The History of Hell

As noted in a previous post, I have been thinking recently about the Christian concept of hell, and although I have written about hell several times in the past, I wanted to add some fresh perspectives on the topic.

When I went off to college in 1993, to a small, Baptist school in central Kentucky, I had the same traditional beliefs about hell that many Christians still hold today: hell is a literal place where people who are not saved literally go to spend eternity in suffering and torment. Like many Christians, I don’t think I had ever given a whole lot of thought to this idea; I believed it simply because it’s what I had been taught from a young age. The bizarre idea that a loving God would send the vast majority of humans to suffer in eternal flaming agony for all eternity had not really crossed my mind. That was an intellectual conundrum I would not come to face for quite some time.

In any case, shortly after arriving at college, I heard talk about how one of the religion professors (at this small school, there were only about three) did not believe in hell. I was scandalized by this. How could someone, especially a Christian professor of religion at a private, Baptist college, not believe in hell? I found this perplexing indeed, and wrote it off at the time as simply the weird ideas of a new-age academic (“new-age” is the term I would have used at the time to refer to what is now frequently called “liberal” or “progressive”).

Now, seventeen years down the line, I count myself among those Christians who disbelieve in the existence of hell. I can state categorically that I do not believe hell is a literal place of flame and torment that exists in space and time.

This statement, of course, may cause my readers to ask the same sorts of questions I asked when I first learned about the religion professor who did not believe in hell. How can someone be a Christian and not believe hell exists? The Bible, after all, talks explicitly about hell. Hell, as the counterpart to heaven, has been part of Christian beliefs from the earliest days of Christianity. Jesus mentions hell in the gospels. When you deny the existence of hell, aren’t you essentially saying that Jesus was at best mistaken, and at worst a liar?

Like many issues within Christian history and theology, this requires a bit of background.

JEWISH BACKGROUND

In the Jewish scriptures – the Christian Old Testament – hell is never mentioned. Indeed, the ancient Jews had no conception of a place like hell. In the Old Testament, when people die, they simply go to the grave. Good or bad, Jew or non-Jew, the grave awaits us all. The Hebrew word in question is sheol.

Sheol was a word used both literally and metaphorically by the ancient Jews, much the same way we used the word “grave” both ways today. We talk about visiting our loved one’s grave, and we also talk about having “one foot in the grave.” The same is true of sheol in the Old Testament. It can be used metaphorically (“The cords of the grave [sheol] entangled me, the snares of death confronted me” Psalm 18:5), or literally (“The bones of the inhabitants of Jerusalem shall be brought out of their tombs [sheol]” Jeremiah 8:1).

Sheol was not, as some recent commentators have suggested, the equivalent of the Greek idea of Hades. In Greek thought, Hades was the abode of the dead. It was not a grave, but rather a sort of collecting place for human souls that had departed their dead bodies. All human souls went to Hades – good and bad. Hades was not a place of punishment or reward, but simply a place for souls to congregate in a sort of dreary underworld existence.

The reason sheol was not like Hades is very simple: ancient Jews had no concept, as the Greeks did, of a soul separate from the living human body. This of course, like the existence of hell itself, is different from much modern theology, which tends to affirm the existence of a soul. Our ideas about a soul separate from our bodies, of course, come from the Greek philosophers of late antiquity, most notably Plato. This Hellenistic philosophy was rampant through Judaism by the time of Jesus and the earliest Christians, which is why souls are talked about consistently by the Jewish-Christian writers of the New Testament. But in the Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament, the human soul is always mentioned in unified connection with the body. For the ancient Jews, souls weren’t separate. They did not leave the body at death. Soul and body were inseparable. The soul, for the ancient Jew, was equated to the breath. The very Hebrew word for “soul” had, as its root, the word “breath.” Just as God “breathed” his own “breath” into Adam, so our own human “breath” is equated with our soul or spirit.

What this all means is quite simple: the ancient Jews had no concept of an afterlife. Soul and body were inseparable, two sides of the same coin, and when a person died, their body (and thus their soul/spirit/breath) simply went into the grave. These ancient Jews, of course, had a concept of heaven, but heaven was not a place of eternal reward for everyday Jews. Heaven was the abode of God and his retinue, not a place pious Jewish souls ventured after death. And there was no concept of a place of punishment like hell at all. Death itself was punishment enough.

Why didn’t the ancient Jews conceive of an afterlife for everyday Jews? That’s a difficult question to answer, but at least part of the answer probably lies in the Jewish tendency to reject anything that smelled of Gentile theology. Remember that the story of the Jews began in slavery in Egypt. After the Exodus, when the Jews settled in the Promised Land and began forming their own kingdom and their own religious codes, they tended to reject all the trappings of “pagan” religions, especially those centered in Egypt, the land of Jewish captivity. They did not worship multiple gods, like the pagans. Unlike the pagans, they did not utter their god’s name. They did not build statutes or draw pictures in likeness of their god – they considered such things to be “idols.” And, unlike the ancient Egyptians, whose concept of the afterlife permeated all levels of Egyptian culture – indeed, it’s fair to say the ancient Egyptians were certifiably obsessed with the afterlife – the ancient Jews did not accept such pagan ideas. The afterlife was a Gentile notion; that, by itself, made it immediately suspect to the sensibilities of self-respecting Jews.

(It’s interesting to note that the ancient Egyptians, while having a very complex and well-developed theology of afterlife, also did not have any concept of a soul separate from the human body. As noted above, this is an idea that did not develop in Western culture until Plato and the Greek philosophers of late antiquity. The Egyptians mummified themselves for the very reason that they had no concept of a soul-body separation. The physical body itself needed to be preserved for the afterlife.)

CHRISTIAN BACKGROUND

We have seen that the ancient Jews had no concept of an afterlife for humans, which means they also had no concept of a place like hell. We have also seen that their word for “grave” – sheol – did not mean anything like the Greek idea of Hades, which necessitated a belief in a soul separate from the human body – a concept that did not exist among ancient Jews.

In the last few centuries before the birth of Jesus, however, Greek culture began to permeate the Jewish homeland. Although the Jews fought, and ultimately won, a great war against Greek overlords in the 160’s B.C.E., Greek culture had come to stay. The Jews, as they say, had become Hellenized.

With this Hellenization came new theologies and ideas. First and foremost, the Jews began to conceive of an afterlife. But their concept was not like afterlife conceptions most common in Christianity today. Since, despite Hellenization, Jews still clung to the idea of a soul inseparable from the body, the Jews began to develop the notion of resurrection. Those pious Jews killed so unjustly over the centuries by various invaders and persecutors, would one day be physically raised back to life. Their bones and bodies would literally reform and come walking out of their tombs.

Along with resurrection for the pious, Jews also began conceiving of punishment for the wicked. God would not only reward the pious with resurrection, but would enact punitive measures against evildoers. This punitive aspect of God was, of course, nothing new in Jewish theology. But where the God of the Old Testament had always enacted his punitive measures against evildoers during their lives (usually by some horrible method of dying), now God’s punitive measures would extend beyond the natural human life. Jews looked around themselves and saw their enemies and persecutors prospering, living fat and happy to a ripe old age. Clearly the old ideas about God’s punitive measures against Israel’s enemies could not stand up to this “modern” scrutiny. So Jews began conceiving of “ultimate” punishments for evildoers. While the pious would be resurrected, the evil would be eternally punished.

What would this punishment look like? In Jewish sources from the time, a number of metaphors are used to convey emerging ideas. From a 1st century B.C.E. book called the Wisdom of Solomon:

The Lord will laugh [the unrighteous] to scorn. After this they will become dishonored corpses, and an outrage among the dead for ever; because he will dash them speechless to the ground, and shake them from the foundations; they will be left utterly dry and barren, and they will suffer anguish, and the memory of them will perish.

Later, in the 1st century C.E., around the time of the New Testament gospels, a work of Jewish apocrypha called 2 Esdras was written, most likely in response to the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 C.E. As an apocryphal book, it envisions the end of time and the Last Judgment:

The pit of torment shall appear, and opposite it shall be the place of rest; and the furnace of hell shall be disclosed, and opposite it the paradise of delight.

It was, of course, in the gospels of the New Testament, written about the same time, where we begin to see references to hell, usually on the lips of Jesus.

In both the New Testament, as well as the above-quoted passage from the book of 2 Esdras, the word used for hell is the Greek word geenna. This word referred to a place outside the city walls of ancient Jerusalem known as the Valley of Hinnom. It was here, in the Valley of Hinnom, that the inhabitants of Jerusalem deposited their collective waste products. It was, quite literally, a garbage dump. Because such a place would have been considered immensely unclean to average Jews, it was perpetually on fire, which helped to keep the contagion of “uncleanness” in check, and also helped the dump from becoming overwhelmed with garbage.

As such, references to geenna (often transliterated into “Gehenna”) were metaphorical in nature. When, for instance, Jesus states, in Matthew 23:33: “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell?” he is referring to Gehenna – the Valley of Hinnom, the burning garbage dump outside Jerusalem’s city walls. He is not, quite obviously, suggesting that God is going to send all evildoers to the burning garbage dump outside Jerusalem’s city walls for all eternity. He is using that place as a metaphor for destruction – which is, itself, a way of referring to exclusion from God’s kingdom. If you reject God’s love and God’s vision of justice, you are not part of God’s kingdom; you are as good as a corpse burning in the Valley of Hinnom.

Consider a modern analogy in regards to flushing a toilet. I might lose my job and, upon returning home, my wife might tell me that I’ve just “flushed my career down the toilet.” Does she mean that I have literally flushed my literal job down a literal toilet? Of course not. It’s a euphemism – a metaphor.

Suppose I said that evildoers – those who are not part of God’s kingdom – are flushed down the toilet. Would you suppose I meant a literal toilet and a literal flushing? No. You would understand that I was using a metaphor. Now suppose that a thousand years from now, Christians come to believe in a literal cosmic toilet where God literally flushes evildoers into an eternal tank of sewage and waste. Sound silly?

To literalize Jewish metaphors about the burning garbage dump outside ancient Jerusalem’s city walls is to completely misunderstand the idea that was being conveyed. If Jesus, or the early Christians who used the metaphor of Gehenna, could somehow be told about modern concepts of hell, based on the euphemisms they used in the 1st century, I believe they would find it bizarre at best. Geenna – Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom – was a metaphor used by early Christians to illustrate their ideas about what one’s life was worth outside the kingdom of God. It wasn’t considered in cosmic terms.

Despite its common place in Christian theology, hell is mentioned only about a dozen times in the entire New Testament. More than half of those come in the Gospel of Matthew alone. There are other references to “fire” or a “lake of fire,” but most of these also come in Matthew and the book of Revelation.

In the modern day, many people imagine Satan as the ruler of hell. This is reflected in our jokes and our colloquialisms. Yet, in the New Testament, no such thing is ever implied about Satan. Satan is not the ruler of hell; he is an evil presence on earth. In Revelation, in fact, the writer tells us explicitly that Satan lives and has his throne in Pergamum, a city in modern day Turkey!

I know where you are living, where Satan’s throne is. Yet you are holding fast to my name, and you did not deny your faith in me even in the days of Antipas my witness, my faithful one, who was killed among you, where Satan lives” (Revelation 2:13).

Antipas, referenced in this passage, was the bishop of Pergamum who was martyred in the early 90’s C.E. (and not Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee during Jesus’ life).

There are only two spots in the entire New Testament where Satan is connected to hell, and these two spots, again, come to us from Matthew and Revelation. In both cases, the writers predict that Satan will be thrown into “the fire” at the end of time (in Revelation it is the “lake of fire and sulfur”). Hell, then, is a punishment for Satan, at the end of time, as it will be for evildoers. Satan does not rule hell.

In the same way that “hell” (geenna), is used metaphorically, so are these references to “the fire” and the “lake of fire.” They are metaphors for utter destruction. In the ancient world, fire was one of the four elements of nature, and it was nature’s destructive force. When an ancient person equated an ultimate punishment to “the fire,” it was a way of saying that the coming punishment was destruction. When Jesus, for instance, says that the “fire” is reserved for “the devil and his angels,” he is saying that evil’s fate is destruction. Again, if I said that my career has been flushed down the toilet, am I talking about a real toilet? Jesus isn’t talking about a cosmic pit of fire.

This may not be persuasive to many of my readers who believe strongly in the existence of a place called hell. But consider one final point. “Fire” and “hell,” as ultimate punishments for evil, are used most frequently by the writers of Matthew and Revelation. But other writers use them as well, particularly “fire.” Such references can be found in both Mark and Luke, as well as 2 Peter, Jude, and the book of Hebrews. Yet among these different writers, there is disagreement about the nature of hell. In Matthew and 2 Peter, for instance, hell, or “the fire,” is a place of complete destruction. For instance: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28); and “But by the same word the present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the godless (2 Peter 3:7). Additionally, Hebrews 10:27 speaks of a “fire that will consume” the ungodly, and 2 Peter, Luke, and Jude all make references to the utter destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, reduced to ash, and how that is a symbol of what will happen to the ungodly.

In all of these accounts, the ultimate punishment is destruction. Yet most people, when they think of hell, think of a place of eternal punishment, where one will burn in agony without dying, suffering through all eternity in unimaginable torment. In the New Testament, there are only two spots that seem to support this sort of view. The first is found in a parable of Jesus. As a parable, of course, the details are not intended to be taken literally in the first place, but to be seen as pointing to a greater truth. In any case, the parable in question is found in Luke’s gospel, and is usually referred to as the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. In this story, Lazarus is a poor man begging in front of a rich man’s house. The rich man ignores him. In time, both men die, with the beggar going to heaven, and the rich man going to hell. The rich man is in “torment” by the “fire,” and asks for a drink of water, which Abraham (who is there by Lazarus) is not able to give him, because of the great chasm that separates them.

There are a lot of interesting things to say about this parable, but the one that matters here is the image of hell not as a place of utter destruction, but a place where someone remains alive in tormenting flames.

The only other spot where this idea is supported in the New Testament comes at the end of Revelation, after Satan is finally defeated by the forces of God at the end of time. There, the writer tells us that the devil will be thrown in the lake of fire, to be “tormented day and night for ever and ever (Revelation 20:10). Again, this supports the idea of hell being a place not of destruction, but of eternal, unceasing torment.

These are the only two spots where this idea is affirmed by the New Testament. As noted above, there are far more references that support “ultimate destruction” rather than “eternal torment.” Furthermore, one of these two spots comes in a parable of Jesus – a morality tale rather than a statement of metaphysical truth. Additionally, it is important to note that Luke never actually uses the word “hell” (that is, geenna). Instead, he calls the place Hades. Also, he doesn’t say that Lazarus is in “heaven,” but rather “with Abraham.” Finally, as the use of the word “Hades” makes clear, by the time of Luke’s gospel (circa 90 C.E.), many Jewish Christians had been Hellenized by Greek philosophy, and had adopted the idea of Hades as a holding place for souls to await a final judgment. Luke adds in the idea of torment and flames, but since he calls the place Hades and not hell, it is consistent with his other comments (the Sodom and Gomorrah reference above) about the ultimate punishment being utter destruction. Hades first, then complete destruction at the end of time.

With that taken into consideration, it is fair to say that of all the New Testament writers who talk about hell, fire, and ultimate punishments, only one writer – the apocalyptic author of Revelation – affirms the idea of hell being a place of eternal torment, rather than a place of final destruction. And even in that account, it is only the devil, the beast, and the false prophet who are explicitly said to be “tormented day and night for ever and ever.” Other ungodly people will be thrown in the lake of fire, so they too will presumably suffer this same outcome, but that is not necessarily stated explicitly by the writer of Revelation. Perhaps only the devil and his angels will get that particularly odious fate.

CONCLUSION

We are left with a few things to make sense of. First, the Jews of the Old Testament did not believe in a place like hell. They had no particular afterlife beliefs at all, good or bad. By the start of the Christian era, Hellenism had brought ideas about souls, the afterlife, and Hades to Judaism, and Jews themselves had developed apocalyptic ideas about ultimate punishments and rewards. In the New Testament, these apocalyptic ideas are illustrated with the use of metaphors: ultimate punishment is related to the destructive element of nature – fire – and is symbolized by the metaphor of the burning garbage dump outside Jerusalem’s city walls – the Valley of Hinnom. Ultimate reward, on the other hand, is symbolized by the kingdom of God and a life lived in union with God. The yin-yang idea here is one of life and death; in early Christian practice, these were referred to as "the Two Ways." One led to destruction – that is, death – and the other to abundant life. Numerous authors in the New Testament describe ultimate punishment in terms of ultimate destruction. Only one writer explicitly refers to ultimate punishment as eternal torment, and even that is only given in the context of the devil and his minions. It is left unclear whether this counts for ungodly human beings as well.

For these reasons, I do not believe in hell as a literal place of eternal torment for people who have not made the right profession of faith. I believe hell is a metaphor for separation from the sacred, from God, and therefore functions as a symbol of what life apart from God might look like.

In the words of the early Christians, it’s like being thrown on the burning garbage dump outside town; in my own words, it’s like being flushed down the toilet.

The Bible and the Afterlife

Perhaps no topic in human consciousness has received quite as much “publicity” over the millennia as the concept of life after death. It has been the subject of countless books, films, and theatrical productions. It is part of the core of just about every religion in history. “What happens when you die?” is a question that all human beings ultimately have to ask and search out answers to.

If you go to Google and type in the phrase “what happens,” before you’ve even finished typing the second word, Google populates a list of possible searches, and the first one (and thus, most popular) is “what happens when you die” (the second option, humorously enough, is “what happens when you lose your virginity”).

Google returns about 12.5 million topics on “what happens when you die” (sadly, only about a quarter of a million on virginity). On “afterlife,” the return is about 6.2 million. For “life after death,” the number soars to 55.4 million.

As Internet search engines attest, the afterlife is a popular topic indeed.

Like most religions, Christianity has deeply-entrenched traditions on life after death. For Christianity, in fact, life after death is at the very core of its entire theology – the belief that because Jesus died for our sins and was raised on the third day, we can be forgiven of our sins and be raised to eternal life as well. While it’s true that many branches and forms of Christianity may or may not emphasize this aspect of Christian tradition, there can be no question that it was a primary characteristic of the earliest Christian church, reflected in the New Testament.

In my experience, it seems that most Christians (I might even be inclined to say “the vast majority of Christians”) believe that when you die, your soul goes to heaven. This is reflected in countless ways in society. When a loved one dies, for instance, we might talk about them looking down on us from heaven, or we might imagine them finally meeting God in heaven. Songs reflect this belief, such as MercyMe’s wildly popular song “I Can Only Imagine,” which pictures the singer’s reaction to arriving in heaven and seeing God face-to-face. We tell formulaic jokes about someone dying and going up to meet St. Peter at the gates of heaven.

Indeed, the idea of your spirit or soul going to heaven when you die is certainly one of the most common beliefs among Christians. I’m not even sure that I personally know any self-professed Christian who does not believe that when you die, your soul goes to heaven. This is a belief that I have personally held throughout my entire life. Even when I have struggled intellectually with my personal beliefs, I have never questioned that the basic concept on life after death is that you go to heaven when you die.

What, then, does the Biblical tradition have to tell us about life after death? Surely it supports this view? Many people may be surprised to discover that our modern conceptions of life after death have almost no parallels in the Biblical tradition. A few months ago, I wrote about misconceptions regarding Biblical content. I recognize now that I was remiss in not including a discussion of life after death in that essay. As I have studied this topic in recent weeks, I can only describe my reaction as “dumbfounded.” How has an idea become so deeply ingrained in Christian culture when it has no basis in the Biblical tradition, and is, in fact, contradicted by the Bible’s own theology on life after death? That analysis is beyond the scope of this essay, but I do want to look deeply at what the Bible itself says about life after death and human eternity.

JEWISH BACKGROUND

Before one can understand anything in the New Testament, one must have a contextual framework from Jewish tradition. The earliest Christians, after all, were Jews working within the structure of Judaism. So was Jesus. Thus, to understand what they were talking about, we have to understand first where they were coming from.

To put it simply, the ancient Jews of the Old Testament did not believe in life after death, at least not for the average person. The ancient Jews did not have a concept of a soul or a spirit separate from the human body. The idea of a soul unbound by “the flesh” of the body originated with the ancient Greeks – who came along after most of the books of the Old Testament were written.

The Jews weren’t unique in their beliefs that the soul and body were united as one. Prior to the Greek philosophical revolution, no ancient civilization imagined a soul separate from the body. The Egyptians, for instance, certainly believed in life after death, but it wasn’t the soul that lived forever, it was the whole body. That’s why they mummified themselves and buried themselves with all their earthly possessions – possessions their physical body would need on its journey through the afterlife.

For the Jews and other ancient “pre-Greek” civilizations, body and soul, “flesh” and “spirit,” were inextricable. One did not exist without the other. Thus, for an ancient Jew, the idea that the soul would leave the body upon death and go to heaven would have been foreign and nonsensical. “Soul” and “body” were words that could be used interchangeably because they meant the same thing – they referred to the whole person, not two disparate parts of a person.

The Jews were certainly familiar with Egyptian ideas about life after death. But like so many other theological beliefs that the Jews regarded as hallmarks of paganism, the Jews rejected the Egyptian concept of the afterlife. For the ancient Jews, when a person died, they didn’t go to heaven, hell, or any other divine plane of existence. Instead, they simply went to a place called sheol in Hebrew. That word translates into English as either “grave” or “pit.” Quite simply, when you died, you went into the ground.

This is evidenced throughout the Jewish scriptures.

From Genesis, chapter 3: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

From Job, chapter 7: “As the cloud fades and vanishes, so those who go down to the grave [sheol] do not come up; they return no more to their houses, nor do their places know them anymore.”

From Psalm, chapter 6: “For in death there is no remembrance of you; in the grave [sheol] who can give you praise?”

From Ecclesiastes, chapter 9: “Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in the grave [sheol], to which you are going.”

The word sheol appears no fewer than 65 times in the Old Testament. Sometimes it refers simply to Jews dying and going into the grave. Sometimes it is used polemically against Jewish enemies in a sense of threatening them with death. Sometimes it is used pleadingly when a person is asking God to rescue them from death and physical destruction (“O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me…you brought my soul up from the grave [sheol]” – Psalm 30:2-3a).

What is clear from the Old Testament is that when people die, they go into the ground. In Jewish tradition, only the greatest of the greats among prophets were given the blessing of going to heaven to be with God for eternity. Elijah being taken up to heaven in a whirlwind is a primary example, and note that in the Elijah story, Elijah doesn’t actually die – his still-living body is taken up to heaven. The reason for that is clear: if he had died, he would have been dead (in sheol) and therefore couldn’t have gone to heaven!

Despite this tradition within the most ancient forms of Judaism, the Jews did, of course, eventually develop an afterlife theology. As best as can be reconstructed from the available texts, this seems to have begun developing in widespread fashion in the middle of the 2nd century, B.C.E. It was during that era, around 160 B.C.E., that the Syrian king Antiochus IV Epiphanes laid siege to Jerusalem and began offering swine on the altar of God inside the Temple. This act was referred to in the book of Daniel (and later mentioned by Jesus in the Gospels) as the “desolating sacrilege” or, in the more poetic words of the King James, the “abomination of desolation.”

In response to this, the Jews revolted, led by a powerful Jewish family known to history as the Maccabees. They succeeded in defeating Antiochus and subsequently set up a Jewish dynasty known as the Hasmoneans, who ruled independently for the next 120 years. That dynasty ended only when Herod the Great came to power in Judea, but even Herod legitimized his own claim to the throne by marrying a Hasmonean princess.

It was during that time of upheaval, revolt, and war that the Jews seem to have begun developing afterlife theology on a widespread basis. Antiochus IV Epiphanes waged a campaign of terror and violence against the Jews. Jews were slaughtered by the thousands for refusing to worship the Greek gods. One story tells of two women who circumcised their children in the Jewish fashion and were punished by first having their children murdered, then parading the women through town with the children strapped to their breasts as though nursing, and ending with the killing of the women themselves by being thrown from the city wall. Another account says: “There was a massacre of young and old, a killing of women and children, a slaughter of virgins and infants. In the space of three days, eighty thousand were lost, forty thousand meeting a violent death, and the same number being sold into slavery” (2 Maccabees, chapter 5).

In the end, of course, the Jews were vindicated. The Maccabees overthrew the violent oppression of the Greco-Syrian Antiochus IV Epiphanes. But what about all those innocent martyrs who died during the occupation? Surely God could not just abandon them to the grave (sheol)?

Thus, the idea of a general resurrection was born in Jewish theology. God would right all the wrongs. God would perform what scholar J.D. Crossan calls “the Great Divine Cleanup” of the world. A great new prophet – called “messiah” or “son of humanity” in Jewish scriptures – would arise to lead the Jews into an eternal earthly kingdom of God’s divine justice; a kingdom of peace and equality opposed to the violent, oppressive kingdoms of the world. When this happened, part of that earthly transformation would include the resurrection of the dead – the vindication of the martyrs.

This resurrection would, by definition, be a bodily resurrection. The dead would physically rise from their graves into newness of life.

THE NEW TESTAMENT

The preceding is the historical context in which the writers of the New Testament, and Jesus himself, lived and worked. This was their religious and theological background.

Ultimately, they did not stray very far from it.

One criticism frequently aimed at the Bible is that it is inconsistent on a variety of theological topics. One topic, however, that the Bible is very consistent on is the topic academics call “eschatology.” That’s just a fancy word that refers to metaphysical ideas about the ultimate destiny of humankind and the end of the world.

In the Gospels, Jesus is frequently found discussing various eschatological topics. True to his Jewish context, Jesus sees the end of the world as God’s “Great Divine Cleanup.” For Jesus, however, this eschatological event has already begun. The kingdom of God – also called the kingdom of heaven – is already present here on the earth. In the Gospel of Matthew alone, there are no fewer than 31 references to Jesus’ vision of “the kingdom of heaven.” The first comes in Matthew’s third chapter, where John the Baptist says: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” In Matthew’s vision, it was Jesus who brought the reality of heaven’s kingdom to earth.

Outside of the Gospels, the various writers of the New Testament continued this vision of God’s kingdom here on earth, and they began to imagine God’s “Great Divine Cleanup” as being an action that would occur in two stages. The first stage had already happened. The kingdom of God had come with Jesus. Now, it is up to Christians to live within that kingdom by emulating Christ. The second stage would come when God consummated the kingdom – when God finished the work, as it were. Jesus would return in a Second Coming and the world would be transformed from a human world of violence and oppression into a Godly world of justice and equality.

This theology forms the entire basis of the book of Revelation, where Jesus – called “the Lamb” – defeats the powers of the world and inaugurates a “new Jerusalem,” which descends down to earth out of heaven. For the writer of Revelation, eternity is here on earth in a world transformed by God through Christ.

Part of this transformation includes the Jewish idea of the resurrection of the dead. Paul talks about this explicitly and in depth in the fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished.” In other words, if Christ has not been raised, then neither will anyone else be raised. The dead are still dead. They have no hope. Paul goes on to say:

As all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power.

Christ was raised first, as the “first fruits” of the general resurrection. At his second coming (and not upon their own deaths), the dead in Christ will also be raised. After that, the end of time comes, when Jesus turns everything over to God.

Paul speaks explicitly about this in 1 Thessalonians as well. He starts off saying: “We do not want you to be uninformed…about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.”

Paul’s congregation in Thessaloniki was concerned about their members who had died. What would happen to them? Paul tells them that since they are Christians, they have a hope that others do not share. He goes on to say: “For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.”

In other words, God will save those who have died. They are not lost to the grave. But how exactly will this happen? Paul tells us.

For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first.

Thus, when Jesus returns at the Second Coming to consummate God’s kingdom on earth, the dead will rise first to meet him. This is the “hope for the dead” that Paul gave to the congregation at Thessaloniki. Paul’s hope wasn’t that the souls of the dead go to heaven. His vision was that the dead will be raised at Jesus’ Second Coming.

After the dead are raised, then, according to Paul, “we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.”

So the dead will rise first. Then those still living will meet Jesus in the air as he descends. Then all will live eternally with Christ on a transformed earth.

Some have read this passage to support the notion of eternity in heaven. Those still alive will be “caught up in the clouds” to meet Jesus “in the air.” Surely this implies an ascension into heaven? Yet Paul explicitly says that this will happen when Christ is “descending” to the earth. Christians are simply rising up to meet Jesus in the air, then to descend along with him to live on the divinely transformed earth.

This fits, in fact, with a known historical practice for receiving dignitaries. First, take note that cemeteries in the ancient world sat outside the city limits. Tuck that in the back of your mind.

In ancient Rome, when the emperor or some other important figure visited a city of the empire, the custom was for the population to exit the city walls and meet him on the road. That was proper etiquette. You didn’t sit inside the city waiting for the dignitary to arrive; you met him outside.

Thus, a visiting dignitary to a Roman city would first be greeted by the dead (the cemeteries were outside the city walls), then by the population who came out to greet him on the road. Following that, everyone, dignitary and populace, would continue back into the city.

This is the ancient model Paul surely had in mind when he described Jesus’ Second Coming to the Thessalonians. As Jesus descended in his Second Coming, he would first be met by the dead. Then the living would rise (leave the earth/city walls) to meet him. Then all would return to consummate God’s kingdom.

All of this is perfectly in line with Jewish theology about the “Great Divine Cleanup” and the general resurrection. The dead are dead. In death, they await resurrection at the end of time when God will right all the wrongs.

CONCLUSION

The point in all this, by now, should be fairly clear. The Bible makes clear and explicit its ideas about life after death. The afterlife does not being when you die. When you die, you are simply dead. In the grave (sheol). Dust to dust. The afterlife begins when God, through Jesus, consummates the “Great Divine Cleanup” of the world, a process that has already begun through Jesus’ earthly life. It will be finished when Jesus returns in the Second Coming to rule over God’s transformed earth, and it is at that time that the dead will be raised and thus the “afterlife” will begin for those who have died.

There is simply nothing in all of the Biblical tradition, both Jewish scriptures and Christian scriptures, to indicate that souls ascend to heaven upon the death of the body. The dead are dead. Their hope is in Jesus’ Second Coming and the inauguration of the general resurrection. This is a consistent and explicit theology throughout the New Testament, and consistent with the Jewish context of the Old Testament.

The idea that the soul goes to heaven (or some other plane of existence) upon death, while the body decays in the earthly ground, is certainly a perfectly valid metaphysical belief. A lot of people across many religions share it. In fact, it may very well be 100% true.

But when a Christian accepts this belief, they do so at the expense, and even in contradiction of, the clear theology of afterlife found in the Biblical tradition.

The Little Apocalypse

The Little Apocalypse (also known as “The Olivet Discourse”) is a passage in the Gospels of the New Testament that depict Jesus’ teachings on the end of the world. Found in the books of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, the story represents Jesus at his apocalyptic and predictive best, explaining how the world will come to an end in fire and destruction, amidst “wars and rumors of wars” and violent earthquakes and famines. 

Much has been made over the years of these apocalyptic visions. Many theologians and apologists argue that the book of Revelation – otherwise known as the Apocalypse of John and said to have been written by the apostle John – expands on Jesus’ own “little” apocalyptic vision in the Gospels. 

John’s apocalypse, of course, is much more familiar to the average person than the Little Apocalypse of Jesus. However, the story of Jesus’ apocalyptic vision has a lot to tell us not only about who Jesus was, but also about the historical context of the late first century, when the Gospel stories of Jesus were being put to parchment. 

MARK’S ACCOUNT 

The Gospel of Mark gives us our earliest account of the Little Apocalypse, comprising the entirety of that book’s thirteenth chapter. In Mark, the story tends to stick out like a sore thumb, and the reason for this is because Mark’s Gospel, in general, is not apocalyptically-oriented. In fact, the chapter on the Little Apocalypse represents almost the entirety of any apocalyptic theology in the Gospel of Mark. 

Mark’s Jesus is a wise, yet secretive rabbi, calling for repentance and purification in Israel, predicting his death and resurrection, but generally steering clear of any “end of times” language. Thus, the Jesus we meet in chapter 13 of Mark’s Gospel seems out of place. Historical context, however, brings this dichotomy into better focus. 

Mark’s version of this story begins with Jesus predicting the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem: “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” From here, Jesus segues into a discussion of the end of times. It starts, so Jesus tells us, with “wars and rumors of wars,” earthquakes, false prophets, and great famines. These, Jesus assures us, are the “birth pains” of the end. Jesus goes on to predict that “brother will betray brother to death” and Christians will be tried for crimes and flogged in the synagogues. 

The final sign, however, will be the “desolating sacrilege” standing “where it ought not to be.” In some English versions, “desolating sacrilege” is translated as “the abomination of desolation.” This is a reference to the apocalyptic prophecies in the Book of Daniel, which include a “desolating sacrilege” in the Temple. In that book, the desolating sacrilege is an act done by the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who conquered Jerusalem in 167 B.C.E. To show his derision for the god of the Jews, Epiphanes erected an altar to Zeus in the Temple and sacrificed swine on it. This action prompted the successful Maccabean rebellion, which led to a century-long “golden age” of Jewish self-rule that ended when the Roman legions arrived.

So Mark’s reference here to the “desolating sacrilege” is a clear reference to Daniel and the horrifying sacrificial desecration of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Mark’s Jesus is saying that when something like that happens again, the end of time will be near.

Jesus encourages his followers to immediately “flee to the mountains” when this happens, without so much as going inside to grab a coat. He laments how terrible it will be in that day for “those who are pregnant and those who are nursing infants.”

More false messiahs will crop up working signs and wonders to deceive people. Finally, the “one like a person” (“son of man” in many English translations) will come on the clouds to gather Christians from the “four winds.” Jesus asserts that although “this generation will not pass away” before these things happen, no one knows for sure when they will take place. Therefore, he says, “keep awake,” lest the apocalypse should sneak up on you like a master on a sleeping servant.

So what, exactly, do we make of these predictions by Jesus? Many historians, in fact, use this passage to date Mark to the early 70’s C.E., shortly after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans. Thus Jesus predicts an event that the writer of Mark already knew had taken place.

Did Jesus really make such a prediction? That is a matter of faith and is an issue for a theological debate, meaning it is beyond the scope of this essay. What seems fairly clear, however, is that Mark was writing during the chaos and upheaval following the Jewish-Roman war and the destruction of the Temple. Understanding that historical context helps to focus Mark’s theological message in this passage. “Wars and rumors of wars” were something Mark and his community were living with daily.
Additionally, Rabbinical Jews and Jewish Christians were beginning to war with one another, in a theological debate that would ultimately split Christianity entirely from Judaism – though it had not done so yet. Thus Mark talks about Christians being persecuted “in the synagogue,” handed over and brought to trial, rejected by their families, and “hated” by “all people.”

As for the “desolating sacrilege,” historical context would suggest this is a Markan reference to the Roman destruction of the Temple and their subsequent occupation of its ruins. If the offering of swine on an alter to Zeus offended 2nd century B.C.E. Jews enough to call it a “desolating sacrilege,” how much more so would the very destruction of the Temple itself be seen as the most unthinkable of abominations?

Furthermore, Mark gives us a curious clue in the text that may indicate that the Roman destruction of the Temple is precisely what he is talking about. From verse 14: “But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be (let the reader understand), then those in Judea must flee to the mountains.” That parenthetical statement – “let the reader understand” – seems to be Mark’s way of interrupting the narrative of Jesus and giving a sort of “hint hint, wink wink” to his readers. It is Mark’s method for saying, “The destruction of God’s Temple, which, to our great horror, has just taken place, is what Jesus was talking about here, folks.”

This puts the entire passage into focus: Mark believed the end was at hand right there in the early 70’s C.E. The sign Jesus had predicted – the destruction of the Temple – had just happened. Wars and rumors of wars were all around. Christians were being persecuted. The entire Jewish culture, which included Christianity, was in violent upheaval. The Jews of Jerusalem had “fled to the mountains” and been dispersed following the Roman destruction of their holy city. False messiahs were cropping up everywhere. As part of his prediction, Mark’s Jesus says: “Pray that [this doesn’t happen] in winter.” In fact, the Temple was destroyed in the middle of summer, right at the end of July, 70 C.E., meaning these prayers had been answered.

Thus, Mark believed that the coming of the “one like a person” was imminent. As Jesus predicts in the passage, “When you see these things taking place, you know that [the one like a person] is near.” Soon the sun would be darkened and the stars would fall from the sky (v. 24-25) and Jesus would return to gather his disciples from the “four winds.” Thus, “this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place,” and therefore the followers of Christ should “keep awake” to make sure they are not caught unprepared. For Mark, the end of the world was now.

MATTHEW’S ACCOUNT

Of course, nearly 2,000 years down the road, we know that Mark was wrong. The end didn’t happen in the early 70’s C.E. The world continued on, Rabbinical and Christian Jews continued to spar with one another, and Christians began to separate themselves from their Jewish brethren and expand instead among Gentiles. About ten years later, in the early 80’s C.E., the Gospel of Matthew was written.

Some evidence suggests that the earliest version of Matthew was written in Aramaic, perhaps around the same time as Mark or even earlier, and our current Greek version of Matthew is a later edition of that early Aramaic version. In any case, the final Greek version of Matthew seems to have taken form by the mid-80’s.

Like his Markan source, Matthew devotes an entire chapter to the Little Apocalypse (the chapter designations, of course, were not original to the texts but were added by later translators). Matthew’s version in chapter 24 starts out closely following Mark’s. Matthew copies much of it word for word, making only minor changes for either syntactical purposes (Mark’s Gospel is notoriously colloquial; scholar Bruce Chilton calls it “Pidgin-Greek”), or in order to gear it better towards his Jewish audience (for instance, Matthew excludes the references to Christians being “beaten in synagogues” and instead makes the persecutors anonymous; he also removes Mark’s harsh language about “[Jewish] brother betraying [Christian] brother to death”).

Matthew’s Jesus, like Mark’s, asserts that the “end will come” only after the good news has been preached. As Matthew moves into the passage about the “desolating sacrilege,” he clears up a bit of Mark’s ambiguity. Matthew’s Jesus, for instance, specifically refers to the book of Daniel (“So when you see the desolating sacrilege…spoken of by the prophet Daniel…”), and he also specifically says that this desolating sacrilege will be “in the holy place,” which is surely a euphemism for God’s land and its Temple.

Starting in verse 26, Matthew adds in a short teaching that does not appear in Mark’s Gospel. Matthew’s Jesus again speaks of false messianic prophets and encourages his followers not to be fooled by them. He then compares the coming of the “one like a person” to lightning that flashes through the sky. Finally, he ends by asserting that “wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.” The implication is that like vultures descending on a carcass, so will the “one like a person” descend on the “corpse” of Jerusalem and its destroyed Temple.

Following this short passage, Matthew picks up his Markan source again, copying Jesus’ words about the “one like a person” appearing in the clouds and calling Christians from the “four winds.” He also repeats Mark’s statements about how “this generation” will see all these predictions come to fruition. 

Following this, Matthew again deviates from Mark by including a story from Jesus comparing the sudden appearance of the “one like a person” to the sudden catastrophe of the flood in the time of Noah. He goes on to say: “Two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and the other left.” Here, Matthew picks up Mark again and encourages his listeners to “keep awake” so that they are not surprised by the second coming.

As we saw with Mark, Matthew seems to believe that the end of the world is near. Writing some ten to twelve years later, he surely realized that Mark had not been entirely correct in assuming the end was imminent, but this does not appear to have concerned Matthew much. Clearly he agrees with his Markan source that the time is coming soon. The destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple – the “holy place” now reduced to a “corpse” – was clearly believed by Matthew, as it was by Mark, to be a sign of the end of times.

Matthew is not entirely silent, however, about the fact that Jesus seemed to be taking his time fulfilling the final portion of his apocalyptic vision. Where Mark’s Little Apocalypse ends after Jesus tells his disciples to “keep awake” – with the clear implication being that the second coming is about to happen – Matthew adds one more story not found in Mark. Jesus tells a short parable about a servant put in charge of his master’s house while his master is away. If the servant does well, Jesus says, his master will be happy upon return. But if his servant decides that the “master is delayed,” and therefore begins to quarrel with his fellow servants and live the high life of worldly pleasures, then the master will “put him with the hypocrites” in the place where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

The point of this story, as well as its contextual necessity for Matthew, is perfectly clear: Jesus has not returned as quickly as we thought he would in the wake of the Temple’s destruction, but that is no reason to quarrel among ourselves or forget the non-worldly lifestyle that we have committed ourselves to. If Jesus returns and catches us “goofing off” as it were, we’ll be in big trouble. It is reminiscent of a bumper sticker I once saw: “Look busy! Jesus is coming!”

LUKE’S ACCOUNT

Like Matthew, the Gospel of Luke used Mark as a primary source. Luke’s Gospel was written about ten years after Matthew’s – thus, perhaps twenty years after Mark.

In chapter 21 of his Gospel, the writer of Luke repeats his own version of the Little Apocalypse of Jesus. Like Mark and Matthew before him, Luke opens the story with Jesus predicting the destruction of the Temple: “Not one stone will be left upon another.” Still following Mark, Luke’s Jesus predicts false messiahs and warns against them. He changes Mark’s “wars and rumors of wars” to “wars and insurrections” and this may be because by the time Luke was writing, the “wars” of the early 70’s were “rumors” no more. But where Mark states that these wars “must take place, but the end is still to come,” Luke changes the wording to: “These things must take place, but the end will not follow immediately.”

We saw above that Matthew had to deal with the fact that Jesus had not yet returned, as had been imminently expected by Mark. Writing another ten years down the road, Luke had to deal with it on an even greater scale. Thus, “the end will not follow immediately” after the “wars” (that is, the Jewish-Roman wars of the 70’s).

At this point, Luke continues on following Mark, discussing how nations will fight one another and there will be earthquakes and famines. In Mark’s account, Jesus transitions from there into discussing the persecutions Christians will suffer from their Jewish brethren (“you will be beaten in the synagogues”). Thus, for Mark, the persecutions would follow the natural disasters and Gentile wars. Yet Luke again alters Mark’s account by asserting: “But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues…” Thus, for Luke, the persecution would happen before the Gentile wars, earthquakes, and famines. These things, Luke asserts, are still in the future.

For Mark, these events happened in the early 70’s, when the Temple was destroyed. Mark read them as predictors of the Second Coming of Jesus. Luke, writing some 20-25 years later, sees that Mark was wrong, so he predicts different wars, and different natural disasters. In Mark, the persecutions – which were already happening when Mark was writing – were the final step before the Second Coming. In Luke, the persecutions are the first step.

Continuing on through Jesus’ Little Apocalypse, Luke follows Mark fairly closely as he describes the various persecutions Christians are facing from their enemies. When he transitions to the “desolating sacrilege” teaching, however, Luke again begins to dramatically edit Mark’s account. There is no reference at all to Daniel’s “desolating sacrilege,” and instead the text says: “When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, know that its desolation is near.” Luke uses Mark’s word “desolation,” but not in the prophetic context of Daniel.

Furthermore, while Mark’s reference to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple was secretive and vague (recall the parenthetical “hint hint, wink wink” comment to “let the reader understand”), Luke says explicitly that this is about Jerusalem and its destruction. However, by saying that Jerusalem’s desolation will be near when armies surround it, Luke is tacitly removing any notion that this event is one of the “signs” that will accompany the end of times. He makes this even more explicit when he states a few lines later that this is “vengeance” on Jerusalem in “fulfillment of all that is written.” In other words, the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple by the Romans was a punishment from God for the great sin of the Jews (which, to the writer of Luke, would have been illustrated by their rejection of Jesus). The key point there, of course, is that Jerusalem’s destruction was just a punishment, and not necessarily a sign of the imminent end of times. Luke is clearly attempting to assure his readers that there is nothing amiss; Jesus isn’t delayed. Christians (like Mark) of the 70’s only thought the end was near. But that was because they had misunderstood the events going on around them. Luke is essentially doing damage control, addressing what must have been a common concern among Christians of the 90’s: “Why hasn’t Jesus returned?” – and perhaps a common criticism from among non-Christians: “Where is this so-called Second Coming?” 

Continuing through the apocalyptic sermon, Luke expands Mark’s account to have Jesus predict the dispersion of the Jews into the surrounding nations after the Roman conquest of Jerusalem. He states: “There will be…wrath against this people [the Jews]. They will…be taken away as captives among all nations [that is, among the Gentiles], and Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles.” Writing twenty or so years after the event, Luke displays the knowledge that could only come from hindsight. The Jews were ultimately dispersed around the Mediterranean, their city and their nation left a ruin and inhabited by Romans. Mark didn’t know this, and Matthew may only have had a hint of it. But Luke knew it well.

As Luke transitions next into the passage about the darkening of the sun, he again redacts Mark, this time in a way that is so explicit that it makes crystal clear his purposes in doing “damage control” about the delay in the second coming. In transitioning to the discussion of signs in the sky, Mark had stated, “But in those days, after [Jerusalem’s destruction], the sun will be darkened…” In other words, these heavenly signs would commence as soon as the dust settled from the Roman war. 

Similarly, Matthew had stated, “Immediately after the suffering of those days, the sun will be darkened…” Luke, however, cuts out the transition all together and simply starts talking about how there will be signs in the heavens, among the sun, moon, and stars. Thus, he removes any mention of a time frame. Where Mark and Matthew made it clear that the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple represented the “beginning of the end,” Luke eliminates that sense all together. For Luke, these signs from the heavens, and the subsequent coming of the “one like a person,” will simply happen at some unknown point in the future.

Luke stays fairly close to Mark throughout the remainder of the Little Apocalypse. But he has one more trick up his sleeve. We have seen that Mark and Matthew both had Jesus assure his listeners that “this generation” would live to see “all these things” taking place. Luke uses this phrase, but he again does damage control by omitting an important word. Instead of referring to “all these things” taking place, he simply says that “this generation will not pass away until everything has taken place.”

This is a very subtle change, but it eliminates the implication that all these signs and wonders will happen in the immediate and imminent future. However, in reasserting the general principle that the present generation “would not pass away” until these things (“everything”) had been accomplished, Luke reassures his readers that while it has taken longer than expected, and some earlier Christians were wrong to expect it so soon, it is still just right around the corner.

CONCLUSION

A study of the Little Apocalypse shows us that Mark and his community were convinced that the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple signified the “beginning of the end.” Matthew, writing a few years later, noted the delay, but still felt confident that the time was near. Luke, writing yet another decade after that, had to deal with major damage control to quell fears about Jesus’ delayed coming, but still felt confident in asserting that his generation would remain to see the end of times.

As we saw at the start of this account, the Gospel of Mark’s Little Apocalypse is unique because the majority of Mark’s Gospel does not have much in the way of apocalyptic language. An account that is largely non-apocalyptic suddenly becomes apocalyptic on a level not far beneath Revelation or the Jewish apocrypha. Matthew and Luke, on the other hand, sprinkle apocalyptic sayings and events throughout their Gospels, making the Little Apocalypse simply a culmination of a general theme. 

How can we explain this? Matthew and Luke likely used a source no longer in existence that scholars have dubbed the Q document. This document can be discerned from the content that Matthew and Luke have in common, but which is not found in Mark. It is interesting to note that this Q material is very frequently apocalyptic in nature. The fact that Mark contains almost no apocalyptic sayings outside of the Little Apocalypse, then, is a strong indication that while Matthew and Luke had access to this source, Mark did not.

Interestingly, some of the sayings included in Matthew’s version of the Little Apocalypse come from this Q document. We saw above that he adds teachings to the Little Apocalypse not found in Mark – a short parable about a delayed master, a discussion of Noah and the suddenness of the flood, and a comment about vultures gathering around a corpse. We know these came from the Q document because Luke also repeats them – though Luke does not place them in his own version of the Little Apocalypse. Instead, he peppers them throughout other portions of his Gospel, attaching them to various other teachings here and there.

Furthermore, there is at least one short passage from Mark’s Little Apocalypse that Luke does not include in his own version of the Little Apocalypse, but instead places into another apocalyptic teaching from Jesus. The passage in question concerns instructions to people not to go into their houses to retrieve their belongings on the last day. In Mark, this was included in the subsection of the Little Apocalypse about the “desolating sacrilege” – that is, the destruction of the Temple. But in Luke, it is in an entirely different account, one that includes the adage about corpses and vultures – an adage, as we saw, that appears in Matthew, but not Mark.

The point to be drawn from all this is simply that apocalyptic perspectives on Jesus and his life seem to go back to the earliest days of Christianity. Numerous texts and oral traditions, imagining an apocalyptic second coming of Christ, were being passed among communities, and we can see this diverse tradition reflected in the varied apocalyptic accounts of the New Testament Gospels.

It is difficult to know for certain what sort of role apocalyptic worldviews played in Jesus’ own life and message. However, many scholars are no doubt correct in suggesting that Jesus’ message, while perhaps not as theologically well-developed and polemically-oriented as it is in the Gospels, must have contained apocalyptic expectations about the imminent end of the world and the coming of God’s kingdom. The question is just how “apocalyptic” that vision was, and whether it imagined the end coming through fire and lightning, or through peace and purity.

In any case, the idea that the “end is near” is surely one of the oldest theological presumptions in all of Christian history – an idea that seems to have been asserted in every Christian generation since the time of Jesus himself, including right up to the present day.

Who Were the Twelve Disciples?

The twelve disciples of Jesus are widely understood by Christians to have been Jesus’ closest companions in life, his inner circle, made up of fishermen and others who gave up family and career to dedicate their lives to following the man who taught radically about the kingdom of God.

Despite the familiarity of “the twelve disciples” among Christians, there is little doubt that most people couldn’t name all twelve off the cuff. It may surprise some to discover that even the texts of the Bible don’t agree on who made up this most distinguished group of men.

EARLIEST BIBLICAL REFERENCES

Among the texts of the New Testament, the seven or so authentic letters of Paul represent our earliest sources. In one of these letters – 1 Corinthians – Paul gives us our first Biblical reference to the twelve disciples:

1 Corinthians 15:5b - …[Jesus] appeared to Peter, then to the Twelve.

Outside of the Gospels, there is only one other New Testament reference to the twelve disciples, and that comes from the book of Revelation, where the writer refers to the “names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.” Revelation, of course, was one of the last books of the New Testament to be written, probably in the first decade of the 2nd century.

Despite only referring once to “the Twelve,” Paul does mention two disciples by name: Peter and John. Peter is referenced a number of times in 1 Corinthians and Galatians, and John is mentioned one time in Galatians.

Interestingly, Paul never tells us explicitly that either of these men was a disciple of Jesus. Of course, the recipients of his letters would have known who they were, so it stands to reason that he doesn’t go into any biographical details.

Still, if one only had the letters of Paul to go by, we would have an idea that there was a group of twelve people who played some central role in the resurrection, but we would not know who they were. In fact, if we had only the letters of Paul to go on, we would no doubt conclude that Peter was not among “the Twelve,” since his role in the resurrection is separated from the Twelve, as indicated in the quoted passage above.

THE GOSPELS

The majority of what we know of the twelve disciples, of course, comes from the four Gospels of the New Testament. These texts were all written in the 1st century, but the earliest of them was written after the letters of Paul.

Mark

In Mark, the first of these Gospels to be written, the writer is kind enough to give us an actual list of names:

Simon Peter
James son of Zebedee
John the brother of James
Andrew (Mark notes elsewhere that Andrew was the brother of Peter)
Philip
Bartholomew
Matthew
Thomas
James son of Alphaeus
Thaddaeus
Simon the Canaanite
Judas Iscariot

Simple enough on the surface. But there is at least one internal trouble spot. Before providing this list of names, Mark had described a scene in which Jesus dines at the home of a tax collector named Levi, and the text tells us that Jesus called on him to “follow me” – a command Levi obeys. That, of course, is the same formula used elsewhere when Jesus is calling his twelve disciples. It seems clear that Levi is one of the “twelve,” yet he does not appear in Mark’s list in the next chapter.

Complicating that issue even further is the fact that Mark refers to Levi as the “son of Alphaeus.” You will notice that one of the disciples on Mark’s list is also the son of Alphaeus, but it’s a man named James, not Levi. No indication is given by Mark as to whether this is the same person, they are two brothers, or they are unrelated and just happen to have fathers by the name of Alphaeus.

If Mark was our only source for the disciples, we would no doubt conclude that James son of Alphaeus was, in fact, Levi the tax collector.

Matthew

Moving on chronologically through the Gospels, we come next to Matthew. The writer of this Gospel used Mark as a primary source, and also provided a list of the twelve disciples:

Simon called Peter
Andrew the brother of Simon Peter
James son of Zebedee
John the brother of James
Philip
Bartholomew
Thomas
Matthew the tax collector
James son of Alphaeus
Lebbaeus Thaddaeus
Simon the Canaanite
Judas Iscariot

You will notice first that the disciple Matthew is now noted as a tax collector – something not mentioned by Mark. Furthermore, when the story of Levi son of Alphaeus is retold in the Gospel of Matthew, Levi’s name is changed to Matthew, and “son of Alphaeus” is eliminated completely. The writer of Matthew seems to have seen the problem with Mark’s text regarding Levi, and simply fixed the problem by asserting that Levi and Matthew were the same person (and not Levi and James son of Alphaeus). The name “Levi” is never actually mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew.

The other noticeable difference between the two lists is that the Gospel of Matthew notes that the disciple Thaddaeus’s name was actually Lebbaeus.

Luke

We come next to Luke. Luke, like Matthew before him, used Mark’s Gospel as a source. However, where Matthew regurgitates something like 90% of Mark, Luke only uses about 60%. And it is when we look at Luke’s list of disciples that we begin to see more prominent discrepancies.

Here is Luke’s list:

Simon Peter
Andrew the brother of Simon Peter
James
John (Luke notes elsewhere that James and John were brothers and the sons of Zebedee)
Philip
Bartholomew
Matthew
Thomas
James son of Alphaeus
Simon called the Zealot
Judas James
Judas Iscariot

To begin with, Luke follows Mark in regards to the Levi/Matthew issue. When Luke tells the story of the tax collector, he calls him Levi (although he leaves out “son of Alphaeus”), and he never mentions that Matthew the disciple is a tax collector. Like Mark, if we had only the Gospel of Luke to go by, we would have no way of knowing what become of Levi the tax collector who became a disciple of Jesus but was then left off the official list of twelve.

Second, Luke changes Mark and Matthew’s “Simon the Canaanite” to “Simon called the Zealot.” Some textual scholars have attempted to connect the two Greek words in question (Kananaios and Zelotes) with Aramaic roots, but these arguments are tenuous and speculative at best. What is clear is that this disciple’s name seems to have varied in both oral and textual tradition from region to region.

Finally, and most significantly, Luke omits the disciple Thaddaeus all together, and adds in a man named Judas James. Depending on which English translation of the Bible you read, this name is given as “Judas brother of James” or “Judas son of James.” In both cases, it’s just a textual guess. The original Greek doesn’t indicate whether this Judas was the son or the brother of James, who this James was, or whether Judas James was simply known by two names (like Simon Peter).

What is clear is that we now have three different accounts of this disciple’s name. Mark calls him Thaddaeus, Matthew calls him Lebbaeus Thaddaeus, and Luke calls him Judas James. While it’s reasonable to assume Matthew and Mark were talking about the same person, it seems that Luke is thinking of someone else entirely. It’s possible, of course, that Lebbaeus Thaddaeus was also known as Judas (son of/brother of) James, but it seems like a stretch. Of course, if it wasn’t the Bible we were discussing, but instead some random ancient text, no one would question at all whether the texts contradicted one another – it would be taken as a given.

Regardless of one’s personal theological perspective, what is clear is that this disciple – like Simon the Canaanite/Zealot – was known by many different identities in both oral and textual tradition during the 1st century.

(One quick note on Matthew’s Lebbaeus Thaddaeus: if you read any English version other than the King James, you will find only “Thaddaeus” listed – no mention of “Lebbaeus.” The reason for this is because the King James was translated from a Medieval Greek text of the New Testament called the Textus Receptus, which many scholars believe is inferior due to its numerous textual discrepancies and questionable provenance. Other than the KJV, most modern English translations use a different textual tradition when creating their translations, and this different textual tradition does not contain the language about “Lebbaeus” in the Gospel of Matthew. More than likely, Matthew’s actual original text conformed to Mark’s original text on the name of this disciple. Luke’s text, however, most definitely deviated.)

John

Moving on to the last Gospel of the New Testament, we come to the book of John. Unlike the three Gospels that preceded it, John does not provide a list of Jesus’ disciples. The writer does refer several times to “the Twelve,” but never provides a complete list of their names. He does, however, refer to several disciples by name throughout the text. In order of appearance, they are:

Andrew
Simon Peter (John notes that Andrew and Peter are brothers)
Philip
Nathanael
Judas Iscariot, son of Simon Iscariot
Thomas called Didymus (Didymus means “the twin”)
Judas (John explicitly notes that this is not Judas Iscariot)
The sons of Zebedee (John only refers to them once, and does not use their actual names)

First, John never mentions anyone named Matthew, Levi, Thaddaeus (or Lebbaeus), Bartholomew, Simon the Zealot, Simon the Canaanite, or James son of Alphaeus.

Second, John tells us Thomas was known as Didymus, something none of the other Gospels mention.

Third, John agrees with Luke that there was a second disciple named Judas, though he doesn’t include any second name for him (i.e. Judas James).

Finally, he includes a disciple – Nathanael – that does not appear in any of the other Gospels.

NON-CANONICAL SOURCES

Most of our non-canonical Christian texts were written in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, well after the New Testament era. However, a handful of non-canonical writings may very well have been contemporaries of, or even in some cases predated, the texts of the New Testament. Most of the debates about the dating of these texts deal with the question of whether they are early (before the Gospel era) or late (right after the Gospel era). In either case, most scholars agree that these texts were at least contemporaries of some of the later New Testament texts, and so I will look briefly at what they have to say about the disciples.

The Gospel of Thomas

Some scholars date this text among our earliest Christian written sources. Indeed, there is a whole school of thought that puts Thomas as a contemporary of Paul’s letters, making it well earlier than any of the Biblical Gospels. Even those who are in the “late camp” on the Gospel of Thomas tend to date it around the same time as books like Revelation, 2 Peter, and Jude.

Regardless of your particular take on that issue, Thomas does mention a few of Jesus’ disciples by name. They are:

Didymus Judas Thomas
Simon Peter
Matthew
Mary
Salome

This is eye-opening, to say the least. First, the text agrees with John that Thomas was called Didymus (“the twin”). But it also calls him Judas, which causes one to wonder if there wasn’t some sort of general confusion in early Christianity about disciples named Judas. We now have three different men with that name among Jesus’ disciples in our various sources.

Second, of course, is the inclusion of two female disciples. While the Biblical Gospels seem to downplay the role of women in some cases, it is clear even from those texts that women played a significant role in the ministry of Jesus. All four Biblical Gospels, after all, agree that it was women who first experienced the resurrection. Additionally, Mark tells us that women traveled with Jesus and helped to finance his ministry. These Biblical texts, however, most definitely do not list any women among Jesus’ inner core of twelve disciples.

Yet the Gospel of Thomas does. The reference to Mary does not explicitly call her a disciple (nor does it imply which Mary we are talking about), but the only other people with speaking roles in this Gospel are Jesus or his disciples. Secondly, Salome – the other woman mentioned – is, in fact, explicitly called a disciple in the passage in which she speaks.

If the Gospel of Thomas is an early text (predating the canonical Gospels), this is highly significant. But even if Thomas comes from the late 1st or early 2nd century, it still shows that even in the New Testament era, some Christians believed that Jesus had included women among his inner circle of disciples. It is also worth noting that while none of our New Testament Gospels refer to any women as disciples, both Mary and Salome are mentioned as followers of Jesus by the canonical Gospel writers. Furthermore, Mary (assuming we are talking about Mary Magdalene) figures much more prominently in the canonical Gospels than many of the named male disciples.

The Gospel of Peter

Most experts agree that this Gospel is a work of the 2nd century, no earlier than 150 C.E., putting it well outside the New Testament era. However, a number of prominent scholars have argued that its writer used early sources that are not found in the New Testament. Since it potentially contains early Christian source material, I will include it here.

The Gospel of Peter is only a fragment of a much longer work, but in the existing text, the following disciples are mentioned:

Simon Peter
Andrew (who is noted to be Peter’s brother)
Levi son of Alphaeus

The interesting reference, of course, is the last one. Recall that Mark first tells the story of Levi son of Alphaeus, calling him a tax collector who becomes a disciple of Jesus. But Mark then fails to include him later on his list of disciples. Luke follows him in this, but omits the “son of Alphaeus” phrase. Matthew, on the other hand, used Mark’s story of Levi, but changed his name to Matthew, and also didn’t include the “son of Alphaeus” phrase. The writer of the Gospel of Matthew essentially connected Mark’s Levi the tax collector with the disciple Matthew.

Remember also that all three of those Gospels included another disciple named James son of Alphaeus.

In the Gospel of Peter, we again see Levi son of Alphaeus, and again he is clearly one of the twelve disciples.

The Didache and the Egerton Gospel

Just a brief note here. Like the two preceding Gospels, the dating of these two texts is hotly debated. Some very prominent scholars, however, have argued that these two documents may represent our very earliest Christian writings, predating even the letters of Paul, and dated somewhere within 10-15 years of Jesus’ death. The Didache is a short series of Christian teachings, and the Egerton Gospel is just a fragment with four brief stories – two that have loose parallels in the canonical Gospels, and two that are completely unknown in any other source.

Since these texts might represent early Christian material, it is important to include them in this survey. The only thing that need be noted, however, is that neither text names any disciples. The Didache, in fact, doesn’t even use the name of Jesus, but instead refers to him as “Lord.”

WHO WERE THE TWELVE DISCIPLES?

The short answer to that question, of course, is that we do not know for sure. Putting together all lists from all available sources, we get the following (the number of sources attesting the name is given in parentheses):

Simon Peter (7)
Andrew the brother of Peter (5)
James son of Zebedee (4)
John son of Zebedee and brother of James (5)
Philip (4)
Bartholomew (3)
Nathanael (1)
Judas James (2)
Judas Iscariot (4)
James son of Alphaeus (3)
Matthew (4)
Levi son of Alphaeus (3)
Simon the Canaanite/Zealot (3)
Thomas (5)
Thaddaeus (2)
Mary (1)
Salome (1)

If we cull this list down based on the most source references, it seems clear that Jesus’ inner circle included Simon Peter, his brother Andrew, the brothers James and John sons of Zebedee, Thomas, Philip, Judas Iscariot, and Matthew.

That’s eight that we can say with a fair amount of certainty, historically-speaking.

More than likely, we can add James son of Alphaeus to that list, as well as Simon the Canaanite (Luke’s slight change of name notwithstanding).

After that, it gets foggy. Church doctrine has long paired Nathanael with Bartholomew, Levi son of Alphaeus with Matthew, and Judas James with Thaddaeus. Mary and Salome, of course, have never even been considered by the Church.

The arguments presented for these pairings go from fairly reasonable to fairly unreasonable. Nathanael is paired with Bartholomew primarily because of his association with Philip and because of the issue between first names and last names. In Mark, Matthew, and Luke, Philip and Bartholomew only appear in the official “lists.” However, they are always listed one after the other. This has led to the argument that they were understood to be a “pair.” In John, we have no Bartholomew, but we do have a Nathanael, and he is paired together with Philip in a story where Philip meets Jesus, then goes and tells Nathanael about him and brings Nathanael into the fold, as it were.

The argument against this theory is simply that it is looking for connections where none really exist. Matthew and Luke pair Philip and Bartholomew together because that’s what Mark did, and they were using Mark as a source. Furthermore, the disciples Thomas and Matthew are always paired together in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, and no one supposes that they were a “pair.”

The second argument in regards to Nathanael and Bartholomew deals with first names and last names. Nathanael is a first name, while Bartholomew is a last name – it literally means “son of Ptolemy.” The argument suggests that John used Bartholomew’s first name (Nathanael), while the other Gospel writers referred to him by his last name. Thus, his name may have been Nathanael son of Ptolemy.

In regards to Levi and Matthew, the primary reason for identifying these two people together is because the writer of the Gospel of Matthew did it himself. When copying Mark’s Gospel, he changed the name of Levi to Matthew and went on to note that the disciple Matthew was the same tax collector who had been called earlier by Jesus. Remember that in Mark and Luke, Jesus calls Levi the tax collector, but then Levi is not listed among the twelve disciples. It is accepted that the “son of Alphaeus” designation given by Mark and the Gospel of Peter is accurate, but simply not mentioned by the other Gospel writers.

Judas James is identified with Thaddaeus because those are the only two apostles left. Mark and Matthew name Thaddaeus. Luke and John mention a second Judas (with Luke adding James to the name).

In all three of these scenarios, and especially the last one, it appears that two differently named people are being equated with one another simply in the service of Biblical literalism. Since it is not possible that the Bible contains errors, these problems must be reconciled. In the case of Thaddaeus in particular, how someone can be known as Thaddaeus, Lebbaeus, Judas, and James, all at once, is simply glossed over.

Thus, we get the official Church list:

Peter
Andrew
James son of Zebedee
John son of Zebedee
Philip
Nathanael Bartholomew
Levi Matthew son of Alphaeus
Thomas the Twin
Judas Iscariot
Lebbaeus Thaddaeus Judas James
James son of Alphaeus
Simon the Canaanite/Zealot

Mary and Salome have easily been rejected by Church tradition because they are only named disciples by the Gospel of Thomas, a text that itself was long ago rejected by the Church as heretical (no doubt, in part, because it did things like claim women were disciples).

It is interesting to note, however, that if we include the four Gospel references to Mary Magdalene as a close follower of Jesus, and add to that the reference from the Gospel of Thomas to Mary as a disciple, Mary is testified as often in our earliest sources as Andrew, Thomas, and James son of Zebedee, and more often than any remaining disciple except Peter (who leads the pack with testimonies in all of our earliest sources).

Even regarding Salome, if we count her reference in Mark (where she is referenced twice), and add that to the reference in Thomas, Salome – a name most Christians have probably never even heard in regards to Jesus – is mentioned as often as Thaddaeus and Judas James, and more often than Nathanael. The fact that Salome is mentioned by name twice in the same Gospel (Mark) also puts her head of most of the other disciples, who are typically only mentioned once – in the official “list” – and then never heard from again.

As to the question of whether James son of Alphaeus and Levi Matthew son of Alphaeus were brothers, Church tradition has left that question unanswered. They have, however, connected James son of Alphaeus to James the Just and James the Lesser. James the Just is noted by both Paul and Luke to have been the leader of the Church in Jerusalem during the first generation of Christianity, and also the brother of Jesus. How the brother of Jesus could have been the “son of Alphaeus” is anyone’s guess, but the Catholic Encyclopedia makes the claim regardless. James the Lesser, on the other hand, is mentioned in the Gospels as the son of one of the several Mary’s who followed Jesus. It is not unreasonable to connect James son of Alphaeus to this person, but there is certainly nothing in the text to imply the connection.

Lebbaeus Thaddaeus Judas James, on the other hand, has been connected to the writer of the letter of Jude. That text starts out with the assertion that it is being written by “Judas brother of James.” In this case, “brother of” is explicitly stated in the text. However, this letter is generally dated to the early part of the 2nd century, making it far too late to have come from a disciple of Jesus, and the writer even refers to the disciples in the third person (“…remember what the apostles of our Lord Jesus foretold…”).

And just to make it a bit more confusing, he is referred to in Catholic circles as St. Jude – to ensure you don’t confuse him with Judas Iscariot.

So now it’s Lebbaeus Thaddaeus Judas James Jude.

I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m skeptical.

CONCLUSION

Many scholars over the years have argued that the Gospel depictions of Jesus surrounded by an inner circle of twelve disciples is likely legendary. They point out that twelve was a sacred number to ancient Jews, a number strongly associated with God, representing the original twelve tribes of Israel, the original Jewish patriarchs who fathered God’s people. It would be easy to see how Jewish followers of Jesus may have begun to imagine an inner circle of twelve disciples, twelve men symbolizing the original Hebrew fathers, twelve men representing the new covenant God was making with humanity, twelve patriarchs going out into the world to father a whole new flock of God’s people.

Such arguments draw evidence from the points I have outlined above. While most of the names of the twelve disciples are generally agreed upon among our earliest sources, there is a clear sense of variation in the earliest oral and textual traditions that informed our existing documents. No fewer than five of the twelve disciples have name variations among our sources. At least three of those twelve have names that are explicitly opposed from text to text. One disciple has a different name or a name variation in all four sources he is mentioned in, and has been given a fifth name by Church tradition.

Whether Jesus actually had twelve disciples is ultimately impossible to prove one way or the other. My personal belief is that the number twelve is probably a later development (although fairly “early” in the post-resurrection Christian movement), and Jesus likely had a varying number of “inner circle” disciples that traveled with him throughout his ministry, including both men and women. Some were there among his closest companions for most of the time – Peter, Andrew, James, John, Mary, perhaps Thomas and Philip. Others may have come and gone – a Levi here, a Bartholomew there, a Judas here, a Salome or Joanne or Nathanael there. Very good arguments have been made suggesting that the entire character of Judas Iscariot is legendary, but I am undecided on that particular issue. I may share that argument in a later essay.

My personal feelings aside, the textual evidence suggests strongly that even the earliest Christians weren’t quite sure about the existence of the twelve, or were at the very least in disagreement about who they were.

Revelation: The Antichrist and the End of Times

Recently on the Rush Message Board, a frequent and long-time contributor who I will describe as an “end-of-times fundamentalist” has started making a lot of comments about prophecies in Revelation, and particularly the so-called “Mark of the Beast” – 666. This number has turned up randomly in his life several times recently, most notably on several trips to fast food restaurants. Most recently, his total at Long John Silver’s was $6.66. He stated that he does not believe these are coincidences, and said that he believes God is trying to tell him something. He has been warning us not to take the mark, and implying that the current world situation is evidence of the end of times. How someone could be a rabid fan of Rush – a band whose lyrics are consistently anti-religion and even atheistic sometimes – is a different topic all together.

In an effort to put some aspects of the book of Revelation into better historical and contextual perspective, I would like for my readers to consider the following points. I will quote some verses, then make commentary. Before doing that however, let me make a brief comment about the number 666.

In our oldest and most reliable early sources, “666” is not the number of the beast. Instead, the number is 616. It appears that a scribe, sometime during the early Dark Ages, simply made a mistake in copying, and that mistake was passed on to future copies, and eventually came down to us as “666.” Church fathers as early as the 2nd and 3rd centuries even addressed the mistake in their own writings. One of these church fathers, Iraneaus – who was a prolific early Christian writer, heresy-hunter, and the Bishop of Lyon in the late 2nd century – believed “666” was the correct number. Textual scholars, however, have known for a very long time that the number was almost certainly 616 in the original manuscript. Today’s scholars have far more early manuscripts at their disposal than Iraneaus had.

Now, with that established, let us move on to some passages from Revelation.

Revelation 1:1 and 3 – (1)The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. (3) Blessed is the one who reads the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.

Revelation 22:7a, 10, and 12a – (7) Behold, I am coming soon! (10) Then he told me, “Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, because the time is near.” (12a) Behold, I am coming soon!

1 John 4:3b – This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.

Revelation and 1 John are said by the Church to have been written by the same person, and they believe that person was the disciple John (scholars almost universally agree that this is not correct, but that is for a different topic – the point is, traditionalists, including end-of-times evangelicals, believe 1 John and Revelation were produced by the same writer).

Thus, it is could not be more clear from these texts that the writer(s) believed the end was coming soon, within their own lifetimes. In 1 John, it says clearly that the antichrist is already in the world.

Therefore, anything prophesied in Revelation was clearly believed by the writer to be events that were going to happen very soon. To assume that the writer was simply mistaken, or that by “soon” and “the time is near” the writer was speaking metaphorically, is to read meaning and words into the text that are not actually there. This is a problem in and of itself, but it becomes an even bigger problem when taken in context with another passage in Revelation:

Revelation 22:18-19 – I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.

Thus, by the warning given by the very same writer who promised all this was to happen soon, anyone who supposes that the writer was writing metaphorically, or was mistaken, is going to be one of the victims of the horrifying prophecies predicted in the book itself.

Taken together with the fact that we know 666 is a scribal error, and 616 was the original number, to believe that these predicted events are still in the future, and to believe that 666 is a significant number accompanying those events, is to put yourself in danger of eternal suffering in the lake of fire.

If I were a fundamentalist and end-of-times believer, I would immediately cease with any suggestion that 666 has any significance whatsoever, or that God is trying to tell me something in the Long John Silver’s drive thru. Furthermore, I would not put much stock in Revelation, because it is clear that if the prophecies were accurate, the events must already have taken place. To suggest anything else is to commit the damnable sin the writer warns about. An end-of-times fundamentalist must assume the events in Revelation are in the past, and we are now living in the period preceding the coming kingdom of God. This, of course, puts a major wrench in fundamentalist theology. A whole new essay could be written just based on that alone.

As for 666 and the antichrist, let us first look at the relevant passage in sections:

Revelation 13:5-6 – The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise his authority for forty-two months. He opened his mouth to blaspheme God, and to slander his name and his dwelling place and those who live in heaven.

Caligula was a Roman emperor who ruled from the middle part of 37 C.E. until the first month of January, 41 C.E. It was a period of roughly 46 months. He was a tyrant and regarded by most people to be certifiably insane. Shortly after he came to power, he fell deathly ill and most believed he was going to die. Somehow, however, he recovered. He later endured several assassination attempts. He proclaimed himself a god and forced people to worship him – something that was quite unprecedented in the Roman empire. He put a statue in the Temple at Jerusalem – the dwelling place of the Jewish and Christian God – thereby severely offending Jews and Christians alike.

Revelation 13:11-18 – Then I saw another beast...he exercised all the authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. And he performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven to earth in full view of men...he ordered them to set up an image in honor of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived...he also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name. This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man’s number. His number is 666 [616].

Emperor Nero was the nephew of Caligula, and ruled during the 50’s and 60’s C.E. He kept with the tradition of forcing people to worship past emperors, including Caligula. He was associated with the great fire of Rome, and was believed by many to have actually orchestrated it. He was obsessed with his own reputation, and frequently found himself at odds with the Senate and the nobles because he routinely enacted legislation to make the masses happy, frequently at the expense of the rich and powerful. He put through a number of economic packages designed to ease the tax burden of the people and to ensure that they remained loyal to him. He was widely regarded as the first Roman emperor to persecute Christians. In ancient Jewish numerology, his name equals the number 616, which is the number contained in the original text. This number is arrived at by taken Nero’s name in Aramaic, and coming up with a “sum” of his name.

It is very obvious, from a comparison of the text to the historical record, that the writer was talking about Caligula and Nero – Caligula being the “first” beast with the “wound” that had healed, and Nero being the second, who followed in the footsteps of the first. Added to that is the known fact that many Christians in the 2nd century and thereafter believed Nero was the antichrist who would return to earth to battle the Christ in the final showdown. This is stated explicitly in a number of 2nd century Christian texts, including the “Ascension of Isaiah” and the “Syballine Oracles.” The book of Revelation, too, was written in the 2nd century. Even the great St. Augustine, writing as late as the 5th century, referred to the widespread belief among Christians that Nero was the antichrist, going so far as to agree that many of Nero’s actions mirrored those of the supposed antichrist.

The fact that the writer was writing in code is pretty obvious from the text. “This calls for wisdom,” and “If anyone has insight...” are sort of like a “Wink, wink. Hint, hint,” phrase in the text. The writer was clearly hinting to his readers that he was speaking in code. The code was used to ensure that if the text fell into the wrong hands, no one could discover any treasonous material in it – the writer knew his Jewish-Christian readers would understand, but knew Roman pagans would not. Furthermore, as mentioned above, Nero enacted a number of economic programs to keep the masses loyal to him. Thus, only those with the “sign of the beast” – that is, only those willing to bow to Nero – could “buy or sell.”

It is also important to point out that the text tells us “everyone” was “forced” to take the sign. It was not something they had a choice in. Thus, the idea that people today need to reject the sign of the beast does not add up with what it says in the text. Later in the text, of course, the writer suggests that only those who did not take the sign would get to enter paradise, but the fact that the writer himself seems to have made contradictory statements is irrelevant. Remember, the Christians of the early 2nd century were subjects of the Roman empire. The point the author of Revelation was making was that only those people who refused to subject themselves to Roman laws and religions would have their names written down in the Book of Life.

It is a virtual certainty that the writer of Revelation pictured Nero as the antichrist, following in the footsteps of Caligula, who was the precursor to the antichrist. The writer clearly believed Nero was due to return to earth and battle Jesus. And of course, 2nd century Christians would not have had Roman histories available to them on every street corner or on the Internet, and their knowledge of the history of the Roman emperors would have been based primarily on oral tradition. It is possible the writer of Revelation pictured Caligula and Nero – as well as all the powerful leaders of the Roman empire – as more or less one and the same, with the actions of each sort of overlapping. The seat of the Roman emperor was a precarious one in the 1st century – no less than eleven men were emperor of Rome from 37 C.E. to 98 C.E. In the year 69 alone, four emperors ruled in a period of twelve months. Of the eleven rulers from 37-98 C.E., seven of them either were assassinated or committed suicide. Someone writing in the early 2nd century would not have had all the facts straight – knowledge and information would have overlapped. What is obvious, however, is that the writer of Revelation pictured the antichrist as a composite of a Roman emperor, who was, to the author and the communities he was writing to, the embodiment of earthly evil.

With this in mind, unless you suppose that a 1st century Roman emperor is going to return to earth in a breastplate and carrying a short-sword, and attempt to take control of humanity, I think we can safely say that these prophecies belong in the ancient, pre-Enlightenment era. They certainly have no relation to the modern world, and the writer made it clear that he believed the final battle was going to happen during his 2nd century life, not 2,000 years later.