John of Patmos: A Controversial but Possible Portrait

WHO WAS THE AUTHOR OF REVELATION?

It was during the latter half of the first century that a man prepared to embark on a short voyage to an insignificant island in the Mediterranean. Ordinary as the trip must have seemed to his fellow travelers, it was destined to cause ripples in history that have still not abated.

The man called himself John, and the departing port was most likely Ephesus, a bustling city of almost half a million. The greatest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World dominated its prosperous life: the famed Temple of Artemis. No doubt John heard the Ephesians quote the poet Antipater, who had seen the wall of lofty Babylon on which was a road for chariots, who had visited the hanging gardens, and the magnificent statue of Zeus at Olympia, and the Colossus of Rhodes, and the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus. But when he saw the house of Artemis reaching to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and he declared, “Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on anything so grand.”

John, however, was not impressed. He was longing for the time when this temple would come crashing down. Soon, he hoped.

All this luxury, all this grandeur—he was sick of it. He couldn’t bear the tunes of the harpists and minstrels, flutists and trumpeters celebrating the gods. He hated the sight of people dressed in fine linen of purple and scarlet, adorned with gold, jewels, and pearls.

Showing off. Clamoring. Living.

The sound of the millstone filled the air. Lights shown through the windows of houses in which artists pursued their craft. In a courtyard adorned with flowers, a bridegroom and a bride laughed in celebration, their friends and family clapping joyously.

“It will all be silenced. It will all be thrown down,” John might have mumbled to himself as he shielded his eyes from the opulence around him and made for the harbor.

But it was no better there. The port was the hubbub of commerce. Merchants ordered servants around to load and unload cargo: iron, bronze, silver, gold, silk, and cloth; scented wood, ivory, and marble; cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, olive oil, choice flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots. And slaves. Human lives.

Did John only think of condemning this thriving culture when he arrived at the isolation of the island? Perhaps. Or perhaps even now he spoke under his breath: “All your dainties and your splendor will be lost to you, never to be found again. You will all weep and mourn. All you shipmasters and seafarers, sailors and merchants—you will all cry at the loss of your riches. It will happen. Soon. And then it will be my time to rejoice.”

John, we have to understand, was a radical. He deemed the materialism of affluent Roman society an enemy of God. But not only that. He also ran counter to many of his fellow Christians. It appears that he had just visited the cities that lay along the main commerce road of what is now western Turkey, and he had found the state of the church appalling.

Laodicea, for one, that center of wool trade and monetary transaction. Had not the Master said that you cannot serve both God and Mammon? Well, the Christians there were trying to serve both, John thought. Rich and satisfied, they were. Spiritually lukewarm. If they did not renounce this world, the Master would spit them out of His mouth. They would go to the place where all worshippers of Mammon were going.

The same in Sardis. With few exceptions, the whole church was spiritually dead. Unless they became more radical and stopped being out to gain the acceptance of society, their names would be blotted out of the Book of Life.

And in Thyatira he had met a woman teacher whose Christianity was so liberal that she even encouraged others to eat the normal meat from the marketplace, which had been sacrificed to idols. God was bound to intervene soon, though. She and all her followers would feel the brunt of God’s disciplinary action, of this John was sure.

Similar teachings were spreading in Pergamum, and in the great metropolis Ephesus the Christians were so caught up in their daily lives that they had lost their initial zeal for God.

But there was hope. A minority of believers was not under the spell of Mammon. They were poor and vulnerable in this world, yet strong in God. Some of them lived radically enough to suffer persecution, such as the dear believers in Philadelphia and Smyrna, who had run into repeated problems with the local synagogue leaders. And in Pergamum one Christian had even been killed for his faith, just like Jesus. A martyr.

In John’s view, the church needed more martyrs: people who were willing to live in direct opposition to their own culture. Some were doing it, and they had to be encouraged, but all the others needed a wake-up call. “Come out of her, my people!”—This was the message the Christians needed to hear. “Separate yourself from the godless society around you, from the money and luxury, the feasting and singing, the marrying and toiling. Come out and seek the Lord!”

This, at least, John intended to do on the island to which he was headed. The ship was leaving the harbor now, and already he was feeling better as the noises of the merchants were swept away by the wind of the open sea. After months of pagan city life, God’s sun shining on the clear turquoise of the Mediterranean water must have felt to John like a welcoming presence from on high.

Yes, he was going to Patmos, one of many small islands between Macedonia and Asia Minor. Hardly anyone was living there. Solitude.

Why he was going? Well, he himself only said it was “because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (Rev. 1:9). This might mean that he was banished there by the Roman authorities for having stirred up too much trouble on behalf of the Christian message. It is doubtful, however, that someone who did not hold any influential position in the empire would be silenced by exile. Senators, relatives of the emperor, government officials, high ladies, famous poets and philosophers—all those might for one reason or another be sent into exile. But some leader of what was seen as merely a quarrel within Judaism? Someone who was most likely not even a Roman citizen, such as Paul had been? There were more expedient ways to silence a non-citizen quarrel maker.

Still, one shouldn’t rule it out. There could have been factors we are not aware of.

But it is equally possible that the phrase “because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” simply means that John went to Patmos voluntarily in order to seek God. One clear message in the Book of Revelation is that Christians ought to separate themselves from Roman society, which John viewed as being on the brim of destruction. What better way of putting his own message into practice than fleeing the madness himself? And what more convincing place from which to write such a message than a remote island?

The Lukewarm Reception of Revelation

The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place; he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who testified to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw. Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it; for the time is near.

- Revelation 1:1-3

No other book in the Bible begins with such a pronounced claim of divine authorship. In essence, John is telling the reader: “Make no mistake. This is from God. And He has something important to say for the very near future, here and now in the first century.”

Such a confident claim forced people throughout the ages to make a definite decision on the book. You either had to embrace it or reject it. Completely. The one thing John did not leave open for you was to appreciate it in a differentiated, half-accepting manner. Hot or cold, but not lukewarm – that’s the effect John was going for.

The only problem is that if you mix hot and cold, lukewarm is precisely what you get. That, at least, has been the overall reception of the book by Christians from the second century onward. Some embraced Revelation as their favorite text; others rejected it as not being from God at all.

The result was that the father of church historians, Eusebius, listed it as a disputed book around the year 300. Some Bibles did not print it as late as the seventeenth century, and even today it remains the only book of the New Testament that – though officially accepted in the canon – is excluded from the liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

That is a rather lukewarm reception, wouldn’t you say?

Why Martin Luther Rejected the Book of Revelation

(Picture copyright by Jacob Schriftman. Do not use without permission.)

The Book of Revelation contains one of the longest quotes of Jesus Himself—a quote, furthermore, that was supposedly written down only moments after He uttered it.

The Gospels were composed decades after Jesus’ life. It would be a mistake to read them as transcripts of Jesus’ teachings, as if the authors based their records on tape recordings rather than oral transmission. The author of Luke, for instance, simply said that he had done his proper research; he did not claim to transcribe Jesus verbatim.

John’s Revelation, on the other hand, does make that claim. Jesus appears in awe-inspiring power and tells John to write down what he is about to receive, and then He launches into a lengthy monologue. Here we have Jesus actually dictating part of the Bible to a human secretary.

Yet, what kind of a Jesus do we meet in these messages? Is it the same Jesus whom so many Christians have grown to love by reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? The Jesus who upset the religious purists by reaching out to sinners and rejects? The one who usually reserved His reprimands to legalists who thought it terribly important to eat kosher food and keep the Sabbath, while ignoring that God’s commandments were meant to help people?

It can be argued, and many Christians in fact have argued, that the Jesus of Revelation is quite a different Jesus than the one in the Gospels and in Paul’s letters. In the Gospels, Jesus condemns an overemphasis on purity, kosher living, as well as misguided religious zeal. In Revelation, He condemns the lack of purity, kosher living, and religious zeal. Legalism seems to have suddenly disappeared as an item on His list of concerns. In the Gospels, He wins over the sinners by accepting them with open arms; now He attempts to reform them by saying that they make Him sick and He will throw them up.

In a word, you could say there is a lack of grace in Revelation. Here, grace is reserved for those who deserve grace, which really makes it no grace at all. Grace means to get something you do not deserve—a theme that runs like a golden thread through the Gospels and Paul’s letters. In Revelation, some say, this golden thread breaks off. Now we are back to the concept of reward rather than grace: getting what you deserve.

That is why Martin Luther, the man who sparked the Reformation, said that Revelation is no prophecy from God at all and that “Christ is neither taught nor known in it.” He later changed his mind, but it seems that such was his view at the time when he distributed his ninety-five theses, which set the greatest shift in the history of the church in motion.

Are Christians today still at liberty to draw the same conclusion about Revelation as Martin Luther did? Or would they be then labeled by many of their fellow Christians as unbelievers, or at least as people spreading false teachings?

A Different Kind of Prayer: Wrestling with Questions

A few days ago, a learned correspondent posed a number of questions that implied a critique of orthodox Christianity and asked me what I do with them.

What I do with questions like that is this: I explore them as honestly as I can (“Might the author of Revelation have simply been a sad, sadistic, legalistic misogynist? Possibly.”) and hurl my doubts in Job-like fashion at heaven, so to speak. Even if there is no answer. I don’t try to defend the orthodox faith, like Job’s friends did, but try to honestly say what I think and feel – in the hope that, if there is a God, He will appreciate my honest search for Him more than my dishonest defense of proper doctrine.

It is, in a sense, the Atheist’s Wager with the twist of “putting my doubt in God” rather than throwing God overboard. I don’t have much of a prayer life in the traditional sense, but I view my critical exploration of these questions ultimately as a prayer.

Making Sense of Suffering

The current battles with terrorists in India remind me of the many other disasters that occured this year.

In the month of May alone, a cyclone in Myanmar killed approximately 130,000 people and made a million homeless. An earthquake in China brought an end to at least 69,000 and robbed five million of their homes, not to mention robbing many young ones of their parents. In Ethiopia, meanwhile, six million children were on the verge of starvation; I don’t know how many of them lived past that month, or what the average life span of the survivors will be. Such a prospect made the tornadoes in the United States seem mild by comparison.

Suffering, however, is also a close companion of those who have been fortunate enough to escape major disasters so far. Who does not know the pain of relationships, even in the midst of health and prosperity? As Augustine wrote in the fifth century,

“What shall I say of the miseries of love… – slights, suspicions, quarrels, war today, peace tomorrow? Is not human life full of such things? Do they not often occur even in honorable friendships? … [W]e do not know the heart of our friend, and though we did know it today, we should be as ignorant of what it might be tomorrow. Who ought to be, or who are more friendly than those who live in the same family? And yet who can rely even upon this friendship, seeing that secret treachery has often broken it up, and produced enmity as bitter as the amity was sweet, or seemed sweet by the most perfect dissimulation?” (The City of God, Book XIX).

Since the reality of suffering cannot be denied, believers in a good God – and those who would like to believe in such a God – have often wondered about the purpose of suffering. Why do people suffer in a world created by a perfectly good and all-powerful God?

In the fourth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus put it like this:

“God either wants to eliminate bad things and cannot, or can but does not want to, or neither wishes to nor can, or both wants to and can. If he wants to and cannot, he is weak – and this does not apply to God. If he can but does not want to, then he is spiteful – which is equally foreign to God’s nature. If he neither wants to nor can, he is both weak and spiteful and so not a god. If he wants to and can, which is the only thing fitting for a god, where then do bad things come from? Or why does he not eliminate them?”

Why indeed? The Book of Revelation in the New Testament seems to suggest that people suffer because God wants to warn them of even greater suffering to come (see Chapter 7). It is His way of pouring cold water on the heads of sinners and waking them from their spiritual slumber.

Proclaiming this pain-stricken earth to be God’s training ground for eternity, however, has mostly failed to bring the skeptic to his knees. Instead, it has caused outrage or at least a lively discussion on why such an idea is problematic.

The first problem is that it completely ignores the suffering of infants, small children, and animals. Is the deer expected to repent of its sins when chased by a lion? And is a torn deer supposed to serve as a warning to its comrades that eternal torment is awaiting the unbelieving deer soul? Hardly. No verse in the Bible promises eternal life to animals. Why then, from a purely theological perspective, do they need to suffer? The same goes for infants and little children who do not yet have the reasoning powers to repent of their sins. Evolution does provide a sensible answer here, but not Revelation.

Second, there are ethical limitations on how much suffering one can inflict for a future good. If I see a group of people approaching a mine field and find myself in the position to warn them, am I justified to issue my warning by mowing down half of them with a machine gun and maiming the rest? Is there any court in the world that would sanction my action? And what are the many diseases, epidemics, earthquakes, floods, and storms but a constant killing and maiming of earthly life?

Third, suffering as a way of steering people away from future suffering only makes sense when they know the good that will come of it. Unless you tell a child that a vaccination will prevent disease, it is hardly going to turn its naked shoulder to the pointy needle. Granted, you sometimes have to force someone into their own good, such as with a baby or a mentally handicapped person. But with them you are not aiming at voluntary submission, which is what Revelation is aiming at.

To take a different example, every soldier-to-be knows the purpose of recruit training. He can therefore interpret its hardships in the right light, knowing that they are necessary for his successful career as a soldier. Applying this to humanity as a whole, one can imagine all people being born in another sphere where God instructs them about His purpose for their eternal lives, before sending them to this earth as a temporary training ground. If this was the case, life on earth would still be a test so hard as to border on cruelty, but at least people knew what they were in for. As it is, however, we are born on this earth and know no other. Different people say different things about the purpose of our planet. There is little agreement on whether this is a boot camp for something better or as good as it gets. And as long as there is still any disagreement on why we are here, Revelation’s take on suffering falls flat.

Forth and last, Revelation itself admits that the whole scheme simply does not work. A minority starts believing in God because of their suffering, yes. But only a minority. For many people, it was not only the Jews and gypsies who died in the Holocaust, but God, too.

A more cautious Christian approach to suffering is to admit that ultimately we do not understand it. We might never know why God lets us suffer so much, but we know one thing: If there was any way around it, God Himself would not have come to suffer. Since He did, since He suffered indescribably and even died, the picture has changed. He has taken His own medicine, so to speak, He has swallowed the bitter pill Himself – and therefore we can trust Him.

This, of course, begs the question of how all the people before the advent of Christ were supposed to understand their suffering, but that would lead us away from Revelation and to books such as Job.

(To read more about various controversies and important issues surrounding the Book of Revelation, see my book John’s Revelation: Its Controversy and Fascination, which will probably be published in 2009 or 2010.)

A History of the End of the World

 

From Publishers Weekly:

The question of how and when the world will end has captivated thinkers for centuries. Wars, natural disasters, social upheaval and personal suffering often send believers back to the writings of their prophets and seers, whose gift is to bring satisfying answers to such questions. The book most studied in the Western tradition is Revelation, the last entry in the Christian canon. Kirsch, an attorney and book columnist for the Los Angeles Times, takes the reader on a delightful 2,000-year journey as he explores a text he describes as “a romantic tale, full of intrigue and suspense” and shows how churches, philosophers, clergy and armchair interpreters have promoted their political, social and religious agendas based on their belief that the end was imminent. Some of this history can be quite sobering, as the powerful have waged wars and built societies based on their varying perceptions of Revelation’s message. However, consistent with Kirsch’s earlier literary efforts, in particular The Harlot by the Side of the Road, the author exercises great care while treating his material with both sobriety and a healthy sense of the ironic. Written clearly and for a general audience, this is a fine book that merits wide readership.

 

This is What I Think About It:

I’ve been a student of the Book of Revelation for some time, and have gone through church history on numerous occasions. So not everything in the book was new. But it was still worth it. 

One might criticize the book for exaggerating its case and for being too quick to make causal connections. I agree.

I nonetheless highly praise the book because it contains a wealth of detailed and highly engrossing information. Kirsch does not expect his readers to believe something simply because he says so; no, he quotes extensively from historical sources, without letting the quotes overburden his prose. 

The result is very entertaining and very informative. I’ve used it more than once in my own lectures to give an outline of Apocalyptic thinking throughout the ages, starting from pre-Christian Judaism and ending in our own time. 

Here are a few highlights from the book about each century: 

ca. 200 B.C.: 

The starting point of Apocalyptic Literature in Judaism was the First Book of Enoch. Part of the Book was The Animal Apocalypse. At its climax, the evildoers on earth are vanquished by an army of “small lambs” that grow horns – the leader of the flock is the lamb with the biggest horn – and they go into battle with a sword bestowed upon them by “the Lord of the sheep” 

Quote from Enoch: “And the people of God had great joy because the name of that Son of Man had been revealed to them. And he sat on the throne of his glory, and the whole judgment was given to the Son of Man, and he will cause the sinners to pass away and be destroyed from the face of the earth. And from then on there will be nothing corruptible.” 

The point: Apocalyptic Literature is the mother of Christianity. 

2ND CENTURY B.C.: 

Here, for the first time in recorded history, we are able to glimpse the remarkable power of the Apocalyptic idea to move otherwise ordinary men and women to offer their lives, sometimes as soldiers and sometimes as martyrs, in the name of God. 

1ST CENTURY B.C.: 

The Essenes retreated into the wilderness, the Zealots were willing to take up arms, others endured the situation and saw themselves as martyrs. 

1ST CENTURY C.E.: 

John of Patmos did not intend his message in Revelation to endure for the ages for the simple reason that he was convinced: It would come to pass soon. He would have been shocked and heartbroken to know that we are all still here to read what he wrote two thousand years ago. 

2ND CENTURY: 

In the first centuries, many Christians struggled with the message in Revelation. It was such a contrast to the other early Christian documents such as the Gospels. 

Revelation was, however, the favorite text of Maximilla and Prisca, who also prophesied – a movement that became known as “New Prophecy.” They taught that the end was near, and discouraged remarriage and the bearing of children: “The biblical command, ‘increase and multiply,’ is annulled by the fact that we are living in the last age.” 

3RD CENTURY: 

A Roman bishop called Hippolytus (ca. 170-235) said that the “Beast” in Revelation is the antichrist mentioned in the epistles of John. 

4TH CENTURY: 

Some saw Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity as the beginning of the Millennium. 

Martin of Tours was convinced that the Beast of Revelation was alive and well somewhere in the world, ready “to assume power as soon as he reached the proper age.” 

5TH CENTURY: 

One of Martin’s disciples, Sulpicius, continued the message. “Now this is the eighth year since we heard these words from his lips. You may guess, then, how soon those things which we fear in the future are about to happen.” 

“Behold, from Adam all the years have passed, and now comes the day of judgment!” Earthquakes and a solar eclipse that was recorded on July 19, 418 were seen as fulfillments of the prophecies in Revelation. 

500 C.E.: 

Some predicted with perfect confidence that the Second Coming would take place in the year 500 C.E. More cautions Christians called them “deliri et insani” – that is, “insane crazies” 

7TH CENTURY 

Mohammed emerged. One Spanish Christian calculated that Mohammed died in the year 666 and that his death showed that the end of the world was imminent. 

A calf born with a birth defect, a little earthquake or a shooting star was quickly interpreted as a sign of the end times. 

An inscription in the seventh century read: “Alpha and Omega. The Beginning and the End. For all things become every day worse, for the end is drawing near.” 

8TH CENTURY: 

A Spanish monk called Beatus of Liebana predicted that the Sabbath Age would being sometime in the year 800. He wrote in 775: “Every catholic ought to ponder, wait and fear, and to consider these twenty-five years, as if they were not more than an hour, and should weep day and night in sackcloth and ashes for their destruction and the world’s, but not strive to calculate time.” 

9TH CENTURY: 

A monk called Abbo of Fleury: “When I was a young man I heard a sermon about the End of the world preached before the people in the cathedral in Paris. According to this, as soon as the number of a thousand years was completed, the Antichrist would come and the Last Judgment would follow in a brief time.” 

For nearly a thousand years, daily life in the here and now seemed to fulfill even the most frightful prophecies of Revelation, and the end of the world seemed to be very near indeed. 

10TH CENTURY: 

In the Middle Ages, the apocalyptic expectations increasingly got an anti-Semitic touch. The Antichrist was supposed to be a Jew, conceived in a Babylonian brothel, the child of the Devil and a Jewish whore. He will seat himself on the throne in the city of Jerusalem, and compel the universal practice of circumcision. 

Crusades started, partly inspired by Revelation.

Publication of the book The Birth and Time of the Antichrist, which became somewhat of a medieval bestseller. 

Another book: The Fifteen Signs of Doomsday. 

11TH CENTURY: 

Some end-time fanatics were also staunch misogynists, such as Peter Damian: “I exhort you, women of the ancient enemy, you bitches, sows, screech-owls, night-owls, blood-suckers, she-wolves. Come now, hear me, harlots, prostitutes, with you lascivious kisses, you wallowing places for fat pigs, couches for unclean spirits.” 

12TH CENTURY: 

Joachim of Fiore: “This will not take place in the days of your grandchildren or in the old age of your children, but in your own days, few and evil.” 

According to Joachim, the seven heads of the Beast in Revelation are the seven persecutors of the church across the centuries of human history, including Herdo, Nero, and Saladin, the Muslim warrior who took back Jerusalem from the crusaders. The seventh head was the Antichrist who was soon to come. 

13TH CENTURY: 

Peter Olivi: The church herself was Babylon the Great. Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan order, was “the Angel of the Sixth Seal.” And the two founders of the Dominica order were the Two Witnesses of the End Times. 

Pope Gregory IX: “What other Antichrist should we await when, as is evident in his works, he is already come in the person of Frederick?” 

14TH CENTURY: 

Johan of Rupescissa, a Franciscan monk from southern France, insisted that all of the affliction foretold in Revelation would be visited on the world as punishment for the sins of the church. He saw the Saracens, Turks, and Tartars who threatened medieval Christendom as the satanic armies that were gathering for the final battle of Armageddon. 

15TH CENTURY: 

Christopher Columbus wrote a book called The Book of Prophecies. He wanted to free Jerusalem of the Muslims and rebuild the temple there. His royal patron, Ferdinand of Aragon, was seen as a worthy candidate for the title of Last World Emperor, and the victory of the Spanish crown over the last Islamic kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula was regarded as a sign of the approaching millennial kingdom. 

Then, however, Columbus discovered America. Writes he: “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John, and he showed me the spot where to find it.” 

16TH CENTURY: 

Luther about the Book of Revelation in the German translation of the Bible in 1522: “My Spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book. There is one sufficient reason for the small esteem in which I hold it–that Christ is neither taught in it nor recognized.” 

It took Luther a few years to see the uses to which he could put the book of Revelation. “The true Antichrist … is reigning in the Roman Curia.” “We too were formerly stuck in the behind of this hellish whore, this new church of the pope. We supported it in all earnestness, so that we regret having spent so much time and energy in that vile hole. But God be thanked that he rescued us from the scarlet whore.” 

17TH CENTURY: 

A group called the Fifth Monarchy Men believed that King Jesus would soon appear and set up a biblical theocracy in England. As one of their rallies was broken up and they were carried to prison, they shouted, “Lord, appear, now or never.” 

A book by Nicholas Raimarus (1606): Chronological, Certain, and Irrefutable Proof, from the Holy Scripture and the Fathers, That the World Will Perish and the Last Day Will Come Within 77 Years. 

18TH CENTURY: 

Jonathan Edwards, who sparked the so-called First Great Awakening in America, interpreted Revelation to mean that the antichrist would reign for 1,260 years, not days, and that the reign had begun in 606 and would end around 1866. He saw the convulsions of the Great Awakening as “signs of the millennium lately begun in Northampton” (the place where Edwards preached). 

19TH CENTURY: 

A man from New York called William Miller calculated that Jesus Christ would return sometime between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844. People left their jobs, sold their houses, and waited on the rooftops of New York. 

20TH CENTURY: 

Charles Taze Russell. “Millions now living will never die.” He fixed 1874 as the starting point of the countdown clock and predicted that the reign of Jesus would begin in 1914. WWI began in that year. 
One Pentecostal journal declared: “War! War! War!!! The Nations of Europe Battle and Unconsciously Prepare the Way for the Return of the Lord Jesus.” WWI was seen as the battle of Armageddon. 

Televangelists all had that emphasis. Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Rex Humbard, Timothy LaHaye, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, and Jerry Falwell. At a crusade in 1950, Billy Graham announced: “We may have another year, maybe two year to work for Jesus Christ, and then, ladies and gentlemen, I believe it is all going to be over.” 

But the examples of the 20th century are too numerous to recount. Read the book. You’ll alternately laugh, cringe, and – if you are that kind of person – pray for God’s mercy on His crazy people. And probably for a greater distribution of His wisdom, too, which has often been lacking when it comes to the question of the world’s end.

The Extraordinary Claim of the Bible

Christians assert that the Bible is inspired by God. They say that, in one way or another, it records how God revealed Himself to mankind.

That is quite an outrageous claim. This book, which you can go and buy in an ordinary book store, is claimed to be the revelation of Ultimate Reality. These sheets of paper, this black ink, are supposedly a trustworthy account of who the God of the universe is. Of this God, of this Unfathomable One, we can simply stroll into a bookstore and buy a “revelation”? It is indeed an outrageous claim.

Now it is well known that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Ordinary claims require little evidence because not much depends on them. If someone claims that on his walk through a park this morning he saw a squirrel, he does not need extraordinary evidence to back up his claim. He saw a squirrel—so what? Whether or not he saw a squirrel makes little difference to the rest of the world. It is not an extraordinary claim. Many people meet squirrels on their walks through a park. If, on the other hand, he claims to have seen a live dinosaur in the park, it does not exactly qualify as something ordinary. The truth or falsehood of his claim would be of some importance to other people in the world, both for scientists and for pedestrians in the said park. If the claim is true and pedestrians do not believe it, their very lives might be forfeited through their disbelief.

Since the claim of a live dinosaur being sighted in a park is so extraordinary, however, most of us would be inclined to disbelieve it. We would find another explanation for the dinosaur: It was a hallucination, or a mechanical dinosaur model, or another large animal that the person mistook for a dinosaur.

In contrast, we would feel no need to have an alternative explanation for the squirrel. Ordinary claims do not require extraordinary evidence, but extraordinary claims do.

Now the Christians’ assertion of the Bible’s authority is in some ways even more extraordinary than the story about the dinosaur. It therefore requires extraordinary evidence, or at least sufficient evidence to even begin considering it as a possibility. Also, if the claim is true, it has much more value than the dinosaur in the park. People’s eternal lives, and in a sense the whole universe, might depend on whether or not the contents of the Bible are true.

This makes it all the more important to examine the Bible’s authenticity. Everything that is supposed to be of great value is checked for its authenticity. If a man opens the front door of his house in the morning and stumbles over a big suitcase lying there, and, upon unzipping it, finds to his great surprise that it is packed to the brim with thousand-dollar bills, he is likely going to think, “This is too good to be true. These bills are probably counterfeit money. Or there is something else wrong about them. I’ll go to the police, tell them the story and show them the money. I want to make sure that this extraordinary gift is for real. I don’t want to get locked up for possessing millions of dollars of counterfeit money or for being in any other way involved in illegal dealings.”

Such a reaction would be wise. It would be rash to go out and start spending the money before checking both its authenticity and legality.

And isn’t a true revelation of Almighty God of much greater worth than a few million dollars? Christians claim that the Bible is, so to speak, a “suitcase” placed as a gift in front of the entryways of our souls, and its contents are weightier than the rest of the world put together. If we thus hold the whole world in our hands, would it not be wise to first make sure that the claim is true?—to check whether the bills are genuine or counterfeit?

(Read more about the claims of the Bible in my new work The C. S. Lewis Book on the Bible: What the Greatest Christian Writer Thought About the Greatest Book.)