The Mighty City and the Holy City: John’s Apocalypse at the Intersections of Power and Praise
I teach an undergraduate course, “God and Religion in the City,” which begins with a unit called “imagined cities.” The first assignment was: “Design your ideal city! Using only graphics, and without any text, use your imagination to come up with an image (or even a model) of what you envision would be the perfect city.” We then turned to consider imagined cities vividly depicted in the Bible. Last semester we read Revelation 21:10-27, using a handout from which I had stripped chapter-and-verse references, to keep students from bringing any baggage of presuppositions about biblical stories to their reading. They did not immediately recognize this as a biblical text, and one observed, “It sounds very beautiful, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of place anybody would really want to live.” One student pushed back against verse 27, “Nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” The student said, “It doesn’t sound like a very welcoming place.” Another complained, “Even though it says ‘Its gates will never be shut by day’ [verse 25], this sounds like a very exclusive gated community.” I found their candor refreshing!
I also wanted my students to consider something that is missing from the heavenly Jerusalem: “I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” (Rev 21:27). Temples, I explained, were familiar features in the cityscapes of Revelation’s earliest audiences. These cities were proud centers of the provincial cult of the emperor, boasting temples to the deified Roman emperor and to the personified city of Rome itself. The provincial cult was not imposed by the distant capital. It was instead sought after by provincial elites, who competed to outdo each other in benefactions and honorifics directed toward Roman leaders whose favor they sought.1 This cult was an important feature of the architectural landscape of cities in the province of Asia, and a popular element in the socio-economic milieu of Asian society.2 “Economically, imperial rule was good for business.”3
John’s declaration, therefore, “I saw no temple in the city” offered a counter-narrative that challenged the narrative in stones, statues and inscriptions that testified to the pervasiveness of Roman rule over the inhabitants of Asia’s cities. By telling his audiences of a city where “its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb,” John counterbalanced the magnificent temples that honored a faraway potentate with the reassurance that God and Christ would be immediately present in their midst. Yet the words of Revelation 21:22 also bear undertones of tragic loss, for the same imperial power that brought prosperity to the cities of Asia was the power that left Jerusalem in ruins two decades before Revelation was written. The magnificence of the Asian imperial temples stood in stark contrast to the ruined Temple in Jerusalem. The lingering trauma of this tragedy led first century Christians to label Rome as Babylon, oppressive heir to the reputation of the empire that had destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BCE.
Recognizing that “the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of [Rome’s] luxury” (Rev 18:3), John proclaims a heavenly imperative: “Come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins, and so that you do not share in her plagues” (Revelation 18:4), urging them to distance themselves from the ways of an empire that Revelation declares damned and doomed: “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!” (Rev 18:2). As Babylon’s business partners weep below (Rev 18:10-13), the heaven’s inhabitants are invited to “Rejoice over her, O heaven, you saints and apostles and prophets! For God has given judgment for you against her” (Rev 18:20).
Did this amount to mere wishful thinking on John’s part? Does the fact that the imperial glory of Rome was to endure for several centuries more expose a fatal flaw in Revelation’s extreme apocalyptic rhetoric, or is there something more at work? For John, bringing down the temple of the emperor Domitian in Ephesus mattered less than dismantling the imperial myth that was the symbolic foundation on which the economic and political superstructure of Roman Asia stood, a myth that many of John’s contemporaries found powerfully convincing. By subverting that myth, the superstructure that depended on it would be reduced to a hollow shell, emptied of its persuasive power. By proposing a convincing counter-narrative, John sought to empower them to hold fast against assimilation and compromise.4 That counterstory, intricately woven together in the pages of the Apocalypse from the symbolic palette of Roman imperial ritual and from the repertory of Israel’s prophetic tradition, overturned Rome by unmasking it as nothing more and nothing less than Babylon, doomed to be consumed by its own excesses.
What were John’s earliest audiences expected to do? It is not likely that many could comply literally with the command, “Come out of her, my people.” This is true despite the indication that John himself had withdrawn from the urban centers of the mainland to the island of Patmos. The book’s inaugural vision begins, “I, John, your brother who share with you in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (Rev 1:9). Of John’s self-presentation in Revelation 1:9-10, François Bovon writes, “It is limited to two biographical elements: his concrete situation as a prisoner for religious opinion, and his ecstatic experience as a prophet.”5 For Bovon, Revelation 1:9a fills in the reason for specifying John’s location in 1:9b. “The persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance” John shares with his addressees is “because of the word of God and the testimony of God.” Brian Blount writes, “Location is not the seer’s crucial point. The issue is that he had been removed from their presence because of his witnessing activities on behalf of the lordship of God and Christ. The location of his exile was not as important for his rhetorical purpose as its reality and its rationale.”6 Noting the lack of evidence that Patmos ever served as a penal colony, David Barr comments on John’s presence on Patmos, explaining that this “could be understood in three ways: he is there for retreat…he is there to spread the gospel of Jesus; he is there as punishment (banished, or more technically relegated there by Roman authority).” He concludes, “How the reader chooses to construe this will have a major impact on how one reads the rest of the story.”7
Barr is right: nothing about John’s explanation of his presence on Patmos requires us to conclude that he was sentenced to the island as punishment. Yet, whether or not John was exiled there matters less than the rhetorical advantage of his distance from the mainland where the seven cities are located. The distance between the offshore island and the provincial urban centers provides a vantage point from which Revelation remaps the relationship between the provincial margins and the distant imperial center in Rome. Writing to the seven cities of Asia from Patmos removes John from the milieu to which his words are addressed, sharpening the focus of his analysis of his addressees’ predicament. Reading what John writes from the island of Patmos to Christians in seven cities of Asia adds its own force to the admonition of Revelation 18:4, “Come out of her, my people.”
John sets before his audience visions of two imagined cities, one the mighty city that was a distant presence looming large through its local surrogates in Asia, the other a holy city descended from above. He urges them to choose between them, to decide their allegiance. In a book that opens with words of benediction for the one who reads it aloud and for those who listen to its words thus proclaimed (Rev 1:4), a document that locates the seer’s inaugural vision “on the Lord’s day” (Rev 1:10), this decision is a matter of who is the proper object of worship: the emperor or the Christ. John positions his readers at the intersection of power and praise—the power of Rome unmasked as Babylon, and the praise of the God who comes to dwell with the faithful in a New Jerusalem. The emperor who was venerated as lord and god is unmasked as a ferocious, death-dealing beast, while the Lamb slaughtered on the cross is the risen Christ, the victorious Lion of Judah.
In the public square of Revelation’s late first century setting, politics was religion and religion was politics. Revelation calls its addressees to resistance, not to retreat. In the words of David deSilva, “John calls the communities to cease striving for political enfranchisement and a piece of the Roman pie…”8 Yet John’s was not the only voice competing for the attention of Christians living “in the belly of the beast” at the end of the first century CE. Other voices were more tolerant of practices that Revelation decries in the strongest terms, and John deploys especially intense vilification against such opponents within the seven churches. For example, John critiques the Thyatirans for tolerating an opponent he calls Jezebel, “who calls herself a prophet and is teaching and beguiling my servants to practice fornication and to eat food sacrificed to idols” (Rev 2:20). Here the Apocalypse redeploys the prophetic metaphor of fornication to describe accommodation to or participation in rituals other than Christian worship. What might have John said to Paul of Tarsus, for whom eating meat sacrificed to nonexistent gods was no big deal under most circumstances (1 Corinthians 8:1-13)?9
If first century cities were complicated places, with many voices competing for attention and influence, with many agendas at play at the multiple intersections of political power, economic structures, and ideas from everywhere, how much more so is that the case in twenty-first century cities? What are principled people to do? Are we to fight or to flee? Are we to give in and give up, or are we to resist and stand firm? What is worth living for, and what is worth sacrificing for? “Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches” (Rev 2:7).
Notes
1. See Craig R. Koester, Revelation: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Anchor Yale Bible; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014) 93-94.
2. See Steven J. Friesen, Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John: Reading Revelation in the Ruins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
3. Koester, Revelation, 93.
4. See David A. Sánchez, From Patmos to the Barrio: Subverting Imperial Myths (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), especially 13-46: “Subverting an Imperial Myth in First-Century Asia Minor: The Dragon Slayer.”
5. François Bovon, “John’s Self-Presentation in Revelation 1:9-10,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 62:4 (2000) 699.
6. Brian Blount, Revelation: A Commentary (New Testament Library; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 42.
7. David L. Barr, Tales of the End: A Narrative Commentary on the Book of Revelation (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 1998), 39.
8. David deSilva, “The Revelation to John: A Case Study in Apocalyptic Propaganda and the Maintenance of Sectarian Identity,” Sociological Analysis 53:4 (Winter 1992) 393.
9. See Koester, Revelation, 100.
This is the first article I’ve read as a brand-new subscriber to The Living Pulpit, and I’m very impressed by Professor Ruiz’ scholarship and interpretation. I would like to correspond further with the author and/or read more of his writings.