James L. Papandrea - The Wedding of the Lamb: A Historical Approach to the Book of Revelation

T he reader will quickly discover that the interpretation presented in this book does not fit neatly into any of the existing categories of dispensationalism or millennialism. By calling it a historical approach to the book of Revelation, I intend to convey two things. First, I do not plan to explore every interpretive option that contemporary scholarship has to offer. This book is not a commentary, and while it does present an interpretation of every verse in Revelation, it is not written as a verse-by-verse commentary, and it is not intended to replace the many fine commentaries that already exist. Rather than go over ground that has been covered again and again, I intend to focus on the way the book of Revelation has historically been interpreted, looking primarily at early Christian sources, in order to offer what I argue is an interpretation that is as close as possible to the way the majority of early Christians would have understood it. Wherever it is appropriate, I have included footnotes that cover alternative interpretations of specific passages.

The second thing I wish to convey by the title is that this book is a departure from popular end-times fiction and other treatments that assume that most of the events depicted in the book of Revelation are still to be realized in the future. On the contrary, I intend to show that the majority of the imagery in Revelation is meant to describe events in the past. This approach takes seriously the history of the Roman Empire and the Churchs place in it as a major influence on the writing of Revelation. Therefore, whenever possible, I will choose an interpretation of a given passage that relates to an event in history, rather than some event in the future.

That being said, I do not reject out of hand the possibility that God might give someone a vision of things to come, and in fact this interpretation assumes that there is an element of predictive prophecy in the book of Revelation and in the related preaching of Jesus. However, in the end, the interpretation presented here is meant as an attempt to capture the understanding of the author of Revelation, and to clarify the way the original audience would have heard its message. It is up to the reader to decide whether to adopt it as his or her own interpretation.

I begin by clarifying the genre of literature we are dealing with. As an example of apocalyptic prophecy, the majority of early Christians would have understood Revelation using various types of non-literal interpretation. Which type of non-literal interpretation (allegory, typology, etc.) would have been used is not a matter of concern, since early Christians would not have had our contemporary categories in mind. Once we have defined the genre, we have to interpret the individual symbols in the text, using the Old Testament as a reference point. After I have explained each of the symbolic images in the text of Revelation, we can use this information to reconstruct a chronology of the text. With Revelation 1:9 as the hermeneutical key, I then categorize the images as relating to events in the past, present, and future relative to the author. These images can then be compared to historical events and placed into a timeline. Finally, in Appendix A, the entire text of Revelation is recast, translating the images into their historical counterparts, resulting in The Book of Revelation in Plain English.

Before we move on, a note about the capitalization of Church. When the word refers to the universal Church, it is capitalized. When it refers to a local congregation, or the Christians in a particular place, it is not capitalized.

I do not claim to have exhausted the topic of the interpretation of the book of Revelation, only to have entered into it, and I offer this study as food for thought, coming from a place of convergence of New Testament interpretation and the history of the Roman/early Christian period.