Reading the letters and Revelation

I am able to do all things through the one who strengthens me. (Philippians 4:13, NET)⁵

You've seen this verse on a wristband, a gym wall, a graduation card. Read on its own, it sounds like a promise that whatever you set out to do, God will see you through. Athletes quote it before a match. Students quote it before an exam.

Before you read another verse of a New Testament letter, build one habit: ask what the sentence just before it says.

That's the whole lesson in one verse. Letters mean what they mean inside their paragraphs and inside the situation that produced them. Take the sentence out and it'll still sound like English, and it will say something Paul never said.

Revelation, at the other end of the New Testament, has the opposite problem. Nobody pulls a verse out of Revelation and puts it on a card. People do something else: they treat a book of pictures as a code and try to match it to the news. This lesson is about both mistakes, and they turn out to be the same mistake wearing two costumes.

A letter is half a conversation

Twenty-one of the twenty-seven New Testament books are letters. Gordon Fee, who wrote the chapters on the epistles in the textbook this course is built on, says the one thing every one of them has in common is that they're "occasional documents", written out of a specific occasion to a specific set of readers.¹ Something had happened in Corinth or Galatia or Colossae. Someone had written to Paul, or news had reached him, and he wrote back.

So we're reading one side of an exchange. Fee compares it to hearing one end of a telephone conversation and trying to work out who's on the other end and what they're saying.¹ We have the answers. We often don't know the questions.

This sounds like a problem for scholars. It isn't. It's a problem for anyone who opens a letter, because the meaning of a reply sits in the gap between what the writer says and what the readers already knew. If you skip the reconstruction you don't read the letter more simply; you read a different letter, one you've written yourself out of the fragments.

Two habits follow, and both come from Fee.

Think paragraphs. Fee's own emphasis: the necessary key to understanding a letter's argument is to learn to "THINK PARAGRAPHS", asking of each one what it says and why the writer says it at this point.¹ Verses are a sixteenth-century filing system (lesson 1). Paragraphs are the writer's units of thought. Philippians 4:13 isn't a unit; 4:10 to 13 is.

Apply the basic rule. You already have this one, and it's about to do the hardest work it does anywhere in the course.

One thing to say plainly before we go further, because it will come up. This lesson writes "Paul" for all thirteen letters that carry his name. Most critical scholars hold that the Pastorals, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, were written in his name by a later hand; most evangelical scholars hold that they're his, and this course holds that too. Nothing in the method below turns on which is right, because the test asks what a letter asked of its own readers either way.

1 Corinthians 13, read at a wedding and read in Corinth

1 Corinthians 13 is read at weddings. "Love is patient, love is kind, it is not envious. Love does not brag, it is not puffed up." (13:4, NET)⁵ It's a beautiful thing to read at a wedding, and nothing in this lesson says stop.

But look at the paragraph on either side.

Notice what didn't happen. The chapter didn't stop being about love, and it didn't stop being true. What changed is that we now know what Paul was doing with it, and that gives us the right to use it elsewhere. A wedding is a place where two people are about to find out whether love is patient. The application is legitimate because the principle is the same. But we got there by reading the paragraph first, rather than by reading the wedding first.

When their situation is not ours

So far the rule has been: find out what it meant to them. The next question is the one people actually fight about, which is what it asks of us.

Fee gives a second rule. "Whenever we share comparable particulars (i.e., similar specific life situations) with the first-century hearers, God's word to us is the same as his word to them."² "All have sinned" (Romans 3:23, NET) is still true. "Clothe yourselves with a heart of mercy" (Colossians 3:12, NET)⁵ is still an instruction. Nothing about the gap between the first century and now changes those, because our particulars match theirs.

The hard cases are where the particulars don't match. Fee sorts them into two kinds.² Some first-century situations have no real counterpart for most modern readers, such as whether to eat at a feast in a pagan temple (1 Corinthians 8 to 10). Others could recur but are unlikely. For both he suggests two steps. First, do the exegesis carefully enough to find the principle the instruction expresses. Second, and this is the part people skip, apply that principle only to genuinely comparable situations, rather than to anything you like.² The stumbling-block principle of 1 Corinthians 8 is his example: it's about inducing another believer to act against their conscience, not about anyone who happens to be offended, and it's regularly abused by long-standing Christians against younger ones.²

Duvall and Hays, in the other standard textbook, picture the same procedure as crossing a river.⁴ Measure how wide the river is between their town and ours in time, culture, and covenant; cross it on a bridge made of the principle; check the principle against the rest of the Bible; and only then land in our town. Their five steps and Fee's two are the same journey described at different resolutions, and here is the working version this lesson will use twice:

1. Name the particular. What exactly is being asked, of whom, in what situation?
2. List the writer's own reasons. Not your reasons for keeping or dropping it. His, in the text.
3. Sort principle from application. Which of his reasons would still hold if the situation changed, and which wouldn't?
4. Ask whether your particulars match. If they don't, apply the principle to a genuinely comparable case, and say which case.

Step 3 is where the work is, and step 4 is where the arguments are.

Now the honest part. Fee says out loud what most readers know and don't say: nearly all Christians already do this. Evangelicals leave "a little wine for thy stomach's sake" (that's Fee's phrase, quoting the King James) in the first century, don't insist on head coverings, and don't exchange the holy kiss. Many of the same readers, he observes, "wince" when a woman's teaching in church is defended on the same grounds, and grow indignant when same-sex partnerships are.² His point isn't that all these cases are alike. It's that you can't pretend to be doing no sorting. Every reader sorts. The question is whether you sort with a method you could defend, or by instinct dressed up as literalism.

Fee offers guidelines for the sorting, worked out with his colleague David Scholer, and he's careful to say they're his current thinking rather than settled doctrine.² Read them knowing where he stood: Fee was an egalitarian, a longtime board member of Christians for Biblical Equality and a contributing editor of Discovering Biblical Equality, and he never pretended otherwise.¹⁹ These are a method offered by someone with a position in the argument the method is about to be used on. Check them against the readers who disagree with him below. There are four that do most of the work:

1. Distinguish the central core of the gospel (human fallenness, redemption through Christ's death and resurrection, his return) from what's peripheral to it. The holy kiss and head coverings, he says, "would seem to be less so".²
2. Distinguish what the New Testament treats as inherently moral from what isn't. Its sin lists, he notes, never contain cultural items.²
3. Note where the New Testament speaks with one voice and where it doesn't. He lists women's ministries as a place where the witness isn't uniform, citing Phoebe, called diakonos of the church at Cenchrea in Romans 16:1, which the NET renders "servant" and other translations "deacon"; Andronicus and Junia in Romans 16:7, whom the NET reads as "well known to the apostles" and others as outstanding among the apostles; and 1 Corinthians 11:5 alongside 1 Timothy 2:12.² Every one of those readings is argued, which sharpens his point rather than blunting it: the witness isn't uniform, and it isn't uniform even about what the witnesses say.
4. Distinguish, within a passage, the principle from its specific application. A writer can support a relative application with an absolute principle without making the application absolute.²

That fourth guideline is where the next section lives.

Head coverings, where three readings part company

1 Corinthians 11:2-16 tells the women of Corinth to cover their heads when they pray or prophesy, and the men not to. Most Western churches don't require it, and most of the world's Christians outside the West still practise something like it, which is worth noticing before you decide what the passage asks.

Walk the four steps.

1. Name the particular. A head covering, or on another reading a hairstyle, for a woman praying or prophesying in the assembly. Note in passing that the passage assumes women do pray and prophesy aloud; Fee points out that many who argue from this chapter for male headship deny the thing it takes for granted.¹ Complementarians answer that praying and prophesying isn't the authoritative teaching or governing that 1 Timothy 2:12 restricts, and that 1 Corinthians 14:34 to 35, three chapters later in the same letter, is where Paul draws that line.

2. List the writer's own reasons. This one is yours.

3. Sort principle from application. Fee's reading is that Paul appeals to the order of creation and redemption (verse 3) to establish a principle, that nothing should distract from the glory of God when the community is at worship, while the specific application looks relative, since Paul keeps appealing to "practice" and "nature".² On that reading, a woman who literally obeyed the text in most American churches "would thereby almost certainly abuse the spirit of the text by drawing attention to herself".² The principle survives; the covering was its first-century form.

4. Do our particulars match? Here Christians divide. Three broad positions, each in its own terms:

Some Christians keep the covering. This is the practice of conservative Anabaptist churches, of the Plymouth Brethren, of most Orthodox and traditional Catholic women, and of a great part of the church in Africa, India, the Middle East, and Latin America; in the English-speaking West there's a small self-conscious revival that calls itself the head covering movement. Their reasoning: Paul grounds the practice in creation and in headship rather than in Corinthian custom; the creation order didn't change in AD 100; and "we have no other practice" means the covering was the practice of every church rather than one local rule. On this reading the particular and the principle are the same thing, and dropping the covering is dropping Paul.

Many Christians who hold to male headship in church and home, who call themselves complementarians, drop the covering but keep the headship. Their reasoning: verse 3 is the principle and verses 4 to 16 apply it in a culture where a covering signalled a married woman's honour; the sign was cultural, the order it signalled was not; the standard lexical studies on their side, Wayne Grudem's survey of kephalē in Greek literature among them, find "authority over" the ordinary sense in Paul's Greek, so verse 3 is an order of authority rather than a genealogy; and the same Paul who wrote this chapter wrote 1 Timothy 2:12, so the principle has other applications that remain.

Many Christians who hold that men and women serve without role distinction, who call themselves egalitarians, read the whole passage as cultural. Their reasoning: the passage assumes women praying and prophesying in public, which is the point being protected; kephalē in Greek often means "source" rather than "authority over", which changes verse 3; verses 11 and 12 immediately balance the creation argument, and the balance goes further than the argument does ("For just as woman came from man, so man comes through woman. But all things come from God.", 11:12, NET)⁵; and the closing appeal to custom shows what kind of argument the whole thing was.

All three groups accept the comparable-particulars test. They land differently because they disagree about what the principle is and which verses carry it. That isn't a failure of the method. The method's job is to make the disagreement visible and honest: each side has to say which particulars it's keeping and why. What the method rules out is pretending the text has no particulars at all, in either direction. "Everything Paul told the Corinthians is for us as written" has to explain the covering. "Everything cultural can be dismissed" has to explain why "all have sinned" survives and the covering doesn't.

We hold, with Fee, that the principle of verse 3 is Paul's and that the covering was its first-century application, and we say that a Christian who keeps the covering, or who reads the headship as cultural too, is reading the same passage seriously and deserves the same hearing. This course doesn't take a side between complementarians and egalitarians about what verse 3's headship then asks of a church. That question isn't settled by the test we've just run, and it isn't this course's to settle.

Apocalyptic works the other way round

Turn to the last book. A letter hides half its meaning in the situation, so the reader's job is to reconstruct what isn't on the page. Revelation does the opposite. It puts everything on the page, in pictures, and the reader's job is to see the pictures rather than to translate them into something else.

Fee describes Revelation as "a unique, finely blended combination of three distinct literary types: apocalypse, prophecy, and letter".³ Each of those words tells you something about how to read it.

It's a letter. It opens "From John, to the seven churches that are in the province of Asia: Grace and peace to you" (1:4, NET)⁵ and closes with a letter's blessing. So everything you've just learned applies: it was occasioned by real churches in real cities with real trouble, and it meant something to them first.³

It's prophecy. John calls it "this prophecy" and expects it read aloud in church: "Blessed is the one who reads the words of this prophecy aloud, and blessed are those who hear and obey the things written in it, because the time is near!" (1:3, NET)⁵ Prophecy in the Bible's sense (lesson 4) is God's word spoken into a present situation, with judgment and salvation as its usual content. Revelation is that: a word from God, Fee says, "to some churches in the latter part of the first century who are undergoing persecution from without and some decay from within".³

It's an apocalypse. That's the genre we have no modern equivalent for, and it isn't a genre of one. 1 Enoch, from the third to the first century BC, opens the tradition with the Book of the Watchers. 4 Ezra, which is chapters 3 to 14 of what English Bibles call 2 Esdras, and 2 Baruch, both written after AD 70, wrestle with the same fall of Jerusalem that Revelation's readers had lived through, and 4 Ezra is in the appendix of many Catholic Bibles as 2 Esdras. And the reader's own Bible already contains one: Daniel 7 to 12 is apocalyptic, which is why Daniel supplies more of Revelation's furniture than any other book.

Fee lists the conventions the genre shares: it grows out of Old Testament prophecy, especially Ezekiel, Daniel, and Zechariah; it's born in persecution; it's written literature from the start rather than collected speeches; it works in visions and symbols; its images are fantasy rather than realism, a beast with seven heads, a woman clothed with the sun; and it's stylised, with a fondness for numbered sets and for numbers as symbols.³ Revelation fits every one of those but one: it isn't pseudonymous. John signs it and sends it to people he knows.³

That runs the letter's problem backwards. A letter's meaning sits partly off the page, so a reader who refuses to reconstruct gets less than the writer meant. An apocalypse's meaning sits in the picture first, so a reader who decodes the picture into events has changed the genre.

Fee's rule for the visions is that they work like parables: see each one as a whole, because "the whole vision is trying to say something", and treat the details as either dramatic effect or as filling in the picture so the first readers couldn't mistake what was meant.³ The sun turning black and the stars falling like figs in chapter 6 probably don't "mean" anything individually; they make the earthquake more terrible.³ The two hundred million cavalry from the Euphrates in chapter 9, on the other hand, are detailed so that a Roman-era reader would think of the empire's eastern frontier and the Parthians beyond it.³

Three conventions follow.

Numbers are symbols. Seven churches, seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls; twelve tribes and twelve apostles multiplied into 144,000; forty-two months; a thousand years. Fee places the "great fondness for the symbolic use of numbers" among the standard features of the genre.³ Most commentators therefore read 144,000 as twelve times twelve times a thousand rather than as a headcount, on the ground that every other number in the book is symbolic. Futurists who read the book's numbers literally take it as a count of Israelites, twelve thousand from each tribe, and they're being consistent with their own rule rather than careless with ours.

The images come from the Old Testament. John cites or echoes the Old Testament, on Fee's count, "over 250 times", so that "every significant moment in his narrative is imaged almost exclusively in Old Testament language".³ The first readers knew their Scriptures and heard the echoes at once; we have to look them up. This is the most useful single habit you can build with Revelation: keep Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Exodus open beside it.

John interprets some of his own images, and those are the anchors. Fee lists six: the one like a son of man is Christ; the lampstands are the churches; the seven stars are the churches' angels or messengers; the dragon is Satan; the seven heads are seven mountains, and also seven kings; and the prostitute is "the great city that has sovereignty over the kings of the earth" (17:18, NET)⁵, which Fee and most commentators take to be Rome.³ Start from the images the author has decoded before you decode any others.

One more thing before the two examples that follow, and it is the strongest objection to the way this lesson has been using the basic rule, because it comes from inside the Bible. Daniel 12:4 tells Daniel to "close up these words and seal the book until the time of the end", and at 12:8 Daniel says "I heard, but I did not understand" and is told the matters are "closed and sealed until the time of the end" (NET). 1 Peter 1:10-12 says the prophets "searched and investigated carefully", probing what person or time the Spirit was indicating, and "were shown that they were serving not themselves but you" (NET).

So apocalyptic may be the one genre Scripture itself says wasn't fully intelligible to its first hearers, and that's what futurists and historicists press here. We still hold the basic rule, because John tells his readers the time is near and expects them to calculate a number, which only makes sense if he meant them to follow him. But the objection is a real one, and it isn't answered by repeating the rule.

666, and the copy that says 616

This calls for wisdom: Let the one who has insight calculate the beast's number, for it is man's number, and his number is 666. (Revelation 13:18, NET)⁵

Read badly, this is an invitation to identify a modern figure. Every generation has done it, with popes, emperors, presidents, and prime ministers, and every generation's candidate has died without the world ending.

Read well, it's an invitation to the first readers to do some arithmetic they were equipped for. Greek and Hebrew both used letters as numerals, so any name had a numerical value; the practice is called gematria. The verse says "calculate", and it says the number is "man's number". John expected his readers to be able to do it, so here is the calculation, and you should run it rather than read it.

Write the Greek form of the emperor's name, Neron Kaisar, in Hebrew letters:

Add them. Now drop the final nun, worth 50, which is what happens when you spell the name from its Latin form, Nero Kaisar, rather than its Greek one, and add again.⁷

Look at the fragment. That's what a verse looks like in the third century: three letters with a bar over them, no verse number, no chapter break, no footnote.

The New Testament textual scholar P. J. Williams, surveying the evidence in the Tyndale Bulletin in 2007, says the Nero identification has been popular since the nineteenth century and that the 616 variant has been taken to support it.⁷ Tacitus, writing about fifty years after the event, reports that following the fire of Rome in AD 64 Nero "fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace".¹⁷ Most historians accept that report; a minority, following Brent Shaw's 2015 article in the Journal of Roman Studies, argue the persecution is a later construction.²⁰ A Roman emperor who demanded honour and killed Christians is what chapter 13 describes.

Now sort what has just been said. History establishes that the early copies read 666 and 616, that both numbers can be produced from Nero's name, and that Irenaeus, writing about 180, knew the 616 variant and rejected it, saying 666 was "found in all the most approved and ancient copies".⁶ Scholars argue about whether Nero is the intended referent. Williams himself urges caution: the Hebrew spelling of the Greek word for "beast" also comes to 666, and its shorter form to 616, so the 616 reading "should not therefore be taken as giving exclusive support to the interpretation Nero Caesar".⁷ Nero is the reading most scholars favour; it isn't the only one, and this lesson gives it as argued rather than settled.

And Irenaeus, who was closer to John than we are by eighteen centuries, refused to name anyone. He tried three Greek names that add to 666, thought one of them, Teitan, the likeliest, and then declined: it's "more certain, and less hazardous, to await the fulfilment of the prophecy, than to be making surmises".⁶ That's the earliest Christian commentator on the verse telling you not to do what the modern identifications do. Note what his reason was, because it cuts against a use this lesson could be tempted to make of him: he held the antichrist to be still future, so his refusal is a futurist's caution rather than a preterist's.

The woman, the child, and the dragon

Chapter 12 is, in Fee's words, "the theological key to the book".³ It's also the clearest case of a vision that reads as a timeline if you don't know the Old Testament and as a picture if you do.

"Then a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and with the moon under her feet, and on her head was a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was screaming in labor pains, struggling to give birth." (12:1-2, NET)⁵ A dragon waits to devour the child. The child is born, "a son, a male child, who is going to rule over all the nations with an iron rod", and is "suddenly caught up to God and to his throne" (12:5, NET).⁵ The dragon is thrown down; John decodes him for us as "the ancient serpent, the one called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world" (12:9, NET).⁵ The woman flees into the wilderness, carried on eagle's wings, and is kept there for a time.

Read as a timeline, this is baffling. Who is the woman, when is the birth, why does the child go straight from birth to throne with nothing in between?

Read as a picture, every piece has an address. The serpent is Genesis 3, and the enmity between the serpent and the woman's offspring is Genesis 3:15. The child who rules the nations with an iron rod is Psalm 2:9. The woman with twelve stars is Israel, Joseph's dream of sun, moon, and stars in Genesis 37:9. Eagle's wings and a wilderness where God feeds his people are the exodus: "I lifted you on eagles' wings", Exodus 19:4 (NET), and forty years of manna. Birth pains are the prophets' image for Israel's labour to bring forth salvation (Isaiah 26:17 and 66:7). The child's leap from birth to throne isn't a gap in the story; it's a picture of the whole career of Jesus compressed to its two ends, born and enthroned, with the cross implied in the dragon's failure.

So what is the picture doing? Fee's answer: it tells of Satan's attempt to destroy Christ and of his own defeat instead, so that within the New Testament's already and not yet, Satan is a defeated foe whose end hasn't come, which is why there's rejoicing in heaven and woe on earth at once.³ The church in Asia Minor, watching Rome sharpen its knives, is being told who's actually losing.

The four schools, in their own terms

So far the rules have been the ones nearly every serious commentator accepts. Now the part where they part company. Fee counts "at least five major schools of interpretation, not to mention significant variations within each",³ and the four names every introduction uses are preterist, historicist, futurist, and idealist. They differ over one question: when do the events pictured in Revelation 4 to 19 happen?

Where each school puts the events of Revelation 4 to 19. The line is schematic and not to scale: the stretch from John's day to today holds nineteen centuries and the stretch to the right of "today" holds an unknown span, so read the positions and not the widths. The historicist bar is drawn in separate blocks because that school reads the events as eras following one another; the idealist bar is unbroken because that school reads them as one pattern present in every age. Every row carries its own name, so nothing here depends on telling the colours apart.

Look at where the bars sit. The four aren't four levels of seriousness. They're four answers to one question, and each has scholars behind it.

Preterist. From the Latin for "past". The preterist says that Revelation, like every other New Testament letter, was written to its own generation about "what must happen very soon" (1:1, NET)⁵, and that "very soon" meant soon. The beast was Rome; the harlot city was either Jerusalem, judged in AD 70, or Rome; most of chapters 4 to 19 was fulfilled in the first century. What the book says to later readers, it says the way Amos does, by what it said to its own.

Its best-known current defender is Kenneth Gentry, who wrote the preterist chapter in Zondervan's Four Views on the Book of Revelation (1998)⁸ and whose 1989 book Before Jerusalem Fell argues that Revelation was written before 70, under Nero, which the reading needs.¹² Preterists are quick to say what their view is not. Gentry calls his own position "orthodox preterism" and has written a book against what he calls "hyper-preterism", the view that Christ's return, the resurrection, and the final judgment all happened in AD 70; his preterism keeps all three in the future.¹⁸ And it doesn't mean the book has nothing to say now. It means the book says it the way the rest of the Bible does, by speaking first to its first readers.

Historicist. The historicist reads Revelation 4 to 19 as a continuous prophecy of the whole course of church history from John's day to the end, so that the seals, trumpets, and bowls are successive eras and the beast and harlot are institutions that rose and fell along the way.

Its method is the year-day principle: a day in apocalyptic prophecy stands for a year, on the pattern of Numbers 14:34 and Ezekiel 4:6, so the 1,260 days and forty-two months of Revelation 11 to 13 map onto twelve and a half centuries of real history. That rule is what turns the seals, trumpets, and bowls into a datable sequence, and it's why historicists say theirs is the only reading that takes the book's own numbers as measurements of anything.

This was the reading Luther sketched in his revised 1530 preface to Revelation, and the reading of most Protestant interpreters for three centuries after the Reformation, who identified the papacy as the antichrist of the book. (Calvin, who never commented on Revelation, reached the same identification from Daniel and 2 Thessalonians rather than from this book.) Its fullest statement in English is Edward Bishop Elliott's four-volume Horae Apocalypticae (1844).¹³

It's the standing reading of the Seventh-day Adventist tradition, whose scholars still work it out in print, and it's otherwise now rare among commentators; the Four Views volume gave its fourth chair to a second futurist position rather than to a historicist.⁸ In its own terms, its strength is that it takes the book's claim to be prophecy of what follows John's day with full seriousness and refuses to leave eighteen centuries of the church's suffering outside the picture. The objection its holders answer most often is that each generation's map has had to be redrawn as history went on.

Futurist. The futurist reads chapters 4 to 19 as describing a period still ahead of us, immediately before Christ returns: a tribulation, an antichrist, the final battle. This is the reading behind most popular prophecy writing, and it's also worked out in detail by scholars, and it comes in kinds.

Classical dispensationalists, represented in Four Views by Robert Thomas, read the book in sequence and as literally as the language allows, keep Israel and the church distinct, and place the church's removal, the pretribulation rapture, before the tribulation.⁸ Progressive dispensationalists, represented by C. Marvin Pate, hold that the kingdom has already begun in Christ and will be completed in a future tribulation and return.⁸ Historic premillennialists, whose great modern representative was George Eldon Ladd, blend preterist and futurist readings: the book spoke of Rome to its first readers and also foretells the return of Jesus, and Ladd's 1972 commentary is the fullest statement of that position.¹¹ What all futurists share, in their own terms, is that the book's central promise is a real future event, and that reading it only as first-century politics or as timeless pattern drains the promise.

Idealist. The idealist, sometimes called the spiritual or timeless reading, takes Revelation as a symbolic presentation of the conflict between God and evil that recurs in every age, so that the beast is every state that demands worship, Babylon is every economy built on exploitation, and the book's comfort is available to every persecuted church without needing a date. Sam Hamstra wrote the idealist chapter in Four Views.⁸

This is also the oldest of the four, and the lesson would mislead you if it left the impression that nobody read Revelation between Irenaeus and 1844. Tyconius in the 380s, and Augustine after him in City of God 20, read the thousand years as the present age of the church and the visions as the shape of every age; that became the standard Western reading for a thousand years, and Andrew of Caesarea's commentary of about 600 is still the Orthodox Church's standard guide to the book.²¹

Reading a vision for its spiritual sense rather than its calendar isn't a modern compromise. It's the fathers' method, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches it today as one of the four senses of Scripture, at paragraphs 115 to 118, with the literal sense as the foundation the others rest on.²² So when Fee says not to press every detail allegorically, he's stating a rule inside the grammatical-historical method that this course uses; he isn't stating a rule the whole church has ever kept.

Mixed readings. Two of the most widely cited recent commentaries are both mixtures. G. K. Beale (1999) describes his approach as "eclecticism, or a redemptive-historical form of modified idealism", modified because Christ's actual return and the last judgment are in the book.⁹ Grant Osborne (2002) is also eclectic, with the preterist, idealist, and futurist readings allowed to interact and the futurist element given the leading place.¹⁰ Ladd mixed preterist and futurist. What these readings share is the recognition that the book spoke to Rome and its churches, pictures a pattern that recurs, and promises a real end, and that the genre's own conventions, near and far horizons painted in one picture, are why all three are there at once.

We prefer a mixed reading in the family Beale and Osborne are usually placed in, because each of Revelation's three genres does work the others leave undone: as a letter it spoke to its first readers, as prophecy it speaks to every age, and as apocalypse its pictures reach to the end. We say that once. A Christian who reads as a preterist, a historicist, a futurist, or an idealist is reading the same book with the same seriousness, and the disagreement is contested within the faith rather than a mark of who's faithful. We hold by faith that Christ will return and judge, which is the one thing all four schools agree the book promises. That isn't something history establishes or scholars settle, and every reading in this section is a Christian's attempt to say when and how the pictures land.

One more place the divergence shows, closing a loop from lesson 4. Ezekiel 40 to 48 describes a restored temple in detail. A dispensational reader, keeping Israel's promises for Israel, expects a literal temple in a future kingdom, and reads Revelation's thousand years (20:1-6) as that kingdom. A covenant reader takes the temple as fulfilled in Christ and his people, and reads the thousand years as either the present age or a picture, which is the position called amillennialism. The same framework that sorted the law in lesson 4 sorts the end here. What both accounts grant, in Beale's formulation, is that the Old Testament writers didn't exhaustively grasp what they wrote.⁹ That's why the argument is about how much more the text carries rather than about whether it carries more, and it's why neither reader is ignoring the text; they're reading it through different accounts of how the Old Testament's promises reach us.

When was it written?

Irenaeus wrote that the vision was seen "no very long time since, but almost in our day, towards the end of Domitian's reign".⁶ Domitian died in 96, so the traditional date is about 95, which most commentators still take. The late case rests on more than Irenaeus: Laodicea is described as rich in Revelation 3, which fits better after the city rebuilt from the earthquake of about 60; the seven churches look like established congregations with time to decay; and the emperor cult in Asia was well developed by the 90s.

The early case is Gentry's. Revelation 11 speaks of a temple still standing to be measured, and Revelation 17:10 says five kings have fallen and one is, which counts to a living emperor before 70 on most ways of counting. Gentry also argues that Irenaeus's Greek at 5.30.3 is ambiguous about whether "was seen" refers to the vision or to John himself, so the sentence may say John lived until Domitian's reign rather than that he saw the vision then.¹²

History establishes what Irenaeus said; scholars argue over whether he was right and how much weight his testimony carries. The lesson doesn't need to settle it. Whichever date you take, the first readers were churches in the Roman province of Asia under pressure from the state.

What people get wrong

"A verse means what it says on its own." Philippians 4:13 is the lesson's opening for this reason. A verse is a numbered slice of a paragraph, and a paragraph is a move in an argument. The unit of meaning in a letter is the paragraph.

"The letters are a doctrine manual, so a phrase means the average of its uses." They're occasional documents, each answering its own situation, so a phrase means what it meant in the paragraph you found it in. Paul's usage elsewhere is real evidence and worth gathering, but it's the second step, not the first, and averaging it flattens the very thing that makes a letter a letter.

"Everything Paul told the Corinthians is for us as written." Then the holy kiss, the covering, and the wine for Timothy's stomach are for us as written, and almost nobody who says this does them. The honest version is: everything Paul wrote is God's word to us, and the comparable-particulars test is how we find out what it asks.

"Everything cultural can be dismissed." Its mirror. The test doesn't dismiss; it distinguishes principle from application, and the principle stays. Fee's second guideline stands in the way of anyone who wants to move the sin lists into the "cultural" column: the New Testament's sin lists never contain cultural items.² Readers who argue the other way about same-sex partnerships say those lists address forms of the practice a first-century writer knew, which is a comparable-particulars argument in its own right; the case on both sides is worked out in Hard Questions, and this lesson doesn't settle it.

"Revelation is a coded timeline of the modern world." Fee's fifth exegetical point is that apocalypses "seldom intend to give a detailed chronological account of the future", and his hermeneutical warning is that the book "was not intended to prophesy the existence of Communist China, for example, or to give us literal details of the conclusion of history".³ The first readers had to be able to understand it, and they'd never heard of any modern state.

"666 identifies a living public figure." Every generation has produced a candidate and every candidate has died. The strongest answer isn't a modern one: it's Irenaeus, writing about 180, who knew three names that fit, preferred one, and still refused, because it's "more certain, and less hazardous, to await the fulfilment of the prophecy, than to be making surmises".⁶ If the earliest commentator on the verse wouldn't name anyone, a pamphlet eighteen centuries later should explain what it knows that he didn't.

"Revelation was written about events already past, so it has nothing to say." This isn't what preterists say, and it isn't what the lesson says either. The preterist reads Revelation the way lesson 4 taught you to read Amos: a word to its own generation that speaks to ours because the God who judged Rome hasn't changed. Even a strict preterist keeps the return of Christ, and Fee, who isn't one, says the book's central word, that discipleship goes the way of the cross and God is in control, "needs to be heard again and again in the church" in every age.³

"Apocalyptic is prophecy, so lesson 4's rules apply unchanged." They overlap and they differ. Both speak God's word into a present crisis with judgment and salvation as the content; both have a near and a far horizon. But prophets spoke and their oracles were collected, while apocalypses were written as books with a structure, so Revelation reads more like an epistle than like Amos: each vision is a building block, and you have to "think paragraphs" here too.³ And the images differ in kind: the prophets mostly used real things, salt and vultures and half-baked bread, while apocalyptic uses fantasy, beasts with seven heads.³ Same God, same purpose, different contract with the reader.

"The four schools are four levels of seriousness." Almost every reader arrives holding one of them, usually inherited, and assumes it's the plain reading and the others are interpretation. All four are interpretation. Each was worked out by people who took the book seriously, each answers a question the others answer less well, and the disagreement between them is a disagreement about a hard book rather than a test of anybody's faith.

Now do it yourself, on Philemon, Revelation 4 and 5, and six passages you have to sort

Connections

This lesson is where the basic rule from lesson 3 reaches full strength. In narrative it kept us from making the characters into models; in the letters it keeps us from making the sentences into slogans; in Revelation it keeps us from making the pictures into a calendar. It's the same rule each time.

Köstenberger and Patterson call the three questions this course has been asking the hermeneutical triad: history, literature, theology. The five genre lessons have been running it in that order, and this lesson ran all three in one sitting: reconstruct the occasion, read the conventions, ask what the book is for.²³

The prophets and Daniel of lesson 4 are the raw material of Revelation. If you did the checkpoint on Revelation 1, you've already seen that John builds with their bricks. Lesson 6's parables are the nearest thing in the Gospels to an apocalyptic vision: both work by recognition.

Lesson 12 will come back to Philemon as the book it reads end to end with the course's method, so what you wrote in Part 1 will be used again. The next lesson turns from how to read the books to where they came from: how the church came to recognise these twenty-seven, and why Catholic and Orthodox Bibles have more.

Go deeper

• Fee and Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 4th ed., chapters 3, 4, and 13: the three chapters this lesson is built on. Chapter 4 has the full set of guidelines on cultural relativity, and chapter 13 walks the whole of Revelation vision by vision.
• Duvall and Hays, Grasping God's Word, 4th ed.: the same procedure as a five-step journey, with far more cases worked through than this lesson had room for. Osborne's The Hermeneutical Spiral (2006) is the graduate-level version of the same move.⁴
• Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge, 1993): Fee calls it "the very best introduction" to how the book works and what it's for.³ Short, and readable by anyone who has finished this lesson.
• Pate (ed.), Four Views on the Book of Revelation (Zondervan, 1998): the four schools arguing with each other in one volume, each in its own voice, with replies.⁸
• Dale Martin, Yale RLST 152, lecture 23, "Apocalyptic and Resistance" (free on Open Yale Courses): the critical-scholarly reading of Revelation as political resistance literature, taught without asking you to believe or disbelieve it.¹⁴ Hear the other side from its own teacher.
• BibleProject, "How to Read the Bible: Apocalyptic Literature" (above), and its companion podcast series "Apocalypse Please".¹⁵

Sources

1. Fee, G. D. and Stuart, D., How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 4th ed. (Zondervan, 2014), ch. 3, "The Epistles: Learning to Think Contextually". The epistles as "occasional documents"; hearing one end of a telephone conversation; Philemon, James, and Romans as exceptions occasioned from the writer's side; "THINK PARAGRAPHS"; the observation that those who argue from 1 Corinthians 11 for headship often deny the prayer and prophecy it assumes.
2. Fee and Stuart, ch. 4, "The Epistles: The Hermeneutical Questions". The basic rule with the 1 Corinthians 13:10 example; the comparable-particulars rule; the two kinds of non-comparable particulars and the two-step procedure; the stumbling-block principle and its abuse; the problem of cultural relativity, the wine, head coverings, and holy kiss examples, and the "wince" observation; the guidelines worked out with David Scholer; the 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 analysis and the sentence on a woman who literally obeyed the text drawing attention to herself; the warning that there is no divinely ordained culture.
3. Fee and Stuart, ch. 13, "The Revelation: Images of Judgment and Hope". Revelation as "a unique, finely blended combination of three distinct literary types"; the features of apocalyptic; not pseudonymous; "over 250" Old Testament citations and echoes; "at least five major schools"; the six interpreted images; the Daniel 10:6 collage; visions as wholes like parables; the sun and figs, and the Euphrates cavalry, as the two kinds of detail; "seldom intend to give a detailed chronological account of the future"; chapter 12 as "the theological key"; the already and not yet; "not intended to prophesy the existence of Communist China"; the recommendation of Bauckham. Whether Fee attaches the frontier-invasion reading to the cavalry of 9:13-19 or to the locusts of 9:1-11 could not be checked at Stage 4 (every hosted copy of the book is blocked at this proxy); the lesson places it on the cavalry, which is where the reading is standardly attached.
4. Duvall, J. S. and Hays, J. D., Grasping God's Word, 4th ed. (Zondervan, 2020). The Interpretive Journey: grasp the text in their town, measure the width of the river, cross the principlizing bridge, consult the biblical map, grasp the text in our town. The four-step box in the body is this lesson's compression of that journey and Fee's two steps into one procedure; it is not a quotation from either. Osborne, G. R., The Hermeneutical Spiral, 2nd ed. (IVP Academic, 2006), for the same move at graduate level. Neither book was opened for this course.
5. NET Bible, 2nd ed. (2019), netbible.org. The draft's first pass used the ESV from BibleGateway; every quotation was re-rendered in the NET and verified word for word at Stage 4 against the NET mirrors recorded in research/SOURCES.md, because bible.org returns 403 in this environment. Passages quoted: Philippians 4:11-13; 1 Corinthians 12:31, 13:1, 13:4, 13:10, 14:1; 1 Corinthians 11:3, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16; Romans 3:23, 16:1, 16:7; Colossians 3:12; Galatians 3:28; Philemon 1-2, 8, 10, 16-18, 21; James 5:14; Daniel 7:9, 7:13, 12:4, 12:8-9; Exodus 19:4; 1 Peter 1:10-12; Revelation 1:1, 1:3, 1:4, 8:6-12, 12:1-2, 12:5, 12:9, 13:18, 17:9-10, 17:18. Scripture quoted by permission. Quotations designated (NET) are from the NET Bible® copyright ©1996, 2019 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. All rights reserved. See Editorial Standards 4.7 for why this course uses the NET. The one phrase in this lesson not from the NET is "a little wine for thy stomach's sake" (1 Timothy 5:23), which is the King James and is Fee's own wording for the example; it is attributed as such in the body, which 4.7 permits where the familiar wording is the subject.
6. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.30 (c. 180), trans. Roberts and Rambaut, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1, at New Advent. The number 666 "found in all the most approved and ancient copies"; the 616 reading as a copyists' error; the candidate names Euanthas, Lateinos, Teitan, with Teitan preferred as "very probable"; the refusal to decide; the vision seen "towards the end of Domitian's reign". Irenaeus held the antichrist to be still future, which is the ground of his refusal.
7. Williams, P. J., "P115 and the Number of the Beast", Tyndale Bulletin 58.1 (2007), 151-153, open access. Gematria as the agreed approach; Nero Caesar as the consistently popular modern proposal, with the Hebrew letter values summing to 666; the 616 variant in Codex Ephraemi and in P115, "dated by its editor J. Chapa to the late third or early fourth century"; the omission of the final nun (50) giving 616; the caution that the Hebrew spelling of "beast" also yields 666 and 616. The PDF host is blocked in this environment and the article could not be re-read at Stage 4. The letter values in the table were checked by hand and sum correctly. Standard manuscript lists date P115 to about 225 to 275, earlier than Chapa's date, and the lesson now prints both.
8. Pate, C. M. (ed.), Four Views on the Book of Revelation (Zondervan Counterpoints, 1998). Contributors: Kenneth L. Gentry Jr. (preterist), Sam Hamstra Jr. (idealist), C. Marvin Pate (progressive dispensationalist), Robert L. Thomas (classical dispensationalist). The volume has no historicist chapter; the reason for that is not stated in it, and the lesson does not assert one.
9. Beale, G. K., The Book of Revelation (NIGTC, Eerdmans, 1999). The stated approach, "eclecticism, or a redemptive-historical form of modified idealism", is reported from publisher and reviewer descriptions, which place it at p. 48 of the introduction; the commentary was not opened for this course. The same applies to Beale's observation that the Old Testament writers did not exhaustively grasp what they wrote, which this course records at Stage 4 of lesson 4 as common ground across the four Old-Testament-to-New frameworks.
10. Osborne, G. R., Revelation (BECNT, Baker Academic, 2002). An eclectic approach in which the preterist, idealist, and futurist methods interact, with the futurist element primary. Described from publisher and reviewer accounts; not opened.
11. Ladd, G. E., A Commentary on the Revelation of John (Eerdmans, 1972). Historic premillennial; blends preterist and futurist readings. Described from publisher and reviewer accounts; not opened.
12. Gentry, K. L., Before Jerusalem Fell: Dating the Book of Revelation (Institute for Christian Economics, 1989). The argument for composition before AD 70, under Nero, including the temple of Revelation 11, the count of kings at 17:10, and the ambiguity of Irenaeus's Greek at 5.30.3. Described from summaries of the argument; not opened.
13. Elliott, E. B., Horae Apocalypticae, 4 vols. (1st ed. 1844; vol. 1 at the Internet Archive). The fullest historicist commentary in English. Not opened; the Reformation-era identification of the papacy with the antichrist is widely documented elsewhere, and no page of Elliott is cited here.
14. Martin, D. B., Yale Open Courses RLST 152, Introduction to New Testament History and Literature, lecture 23, "Apocalyptic and Resistance" (2009). Revelation as apocalyptic operating in dualisms and calling for cultural and political resistance; Rome as Babylon.
15. BibleProject, "How to Read the Bible: Apocalyptic Literature", YouTube; video page. Title and channel verified by YouTube oEmbed at draft time. oEmbed returns no duration, so no running time is printed here; the video's own page carries it.
16. Wikimedia Commons, "Oxford, Sackler Library Ms LXIV 4499 (Papyrus 115) Plate 3 verso crop Number of the Beast χιϛ 616", file page. Public domain. Commons is blocked in this environment; the file and its licence were verified at draft time and not re-checked at Stage 4. That P47 (Chester Beatty III) contains Revelation 13:18 and reads 666 is from standard manuscript descriptions, checked by web search rather than from the manuscript.
17. Tacitus, Annals 15.44, trans. Church and Brodribb (1876), at Wikisource. After the fire of AD 64 Nero "fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace".
18. Gentry, K. L., Have We Missed the Second Coming? A Critique of the Hyper-preterist Error (2016). Gentry's own terms: "orthodox preterism" for his view; "hyper-preterism" for the view that Christ's return, the resurrection, and the final judgment occurred in AD 70, which he rejects.
19. Gordon Fee's own position in the debate his guidelines are used on: board of reference member of Christians for Biblical Equality, and a contributing editor of Pierce and Groothuis (eds), Discovering Biblical Equality, where his essay is "Hermeneutics and the Gender Debate". From web search and published memorials rather than from a fetched primary source. Disclosed in the body because research/SOURCES.md requires a scholar's commitments to be stated where he is cited approvingly. For the complementarian side named in the body, Grudem's studies of kephalē are collected in Piper and Grudem (eds), Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (1991); for the egalitarian side, Discovering Biblical Equality (2005). Neither volume was opened; both are named as positions rather than quoted.
20. Shaw, B. D., "The Myth of the Neronian Persecution", Journal of Roman Studies 105 (2015). Argues the Neronian persecution is a later construction; answered by Jones, Barrett and others, and the majority of historians still accept Tacitus's report. From web search; the article was not read.
21. Tyconius (Book of Rules, c. 380s) and Augustine, City of God 20, on the thousand years as the present age of the church; Andrew of Caesarea's commentary (c. 600) as the standard Orthodox guide to Revelation. From web search and reference works; no primary text was fetched.
22. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 115 to 118, on the senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the spiritual subdividing into allegorical, moral, and anagogical, with the literal as the foundation.
23. Köstenberger, A. J. and Patterson, R. D., Invitation to Biblical Interpretation (Kregel, 2011). The hermeneutical triad of history, literature, and theology. Recorded in this course's research file at Stage 1 as the check on the genre lessons and not opened; named here for the frame it gives, not quoted.