Revelations on Bible’s dark book

IF, as critic Northrop Frye said two decades ago, the Bible beats at the heart of our Western creative imagination, then the good book’s closing pages could be described as the vein throbbing in our forehead.

The Book of Revelation, a lurid 12,000-word finale to the New Testament filled with riddle-strewn allegory and end-of-time massacre, transforms the gentle Nazarene of the Gospels into an unrecognizable warrior-king. Who wrote the text? From what fevered tradition did it spring? How did it become part of the biblical canon? What in the world is it supposed to mean and why does it still fascinate and inspire?

All these mysteries are wrapped in enigmas and, in some instances, soaked in blood.

To answer some of these questions comes Jonathan Kirsch, the erudite author of numerous books on spiritual and religious history. As a cultural observer, he tries to explain why so many Americans fully expect that, any day now, the cosmic fat lady will sing.

In “A History of the End of the World,” Kirsch picks through the thicket of speculation surrounding Revelation and examines, in a wry and expert manner, the book’s uses and abuses throughout history, from antiquity and the Middle Ages all the way to the Branch Davidians of Texas and the currently popular “Left Behind” potboilers.

So who cooked up this tale of a beast taking over the world and a repellent whore fornicating with all and sundry, of 144,000 male virgins escaping unscathed and, crucially, of Jesus winning victory at Armageddon and establishing a thousand-year era of perfection that ends in cataclysm, the resurrection of the dead and the dispatching of all humankind to either bliss or torment? The author gives his name as John and claims, like no other in the New Testament, that he is a mere conduit for divine dictation and that his book is in God’s own voice.

Kirsch, like many biblical scholars, sees this John as an otherwise unidentifiable Jewish mystic of the first or second century, whose midlife exile from Judea to Hellenized Asia Minor accounts for the execrable Greek of his prose. Very early Christianity was just another facet of the kaleidoscopic world of Judaism that, in some variants, embraced apocalyptic and messianic revenge fantasies in response to imperial oppression. A Jewish believer in Jesus, this John draws deeply from a well of earlier end-of-the-world imaginings and from the Hebrew Bible: In Revelation, Jesus merits a mere dozen or so explicit mentions, while outright references to Jewish tradition surpass 500. Thus Revelation is, as Kirsch puts it, “hard-wired” to apocalyptic Judaism.

John took that tradition and turned up the volume, producing a truly terrifying work that makes searing reading even today. A man of vitriolic temperament, he seethed against any sort of compromise in spiritual matters and any pragmatic accommodation with the ruler in Rome (called “The Great Whore of Babylon”).

All of the Abrahamic religions contain apocalyptic prophecies -- one of Islam’s has Jesus as a co-general in the final battle against evil -- but Christianity’s has the signal distinction of a formidable authorial footprint. Kirsch muses on what that has meant: “John is plainly obsessed with purity in all things, including ... such thoroughly human concerns as sex, food and money. And his obsessive personality may help us understand why the book of Revelation has always exerted such a powerful influence on readers with similar traits, ranging from religious zealots to the clinically insane.”

Yet not only the mad and the violently pious have been affected by the book. Kirsch reminds us that John bequeathed a series of images -- Armageddon, the Four Horsemen, the Great Whore, the Seventh Seal -- that have been rendered by artists from Dante and Durer to Blake and Bergman. The political demonology of the book, which encodes a horrible enemy as 666, has given rise to what Kirsch cheekily calls “Pin the tail on the Antichrist,” as successive generations of people angry at their times discern in their adversaries the mark of the Beast: popes, kings, emperors, Muhammad, Saladin, Napoleon, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Stalin and on and on -- the list of devils unsuccessfully ushering in the end of time is lengthy.

A masterful tour of a lush jungle of delusion, Kirsch’s history also demonstrates that whenever a culture war besets a society, as in today’s America, John’s apocalypse comes galloping back into view.

The ultimate take-no-prisoners narrative, Revelation houses a battery of rhetorical weapons and tolerates no squeamish nuance. This ugly duckling of the New Testament, which such Christian elders as Augustine and Jerome warned against taking literally, continues to exert a pull on those who feel, rightly or wrongly, oppressed or outraged. Since some form of persecution, and certainly the persecution complex, will remain a constant in human affairs, the Book of Revelation, just like the world it keeps trying to destroy, simply refuses to go away.

For those beleaguered by the constant sniping over morals in present-day America, Kirsch’s splendid examination of this dark corner of religious resentment holds out a new perspective and, mercifully, some solace.

Stephen O’Shea is the author of “Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World” and “The Perfect Heresy: The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars.”