A History of the End of the World (10 page)

Once John left the war-torn and bloodstained Jewish homeland, or so we might speculate, he made his way to the Roman province known as “Asia”—that is, an area of Asia Minor that is largely contained in what is now modern Turkey. From the vantage of the imperial capital at Rome, the province of Asia was only a backwater, full of unsophisticated and untutored yokels, but the cities that John visited were lively places where the local gentry aspired to make themselves over in the image of Roman civilization. And John, as we shall see, was as deeply troubled by the Roman way of life as he was by Roman imperialism or the religious practices of classical paganism.

John himself tells the reader that he was on “the isle that is called Patmos” when he was granted the strange and shattering visions that are described in the book of Revelation. Patmos is one of the so-called Dodecanese, a cluster of twelve Greek islands in the Aegean Sea, located along the southwestern coast of Asia Minor. Only eleven square miles in area, Patmos is a harsh and hilly volcanic island rising to about a thousand feet. And so it was proposed in the fourth century by Victorinus, author of the earliest commentary on Revelation to survive intact, that John had been sentenced to a term of hard labor on Patmos—“condemned to the mines by Caesar Domitian”—and released on the death of the emperor who sent him there. Like so much else in Revelation, the grain of speculation grew by accretion over the centuries: Austin Farrer, writing in the aftermath of World War II, provocatively refers to John’s place of confinement as “the concentration-camp at Patmos.”
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John himself is not entirely clear on the question of how or why he came to Patmos. Some translations suggest that he was on Patmos “
for
the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ”—that is, for the purpose of preaching the Gospel to any Jews or pagans who might be willing to listen. Other translations, however, render the same passage to suggest that he had been exiled to Patmos “
on account of
the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ”—that is, as punishment for his missionary work, which is the meaning favored by modern scholars.
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Indeed, the New Living Translation, the work of contemporary evangelical scholars, takes the liberty of adding an explanatory phrase that appears nowhere in the original Greek text of the New Testament: “I was exiled to the island of Patmos for preaching the word of God and speaking about Jesus.”
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No ancient source other than Revelation itself suggests that the Romans used Patmos as a place of exile, although political prisoners were apparently banished to other nearby islands in the Dodecanese. Then, too, Adela Yarbro Collins wonders out loud whether
any
Christians would have been granted the relatively benign punishment of exile: “The odd thing about this hypothesis,” she asserts, “is that most condemned early Christians were executed, not deported.”
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Still, it is hardly plausible that John would have gone to Patmos merely to preach the Gospel, given the scanty number of souls that would have been available in such a small and remote island. John looked for—and found—a much more promising place to deliver his startling message about the end of the world.

John makes it clear that his missionary work was conducted not on the barren island of Patmos but in the bustling commercial centers of Asia Minor. The opening chapters of Revelation consist of a series of messages addressed by John to the Christian churches of seven cities in western Asia Minor—Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. These messages, or “letters” as they are often called, are the best evidence that John had spent enough time on the ground in these cities to gain an intimate knowledge of the politics and personalities of each place. Indeed, one of the keys to understanding the anger and resentment in the book of Revelation is the prickly relationship between John and the preachers, congregants, gentry, and provincial authorities, all of whom were far more comfortable than John himself with the good life that was available to the citizens of the Roman Empire, whether they were pagan, Christian, or Jewish.

Ephesus, for example, was a mercantile center that hummed with civic pride and ambition. The city lay at the mouth of a major river and at the junction of three busy roads, and thus it served as a hub for all of western Asia Minor. Designated as a “free” city by Rome, Ephesus was governed by an assembly of its own citizens—an
ekklesia,
the same Greek word that is used to identify a church—and never suffered the indignity of occupation by the Roman army. Still, it was one of the so-called assize towns where the Roman governor routinely stopped to hear and decide important legal cases, a fact that only added to its stature among the provincial towns and cities of the far-flung Roman Empire. For all of these reasons, Ephesus was “a city where men might look on the pageant and panorama of Greco-Roman life at its most brilliant.”
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Ephesus was also the site of the so-called Artemesium, a temple dedicated to the goddess of chastity and childbirth (as well as fauna, flora, and the hunt) who was known to the Greeks as Artemis and to the Romans as Diana. First erected by the famously rich King Croesus, the temple had been rebuilt several times over the centuries. The Artemesium as it existed during the lifetime of John—fashioned of marble and rare woods, adorned with gold and jewels, and featuring a statue of the goddess rendered in ebony and precious metals—was regarded as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

But for a true believer like John, the statue would have been properly called an idol, and the whole spectacle was yet another example of what the Bible condemns as an abomination. “We think of Diana as the loveliest of the goddesses,” writes one exegete of the mid–twentieth century, reminding us of how
all
pagan art was regarded by the first Christians. “But the image was a black, squat, repulsive figure, covered with many breasts—a strange, unlovely, uncouth figure.”
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Perhaps it was the figure of Diana, or some other exotic work of pagan statuary on which his eye might have fallen, that John has in mind when he conjures up the Mother of Harlots, “decked with gold and precious stones, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.”
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A far less extravagant practice of paganism, however, was even more provocative to a strict monotheist like John. By the first century, a fashionable new cult had come to Rome from the Asiatic provinces, and patriotic Roman citizens began imagining the Roman emperor to be the symbol of the spirit (or
genius
) of the Roman Empire. For that reason, they saw praying for his well-being as a way of praying for the welfare of the empire. Here, too, was an opportunity for a provincial town to enhance its celebrity and stature; an official sanction from Rome to raise a temple in honor of the emperor might be likened to the bestowal of an Nflfranchise. In 26
C.E.
, for example, Sardis was among ten cities in competition for the privilege—and Smyrna was the ultimate winner. In fact, Ephesus, Pergamum, and Thyatira, along with Sardis and Smyrna, were all centers of the so-called emperor cult.

The veneration of the emperor, as we shall shortly see, was hardly the occasion for the heathenish excess that paganism was advertised to be in Jewish and Christian propaganda; nothing more was required of the worshipper than to spill a few drops of wine and cast a pinch of incense on the coals of a brazier placed before an image of the imperial
genius.
But John would have regarded the newfangled practice as even more offensive than the worship of the old gods and goddesses. When John conjures up the seat of Satan in his letter to the church in Pergamum—“where Satan’s throne is”—he may have been thinking of the temple that was erected there in 29
B.C.E.
in honor of “divine Augustus and the goddess Roma.”
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As a man raised and tutored in traditional Judaism, he would have found any gesture of worship toward a mere human being enough to put him in mind of another emperor who demanded worship—Antiochus the Madman—and thus to provoke his rage against the reigning Roman emperor.

The seven cities that John visited, however, were more notable for their political and cultural ambitions—and their mercantile accomplishments—than for their practices of pagan worship. Smyrna, for example, was an important seaport and a center of the wine trade, and its rich merchants supported a library, a stadium, and the largest public theater in Asia Minor. Pergamum, too, boasted of its library, and the name of the city is the root of the English word “parchment,” which was supposedly invented there. Ephesus hosted the gladiatorial games that provided a spectacular if also bloody form of popular entertainment. And, significantly, Thyatira quartered a great many of the guilds that figured so crucially in trade and commerce in the ancient world—the artisans and craftsmen, merchants and traders who were the makers and sellers of the beautiful and useful things that the Roman population found pleasurable or practical or both.

Nothing in the picture of the seven cities that is preserved outside the pages of Revelation suggests that they were “seats of Satan.” Rather, they appear to be places where ordinary men and women—Christians, Jews, and pagans alike—could and did lead prosperous, safe, pleasurable, and decent lives. But the picture is distorted when viewed through the eyes of true belief. For the author of Revelation, the unremarkable compromises that a man or woman might be willing to make in order to live the good life in a cosmopolitan city were just as sinful as the veneration of the Roman emperor or the offering of prayer to the many-breasted Diana. To him, as to religious fundamentalists in every age, from the Maccabees of the late biblical era to the strict and self-denying Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the modern world, the seeking and getting of the good things in life was something demonic.

Indeed, what really troubles John is the fact that the seven cities offered so many opportunities for Christians to embrace the Roman ways of life and rewarded them so richly for doing so. And nothing is more contemptible in his eyes than the simple and unremarkable act of buying and selling. Of all the satanic excesses that John condemns with such fury and disgust, he seems to regard commerce as the cardinal sin.

Perhaps the best evidence is found in the punishments that John envisions for the enemies of God in the end-times. John begins by introducing his readers and hearers to the “beast” who symbolizes Rome as the earthly agent of Satan. Anyone who “worships the beast and its image,” he insists, will be identifiable by “a mark on his forehead or on his hand”—a symbol, as we shall see, that can be best explained as a reference to the most fundamental tool of commerce, the coin of the realm. And then he warns that a special punishment is reserved for anyone who is so marked.
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“He shall drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured unmixed into the cup of his anger, and he shall be tormented with fire and sulphur in the presence of holy angels and the presence of the Lamb,” says one of the angels who appear in John’s visions. “And the smoke of their torment goes up for ever and ever; and they have no rest, no day or night, these worshippers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name.”
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Indeed, the very first sinners to be punished in the end-times will be those who bear the mark of the Beast. Seven angels will pour out seven vials containing “the wrath of God”—and the first vial poured by the first angel will cause “foul and evil sores” to come upon those “who bore the mark of the beast and worshiped its image.”
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And, at the end of the long ordeal that is described in such harrowing detail in Revelation, all of those who bear the mark of the Beast will be “cast alive in a lake of fire burning with brimstone.”
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The mark of the Beast is apparently a name, presumably the name of a Roman emperor, or perhaps the numerical equivalent of the letters in his name. Elsewhere in Revelation, as we shall shortly see, John famously reduces the name of the Beast to the number 666, a kind of alphanumeric code that is possible only in languages (including both Hebrew and Greek) in which letters also serve as numbers. Here, too, is evidence of his Jewish roots: the extraction of mystical meanings from the biblical text by calculating and manipulating the numerical values of letters, a practice known as
gematria,
was favored by Jewish mystics. And John gives us an important and illuminating clue to what he has in mind about the thoroughly mundane function of “the mark of the beast”:

“[The beast] causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the head,” explains John, “
so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark,
that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.”
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Buying and selling, as we have seen, were among the principal occupations of the seven cities where John preached, a source of wealth and the pleasurable things that wealth can bring. Wealth, of course, is measured in money. And the money in circulation throughout the Roman Empire was prominently marked with the name and image of the Roman emperor in whose reign it was minted. Some coinage, in fact, plainly identified the emperor with the Latin word
divus
or the Greek word
theos,
both of which mean “god.”
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Significantly, the Greek word in Revelation that is translated as “mark” is also “a technical term for the imperial stamp on commercial documents and for the royal impression on Roman coins.”
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When a coin crosses the palm of a Christian, John seems to say, he or she is marked by the Beast.

John is seldom content with using a word or a phrase to express just one thing, and the mark of the Beast fairly shimmers with deeper meanings. The Greek word for “mark,” for example, is also used to refer to the brand that was burned into the flesh of cattle to identify their owner. A few ancient sources suggest that slaves and soldiers were similarly branded (or tattooed) as a deterrent to escape or desertion. One source insists that prostitutes, too, were branded with the mark of the man who owned or employed them. And the third book of Maccabees recalls one hateful Egyptian pharaoh of the Hellenistic era who orders a few of his Jewish subjects to be branded with the figure of an ivy leaf, the mark of the god Dionysius.
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