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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Op here. Thank you. Is this what’s in the book of revelation verbatim ? Or is this how they interpret it? [/quote]

No. It's not in Revelation at all. Revelation is a piece of genre writing -- apocalyptic; a genre that was actually pretty popular 2k years ago. "Revelation," the last book in the Christian Bible, is mostly a political text condemning Roman rule, or certain aspects of it and leaders anyway, in a way that is cryptic enough to save the skins of the early Christians who wrote it and passed it about. They used the apocalypse genre to obscure things. Why do that? At the time, the people who agreed with what they had written in it, understood it pretty clearly. It was an IYKYK thing. The brilliance of it at the time -- using a crazy sounding end-of-the-world story (again, a popular genre at the time) to both hide and convey secret meaning at the same time -- is what causes so much trouble now. If the only way to understand it then was IYKYK, there is no chance any of us can fully understand it now. (But there are brilliant scholars who understand enough for us to know basically what the book is -- an anti Rome political tract -- and what the writer(s) was attempting to accomplish.) The inherently cryptic and strange nature of the work, combined with the fact that 2k years later we have zero context, allows all kinds of folks to advocate for any message they want to see in there. Like literally anything. And the Evangelicals have gone pretty nuts on it. But I think any literal interpretation of just about any part of the Bible is missing much of, if not the whole, point. I am a Christian who loves the bible, fwiw.

I think of the issue with ancient genre writing this way: Picture 2k years from now someone not only removed in time but far removed from the English language and the Western Civ of our time picks up, oh, say, The Lord of the Rings. And then they and their friends start arguing over whether or not there were elves and hobbits and what not "back then." The consensus becomes that people 2k years ago were completely ridiculous because they believed in these imaginary things. Well, no, of course not -- you have to take genre into account. And our imaginary readers don't know what fantasy writing is. People write about hobbits and elves for all kinds of reasons including entertainment, wanting to convey certain values, etc. Taken out of context The Lord of the Rings is nonsense. And of course that misses the whole point. But easy to do if you don't have the whole context. [/quote]

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