The Significance of John's Book of Revelation

The year 246 AD was the year when the thousandth anniversary of the Roman Empire was going to be celebrated. It seems to have prompted some Christians, especially in the Eastern part of the empire to assume that this was the one thousand year event that John was talking about in Revelation.

Within two years following the thousandth anniversary of the founding of Rome, the Emperor Decius proclaims an empire wide sacrifice to the city’s deities. All citizens including Christians were expected to sacrifice or be liable to imprisonment or death. Read in the context of the Revelation of John, this was deemed by many to be a yet a further confirmation of John’s prediction of the end of time.

Following the death of Decius, who was killed in battle by the Persians, the Emperor Diocletian spends roughly ten years, from 303 to 313 CE persecuting Christians. A large number of arrests of Christians were made and many were martyred, as well as the destruction of church buildings. It was not until Constantine the Great took over as Emperor that Christianity was declared a legitimate religion of the Roman Empire..As long as the empire was pagan, Rome could be an historical stand in for Babylon. After all, that's what the text of apocalypse says.

The awkwardness for Christianity, with its own apocalyptic heritage, comes with Christianity's political success. When Constantine converts to one, remember, just one form of Christianity ... in 312, from the perspective of John, the writer of Apocalypse, the beast has entered the church. But from the point of view of Eusebius, one of Constantine's Bishops, it's God's working in history. It's the revelation of the messianic peace that Isaiah talked about. From Eusebius' perspective--I mean we're used to thinking of the empire being Christian, they weren't, it just happened in their lifetime--this is an unthinkable thought and yet it occurs.

So Eusebius, looking at these traditional apocalyptic texts, knows that the traditional apocalyptic reading has to be wrong, because now the empire is Christian. ...The empire isn't God's opponent, and therefore, interpretations that look at these texts as speaking about God defeating the evil empire of Rome are clearly wrong interpretations, because now God's servant is himself the emperor.

So what Eusebius will do is, he's one of a number of Christians who begin to discredit an apocalyptic frame of mind, now that Christianity, in a sense, with the consolidation of power under Constantine, settles down into history. Apocalypticism, for people who are prepared to settle down into history, is something that is old fashioned, is clearly wrong and is therefore heresy.

What you get when you have the Constantinian revolution is a principled opposition to the Book of Apocalypse. Once the weight of communities decide that the book is going to be kept in the collection, then your option is no longer to drop the text, your option is to reinterpret it, and that's what people do next.

Once Christianity became legitimate, and recognized by Constantine, then the Book of Revelation was a problem. Because one didn't want to insult the city of Rome or the Roman emperor. And it's very interesting the reinterpretation that occurred at that time. Instead of being read as a dichotomy between God and Christ as ruling in heaven, and eventually on earth, and this evil Roman power on earth in the meantime, there came to be a compilation of the two. That the Roman emperor came to be seen as a representative of Christ. And Christ came to be understood as, as ruling on earth through the current political system.

Augustine of Hippo, who later became canonized as Saint Augustine was probably the most important and influential thinkers of the early Christian period, is one of the leading thinkers. It is largely due to his influence that the Revelation of John is even in the New Testament at all.

What Augustine does by helping put the Book of Revelation in the Bible really accomplishes two things. One, he provides a normative reinterpretation of the book as symbolic representation and not literal history. This version is the one that eventually became the accepted view throughout most of later Christian tradition.

Secondly, by placing it at the end of the New Testament and declaring "You may not add to or take away from any thing in this book." it has the double effect of reinforcing John’s Apocalyptic message, and providing closure of the New Testament itself as the final legitimate vehicle of gods message.