Book of the week: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation by Elaine Pagels

(Viking, $28)

The Bible, as all good Christians know, boasts “a Hollywood ending,” said Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. The Book of Revelation, written in the late 1st century by a Jewish mystic who had accepted Jesus as the Messiah, features fantastical beasts, impressive pyrotechnics, and a good-guy-versus-bad-guy showdown that can’t be topped. But Elaine Pagels’s “eye-opening” new analysis suggests that the Bible’s strangest book has been misinterpreted for centuries. Rather than a comprehensive prophesy of future end-times, Revelation is largely a commentary on contemporaneous events—a “political cartoon” of sorts. The book’s exploding mountains? Merely a nod to Mount Vesuvius, Pagels says. The dreaded “number of the beast”? An easily decrypted code name, if one knows Jewish numerology, for the Roman Emperor Nero.

The book’s author was, more significantly, “not a Christian as we currently understand the term,” said Laura Miller in Salon​.com. “Pagels makes a persuasive case” that John of Patmos was as incensed by gentiles joining the Jesus movement as he was by Rome itself. He predicted imminent doom for both groups, one for failing to observe Jewish strictures on food and sex, and the other for having just destroyed Jerusalem. But John’s apocalyptic imagery has proved “remarkably adaptive.” The Christian church created among the gentiles by Paul the evangelist eventually found that Revelation could be a useful weapon. In about A.D. 360, a fiery bishop named Athanasius led a campaign to have the book tacked to the end of the New Testament, reinterpreted as a threat to Christians who questioned church authority.

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Not every reader will appreciate Pagels’s insights, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. The author of The Gnostic Gospels traffics in the sort of “respectful academic discussion” of biblical history that “strikes liberal Christians as perfectly reasonable while leaving evangelicals and other conservatives feeling gored.” Both parties might be disappointed that she hasn’t included “a fuller reflection on the inspirational power of Revelation.” However John of Patmos intended his tale to be read, after all, it has gripped the imaginations of countless Christian faithful. Pagels anticipates readers’ need to rediscover what redeems Revelation, but offers only a hint—“just enough to send us back where she wants us to go: to the Bible, to think again.”