Apocalypse: Now or Never?

Transcript

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Shirley Paulson:

Welcome everybody here tonight to the July, 2025 Bible and Beyond discussion. I’m your host, Shirley Paulson, and it’s a real treat to be able to welcome back to our Bible and Beyond Discussion this evening, Professor Arthur Dewey. The title of our discussion tonight is “Apocalypse: Now or Never?” So let me introduce my friend and fellow Westar Scholar Arthur Dewey, who, by the way, was a wonderful editor of my book on the Secret Revelation of John, for those of you read it. If you’re reading Westar’s Fourth R Magazine, you have met Art who writes its front page Editorial with each edition. But you may not have known that Art is an award-winning and honors recipient Professor of Theology at Xavier University. He’s a specialist on the historical Jesus and the New Testament…who also happens to be a poet and author and publisher too. So thanks so much, Art, for taking the time to be with us this evening. So glad to have you with us.

Arthur Dewey:

Thanks, Shirley. It’s really a pleasure to be with you all. I’d like to begin with a poem.

It’s called “In the Park of National Resistance.” If my Boston accent drops the R’s forgive me. But this poem was occasioned by the fact that in the town of Thessaloniki, northern Greece, they’re constantly building a railroad system and every time they dig, they find something. So everything stops. This time, however, when they started digging at a place in the northern part of the city, they uncovered what actually was a mass grave of people who resisted the right in the Greek civil war after the second World War. And I was struck by this and having been in many times at Thessaloniki, I was moved to write this:

A skull, then another, then another, each with a bullet hole,

then a woman’s shoe, a handbag and a ring.

The Metro’s expansion again is delayed.

Nothing in Thessaloniki is built in a day or a year

For there was an underground station of partisans already in place.

Silence lifetimes ago, when liberties were taken to seed a mass grave

Like pomegranates, memories break open of how prisoners

from Yedi Kule Castle wrote last minute letters,

how 19-year-old Agathius dared to refuse,

how still in school uniforms, two girls remain.

This is not a tomb that grudgingly opens,

but a constant unearthing of what we thought was life.

And I begin what I’m saying tonight by trying to underscore that resistance can pop up at any time anywhere, and that the world that occupies our attention that might hold us enthrall is actually more porous and fragile than we imagine. And that assertions of power and dominance thundering across media can be muted, turned off, or even transmuted by what many would assume to be the powerless and the marginal. So basically I’ve just given the whole ball of wax away in that!

What I need to talk about, just some basics here. This is not a thorough going commentary on the “Scroll of Unveiling.” I call it the Scroll of Unveiling because the word ‘apocalypsis’ means, literally, to uncover, and it’s not uncovering something that is not there. It’s something that’s there. So you think of a veil and taking the veil off, and that’s what the unveiling is. The word ‘reveal’ really is the same word, but ‘unveiling,’ I think, works well in English. And also it’s another good way of looking at this scroll. So the first thing is the title. The second thing is how to read it.

I don’t know about you, but when I was 11 years old, I did something very odd. I did something right, and my mother finally said, surprisingly, you can have anything you want. And we didn’t have any money. So I asked what would be the most forbidden thing! And we grew up in a Catholic house. So the most forbidden thing, of course was the Bible! Catholics don’t read Bibles, because if you read it, you’d be like the Protestants down the street and go to hell! So you got a Bible, but you never read it. You inscribed weddings and births and deaths, but don’t read it. Well, I decided to read it. It took me a year and I thought, I will “know the truth and the truth will make me free.” Well, I got through Genesis and Exodus, fine. Things begin to boggle down in Leviticus.

I couldn’t understand any of the wisdom literature. The prophets drew me for a loop. The histories got me back at least to a narrative. And finally, with great breath, I got into the New Testament. I got into the gospels—they were familiar territory. But then all of a sudden after the Acts, I got into Paul, and I didn’t know what was going on there. None of the letters made any sense, and I ended up with Revelation. So a year into that left me completely flummoxed. The truth was not clear. I didn’t know what to do with it, and I sort of let it lie. That might be the origin of why I am a scripture scholar today. But it was a very interesting experience.

And why do I say this? Because when one reads the Book of Revelation, there is a tendency—and historically this is the case—that people think, number one, that there’s a secret, there’s a code that needs to be cracked. And that if you’re smart enough, bright enough, and you know the math, you can figure it out. Well, that doesn’t work. And what I’m going to say tonight is, number one, there is no secret, there is no code, but there is a need to understand what kind of material this is, and how do you read this material? It is not meant to be read A, B, C, D in a serial fashion. Why? Because we have a series of what I would call, kaleidoscopic visions that constantly change. And you’re not seeing really a series of things leading up to something. You’re seeing the same thing from different angles, in different ways, and that can be perplexing. And even when you read it without all of that, it’s still perplexing. So what I submit to you is that I would urge you not to read this book sequentially, but kaleidoscopically.

Shirley Paulson:

That’s a great word.

Before you go too much further, I’m wondering if you might also clear up something else that I want to make sure we cover. People who’ve read my book about the Secret Revelation of John know that that’s not the same thing as this Revelation, but they’re Johns in both of these books. Could you tell us just who these Johns are so we get that clear?

Arthur Dewey:

We don’t know! That’s the thing we just don’t know. Tradition assigns the name. Now in the Unveiling, it does say a man named John.

Shirley Paulson:

Yes.

Arthur Dewey:

What does that mean? It means he’s named John. He’s just a Joe. This is not John the Evangelist. First of all, we don’t know who wrote the Gospel of John. If you look closely, he’s never mentioned by name. It’s the Beloved Disciple. And the Beloved Disciple is dead even before the Gospel of John ends. And if you compare the language, the way the Greek reads, it’s not the same hand. There’s no relationship whatsoever between whoever wrote the Gospel of John and maybe the letters of John, which are not even letters, with Unveiling—Scroll of Unveiling—and the Apocryphon of John. That’s another fellow altogether too. What we don’t understand… in modern times, people always assume that the book has an author and that everybody knows the author, et cetera. But in fact, in the ancient world, there were many books that were gathered together and they would put a name on it to give it authority.

Here, the interesting thing is that it’s not an authoritative person. This is a person who has been deported. If you look at the first three chapters at The Unveiling, you see that this man has been put on this island of Patmos, which is off of Asia Minor, and it was basically a prison colony where the Romans would put people. The Romans had two ways of killing you. They could execute you, they could behead you, or crucify you, or they could do something worse. They could exile you. Why is that worse? Because exile means that you are removed from those people you know. You’re also removed from the gods that you can cultivate.

And if you don’t have relationship or possibility of relating to the gods, so there’s no temple or anything like that, there’s no way of contacting, you become a dead person walking. You become literally a zombie. And that’s what the Romans wanted, that Romans wanted you to be a living dead person, which is worse than death. So that’s what he’s in. Now, the interesting thing is in the first three chapters, you have this guy who receives this vision, and it’s written in apocalyptic collage, actually. These images have already been found, in various apocalyptic texts like just the book of Daniel, and it’s all put together. And you got this figure of the Son of the Human One, who was once dead and now is alive again, and who speaks to it. And the interesting thing is that this man, on this island, who should not be having this, is having this. He’s having a vision, he’s having contact, and he’s told to transmit his visions to seven communities on the mainland.

And what are these communities? Well, they’re named, and they seem to be towns and cities that were in competition for becoming centers of the imperial cult, the Emperor cult. And if you become a winner in a center for cultivating the emperor, what do you get? Well, you get a temple, you get games, you get perhaps the visit of the emperor, you get visitors, you get lots and lots of money, and you’re part of the Roman economic cycle. So it’s a good deal to get involved in it, and it could very well be that each, and maybe all of these towns, felt the pressure to get involved in that sort of thing.

So one other thing…two things. One is apocalyptic language, and then I want to talk about myth. Some of you have talked about apocalyptic literature before. Some of you haven’t. Apocalyptic literature is a relatively new literature. It came into existence among the Jews in the second century, before the common era, when there was a persecution by Antioches IV Epiphanies. Can you imagine being named Epiphanies, which means the manifestation of God? He was a very handsome man from the coinage. He was very handsome. He found himself to be a lover of the Greeks, and he wanted to make the Jews into Greeks. They just had to do some things, like change the name of Yahweh to Zeus, god-the-Most High. You had to sacrifice pork—pigs in the temple, which was a no-no. And most of the high priests went along with it, but some people didn’t.

There was resistance, some people wanted to keep to the traditions, and they were executed.

And there were scribes who noticed all this, and they were troubled by the fact that the people who were trying to be faithful to the covenant—believing that if they were faithful, God would be faithful to them and save them. God didn’t come. So where was God? What comes out of it is, well, there was the Maccabean Revolt on one side, but on the other you had scribes writing the Book of Daniel, and that’s the beginning of apocalyptic literature. And in the Book of Daniel, you have these visions that indicate that this current regime is the loss of many regimes that will come to an end. And it’s done in sort of coded language. So if it’s caught by the Syrians, they won’t be killed, at least immediately. And it’s trying to say that God, in fact, does remember the innocent ones, does remember those who are unjustly killed, and God will bring vengeance. Okay?

Now the next point I would like to make is mythic language. Apocalypse indulges in mythic language. In the United States today, when we use the word myth, it’s equivalent to saying it’s not real, but that’s not what myth means in the ancient world. Myth is the language which you invoke when you’re in situations beyond your control.

For example, if somebody in the ancient world fell in love, what did that mean? It meant that Aphrodite was making a presence felt. If you’re on a ship and you’re in a whirlpool or a hurricane, or something comes up, and you start praying, to whom do you pray? You pray to Isis, of course, the goddess of safety. And if the ship comes into harbor, you can unload your goods. You put your stuff back, you make it all the way back to Parth. What do you do? You give thanksgiving to Isis, for not only saving the ship, but bringing home the goods. And all of this is done in mythic language. The language of prayer is the language of myth. Myth does a number of things. Myth gives you a sense that when things are at a loss, you’re in a sense of vertigo, it gives you a language to use. It gives you a sense of where you’re from, where you’re going, and who you are. It also gives you an ability to be empowered. When you feel the loss of power and you invoke the gods, you are doing what? You’re connecting with power, and that’s what myth really is. Part of the problem in the modern world is that we feel powerless because we don’t like to use mythic language. But there’s power, and there’s also the loss of power, and the feeling of that. But we feel stymied because we don’t have the words for it.

I think it’s Tommy Boy or something—when, what’s it? The comedian rolls down a mountain, and halfway down he clutches a little stick, and that doesn’t work, and comes all the way down. Now this guy has rolled down the entire mountain. He gets up, dusts himself off and looks up and he says, “Awesome!” He didn’t have any other words. When we have something…when people, for example, have an experience in life and it makes them cry, it gives them gratitude, we feel at a loss for words. The ancients had words, and those were words of myth. Okay? Now again, the reason I bring that up is because the Book of Revelation, Scroll of Unveiling, is saturated in all of that type of language. Okay? So should we pause for a couple of questions?

Shirley Paulson:

Maybe we should do that.

Okay. Joy has a hand up. Go ahead. Joy.

Joy Dryden:

I don’t understand what you mean by reading the book of …

Arthur Dewey:

Kaleidoscopically

Joy Dryden:

Yes.

Arthur Dewey:

Alright. Do you know what a kaleidoscope is?

Joy Dryden:

Yes.

Arthur Dewey:

Okay, so think of looking through a kaleidoscope and then you turn it and what happens? Well, you have the same pieces, but they’re now reshaped. What’s going on in the Book of Revelation is you get one scene and then you’re going to get another. And some of it is really very, very different. And the tendency is to say, well, they’re not the same. Well, actually, they’re really aspects of the same thing. Only you’re seeing it differently. For example, the ending of the Book of Revelation ends remarkably with the heavenly Jerusalem coming down. And the heavenly Jerusalem is, in fact, as big as the conquest of Alexander the Great! It’s not a city of regular proportion. If you look at the length that they give it and you measure it out on a map, you see that he’s talking about something huge, and it’s a cube. It’s not flat, it’s a cube and there’s no temple in it. The presence of God is light and reflecting all throughout it. There are no priests. It’s a total secular city, but God is completely there. It’s a remarkable thing. And if you look more closely, it’s described as being by the four rivers. And those four rivers were where Babylon originally existed. So the New Jerusalem is Babylon revisited. The curious thing is they call Rome Babylon—negative. Now it’s being used positively.

He keeps on flipping things around.

Shirley Paulson:

Great. Thanks for that question too, Joy. Honor, go ahead and then we’re going to get into some texts here. So go ahead.

Honor Haase:

Early on, Mr. Dewey said John was exiled on Patmos. He shouldn’t have been getting this revelation.

Arthur Dewey:

He shouldn’t, no.

Honor Haase:

You’re saying because he was removed from the place he grew up where he thought God was?

Arthur Dewey:

He was removed from his community. From the Roman point of view, he doesn’t have the paraphernalia. He doesn’t have the wherewithal to connect to his God.

Honor Haase:
Ah, okay.

Arthur Dewey:

You see, if I’m a Roman, how do I connect with my God? I sacrifice! I have to go to the temple. I have to bring an animal. I have to sacrifice it. I have to go through that process. Alright? So if I’m a Roman… for example, Augustus exiles out his daughter. She was a bit of a… well, she was notorious, and he had to get rid of her, but he didn’t kill her. He exiled her. And that was living death to her. Not only could she no longer find paramours, but she could not worship her gods.

Shirley Paulson:

Toto comments (in the Chat) that Patmos has no wifi either.

Haha! That’s right. Well done.

Arthur Dewey:

That’s right. And the curious thing is, “How did they smuggle out these visions? That’s the other thing. Were they written, or were they memorized? This is part of an…, it could be total oral performance. I have a colleague who recently retired at Wright State up this road from where I am in Cincinnati, and he’s a specialist in the Book of Revelation. He used to claim that the Book of Revelation would be performed and would be memorized after two or three showings. And you might say that is kind of weird. Well, actually, when I teach the Book of Revelation, the final exam is the performance of Revelation. Now, I don’t have my students memorize all 22 chapters, but we can perform it in two hours, the thing, and it’s hilarious at points. There’s burlesque in it. It’s meant to be funny. It’s also meant to be terribly frightening. There were so many aspects to it.

Shirley Paulson:

So I brought up for you Revelation 4. Is that what you wanted to talk about?

Arthur Dewey:

Yeah, let’s go there. Yeah. Revelation 4 takes place in the heavenly throne room. Does anybody know New Orleans, particularly Preservation Hall? I love that place. That’s where I think I’ve really learned jazz there. I sat at the feet of this clarinet player. He was a young 92, and I remember his face. It was jagged and wrinkly and almost like the face of God. It was an amazing face. And I remember his getting up and playing the clarinet, and that 92-year-old body became young again.

And his younger brother who was 91, accompanied him on trumpet. It was an amazing thing. And to sit at their feet and just to listen to how their music played against each other. And I would urge you to think jazz too, because what jazz is in the United States is a way in which people took music, took the white man’s music, and turned it upside down and gave it back. And many of the people who played it thought it was totally new, but in fact, they were playing their music, only they were playing something totally different. They had completely reframed it. And yeah, so why do I say that? Well, here we are in the throne room. I like to call it Preservation Hall because this is where it’s all happening. For the revelation, the person who has a vision, you’re going into the heavenly throne room.

This is where all reality exists, and you’ve got all these people around the throne, but they start singing,

“Holy, holy, holy. The Lord God Almighty, who was and is, and is to come.” And then they say, “You are worthy, our Lord and God to receive glory and honor and power, for You created all things. And by your will, they existed and were created.”

Now, what we don’t usually hear is that You are worthy. In Greek is axios ei. You are worthy. And you know who used to called worthy? The emperor! When the emperor entered—the coliseum did not exist then—let’s see… Yeah, it would’ve because it’s in the nineties and even before, when the emperor would enter into a theater or something like that, the Praetorian God would, with arms stretched, yell out axios ei! Worthy are you! And they would keep it up just like they did in 1932 in Germany, with Heil, Hitler! And ‘Lord and God’ is exactly what Domitian was called. The emperor was called that. And then to receive glory, honor, and power—all of these were given to the emperor. What I’m saying is this, that the language here—if you were to go around the ancient world—this would be language that was reserved for the emperor. And what they’re saying is that that language actually comes out of the heavenly throne room.

Yeah, the heavenly throne room. So what are they doing? They’re performing jazz. They’re taking what was the Roman, and they’re saying, “This is what’s really going on in the heavens.” And guess where it’s also going on? It’s going on in the communities—those seven communities, who are also crying out, “You are worthy to receive glory and honor and power.” In other words, Preservation Hall. Yes, it’s in heaven, but it’s connected to those communities crying out. The heavens and those communities are one. And again, think of what I said earlier, that this man should not have any contact with his God, when in fact, he’s giving a vision that these communities are not only in contact with the God, but their God is showing them where reality really exists. Okay, let’s go on.

Shirley Paulson:

You want to see chapter five?

Arthur Dewey:

Yeah. Revelation 5. Let’s go to 5.

Okay. Now we bring in the question of the scroll. And you have the elders and the four creatures saying, “You are worthy”—there’s the ‘worthy’ again—to take the scroll and break the seals. Now the question is, what does scroll mean? There are seven seals in the scroll. In the ancient world, most of the people are illiterate. It’s an oral world to them. To take a scroll and to unroll it and to read it, only 5% of the population can do that. And scrolls then were seen as sources of power. It’s equivalent today… I don’t know about you, but when I have any problems with my computer, I have to go to somebody who knows how to do it. They unravel the mysteries of the internet to me here in the ancient world, the person who can open the scroll, read it and then explain it has the power.

Now, another way of saying it is they can break the seal and it finally gets down to “who can break the seal?” Yes, it says, “I saw the right hand of the one seated on the throne…” Okay, “…and sealed with seven seals,” and he saw a mighty angel with the loud voice, who is worthy—there’s the word ‘worthy’ again—to open the scroll and break the seals? Nobody could do it. “I wept bitterly and then one of the elders says, “Don’t weep. The lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has conquered. So he can open the scroll and the seven seals. Well, we know who that is. That’s the anointed one, right? The interesting thing is the lion doesn’t open the scrolls. It’s the lamb! And it says, “You are worthy to break the seals, for you were slaughtered, and by your blood, you ransom for God. Saints from every tribe and language and people and nation, you made them a kingdom and priest serving our God, and they will reign on earth. Worthy is the lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing to the one seated on the throne…be blessing and honor and glory and might. Again, blessing, honor and glory.

These are all the imperial praises. Who gets it? The lamb who was slaughtered, not the lion of Judah, but the lamb who was slaughtered. This is an incredible transposition here. You expect the lamb, that is, you expect the lion. Why? Because in the Roman world, the ones with the power win. The Roman world was a transactional world. I win at your expense. The Romans won at the expense of all those underneath them. 85% of the population were considered expendable. They served the elite. And when they finished serving the elite, they disappeared. They didn’t count.

And that’s why we have Roman history of the leaders and not of the slaves. And the interesting thing is if you are crucified, if you died, if you’re slaughtered, you’re accounted among the losers. But in fact, the key—the one who can break the seal, who can unlock the mysteries of history—is the crucified one. And guess what? There’s no secret because those people in the communities already know that. And they know about Jesus. They know he has been crucified. There is no secret.

So this is the interesting thing. Chapter five gives it all away. Those people who go through the Book of Revelation and try to say, “I’m going to show you how this predicts history”—and we do this about every 20 years. Somebody does this, and by the way, oh, excuse me, I should say this: “If you want to make any money on the Book of Revelation, forget everything I just said. Make sure you know absolutely nothing. And you live out of fear and hope, especially fear and read the Book of Revelation and throw all your sense of vengeance and fear into it. Put it together in a book. Make it as sloppy as possible and you will sell a lot!

On the other hand, if you’re interested in what it meant and where it’s really coming from, then you’re not going to get a lot of money out of this because, you see, there’s no secret. How many of you have been—when you go into YouTube—you pass it by somebody who has a secret who’s going to solve diabetes, heart problems, et cetera, and all you have to do is click on, right?

Yeah. But here the Romans knew in their mind what made the world. What made the world was power and might, strength and honor, and that’s what made it up. We win. You lose. In fact, they even have coins. When Jerusalem was taken, we have coins of Vespasian, who was the emperor. And on the front, you have the ugly profile—and he was not too handsome—of Vespasian. On the back, you have a palm tree indicating the east. You have a woman sitting down with her hands behind her back, her head bowed. Actually some have her hands behind her back. Others have one hand on her leg and her head in her hands. And then behind the tree you have a male standing, a Roman. And around it, it says Judea Capta, because, you see, the Jews— Judea—has to be a woman because a woman is second class. A woman is the image of the one who fails. And here, what fails here is the lamb that is slaughtered. And, in fact, this is the one that opens it all up.

Shirley Paulson:

Wow. Do you think we should have some more questions again before we go on?

Back to Honor.

Honor Haase:

Again, I don’t have a question. My comment is Wow! Yeah, right. I think that was a collective Wow. From everybody, right?

Arthur Dewey:

Again, these are selective, so you have to be careful. What I’m trying to get you to see is that there is sort of an artistic project going on here. The Book of Revelation was constructed. It’s like a collage, and it’s an artistic thing, that the apocalyptic writers put together these images to literally engender visions. Okay? This is an interesting thing. They are engendering visions by putting these things together. And are they trying to commit fraud or anything? No. This is like when you’re rubbing sticks together and you get fire. This is how you get visions.

Shirley Paulson:

We do have two hands up here.

Roger Whiteway:

Sure. So we have this guy on Patmos who gets this vision and it’s a penal colony. Did he share it with the others? And would the others even know what the hell he was talking about, if he did share it?

Arthur Dewey:

Well, he had to share it with somebody because it got out. Now we just don’t know how it happened. Now remember, the other thing we should also mention is that Roman jails and things like that are more porous than we think. For example, Paul, when he was in jail, had visitors. Women used to go, but the gladiators were effectively prisoners too. What did the women do before the gladiators went out? They had sex with them. I mean, really? So yeah, I can imagine a boat pulling in and he, over a period of days, communicates this. None of it has to be written down, and it is in fact sent. Now, it could very well be… The interesting thing is that the Greek is bad.

The only way I can understand it is that whoever wrote this is thinking in Aramaic. He is not thinking in Greek, but his Aramaic isn’t that good. For example, there’s not one quote from the Hebrew scriptures that is full. It’s broken. And I’m thinking, what could account for all this brokenness? The Jewish war! This guy was suffering from PTSD. This is the other side of it. Jerusalem was destroyed in the year 70; the Romans took out Masada in 72; the triumph of Titus was about that time; 5,000 Jewish slaves helped to create the coliseum. The coliseum was built on the booty from the temple.

You think about it, a lot of this stuff going on. Who is this? Who is this John? Well, was he somebody who was in Judea and now was in Asia Minor? Maybe. Did he know people? We don’t know for sure. But we do know that there’s been a lot of trauma.

See, the key thing about apocalyptic literature is that people who produce it have been traumatized, and they’re doing… It’s like Alice and Wonderland going down the rabbit hole. You’re grabbing on anything that you can hold onto, and that’s what they’re doing. And there’s a sense of vengeance. There’s violence, there’s a lot of stuff, and it’s not nice. This is not nice stuff. And part of apocalyptic literature is based upon the hope that there will be vengeance.

Shirley Paulson:

That’s sobering. Yeah. Thanks for that question, Roger. And Helen, go ahead.

Helen Mathis:

So John the prophet is on exile, and he writes this message to the churches that basically says they have to continue to suffer until there is that—I don’t see it so much as vengeance as the belief in justice, perhaps. But the vengeance is the satisfaction that one gets when one sees one’s enemy or the whole city of Rome or Babylon, completely implode. But what I don’t understand is the long-term appeal to Revelation in the history of the book itself. Because clearly nothing happened the way it’s said in the book. And a lot of people didn’t like the Book of Revelation because it was so reactionary in terms of the Roman Empire. They didn’t like it for that reason.

So I’m just trying to figure out how it got into the canon and it almost didn’t, as we know,

Arthur Dewey:

You’re right. You’re right. It’s a good point.

Helen Mathis:

Is there a spiritual message that made it compelling, that made it included into the scriptures? I mean, I could see a spiritual message in it, but…

Arthur Dewey:

Well, let me put it this way. Life… the flaw goes out of one’s life often. In other words, the books of revelation, apocalyptic books, come into existence when people feel that their world has come to an end.

Helen Mathis:

And they need outside help.

Arthur Dewey:

Yeah, I mean, think about it. I mean, one’s world comes to an end when one loses a spouse. One’s world comes to an end when you lose a child. Yeah. What happens if the world that you know, I mean, right here in the United States right now, is our world coming to an end? In the United States, from the colonies on. We’ve had people using the Book of Revelation about every 25 years, the Hale Bopp group… They’re all using it, but they all have a sense that the world that they know doesn’t exist anymore. It is greatly threatened. And that’s what I think is what’s going on. In the Middle Ages, you had this around the year 1000. They really thought that this was it. This was going to be it. They had the penitentials and they had all sorts of crazy things happening. But it’s not just every thousand years, it’s every 25 years. And unfortunately, there are also people with very little conscience who make money on it.

Helen Mathis:

Yeah, the Left Behind series was extremely popular. Do you see any other reason for the appeal of the book of Revelation other than the fact that it has this message for people that are on their last leg in terms of hope?

Arthur Dewey:

Trauma speaks. This is this traumatic book, and people who have been traumatized are going to latch onto it. Unfortunately, in Christianity, we have specialized in traumatizing people too. No, Christianity is not the only group, let’s be honest. But we’ve done our damnedest to do that too. The way we see the death of Jesus often is one of trauma.

Helen Mathis:

So I’m a traumatized person, and the message is that there will be justice?

Arthur Dewey:

There is justice. There is hope. Yeah.

Helen Mathis:

There is hope.

Arthur Dewey:

And you’ll be among the ones wearing white. You can see why Christian nationalists get into it too.

There was a guy by the name of Miller in New Hampshire around 1830 or so, who went through the Book of Revelation, and he discovered the meaning of it. And one of his assistants became his compatriot in this. And they went down to the center of sin, the worst place in the world in 1830. You know where that was? The city of Boston, of course! And how they can imagine a bunch of Presbyterians and whatnot being so sinful? But they were. And he went down, and his message took off, and he was very successful. And the interesting thing is, he was announcing that the world was coming to an end in a year. They built a church. Now why do you build a church when the world’s coming to an end? They always seem to want to do something like that. So they built a church, and on the day of the end, the people left their homes, the businesses, unattended, and they were dressed in white. They went to the church around nine o’clock. By noon, some of them got onto the roof. By one o’clock, they were literally throwing the sheets into the heavens. And at three o’clock, Miller came out and said, I made a little mistake. It’s going to be next year. And people said, “Oh, we know that from the Red Sox! But of course, it happened again, but not as much… Well, proof that Boston was really rotten was that when the people went back to their homes the first time, they were, in fact, robbed.

So it didn’t work the second time. And Miller went back to New Hampshire. They became the Millerites, who became the Seventh Day Adventists.

Now the interesting thing, though, about that church is that it was turned into a theater, and then in the thirties, into a burlesque house, and there was a sign on it: “They’ve been taking their clothes off since 1832.” And then Boston built City Hall, and they knocked all of that down. And I regret not being old enough to at least take a picture of that sign because it was worth that!

Helen Mathis:

Okay. Can I throw out one more really quick question? So I don’t believe that the world’s going to come to an end. I don’t believe in that revelation message. So why should I care about the Book of Revelation? What does it say to me?

Arthur Dewey:

No, you don’t have to [care about it]. Maybe it doesn’t appeal to you.

Helen Mathis:

It actually does but not for that reason.

Arthur Dewey:

Yeah. I find this to be an interesting book because it helps me understand what was going on in the late first century among the Jesus followers. But it also shows me that they had some issues because the end didn’t come. In the Gospel of Mark, the community believed they were the final generation. It didn’t come. So Matthew and Luke were written basically to… well, it’s not going to come right away. We’re going to have to deal with the Empire. We’re going to have to live in the Empire. That’s how Luke tries to deal with it. The Gospel of John also tries to deal with the end of the world by saying, “The end of the world occurs when you encounter the word.” So John turns it around. They’re all doing something, but they’re all recognizing that the end didn’t come. Paul thought the end was coming within his lifetime or shortly thereafter, and he was wrong.

….Well, what’s going on in Revelation 13 is that it’s a parody. And one of the things to do, we don’t have time to do it here, is to read chapter 13. It’s about the beast and the coming out of the sea and the various things. But when you read 13, you have to realize that it is predicated upon chapters four and five. In other words, everything that the beast is trying to do has already been done. And when there’s a line that says, “Who is the beast?” Well, the phrase, “Who is like” that is the name of Michael, the archangel: Mi-who, cha-like, el-God. “Who is like God?” And what they’re basically saying, when they’re saying, “Who is like the beast?”—it’s a parody and they’re trying to claim that this one is worthy. But in fact, we’ve already been singing the song that the Lamb is worthy. The Lamb has opened it up.

So what you have in 13 is a parody. It is turning. It’s saying that the Roman Empire…It’s not that the emperor doesn’t have any clothes. The emperor is going around in used underwear—that the real clothing belongs to the lamb. He’s the one. He’s getting all the… What you are doing is at best a parody, and it’s a laughable one. So in effect, what they’re doing, they’re taking these monstrous images and they’re turning around. And so the people can literally laugh at them. When I had my students do this, a young woman did this: the lady and the beast, and she dressed in a red dress. She was a scholar woman, of course. And the beast was a little chihuahua in a tutu, and it was perfect.

Again, I stupidly didn’t take any pictures, but it was a perfect parody. And that’s what it is. It’s a burlesque show. They’re unveiling what the empire is really about. Now, the interesting thing is how cheeky this is. What do I mean by that? In the first century, all the way into the middle of the second century, the Roman Empire was going great guns. They were, in terms of economics, in terms of power, et cetera, they were unstoppable. So for anyone to parrot it in this way, and then when you get into the laments—in chapters 17 and 18—when you get into the laments, it’s so ridiculous. How can you say that all this greatness which is going on has, in fact, fallen? Fallen is Babylon! In other words, they’re speaking to power and they’re saying, we see through you. We see through you. You do not have the power because the power is in Preservation Hall. The power is in our communities. We’re singing it. And we know that the power is already there because we know what the death of Jesus means. And we’re connected. And because we’re connected, we can have hope. And their ultimate hope, of course, is the heavenly Jerusalem, which comes down to earth. It’s not up in heaven, it’s on the earth.

Shirley Paulson:

So we are open to more questions here before we close up. Okay, Honor, go ahead again.

Honor Haase:

Well, what he said about being laughable makes me remember something I’ve read about the Second World War in Denmark, that in the movie theaters, the projectionists would make a mistake and reverse the news reel that showed the Nazis goosestepping backward. It was hilarious.

Arthur Dewey:

That’s right, that’s right. Those little things, that little touch. It’s an artistic touch. That’s right.

Shirley Paulson:

Very interesting and Toto.

Toto:

So I just wanted to say thanks. I appreciate this different kind of view. Another look at Revelations, because I’ve always hated it, always disliked it since “88 ways that Jesus is coming back in ‘88”. It’s rubbed me the wrong way. Except now, the way that you present it or frame it, it’s kind of punk, right?

Arthur Dewey:

Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And like punk, it has its rough edges.

Toto:

Exactly.

Arthur Dewey:

But I guess you have to roll with the punches because when you read the Book of Revelation, it’s not very happy with women. It’s not a good thing. Now you’ve got the woman with the child, and it’s very violent. When you talk about the various plagues and things like that, that ain’t good. But you’ve got to see that this is another way of somebody who has no power trying to deal with the fact that these people are giving it to us in the neck. But Yookim of Fior was a medieval monk who, on Easter Saturday had a breakthrough revelation about Revelation. And he said that you can interpret it that it was once the Age of the Father, today is the Age of the Son, and now it will become the Age of the Spirit. And he called it the reign of the Father. Well, the “third reign” is the “reign of the Spirit.” But in German, that’s reich. And in fact, that’s what the Germans did when they used the word Third Reich. Some of them were thinking of that. And in fact, in ‘33 when Hitler was brought in, ministers were proclaiming that his arrival was the Age of the Spirit. They were preaching that. You can see how it can be misused and abused. And I agree with you, Toto, that the Book of Revelation, if you read it literally and you read it as a way of getting even because of what it’s pointing to, that can be deadly, that can be really deadly and contrary to everything that I think Jesus is about.

Shirley Paulson:

Thank you for that. I like the way the word kaleidoscope is helping us to frame all these different ways of thinking about this. It’s a very helpful word for us tonight. So Grace, go ahead before we wrap up.

Grace:

Well, when he said,”Hitler and the Third Reich,” people think that Jesus today is the coming Christ. So I can see where they’re getting that from—now, from what Mr. Dewey just said.

Arthur Dewey:

Yeah, it’s frightening. It really is. There was a bishop appointed by Hitler. His name was Ludwig Mullah. Nobody knows him now. He wrote a paraphrase of the Sermon of the Mount, and I use that in class every year with my students in English. I don’t give them the German and I don’t put in the Furor. I put the President and I don’t put national socialism, I say “our country,” but I do leave in purity of blood.

And I ask them, “Who do you think wrote this?” Some say “the Pope;” some say “you”. I said, “No, it’s somebody in the 20th century!” And nobody, I think—in doing this over 30 years— I think three people said, “sounds like a Nazi.” That’s in 30 years. Why? Because it’s the Sermon on the Mount. It must be good stuff. But when you read it closely, you say, “Holy mackerel, this is sick. This is really sick.” But that’s what was preached and that’s what white Christian nationalism is about today. They will use scriptures to their advantage to support their prejudice and their power play.

I think that’s the key. And that’s why the question of myth is important. Myth says that you can talk about power. Myth says that we really have to recognize the power of relations that we’re in. The book of Revelation says, “I’m at a loss. I think power is overwhelming me. And it’s saying, no, there’s a deeper power in Preservation Hall. That power is the power of the lamb. Not the one who conquers, but the one who was slaughtered. And we are with him.” And that I think is the saving part of the Book of Revelation.

And it says to us… I mean the book of Revelation is… let me put it this way. How many of us can imagine heaven? Heaven is a way in which we can see the possibility of going beyond the givens. And you might say, the bars of our world, of our situation. And what if heaven is intrinsic to where we are right now? That we begin here. Heaven doesn’t begin in the future. Heaven begins right now. And if you can hold onto that, then no matter what happens, you can imagine, I can think of something better. I might not have it right away, but one of the ways I look at it is when things go bad, I will say, “Yeah, but you’re not God.”

I know I’m not God, but I know you are not God. And if you think you are, you’re an ass. And yet, what does that do? It frees me. It gives me a sense of maneuverability. And isn’t that what prayer is about? Prayer is the ability to resist, to remember that there’s more than what meets the eye and that we can live out of that. We can live out of that hope. A little girl once said, “Heaven is wherever God is acknowledged.” And I would go further. I’d say, “Heaven is where this deep love and commitment, this compassion, is acknowledged. I think that’s what heaven is. And we do it. We’ve done it. Every one of us on this zoom says we’re alive because somebody, at some point, was compassionate, and we didn’t even know it.

Shirley Paulson:

That’s really beautiful. And it just seems to me that we’re talking about how we’re realizing the reality of this concept of heaven. But also I think Revelation is saying that we don’t have to be victims. Finding that we’re not victims.

Arthur Dewey:

That’s very important. That is very important.

Helen Mathis:

That’s where I was trying to go, is to get a more universal sense of what’s going on in Revelation than just a historical record.

Arthur Dewey:

The problem, however, is that we don’t want to be victims, but we also want to be winners. We want to be winners. We want to be victors. And that’s where it goes wrong. That’s where it goes bad.

Shirley Paulson:

If you read it that way. I’m so grateful to you Art for coming to join us tonight and to get us thinking about this book, this enigmatic book that as you say, comes up every generation and wondering. I like your title of this talk—Apocalypse: Now or Never? This is helping us think more deeply about what this apocalypse word means. We have to close it out tonight. And I want to just thank everyone for being with us tonight.

Arthur Dewey:

Yeah, thanks for the great questions and the pushback is wonderful.

Shirley Paulson:

So this is the Monthly Bible and Beyond discussion. We usually meet on the fourth Monday of the month from 8:00PM to 9:00 PM Eastern time. So our next meeting will be Monday, August 25th. So each Bible and Beyond discussion is led by a knowledgeable scholar who provides a thoughtful overview of some early Christian text.

So before we wrap up, I do want to make sure that you’re aware of our new Reflections program, which starts tomorrow. It’s a one hour zoom time where we can talk together about our scholar’s discussion. This is open for all Patreon supporters at the level of $10 or more. If you haven’t signed up, please consider going on over to patreon.com/bible and beyond to become a member and join us for more reflections on these wonderful discussions. So who’s coming next month? Dr. Paul Anderson will be with us to talk about the riddles of the Gospel of John. Again, that’s Monday, August 25th. So join me in a special thanks to Art for coming to be with us tonight, stretching our minds into the new world of Beyond Apocalypse. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you.