Season 2 · Episode 26
Full episode description
Part 2 of Revelation follows the strangest reception history of any New Testament book. Written against the empire of Rome, the Book of Revelation eventually became the last book of the Bible in the church that Rome legalised. The journey from anti-imperial apocalypse to canonical scripture took three centuries, and at every stage someone tried to leave the book out.
This episode walks:
- the authorship fight, opened by Justin Martyr in the second century, who attributed the book to the apostle John, and reopened by Dionysius of Alexandria in the third century, who carefully showed the Greek of Revelation could not be by the same hand as the Greek of the Gospel of John
- the bishops who left Revelation off their canon lists for three centuries, including most of the eastern church well into the fifth century
- the decoding tradition, where the number of the Beast, 666, became a numerology puzzle that has been solved and re-solved as every successive enemy of Christianity
- Irenaeus of Lyon, who in the late second century invented the Antichrist by reading two verses of the First Letter of John together with Revelation, a figure neither text alone describes
- Augustine of Hippo, who in the City of God resolved the troublesome thousand-year reign by allegorising it into the church itself, defusing the radical promise of Revelation 20
- Athanasius, who in the Easter letter of 367 CE included Revelation in his canon list and redirected its symbolic firepower from empire to heresy
- Constantine, who put the dragon on his coins and claimed the eschatological victory for the empire itself
The book that survived was not the book that was written. The Apocalypse against Rome became the imperial Apocalypse.
Not from tradition. From evidence.