Chapter eighteen imaginatively celebrates her fall. As it does so, it describes the luxury of empire: “She glorified herself and lived luxuriously . . . clothed in fine linen, in purple and scarlet, adorned with gold, with jewels and with pearls.” Her “merchants were the magnates of the earth,” and “the kings of the earth lived in luxury with her.”45
John provides a vivid picture of cargo ships carrying the wealth of the world to Rome as the center of the domination system. His list of cargo includes luxury items, agricultural products, and human slaves:
. . . gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory, all articles of costly wood, bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, olive oil, choice flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, slaves, and human lives.46
But all of this will end: “All your dainties and your splendors are lost to you.” Those who had grown wealthy from her exploitation will mourn: “Alas, alas the great city, where all who had ships at sea grew rich by her wealth.”47
Religious Legitimation Little more needs to be said about religious legitimation. The Roman Empire’s claim that its domination reflected the will of the gods has already been emphasized. John refers to this in the second half of Revelation 13, in his portrait of “the false prophet” who leads people to worship “the beast.”48
Thus, as we have seen, Rome is indicted by John not simply for its persecution of Christians but because it incarnates the domination system. That same system, in different incarnations, was known in Egypt in the time of Moses and in Israel in the time of the predestruction prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Rome and the beast have an ancient lineage. “Babylon the Great” is not a code name simply for Rome; it designates all domination systems organized around power, wealth, seduction, intimidation, and violence. In whatever historical form it takes, ancient or modern, empire is the opposite of the kingdom of God as disclosed in Jesus.
This analysis is consistent with the content of John’s letters to the seven churches. Some (and perhaps all) of these communities had been established a generation earlier. We should imagine them as having been similar to the communities of Paul: initially remarkably egalitarian communities living by an alternative social vision. Now, a generation later, some are beginning to fall away from the power and passion of the founding vision.
John does warn some of his communities of the possibility of persecution, but that is not his focus. His messages to the individual groups commend some for their faithfulness to Jesus and reprove others for their accommodation to the culture and values of empire, calling them back to what they first heard. The communities in Smyrna and Philadelphia, to whom nothing negative is said, are commended for being rich even though poor and for being faithful to Jesus’ word even though they have little power.
The community in Ephesus is reproached for having abandoned the love its members had at first and is urged to repent “and do the works you did at first.” The communities in Pergamum and Thyatira are charged with eating food that has been sacrificed to idols, a symptom of accommodation. To those in Sardis, John says, “You have a name of being alive, but you are dead.” That community is urged to “strengthen what remains and is on the point of death” and “to remember what you received and heard.” The community at Laodicea, which has become rich and prosperous, is indicted for being “lukewarm, neither hot nor cold.” Cumulatively, John’s negative indictments portray communities that no longer differentiate themselves from the world of empire.
In this context, John’s portrait of Rome means, Do not betray the vision of Jesus and accommodate yourself to empire, for it is the beast. In his own words, as he writes about Babylon the Great, the world of empire: “Come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins, and so that you do not share in her plagues, for her sins are heaped high as heaven.”49
A Tale of Two Cities
The tale of two lordships concludes with a tale of two cities. The climax of the Apocalypse is a vision of a very different kind of city. After John’s vision of Babylon the Great and its fall, he sees “a new heaven and a new earth” and “the New Jerusalem” descending out of the sky. Babylon the Great, just described, is the city of Rome as well as the Roman Empire. The New Jerusalem is the city of God as well as the kingdom of God. Revelation is thus a tale of two cities: one city comes from the abyss, the other from God.50
John’s vision of the New Jerusalem is highly symbolic, with virtually every one of its details based on imagery from the Hebrew Bible. His symbolism echoes the story of creation and paradise even as it moves beyond and speaks of the deepest yearnings of humankind.
John sees a “new heaven [sky] and new earth.”51 It is a new creation, and in the new creation “the sea was no more.” The sea as the home of the ancient monster, from which empire after empire ascended, is gone. Then he sees the New Jerusalem descending out of the sky “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband,” and he hears a loud voice proclaiming that God now dwells with humankind:
See, the home of God is among mortals.
God will dwell with them.
They will be God’s peoples,
And God will be with them.
In the New Jerusalem, the ancient afflictions of humankind are all gone: grief, pain, and death are no more. “God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”
The size and construction of the New Jerusalem are fantastic. It is huge. It is a square, fifteen hundred miles on each side. Indeed, its height is equal to its width and length, so it is a cube, like the holy of holies in the temple in Jerusalem. But the city has no need of a temple, “for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.” The city is made of transparent gold, “pure gold, clear as glass.” So also its streets are “pure gold, transparent as glass.” It is Jerusalem the Golden.52 Its walls are pure jasper, and its foundations are adorned with every kind of jewel. Its twelve gates are twelve pearls, and they are never shut by day—and there is no night.
The significance of the New Jerusalem is universal. Not only is it huge, with open gates, but “the nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.” In this great city, next to “the river of the water of life” is “the tree of life” whose “leaves are for the healing of the nations.” It is the city of light, in which there is no more night. It is the city of God, in which God and the Lamb dwell with humankind.
But what are we to make of this vision of the New Jerusalem? The city that John contrasts to Babylon and the world of empire is clearly no actual city. One cannot imagine it ever existing, whether in this world or another. So has John left the world of history? Is he, as one might imagine, speaking of “heaven” in his highly symbolic language?
We must not too quickly assume so. For it is impossible to reconcile all of what he says with the supposition that he is speaking of heaven. Many of the details John mentions are specific to earthly life:
The new Jerusalem is “on earth,” though it is a new earth and heaven.
Kings and nations remain in John’s vision, for they come streaming to the light of the New Jerusalem.
The city’s tree of life is for the healing of the nations.
The gates of the city are open to the world.
Though John’s vision recalls the language of paradise (and is in that sense paradise restored), it is not a vision of individuals communing with God in an idyllic
garden. It is a vision of humans living together in a city. And it is the opposite of life in the other city, the world of empire.
Thus John’s vision has historical elements. We need to remember that this is the language of apocalyptic. As such, it is enigmatic, metaphorical, parabolic. John’s concluding vision is perhaps best understood as “the dream of God”—God’s dream for humankind.53 Throughout the Bible, God’s dream is a dream for this earth, and not for another world. For John, it is the only dream worth dreaming.
Concluding Reflections
The book of Revelation is not without its flaws. John’s portrait of Rome as “the great whore” and of 144,000 men “who have not defiled themselves with women” reflects a misogynistic attitude.54 His portrait of God as sending massive destruction upon the inhabitants of earth is extreme. In one scene, blood flows “as high as a horse’s bridle for a distance of about two hundred miles.”55 The God of Revelation sometimes has more to do with vengeance than justice, and the difference is crucial.56 Though John cannot be blamed for all the meanings that Christians have sometimes seen in his book, Revelation supports a picture of God as an angry tyrant who plans to destroy the earth and most of its people.
Nevertheless, in this final book of the Christian Bible, we find the same twofold focus that marks so much of the Bible as a whole: radical affirmation of the sovereignty and justice of God, and radical criticism of an oppressive domination system pretending to be the will of God. The domination system that John indicts is a subsequent incarnation of the domination system that existed in Egypt in the time of Moses and then within Israel itself in the time of the classical prophets. It is the same domination system that Jesus and Paul and the early Christian movement challenged.
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