The word revelation is etymologically linked to the word apocalypse. The former descends from the Latin revelatio, while the latter comes from the Greek apokalupsis. Both terms literally mean "unveiling" or "uncovering". Both words were used in the classical world in a mundane sense to refer to the pulling back of physical curtains or veils, and in a mystical sense to the revealing of divine mysteries.
In contemporary English, the meanings of these two words have diverged somewhat.
- Revelation usually has the connotation of a discovery, often with an element of surprise or shock. It is not restricted to religious contexts. "I watched a television program about poverty in Africa, and it was a complete revelation to me."
- Apocalypse, by contrast, has developed a more technical meaning. Sometimes it is used as a synonym for eschatology ("the end of the world"), but this is sloppy and imprecise. The word is more properly used to refer to a genre of literature that claims to provide divine or angelic messages. Apocalyptic literature is often eschatological, but not always. Some apocalypses were visions, not about the future, but rather about the distant past (such as the moment of creation, or the Fall). Others provided guided tours of celestial or infernal realms. Apocalyptic literature was popular in the Greco-Roman period, and plenty of both Jewish and Christian examples survive. Some Christian, Jewish, and Muslim writers continue to create apocalyptic literature today; the most well-known example in the United States is probably the dreadful Left Behind series.
Revelation in the New Testament
We know that many popular apocalyptic works circulated in late antiquity, but only one of these, the Revelation of St. John, eventually made it into the canon of the New Testament. Even that book was controversial. As late as the fourth century, a church historian could observe that the Book of Revelation is "by some accepted among the canonical books but by others rejected" (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 3.25). Furthermore, some Christian sects wanted to include other apocalyptic books in the canon along with John's. The most popular of these was the so-called Apocalypse of Peter, which no longer survives in its entirety.
Today the final book of the New Testament is usually known in English as Revelation, Revelations, or The Revelation to St. John, though some older translations render the title as Apocalypse. The author identifies himself as a man named John who is living on a rocky island called Patmos, off the western coast of what is now called Turkey. Some early church traditions maintain that this is the same man who wrote the Gospel of John, but this is very unlikely for a number of reasons.
- Where the book of Revelation is written in awkward Greek filled with Semiticisms (suggesting that the author's first language was Aramaic or possibly Hebrew), the gospel is written in clear, clean Greek that makes use of a great deal of contemporary philosophical lingo.
- Furthermore, the themes and vocabulary of each book are vastly different, as are their visions of Jesus. To choose just one example, the gospel emphasizes God's love for his creation, while Revelation... mmm, not so much.
- Finally, and most importantly, Revelation seems to take for granted that the disciples lived sometime in the past, and it's clear that the author does not see himself as one of them (21:14). The gospel, by contrast, explicitly makes the claim in 21:24 that its author was an eyewitness to Jesus' ministry, and a "beloved disciple" of Jesus himself. (Whether we can believe these claims is a question for another node.)
Scholars generally refer to the author of the gospel as John the Evangelist and the author of Revelation as John of Patmos. Neither of these should be confused with John the Baptist.
The word "revelation" can, of course, be interpreted in a more general way. Christians believe that the entire Bible is (and describes) God's revealing of himself to humanity, and further, that Jesus as the word of God was the purest divine revelation that humanity has experienced. Be that as it may, I will spend the rest of this node discussing the specific book of the Bible that is known as Revelation.
Revelation In Context
The Book of Revelation has much in common with other apocalyptic works from the Second Temple period. It is fiercely eschatological, and describes the end of the world in graphic and lurid detail. It is filled with bizarre symbolic events, gruesome monsters, repetition of sacred numbers (especially four, seven, twelve, and multiples of these), and nasty predictions about what will happen to unbelievers when God returns to establish his kingdom on earth. Unlike the rest of the New Testament, Revelation is a violent and militant book: Jesus is no longer a gentle teacher or a suffering prophet, but rather, a sovereign king backed up by legions of angelic armies.
Some of Revelation's specific images were inspired by Daniel, the only apocalyptic book in the canon of the Hebrew Bible. For instance, the elaborate portrait of beasts with multiple heads and horns in Revelation 13 is an intentional parallel to the beasts of Daniel 7. Traditionally Christians have read these books side-by-side, figuring that the prophecies in the later book pick up where the prophecies in the earlier book left off.
All that being said, there are some aspects of Revelation that are unusual even by the standards of ancient apocalyptic. For instance, the first half of the book is written in an epistolary style -- that's a fancy way of saying that it's structured as a series of letters. This demonstrates that by the time Revelation was written (probably around 90 CE), the epistle, or letter, was considered a valid scriptural form. We probably have Paul of Tarsus to thank for this. It certainly was not the case in either Jewish or Greco-Roman religion before the middle of the first century.
Another unusual element of Revelation is that an author of no especial importance names himself. Most surviving apocalypses are written pseudonymously; they are usually ascribed to famous Jewish prophets and patriarchs (e.g., the Assumption of Moses, the Book of Enoch) or Christian disciples (like the aforementioned Apocalypse of Peter). John of Patmos, however, makes no grand claims for himself. He simply identifies himself as "a servant" of Jesus Christ who was granted a series of visions by angels.
So what does it all mean?
For two thousand years now, many Christians, and some non-Christians, have been trying to decode this book. The sorts of people who write headlines in the Weekly World News trumpeting the "discovery" that the letters in Saddam Hussein's name (or Osama bin Laden's, or Adolf Hitler's, or whichever dictator du jour you may prefer) add up to 666, or the rural evangelical preachers who equate the Whore of Babylon with the Roman Catholic Church, or the authors of lousy screenplays in which various heretics save the world through the "right" interpretation of Revelation while corrupt religious organizations try to stop them -- all these have one thing in common: they treat Revelation as a cipher, in which every element neatly maps onto some simple reality. It is assumed that, upon the discovery of the correct "key," the book will all make perfect sense.
Personally, I think this is a boring way of reading any text, and it's an especially boring way to read a text as rich and as fascinating as Revelation. If you want to match up the beasts in Revelation with contemporary world leaders, more power to you, but I think I'll sit out this round.
Further Reading:
Though much of the material in the online Catholic Encyclopedia is out of date, and though it is possessed of a strong Catholic bias, many of its articles are quite good. The article on Revelation can be found in the "Apocalypse" entry at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01594b.htm.
An entertaining, semi-scholarly overview of apocalyptic themes in world literature can be found in Yuri Rubinsky and Ian Wiseman's A History of the End of the World. Sadly this book is out of print, but many libraries will have a copy.