Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Why Most people who read Revelation are Wrong about It Written by Bart Ehrman, Read by Ken Teutsch I'm going to spend a few posts explaining what the Book of Revelation is actually revealing.
[00:00:18] But first I want to explain what it is not revealing.
[00:00:23] It is not revealing what is to happen soon in our own day as fundamentalist preachers, just about the only ones who read the book in any detail have repeatedly claimed, insisted for the past 200 years.
[00:00:38] Just last week there was another fundamentalist scare. The Rapture is going to happen soon.
[00:00:44] Hey, read the Book of Revelation, it says so.
[00:00:47] Yeah. No, it ain't going to happen soon. And no, Revelation does not say so.
[00:00:53] It's about something else.
[00:00:55] Who knew? Well, critical scholars for one, and anyone who follows all these doomsday predictions and predictors for another.
[00:01:04] Here's part of what I say about it in my book what the Bible Really Says about the End Simon & Schuster, 2022 it can be amusing for non fundamentalist readers who first encounter modern prophecy books which are written to show how the Bible predicts how the end is coming soon in our time.
[00:01:27] To notice how many of these books begin by indicating that all of their fundamentalist predecessors have been wrong.
[00:01:35] They were too precise in picking a date, or they misinterpreted this or that passage, or they were advancing their own agendas instead of listening to what the Bible actually predicts. But now the they say in this book we will see what the signs are definitely pointing to.
[00:01:54] Often the author will insist that these are not his own hypotheses, but are the teachings of the Bible itself. The implication is if you disagree with the author's claims, you are disagreeing with God.
[00:02:10] The invariable thesis of all of these books, that the Bible was not written for its own time but for ours, encounters a rather obvious it would mean that the biblical authors who address specific readers did not expect them to have any clue what they were talking about.
[00:02:28] That's not how authors, ancient or modern work authors, write for readers in their own time and place.
[00:02:36] When John addressed the first century Christians in the Church of Philadelphia in Asia Minor, he was giving them a message he did not secretly intend. The Message for 21st Century Christians in the Church of Philadelphia, Pennsylvan Among Modern Prophecy experts who argue to the contrary that Revelation was meant for readers living 1900 years after its author's death, none has been more outspoken than Hal Lindsay, author of the late Great planet Earth.
[00:03:10] In 1970, Lindsay argued that Revelation described what would happen before the end of the 1980s when his predictions didn't come true, or even close to true. He continued writing books and giving lectures about how now the signs were coming to be fulfilled. He was still talking about it over 50 years later.
[00:03:32] He died just last year.
[00:03:35] But that must mean that the biblical authors were not in fact writing for Christians in the 1970s and 1980s as he originally claimed. But for those in the 1990s, then for those in the 2000s, then in the 2000s, and now in the 2000s, the goal posts continually move. If they didn't, there'd be no reason to keep writing more and more books showing that the prophecies are finally now being fulfilled.
[00:04:06] In his original book, when Lindsay argues that Revelation was not written to be understood by its first century readers, he does so with an intriguing sleight of hand.
[00:04:16] He does indeed stress that we need to put the author in his own time and understand what he understood. But that does not mean that Lindsay wants to understand the book in its own context. Just the contrary, in Lindsay's view, as a first century Christian, John of Patmos was shown visions of events to transpire 1900 years later, and he simply could not understand what he was seeing.
[00:04:42] How could he? How could someone 2000 years ago describe the explosion of a nuclear bomb? He would have to do the best he could, using the only images available to him in his first century context. That's what he did.
[00:04:57] Lindsay explains how this works over and over again.
[00:05:01] His explanations seem to make good sense to his readers, millions of them.
[00:05:07] But the explanations never do quite work when you look at what the biblical author actually says.
[00:05:14] Most readers don't do that, of course. They just take Lindsay's word for it.
[00:05:19] They would be better off looking at the passages.
[00:05:22] Let me give an example, one that Lindsay has repeated over the years.
[00:05:27] It involves a striking passage from Revelation 9, which describes the plague of torturous locusts unleashed on the earth when the fifth trumpet is blown.
[00:05:38] Here I quote the passage in full.
[00:05:42] And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from heaven to earth. And he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit. He opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace.
[00:05:58] And then from the smoke came locusts on the earth. And they were given authority, like the authority of scorpions of the they were told not to damage the grass of the earth, or any green growth or any tree, but only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. They were allowed to torture them for five months, but not to kill them. And their torture was like the torture of a scorpion when it stings someone. And in those days, people will seek death but will not find it. They will long to die, but death will flee from them.
[00:06:33] Revelation 9:1 6.
[00:06:36] It is a horrible image of suffering.
[00:06:40] John goes on to describe these vicious locusts in greater detail.
[00:06:45] And these details give Lindsay the code he needs to unlock the puzzle of the modern day reality that the first century Prophet tried to explain.
[00:06:56] In appearance, the locusts were like horses equipped for battle. On their heads were what looked like crowns of gold.
[00:07:06] Their faces were like human faces, their hair like women's hair, and their teeth like lions teeth. They had scales like iron breastplates. And the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle. They have tails like scorpions with stingers, and in their tails, yellow, is their power to harm people. For five months.
[00:07:30] Revelation 9, 7, 10.
[00:07:33] Lindsay uses these details to show what these locusts coming through the air to assault people really are.
[00:07:41] They are attack helicopters. The Prophet John is seeing a battle scene right out of Apocalypse now, or for Lindsay, right out of the actual war in Vietnam.
[00:07:53] These locusts look to John like battle horses because they are mobile creatures rushing into battle.
[00:08:00] They are flying through the smoke. Is this from napalm?
[00:08:04] They seem to have human faces. Those are the pilots looking through the windscreens. They have crowns of gold. Those are the pilots helmets. The creatures have something that looks like women's hair. That's a description of the rotors moving so quickly. They appear like wispy strands of hair. They seem to have lion's teeth because under, under the windscreens are six barreled cannons that from a distance look like teeth at the bottom of the face. And they sound like many chariots rushing into battle because of the overwhelming noise from the rotors, familiar to anyone who has heard the terrifying sound of choppers overhead.
[00:08:41] It certainly sounds plausible, and so that's probably it, right?
[00:08:46] No, there's a problem with this understanding, and it involves what these locusts are instructed to do.
[00:08:54] Why, according to Revelation, do they come out of the pit in the first place?
[00:08:59] What is the catastrophe they are to cause on Earth? Lindsay skips that little detail.
[00:09:05] These creatures are told to torture people for five months, but not to kill them. The people they attack do not die. They are not allowed to die. On the contrary, they desperately want to die, but cannot. The locusts sting, and the sting is fiercely painful, but never mortal. Everyone but the followers of Jesus is forced to endure five months of horrible anguish with no possible death.
[00:09:32] These locusts can't be attack helicopters. If they were, why would they not be able to kill anyone? Isn't that the point of an attack helicopter?
[00:09:41] Has any government ever designed one with, say, a six barreled cannon meant to inflict unstoppable torment for five months without causing a single death?
[00:09:51] The reason Lindsay's interpretation does not work is because he does not take the text seriously enough. Futuristic interpretations almost never do. That is ironic, of course, when they are proclaimed by fundamentalists who think the Bible provides God's own words.
[00:10:08] But the interpreters choose not to read the words carefully. A large part of the problem is their approach itself. As I've discussed before, these readers are not reading, they are assembling a jigsaw puzzle which leads them to ignore what the text actually says in order to create the picture they themselves have imagined.
[00:10:30] Historical scholars do not approach texts this way.
[00:10:34] To interpret a passage, they see what it actually says before trying to figure out what it means.
[00:10:42] I'll keep up this theme in the next post.
