Good article...Fear is probably the most powerful emotion; it is precisely what allowed a U.S. president to take this nation into an indefensible war. Living in a "gated community" is a logical step once fear is instilled. Ironically, most gated communities can easily be penetrated by someone on foot!
The Book of Revelation has terrified and confused readers for centuries. Few agree on its meaning, but many have opinions.
By John Blake, CNN March 31st, 2012 10:00 PM ET
(CNN) – The anti-Christ. The Battle of Armageddon. The dreaded Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
You don’t have to be a student of religion to recognize references from the Book of Revelation. The last book in the Bible has fascinated readers for centuries. People who don’t even follow religion are nonetheless familiar with figures and images from Revelation.
And why not? No other New Testament book reads like Revelation. The book virtually drips with blood and reeks of sulfur. At the center of this final battle between good and evil is an action-hero-like Jesus, who is in no mood to turn the other cheek.
Pagels’ book is built around a simple question: What does Revelation mean? Her answers may disturb people who see the book as a prophecy about the end of the world.
But people have clashed over the meaning of Revelation ever since it was virtually forced into the New Testament canon over the protests of some early church leaders, Pagels says.
“There were always debates about it,” she says. “Some people said a heretic wrote it. Some said a disciple. There were always people who loved and championed it.”
The debate persists. Pagels adds to it by challenging some of the common assumptions about Revelation.
Here are what she says are four big myths about Revelation::
1. It’s about the end of the world
Anyone who has read the popular “Left Behind” novels or listened to pastors preaching about the “rapture” might see Revelation as a blow-by-blow preview of how the world will end.
Pagels, however, says the writer of Revelation was actually describing the way his own world ended.
She says the writer of Revelation may have been called John – the book is sometimes called “Book of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine” but he was not the disciple who accompanied Jesus. He was a devout Jew and mystic exiled on the island of Patmos in present-day Turkey.
“He would have been a very simple man in his clothes and dress,” Pagels says. “He may have gone from church to church preaching his message. He seems more like a traveling preacher or a prophet.”
The author of Revelation had experienced a catastrophe. He wrote his book not long after 60,000 Roman soldiers had stormed Jerusalem in 70 A.D., burned down its great temple and left the city in ruins after putting down an armed Jewish revolt.
For some of the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus, the destruction of Jerusalem was incomprehensible. They had expected Jesus to return “with power” and conquer Rome before inaugurating a new age. But Rome had conquered Jesus’ homeland instead.
The author of Revelation was trying to encourage the followers of Jesus at a time when their world seemed doomed. Think of the Winston Churchill radio broadcasts delivered to the British during the darkest days of World War II.
Revelation was an anti-Roman tract and a piece of war propaganda wrapped in one. The message: God would return and destroy the Romans who had destroyed Jerusalem.
“His primary target is Rome,” Pagels says of the book’s author. “He really is deeply angry and grieved at the Jewish war and what happened to his people.”
2. The numerals 666 stand for the devil
The 1976 horror film “The Omen” scared a lot of folks. It may have scared some theologians, too, who began encountering people whose view of Revelation comes from a Hollywood movie.
“The Omen” depicted the birth and rise of the “anti-Christ,” the cunning son of Satan who would be known by “the mark of the beast,” 666, on his body.
Here’s the passage from Revelation that “The Omen” alluded to: “This calls for wisdom: let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred sixty-six.”
Good movies, though, don’t always make good theology. Most people think 666 stands for an anti-Christ-like figure that will deceive humanity and trigger a final battle between good and evil. Some people think he’s already here.
Pagels, however, says the writer of Revelation didn’t really intend 666 as the devil’s digits. He was describing another incarnation of evil: The Roman emperor, Nero.
The arrogant and demented Nero was particularly despised by the earliest followers of Jesus, including the writer of Revelation. Nero was said to have burned followers of Jesus alive to illuminate his garden.
But the author of Revelation couldn’t safely name Nero, so he used the Jewish numerology system to spell out Nero’s imperial name, Pagels says.
Pagels says that John may have had in mind other meanings for the mark of the beast: the imperial stamp Romans used on official documents, tattoos authorizing people to engage in Roman business, or the images of Roman emperors on stamps and coins.
Since Revelation’s author writes in “the language of dreams and nightmares,” Pagels says it’s easy for outsiders to misconstrue the book’s original meaning.
Still, they take heart from Revelation’s larger message, she writes:
“…Countless people for thousands of years have been able to see their own conflicts, fears, and hopes reflected in his prophecies. And because he speaks from his convictions about divine justice, many readers have found reassurance in his conviction that there is meaning in history – even when he does not say exactly what that meaning is – and that there is hope.”
3. The writer of Revelation was a Christian
The author of Revelation hated Rome, but he also scorned another group – a group of people we would call Christians today, Pagels says.
There’s a common perception that there was a golden age of Christianity, when most Christians agreed on an uncontaminated version of the faith. Yet there was never one agreed-upon Christianity. There were always clashing visions.
Revelation reflects some of those early clashes in the church, Pagels says.
That idea isn’t new territory for Pagels. She won the National Book Award for “The Gnostic Gospels,” a 1979 book that examined a cache of newly discovered “secret” gospels of Jesus. The book, along with other work from Pagels, argues that there were other accounts of Jesus’ life that were suppressed by early church leaders because it didn’t fit with their agenda.
The author of Revelation was like an activist crusading for traditional values. In his case, he was a devout Jew who saw Jesus as the messiah. But he didn’t like the message that the apostle Paul and other followers of Jesus were preaching.
This new message insisted that gentiles could become followers of Jesus without adopting the requirements of the Torah. It accepted women leaders, and intermarriage with gentiles, Pagels says.
The new message was a lot like what we call Christianity today.
That was too much for the author of Revelation. At one point, he calls a woman leader in an early church community a “Jezebel.” He calls one of those gentile-accepting churches a “synagogue of Satan.”
John was defending a form of Christianity that would be eclipsed by the Christians he attacked, Pagels says.
“What John of Patmos preached would have looked old-fashioned – and simply wrong to Paul’s converts…,” she writes.
The author of Revelation was a follower of Jesus, but he wasn’t what some people would call a Christian today, Pagels says.
“There’s no indication that he read Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount or that he read the gospels or Paul’s letters,” she says. “….He doesn’t even say Jesus died for your sins.”
4. There is only one Book of Revelation
There’s no other book in the Bible quite like Revelation, but there are plenty of books like Revelation that didn’t make it into the Bible, Pagels says.
Early church leaders suppressed an “astonishing” range of books that claimed to be revelations from apostles such as Peter and James. Many of these books were read and treasured by Christians throughout the Roman Empire, she says.
There was even another “Secret Revelation of John.” In this one, Jesus wasn’t a divine warrior, but someone who first appeared to the apostle Paul as a blazing light, then as a child, an old man and, some scholars say, a woman.
So why did the revelation from John of Patmos make it into the Bible, but not the others?
Pagels traces that decision largely to Bishop Athanasius, a pugnacious church leader who championed Revelation about 360 years after the death of Jesus.
Athanasius was so fiery that during his 46 years as bishop he was deposed and exiled five times. He was primarily responsible for shaping the New Testament while excluding books he labeled as hearsay, Pagels says.
Many church leaders opposed including Revelation in the New Testament. Athanasius’s predecessor said the book was “unintelligible, irrational and false.”
Athanasius, though, saw Revelation as a useful political tool. He transformed it into an attack ad against Christians who questioned him.
Rome was no longer the enemy; those who questioned church authority were the anti-Christs in Athanasius’s reading of Revelation, Pagels says.
“Athanasius interprets Revelation’s cosmic war as a vivid picture of his own crusade against heretics and reads John’s visions as a sharp warning to Christian dissidents,” she writes. “God is about to divide the saved from the damned – which now means dividing the ‘orthodox’ from ‘heretics.’ ’’
Centuries later, Revelation still divides people. Pagels calls it the strangest and most controversial book in the Bible.
Even after writing a book about it, Pagels has hardly mastered its meaning.
“The book is the hardest one in the Bible to understand,” Pagels says. “I don’t think anyone completely understands it.”
Day Six of May 21 Apocalypse: Harold Camping Narrows Down Identity of Antichrist
Courtesy Universal Pictures
By BC Bass Wednesday, May 18, 2011
SAN NARCISO, Calif. -- With just two days and a few hours of life remaining for the denizens of God’s creation, Judgment Day mouthpiece Harold Camping -- of Christian media leviathan, Family Stations -- has divulged more details about the Second Coming of Christ. In Camping’s latest revelation, he attempts to narrow down the identity of the Antichrist. As foretold in the Book of Revelations, the nemesis of the Lord will likely assume the misleading form of a savior, widely believed to be a politician or an individual holding enormous global sway. Based on Family Stations’ Wednesday broadcast, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the disgraced managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have become Camping’s two most feasible suspects.
The Terminator
Camping had targeted Arnold Schwarzenegger as his front-runner until the news of Strauss-Kahn’s arrest for rape this week. Family Stations representatives provided the following justification for Schwarzenegger’s qualifications as Antichrist.
Arnold Schwarzenegger seems the perfect candidate. His family history is checkered and morally dubious. First of all, he comes from a long and storied line of Nazis. His father Gustav was a member of the Nazi Party. Then there’s Kurt Waldheim, former secretary general of the United Nations, who was discovered to have participated in Nazi atrocities during World War II. That information came to light while he was running for president of Austria in 1986. Why is this important? Because Mr. Waldheim is a close friend of Mr. Schwarzenegger. And Waldheim wasn’t just any Nazi. His name appears on the Wehrmacht’s “honor list.”
That Austria, where both men are from, had opposed Hitler’s regime until forced into it through the Anschluss, is particularly poignant given that the Schwarzeneggers and Waldheims were on board with genocide from the start.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was also a notorious drug user. He famously smoked pot on camera in one of his homoerotic muscle movies. He later admitted to steroid use. He hung around Steve Reeves a lot too. If you don’t understand the impact of that, ask a homosexual. Then condemn him and run away.
And of course, Schwarzenegger cherished his film role as the Terminator, an unstoppable beast sent to destroy all humankind in order to create a soulless new world through a nuclear holocaust. He also starred in a film about the apocalypse called “End of Days.” Coincidence? Nope. And in that awful film, the devil possesses him, at which point he attempts to rape an innocent girl. This too closely mirrors Schwarzenegger’s real life.
We also believe that the letters of his last name, rearranged, impart a dreadful warning. Our research concludes that his name is an anagram for “Czar’s Egg When Re.” A czar is an evil communist tyrant. His egg would be the spawn of the devil. And “when Re” would allude to the return of the heathen Egyptian god Amen-Re, a possible reference to humans resuming worship of false idols and demons.
Mr. Schwarzenegger’s credentials as a harbinger of Doomsday are truly difficult to deny.
Overturning the Tables of an Evil Money Lender
IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn was charged with seven criminal counts on Monday and faces a possible 25-year sentence after being accused of sexual assault on a hotel worker in New York City. He remains in jail at Rikers Island as a grand jury weighs the evidence to indict him.
According to the plaintiff, Strauss-Kahn emerged from his bathroom naked, grunting like a “rutting chimpanzee.” He then allegedly forced the plaintiff to the ground and engaged in a series of humiliating and unsanitary sex acts that, while legal in France, are outlawed in the United States.
Theologians from Family Stations clarified their reasons for now considering Strauss-Kahn a possible Antichrist contender:
Mr. Strauss-Kahn, despite his penchant for rape, has unparalleled power and influence in the theater of global economics. Although he is being pressured to resign, his departure could jeopardize many sensitive political situations brewing across the world. In many ways, he maintains a delicate balance between frail alliances.
But now Brazilian and Chinese foreign ministries are using Strauss-Kahn’s arrest as leverage to end the World War II-era “gentleman’s agreement” that guaranteed Europe the managing director’s post. If that came to pass, and the IMF became controlled by a non-European director, we could see the collapse of world markets in a matter of days, as Islamic terrorists or brown-skinned communists assumed his mantle. But perhaps this was all part of his master plan to destabilize the world, create chaos, and usher in the legions of Hell.
The Uncomfortable Parallels and Prophesies
The most interesting correlation between the two men, in Camping’s expert analysis, is that they have held positions of significant power in large economies of scale, have at one time been touted as saviors, and have molested their servants.
“These are all signs described by John, if you fully comprehend his Revelation,” Camping claimed. “There are so many specific references to sexual transgressions involving menial servants. In the prologue to the first Revelation, it is written, ‘God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place.’ We interpret this to mean that the Antichrist will display his penis to a hapless maid and produce a scion through her. It’s clear that God warned humans of this eventuality. But it gets worse. In the second Revelation, it is written that the Antichrist ‘misleads my servants into sexual immorality.’ Then in the third book it says, ‘I am coming soon.’ Right there! That’s the climax of the Beast’s sexual congress with the servant. The evidence is beyond refute. This is happening, friends. It has happened.”
Camping, for his money, says that he is still betting on Schwarzenegger as the Antichrist, and believes this will be revealed on the last episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” where Schwarzenegger’s estranged wife Maria Shriver is slated to appear.
“I wouldn’t want to make a definite claim just yet, because I haven’t finished my studies on the matter,” Harold Camping cautioned. “But Strauss-Kahn has not produced an illegitimate offspring that we know of. Arnold Schwarzenegger most certainly has.”
Mildred Patricia Baena had been a housekeeper for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver for over 20 years. Schwarzenegger fathered a son with her during that time, which was only recently made public. The product of their union is now 13 years old.
“Thirteen,” Camping mused. “Not a godly number, is it? I think that says it all.”
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