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bb0040a
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Jesus'] resurrection is therefore God's promise of new creation for the whole of the godforsaken reality which the crucified Jesus represents. It is therefore an event of dialectical promise: it opens up a qualitatively new future, which negates all the negatives of present experience. It opens up a future which is not simply drawn out of the immanent possibilities of present reality, but radically contradicts present reality. It promises l..
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resurrection
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Richard Bauckham |
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c0bf907
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Testimony should be treated as reliable until proved otherwise. "First, trust the word of others, then doubt if there are good reasons for doing so."
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Richard Bauckham |
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cdbb39c
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When the slaughtered Lamb is seen `in the midst of' the divine throne in heaven (5:6; cf. 7:17), the meaning is that Christ's sacrificial death belongs to the way God rules the world.
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Richard Bauckham |
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98ee050
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This means that "meeting the current toward elimination of names is the counter current of late development, which . . . gave to simplified matter the verisimilitude of proper names."
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Richard Bauckham |
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fe714f7
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It is clear that John saw himself, not only as one of the Christian prophets, but also as standing in the tradition of Old Testament prophecy.
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Richard Bauckham |
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1a91491
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However it--or the kind of extreme individualistic epistemology it embraces--can lead historians to an overly skeptical approach particularly to those sources that were intended to recount and inform events of the past, that is, testimony in this restricted sense. Particularly in Gospels scholarship there is an attitude abroad that approaches the sources with fundamental skepticism, rather than trust, and therefore requires that anything th..
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wisdom
facts
christian-gnosticism
christian-history
christian-mystics
conversion-of-paul
epistles
epistles-of-paul
gentile
gnostic
gnostic-gospels
gnosticism
gospel-of-john
grosticicm
historical-facts
historicity-of-paul
mystics
solomon
synoptic-gospels
tanakh
church
christ-myth-theory
historicity-of-jesus
paul
jewish
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Richard Bauckham |
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9c74e1b
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Young scholars, learning their historical method from Gospel scholars, often treat it as self-evident that the more skeptical they are toward their sources, the more rigorous will be their historical method. It has to be said, over and over, that historical rigor does not consist in fundamental skepticism toward historical testimony but in fundamental trust along with testing by critical questioning...
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myth
christ-myth
ecstatic-visions
jesus-myth
jewish-messiah
messiah
paul-s-visions
unreliable
visions
christ-myth-theory
historicity-of-jesus
historicity-of-the-gospels
jews
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Richard Bauckham |
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640168d
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The word "ungodly and word-group" in Jude...It describes, not theoretical atheism, but practical godlessness."
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Richard Bauckham |
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809572f
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The whole of Revelation could be regarded as a vision of the fulfilment of the first three petitions of the Lord's Prayer: 'Your name be hallowed, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven' (Matt. 6:9-10). John and his readers lived in a world in which God's name was not hallowed, his will was not done, and evil ruled through the oppression and exploitation of the Roman system of power.
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Richard Bauckham |
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606d28d
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However it--or the kind of extreme individualistic epistemology it embraces--can lead historians to an overly skeptical approach particularly to those sources that were intended to recount and inform events of the past, that is, testimony in this restricted sense. Particularly in Gospels scholarship there is an attitude abroad that approaches the sources with fundamental skepticism, rather than trust, and therefore requires that anything th..
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christ-myth-theory
eyewitnesses-of-jesus
historicity-of-jesus
historicity-of-the-bible
historicity-of-the-gospels
historicity-of-the-new-testament
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Richard Bauckham |
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1c4b9dc
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The first is rarely noticed. John's work is highly unusual in the sheer prolific extent of its visual imagery. It is true that symbolic visions are typical of the genre. But in other apocalypses other forms of revelation are often as important or more important.
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Richard Bauckham |
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22a517d
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A second formal, literary difference between Revelation and the Jewish apocalypses is that, unlike the latter, Revelation is not pseudepigraphal.
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Richard Bauckham |
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5ec012a
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The whole book of Revelation is a circular letter addressed to seven specific churches: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea (1:11; cf. 1:4; 22:16). They are probably named in the order in which they would be visited by a messenger starting from Patmos and travelling on a circular route around the province of Asia. But many misreadings of Revelation, especially those which assume that much of the book was not ..
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Richard Bauckham |
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baacb89
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The device of the seven messages enables John to engage appropriately with seven different contexts in which his book would be read and also to integrate those contexts into the broader perspective of the rest of the book, in which John is concerned with the worldwide tyranny of Rome and, even more broadly, with the cosmic conflict of God and evil and the eschatological purpose of God for his whole creation. In this way he shows the Christi..
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Richard Bauckham |
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e861f34
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The fact that John explicitly and carefully contextualizes his prophetic message in seven specific contexts makes it possible for us to resist a common generalization about Revelation: that it is a book written for the consolation and encouragement of Christians suffering persecution, in order to assure them that their oppressors will be judged and they will be vindicated in the end. The common, uncritical acceptance of this generalization ..
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Richard Bauckham |
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18db65d
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Once we have fully recognized the specificity of the seven messages to the churches, it is possible to ask whether John also envisaged other readers. Why does he write to seven churches? These were by no means the only Christian churches in the province of Asia, and John must surely have expected his work to be passed on from these seven to other churches in the area and even farther afield. The definitiveness with which he seems to envisag..
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Richard Bauckham |
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2ab87bf
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The extent and character of the continuity and the differences between prophecy and apocalyptic are highly debatable. But the distinction means that the relationship between Revelation and the Jewish apocalypses has also been debated. Often the issue has been posed in a misleading way, as though John himself would have made the kinds of distinction modern scholars have made between prophecy and apocalyptic. This is very unlikely. The book o..
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Richard Bauckham |
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5427ba8
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The range of different situations in these seven churches is sufficient for any Christian church in the late first century to find analogies to its own situation in one or more of the messages and therefore to find the whole book relevant to itself. Churches in later periods have been able to do the same, allowing for a necessary degree of adjustment to changing historical contexts.
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Richard Bauckham |
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2a634ac
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We may still ask in what sense Revelation belongs to the genre of ancient religious literature we call the apocalypse. J. J. Collins defines the literary genre apocalypse in this way: 'Apocalypse' is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salva..
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Richard Bauckham |
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bd8a184
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The heavenly revelation he receives concerns God's activity in history to achieve his eschatological purpose for the world. In other words, John's concerns are exclusively prophetic. He uses the apocalyptic genre as a vehicle of prophecy, as not all Jewish apocalyptists did consistently. So it would be best to call John's work a prophetic apocalypse or apocalyptic prophecy. With that qualification, it obviously fits the definition of the ge..
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Richard Bauckham |
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b233c50
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False worship, such as John portrays in the worship of the beast, is false precisely because its object is not the transcendent mystery, but only the mystification of something finite.
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Richard Bauckham |
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8a3dfbb
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the images of Revelation are symbols with evocative power inviting imaginative participation in the book's symbolic world. But they do not work merely by painting verbal pictures. Their precise literary composition is always essential to their meaning. In the first place, the astonishingly meticulous composition of the book creates a complex network of literary cross-references, parallels, contrasts, which inform the meaning of the parts an..
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Richard Bauckham |
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6c10c87
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Secondly, as we have already noticed, Revelation is saturated with verbal allusions to the Old Testament. These are not incidental but essential to the way meaning is conveyed. Without noticing some of the key allusions, little if anything of the meaning of the images will be understood.
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Richard Bauckham |
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c174a8f
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The Old Testament allusions frequently presuppose their Old Testament context and a range of connexions between Old Testament texts which are not made explicit but lie beneath the surface of the text of Revelation. If we wonder what the average Christian in the churches of Asia could make of this, we should remember that the strongly Jewish character of most of these churches made the Old Testament much more familiar than it is even to well..
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Richard Bauckham |
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cb447a4
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As well as their pervasive allusion to the Old Testament, the images of Revelation also echo mythological images from its contemporary world.
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Richard Bauckham |
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fddc26a
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Thus it would be a serious mistake to understand the images of Revelation as timeless symbols. Their character conforms to the contextuality of Revelation as a letter to the seven churches of Asia. Their resonances in the specific social, political, cultural and religious world of their first readers need to be understood if their meaning is to be appropriated today. They do not create a purely self-contained aesthetic world with no referen..
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Richard Bauckham |
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6277038
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The point is not to predict a sequence of events. The point is to evoke and to explore the meaning of the divine judgment which is impending on the sinful world.
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Richard Bauckham |
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6445af9
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if we try to read it as prediction of how that judgment will occur we turn it into a confused muddle and miss its real point.
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Richard Bauckham |
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20ceab2
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The method and conceptuality of the theology of Revelation are relatively different from the rest of the New Testament, but once they are appreciated in their own right, Revelation can be seen to be not only one of the finest literary works in the New Testament, but also one of the greatest theological achievements of early Christianity. Moreover, the literary and theological greatness are not separable.
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Richard Bauckham |
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cff52b4
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Perhaps enough has been said to indicate that the imagery of Revelation requires close and appropriate study if modern readers are to grasp much of its theological meaning. Misunderstandings of the nature of the imagery and the way it conveys meaning account for many misinterpretations of Revelation, even by careful and learned modern scholars.
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Richard Bauckham |
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6532549
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Misinterpretations of Revelation often begin by misconceiving the kind of book it is.
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Richard Bauckham |
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92e4575
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Thus Revelation seems to be an apocalyptic prophecy in the form of a circular letter to seven churches in the Roman province of Asia.
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Richard Bauckham |
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4952dce
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Theological meaning is thus written into the detail of John's meticulous literary composition.
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Richard Bauckham |
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fc8b548
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we must try to do justice to the three categories of literature - apocalypse, prophecy and letter - into which Revelation seems to fall.
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Richard Bauckham |
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ac962fe
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Revelation is a literary work composed with astonishing care and skill. We should certainly not doubt that John had remarkable visionary experiences, but he has transmuted them through what must have been a lengthy process of reflection and writing into a thoroughly literary creation which is designed not to reproduce the experience so much as to communicate the meaning of the revelation that had been given him. Certainly Revelation is a li..
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Richard Bauckham |
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161c180
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Although most early Christian prophecy was oral, not written, John had plenty of models for a written prophecy, both in the prophetic books of the Hebrew scriptures and in the later Jewish apocalypses. In its literary forms what he writes is indebted to both kinds of model.
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Richard Bauckham |
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fbc9145
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His task is to proclaim the fulfilment of what God had revealed to the prophets of the past. The whole book is saturated with allusions to Old Testament prophecy, though there are no formal quotations. As a prophet himself, John need not quote his predecessors, but he takes up and reinterprets their prophecies, much as the later writers in the Old Testament prophetic tradition themselves took up and reinterpreted earlier prophecies.
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Richard Bauckham |
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9cbf63b
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It seems that John not only writes in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, but understands himself to be writing at the climax of the tradition, when all the eschatological oracles of the prophets are about to be finally fulfilled, and so he interprets and gathers them up in his own prophetic revelation. What makes him a Christian prophet is that he does so in the light of the fulfilment already of Old Testament prophetic expectatio..
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Richard Bauckham |
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4c9fd16
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In the first place, John's work is a prophetic apocalypse in that it communicates a disclosure of a transcendent perspective on this world.
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Richard Bauckham |
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4537396
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A second important sense in which Revelation stands in the tradition of the Jewish apocalypses is that it shares the question which concerned so many of the latter: who is Lord over the world?
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Richard Bauckham |
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2eaae10
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In its daring hope for the conversion of all the nations to the worship of the true God it develops the most universalistic features of the biblical prophetic tradition. In its conception of the church's prophetic witness as standing for the true God and his righteousness against the political and economic idolatries of Rome it is faithful to the prophetic tradition's conviction that the true worship of the true God is inseparable from just..
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Richard Bauckham |
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4b423e8
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All this - with much more in these chapters - makes up a wonderfully varied but coherent evocation of the biblical and theological meaning of the divine judgment John's prophecy pronounces on Rome; but if we try to read it as prediction of how that judgment will occur we turn it into a confused muddle and miss its real point.
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Richard Bauckham |
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88984ca
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But they are sufficiently few to make the reapplication of the images to comparable situations easy. Any society whom Babylon's cap fits must wear it. Any society which absolutizes its own economic prosperity at the expense of others comes under Babylon's condemnation.
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Richard Bauckham |
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64924a2
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Whether they were Jews or Gentiles, most of John's readers were used to belonging to a city. Most citizens of the great cities of the province of Asia would have thought it possible to be fully human only in the public life of a city. For those of John's readers who had the social status and affluence sufficient to participate in this public life - and probably many of them did - the most difficult and alien aspect of Christianity would hav..
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Richard Bauckham |