#313 — Apocalypse
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Summary
Bart Ehrman is a distinguished professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the author of six books, including Armageddon, Misquoting Jesus, How Jesus Became God, The Triumph of Christianity, Heaven and Hell, and Most Recently, Armageddon, which is the focus of today s conversation. In this episode, Bart talks about the book of Revelation and its implications for Christian belief, particularly in the U.S., and the future of our world. He also talks about his religious upbringing and how he became a committed Christian, and why he believes that prophecy is a fundamental part of God's plan for us to live in the world as it is written in the Old and New Testaments, and that we should all be prepared for the end of the world, as viewed through the Book of Revelation. This episode is the first part of a two-part conversation with Dr. Bart Ehrmann, in which we discuss the impact of Revelation on Christian belief and the consequences of prophecy in the New Testament and the history of early Christianity. In part one of this conversation, Dr. Ehrmans talks about how he grew up in a Christian household, and explains why prophecy is so central to Christian belief. The second part of the conversation focuses on the concept of prophecy and the implications of Revelation in the Bible and the Old Testament. Armageddon, and its relevance to the Christian faith and the Christian life in the modern world, and how it relates to the Bible. the end-of-of the world prophecy that is predicted in Revelation and the Bible, and what Christians should do in the future. in the sequel to Revelation, The Last Testament, Armageddon. and The Last Epilogue, The Last Days of the Bible of Revelation and its impact on Christian faith, and how we should be prepared to live up to what we should learn from it and what we can expect in the next chapter in our lives and in our own lives and the rest of our lives. Music: " Armageddon" by Ian Dorsch and "Heaven and Hell and Hell" by Jeff Perla by Robert Kwan, by Kevin McLeod, "Heal and Talk About It (feat. by The Good News, & "The Good News and the Good News by John Piper by the Good Morning, Bad News and Goodbye, and The Bad News, and Good Morning by John Singleton
Transcript
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I just received an update from a former podcast guest.
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Meg Smaker was my guest for episode 300, where we discussed her cancellation.
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She's a documentarian who made a film originally titled Jihad Rehab.
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And if you recall, her film was accepted to the Sundance Film Festival and others, and that
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she was promptly canceled for having the temerity to make a film on this topic, while being of
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the wrong racial and religious identity, and anyone who heard that episode understands that
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she was absolutely the wrong target of this kind of activist hysteria, having lived for
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years in Yemen and having produced an entirely compassionate and balanced film.
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Anyway, the response to that podcast was overwhelmingly positive, and she had a GoFundMe campaign to
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help her release the film, which I think only had a few thousand dollars in it before we recorded
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And after you guys heard from Meg, very quickly she raised over three quarters of a million
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dollars, so needless to say, that was a tremendous help to her.
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And she's now releasing the film herself, and there are upcoming theater dates for the month
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of April in New York, Washington, Chicago, Denver, Austin, San Antonio, Los Angeles, and perhaps
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Anyway, the information can all be found at jihadrehab.com.
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Bart is a leading authority on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity, and a
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distinguished professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
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He's the author of six New York Times bestsellers, and has written and edited more than 30 books,
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including Misquoting Jesus, How Jesus Became God, The Triumph of Christianity, Heaven and
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Hell, and most recently, Armageddon, which is the focus of today's conversation.
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The topic today is really the end of the world, as viewed through the book of Revelation, and
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more importantly, what Christians, especially in the United States, believe about prophecy and
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I don't tend to focus on religion much these days, and it's always amazing to be reminded
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of what people specifically believe on this front.
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It really is quite extraordinary, and unfortunately still all too consequential.
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So you have written a new book titled Armageddon, which, I mean, I guess all the products of
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biblical prophecy are attention-getting, but the concept of Armageddon is close to the
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heart of, I would imagine, all evangelical Christians.
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I want to track through your book because it's a discussion of Revelation, the book of Revelation,
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I can't say I committed much of its sequence to memory, but I want you to tell us what is
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in there, and we'll talk about its implications for Christian belief, particularly in the U.S.
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But before we do, you've been on the podcast before, and we spoke about many issues related
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Because it's pretty relevant to understanding how you come at these topics.
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Because, so when I was in, I was raised in kind of a nominally Christian household, but
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But when I was 15, I had a born-again experience and became a very committed evangelical.
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And after high school, instead of doing something kind of normal, like go to university, I went
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to Moody Bible Institute, which was a bastion of fundamentalism.
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And the relevance to this is that I believed that every word in the Bible was inspired by
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And the book of Revelation, we took as a prediction of what was soon going to happen in our lifetimes.
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And so that's how I started out, as a firm believer in the Bible.
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And I ended up going to Wheaton to finish my degree and did a degree in English.
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And then I went off to Princeton Theological Seminary.
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And when I was there, I was still studying the Bible.
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But it tended to be more liberal in its orientation.
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And the professors there, by and large, didn't think that the Bible is infallible or inerrant.
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They thought that there are mistakes in the Bible and contradictions.
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And it took me a long time to get my head around that, because I just didn't believe
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But then eventually, as I started reading the New Testament more in the original Greek,
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and I started reading the Old Testament in Hebrew, I started realizing there really are
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And so I gave up my view of the inerrancy of the Bible.
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I remained a liberal Christian for a long time, but in the midst of giving up the idea
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of inerrancy, I gave up the idea that the book of Revelation is predicting what's really
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And so for a long time, I had the kind of standard liberal Christian view, which is that
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the book of Revelation is not a literal description of the future, but a kind of a book of hope
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that those who are being oppressed for being righteous now will be rewarded later.
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Not that it's a literal description of what will happen, but it's an apocalyptic sense
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that at the end, God's going to make right everything that's wrong.
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And so that's what I held for a long time, until about five years ago.
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I really started studying Revelation, and I thought, you know, both of those views, they're
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It's absolutely not talking about our future the way almost everybody thinks it is, but
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It's a violent, wrathful book and about getting revenge.
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And so I've completely changed my view about it.
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If memory serves, Jesus comes back, and he's not in a good mood, and he's really not one
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He's introduced as the lamb that was slain, and that makes you think, starting off, that
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well, so this will be a book about how, you know, Jesus suffered violence from others,
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and it'll be a book supporting that approach to nonviolence.
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But it doesn't take long before you realize that this lamb who was slain is coming back
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So let's define a few terms before we get into the book itself, because I realize I think
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I'm using one of these common terms inaccurately.
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The term apocalypse, which I gather is just a synonym for revelation, has come to mean,
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and I think common parlance, it's more or less synonymous with a calamity, you know, and
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It's like the apocalypse is the end of the world, and it's just a confusion based on
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the fact that that's what is being described in revelation?
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I mean, the word apocalypse is a Greek word, apocalypsis, and it means something like an
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And so they're just—in Latin, it'd be revelation, and in Greek, it'd be apocalypse.
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And I think what happened was that this term, apocalypse, came to be applied to an entire
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literary genre from the ancient world, which people don't write in this genre anymore.
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But in these apocalypses, Jewish and Christian apocalypses, they often talked about the crises
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that were coming and about how in the end it would be okay, but for now, it's just going
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And so the apocalypse came to refer to this period of hell on earth before it was resolved.
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And it's because that's what these apocalypses discuss, and so that's how the term then shifted
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Right, but do you think that's an appropriate usage now, or is that a corruption of the term
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And just like a lot of terms mean a variety of things in different contexts, this term usually
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when we say the apocalypse is coming, that's what we mean.
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Then I will not issue any retractions over phrases like a misinformation apocalypse that
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Armageddon is a term made up by the author of Revelation.
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It's referring to the valley outside of Megiddo.
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Megiddo is a town in Israel that you can still visit.
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And it's a place outside of this town, this city.
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There was a place where a lot of major battles happened in the Old Testament.
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And Armageddon in the book of Revelation is the place where the final battle will take
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place, where the armies of the enemies of God are gathered together, and Christ comes
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from heaven with the heavenly armies to do battle.
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And so that, too, has come to mean something like the ultimate end of the world.
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Well, let's talk about Revelation and what we know about it as a book, and it's the history
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What do we know about John of Patmos, who supposedly authored it?
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Well, I think the person that we call John of Patmos really did author it.
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One of the things about these apocalypses, this ancient genre, is that usually they're
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Normally, the person claims to be some famous person from the past.
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And so we have an apocalypse of Abraham, the father of the Jews, or an apocalypse of Enoch,
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Or we even have an apocalypse of Adam, as in Adam and Eve, who wrote an apocalypse.
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And the reason they picked these ancient spiritual figures is because these books contain revelations
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of the secrets, the divine secrets, that are going to make sense of the chaos that's happening
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And who better to be given a revelation than one of these people?
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So the apocalypse of John is somewhat unusual because the person tells us his name.
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And this person appears to be someone known to his audience.
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He does not claim to be the disciple John, John the son of Zebedee, one of Jesus' disciples.
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The book ended up being included in the New Testament because people ended up thinking
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But already in early Christianity, some of the scholars realized, yeah, it's not the same
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person who wrote the Gospel of John, for example.
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So all we know about this John of Patmos is what we find in the book, which is that he
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appears to be riding from the island of Patmos, which is off the west coast of what's now Turkey.
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And he says he's there for the word of God, and that's usually taken to mean that he's
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been exiled as, you know, for he's being persecuted and has been exiled for his Christian activities.
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And so it's not completely clear why he's on Patmos, but it has something to do with
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And one thing that struck me in your book was the claim that the Greek in the book isn't
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And this put me in mind of something Nietzsche wrote.
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But he said it was clever of God to learn Greek when he wanted to become an author and not
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And I always took that as just, you know, Nietzsche being snide.
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But you say that the Greek text actually is kind of substandard Greek.
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So Nietzsche, as you know, started out teaching classics.
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And so he was actually, he was very, very good at Greek.
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And he, and the Greek of the entire New Testament was often lambasted in the ancient world by ancient
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literary elite as being really kind of second rate.
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And, and most of, most of the New Testament is second rate by high literary standards, but
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The last time I taught a, I've got an adjunct appointment in the classics department here
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And a few years ago, I was teaching an advanced undergraduate class on the New Testament Greek.
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And one of the assignments I gave them is I had them read chapter one of Revelation and
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Not just, not just bad Greek, you know, not just like not very good, but actually bad,
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And the, the theory that most people have for that is that his native language was maybe
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Aramaic or some kind of Semitic language and that Greek is his second language.
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But the more I looked into it, the more I realized it's not that this, it's not that
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he's showing that he normally could speak a Semitic language.
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So, you know, you shouldn't expect that just because somebody can write Greek, it means
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And I think he's just somebody who's not a good writer.
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Well, so what have fundamentalists done with this inconvenient detail that this text that
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is supposedly inerrant and directly inspired by the creator of the universe shows in its
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original, the language of its original composition, less than perfect mastery of the language.
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There are, there are biblical scholars, not just fundamentalists, but others too, who, who
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One explanation that gets floated around is that this author actually could write very
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good Greek and they point to some passages where the Greek's pretty good.
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And so they say, well, if he could write Greek well, then it must mean that he's choosing
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And so one theory is that this author, because he's giving such a counter-cultural message
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that he's writing it in street lingo, that he's, you know, and that he's, he's trying,
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I actually considered it for a while, but it just isn't true.
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We, we know nothing about Greek street lingo to begin with.
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So there's no way to establish that that's what, what it would, that this is what it would
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But apart from that, you know, even some of my not best students can sometimes construct
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But, and I, so I, so I don't think there's much of an explanation, but they, they usually
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just say something like, you know, God is, God's giving him the absolute right idea.
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So the words are right, even if the grammar's wrong.
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You can imagine how that lands with an atheist over here, but.
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So let's talk about how the world ends, according to this text.
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I don't know in what sort of detail you want to track through it, but just give us the story
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So the book describes itself as a book about the wrath of God and the Lamb, the Lamb being
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The way, the way it works is really not that complicated.
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Most, most, I mean, the reality is most people avoid the book of Revelation, except for the
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people who want to see what's going to be happening next year sometime.
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The people who are fundamentalists, who are interpreting it in order to show that, you
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know, what's going to happen in our near future.
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Most other people just avoid it because it just seems so weird and bizarre.
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And my experience is that most students, or most others, are afraid of it because it's
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But in fact, it's not hard to follow if you're just given the roadmap.
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Well, that's hard to say because the Bible was never, there was never a vote or anything
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It was widely debated for the first several centuries.
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And it wasn't until the fourth century that the majority of church leaders started agreeing
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So it was floating around and it was highly, highly controversial.
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Today, the reasons we find it controversial is because of all the blood and violence.
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The way it works here is that John is given a vision of the heavenly realm.
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The prophet is taken up into heaven to see how the realities up there make sense of what's
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In chapter 4, John goes up and he goes into the throne room of God.
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And God is holding, God's on the throne, he sees God on the throne, holding a scroll that
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So it's this writing that's been sealed with seven seals.
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And the scroll is taken by the Lamb, the Christ image, and Christ starts breaking the seals.
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And every time he breaks one of the seals, a catastrophe hits the earth, usually a very
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When he breaks the seventh seal, then there's an introduction to seven angels who each has
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And with the blowing of each trumpet, more disasters happen.
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And when the seventh angel blows the seventh trumpet, we're introduced to seven angels who
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have bowls on their shoulders of God's wrath, and they pour God's wrath out on the earth.
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So by this time, you've had a threefold series of seven disasters each.
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And he arranges for the Battle of Armageddon, where his chief enemy, called the Beast, which
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Christ comes forth from heaven with his armies, slaughters the Beast and the armies of earth.
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And then that introduces a thousand-year rule of Christ here on earth, just with the martyrs
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of Jesus, following which there's a final judgment.
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Everybody who's ever lived is raised from the dead and faces judgment.
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Those who are opposed to God are thrown into a lake of burning sulfur.
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That's how he kills everybody on earth, which is 99% of the population that's ever lived.
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And then the saints are given a new heaven and a new earth.
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A Jerusalem descends from heaven, a new Jerusalem that is 1,500 miles cube.
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So let's define a few more terms that will be familiar to people, many of whom who have
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not even opened this part of the Bible, because they've just been received into the common
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conception of American Christianity in particular.
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Because when I was a fundamentalist Christian, I believed that the rapture was going to be
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The rapture is the doctrine that is found in conservative evangelical and fundamentalist
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circles that says that Jesus is coming back from heaven to take his followers out of the
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And so the idea is that surely, you know, the true followers of Jesus aren't going to have
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to experience this, and so Jesus takes them out.
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The word rapture comes from a Latin word, which means to be snatched up.
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And so the idea is that Jesus returns, snaps up all the Christians up to heaven, and then
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And this period of chaos and suffering that the good Christians will be able to avoid by
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It's called the tribulation, and in those circles, it's to last for seven years.
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When I was a student in the 1970s, we thought the rapture was coming soon, and there was all
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this talk about how we didn't want to be left behind, because that would be a very bad thing.
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And there was a movie that was called Thief in the Night that came out in something like
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But it was about the rapture having happened, and the people who were left behind are controlled
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by the Antichrist, including the liberal Christians who didn't believe in the rapture.
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And so this scared the daylights out of all of us.
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And so that ended up developing in the 1990s with this series, the Left Behind series, that
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That by the time Tim LaHaye, Timothy LaHaye died in whatever it was a few years ago, there
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And there's been very interesting research on it, showing that most people who read it
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And so, which returns me to your question, where is all of this in the book of Revelation?
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And the startling answer is, it's not in Revelation at all.
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There is nothing about the rapture in the book of Revelation.
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This is a—the rapture had never been conceptualized until the 1830s.
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So throughout the entire history of Christianity until the 1830s, nobody had ever thought of
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the rapture, but it came into existence then and took over evangelical Christianity, first
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It's a little bit complicated, but there's a man named John Henry Darby who founded this
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small group of—it's kind of like a denomination, a small denomination called
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And it was in the 1830s—about 1830 he started this group.
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And they were—they're very hardcore Bible believers.
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And he thought that when you read the Bible carefully, you can see that the Bible is set
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up to show that God deals with the human race differently at different periods of time.
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And so when he deals with Adam and Eve, he just tells them, don't eat the fruit off of
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They do eat the fruit, and so that messes everything up.
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And so later he sends a flood because there's sin all through the world.
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And then he tells Noah that he needs to institute government.
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And so he tells Noah, if anybody kills someone else, it's the death penalty.
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The idea of conscience and government go on for a while until Abraham comes, and then
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he gives Abraham a promise that there's going to be—that his descendants will be the people
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And so at every point, things are changing depending on what God does at the moment.
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He gives Moses the law, finally, and then people are under the law until Jesus comes, and Jesus
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And so there are these periods of time that God deals with people differently depending
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And so there are seven of these periods, and they're called dispensations.
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And these—at the end of the sixth dispensation, at the end of the Christian period, God sends
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There's this hell on earth, and then there's the millennium, a thousand-year rule of Christ.
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And so what Darby wanted to argue is that God is certainly not going to have his righteous
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people suffer through this tribulation before the millennium, so he takes them out of the
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He called it the secret rapture, because he said the Bible says no one knows when it
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will happen, so it's a secret when it will happen.
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And then that ended up becoming a popular view over a long period of time.
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And there's this distinction between premillennialism and postmillennialism, which offer a very different
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Isn't there just a clear description as to the sequencing here?
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I mean, you might want to define what the difference is.
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Well, it weirdly—you know, part of my book is trying to show how all of these things actually
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are closely connected with social and political realities in the modern world.
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And one of the very strange things is that this kind of thinking actually started with
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When the French Revolution hit, theologians in England were very, very, you know, upset
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and thought, this is surely an indication that the end is almost here.
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This started the modern idea that the Bible is predicting the imminent end.
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For most of history, not just the book of Revelation, but the entire Bible was not interpreted as a
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prediction of our future, but with the craziness of the French Revolution, the chaos and the slaughter,
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theologians started saying, look, this is what was predicted.
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That view came over to America, and especially in America, there was a much more positive outlook
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Technology was developing, sciences were developing, the Enlightenment was hitting America, and there
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were theologians like Jonathan Edwards, who's most famous for his sermon, Sinners in the
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But he was actually—he was a real intellectual.
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He was trained in philosophy and in science, and he went to Yale when he was something like,
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And he developed the idea that the way we are improving here on Earth, and especially in
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America, we are moving toward the kingdom of God, we are going to be implementing the kingdom
00:29:30.220
of God, that this was God's plan all along, that America would introduce the world into
00:29:36.300
a period of peace and prosperity, and that that would be the millennium that the Bible
00:29:42.940
It's not a literal thousand-year reign of Christ.
00:29:45.880
It's the glories we're going to be bringing in by our advances.
00:29:49.720
In that understanding of things, Jesus was going to come back, but he would come back
00:29:54.160
after the millennium in order to bring eternal life here on Earth, so that it wouldn't just
00:30:01.220
be people would live and die in this great kingdom, but that it would be an eternal kingdom.
00:30:06.920
And so Jesus would come after the millennium, and that was post-millennialism.
00:30:11.740
That kind of optimism swept through a lot of Christianity through the 19th century, and
00:30:19.200
it took a very serious hit with World War I, where it turned out that the advances in technology
00:30:26.660
led to things like machine guns, and the realities of war became apparent, and it started looking
00:30:34.920
like we're not really improving things by our advances.
00:30:40.420
Then, of course, there was a depression, and then there was a Second World War, and atomic
00:30:45.960
bombs drop, and people basically gave up on post-millennialism then.
00:30:51.300
They said, we are not heading toward the kingdom.
00:30:57.880
The pessimism had started back with Derby back in the 1830s, but now just about everybody
00:31:03.420
bought into it, that in fact, this world's getting worse and worse, not better and better,
00:31:08.100
and it's going to continue getting worse until real craziness hits.
00:31:13.340
And so the idea then was that Jesus is coming back not after we develop a millennium, but
00:31:19.640
before the millennium, because we're not going to develop it.
00:31:23.260
What's going to happen is Jesus will take his followers out of the world, and then after
00:31:28.540
this chaos happens for seven years, he will then return and start the millennium.
00:31:36.960
And so the idea is that Jesus returns before the millennium, not afterwards.
00:31:43.460
Yeah, it's interesting, because they have enormously different ethical and political consequences,
00:31:50.120
So if you're a pre-millennialist, fundamentalist, and you're eager for Jesus to come back and
00:31:57.720
set the world straight, you look at the chaos of human events, and no matter how bad things
00:32:06.800
Like, the worse things are, the better they are on some level, because it's not until the
00:32:15.200
Whereas if you're a post-millennialist, you know that he's not going to come back until
00:32:19.620
we actually manage to build something like a paradise here on Earth and maintain it for a
00:32:25.460
So it's a very different expectation of the fulfillment of prophecy, and it's a very different
00:32:36.000
Yeah, well, the fundamentalists are all pre-millennialists.
00:32:39.500
But there are, you know, there are, you know, Christianity is a very diverse phenomenon throughout the
00:32:46.460
And most liberal Christians don't subscribe to this, like mainline Christians, you know,
00:32:53.240
just the mainline Protestant denominations, you know, Methodists, and Presbyterian, Episcopalian,
00:33:00.760
And they tend to have a much stronger social agenda as a result, because they think we need
00:33:07.440
And they tend not to even think or talk about millennial issues.
00:33:11.400
They think the Book of Revelation is a symbolic book.
00:33:16.740
It's not meant to be taken as a description of things that are actually going to happen.
00:33:21.560
Those who do think that it's actually going to happen tend to be premillennialist.
00:33:26.160
And some of them, some of the fundamentalist leaders are quite anxious for things to get
00:33:32.200
worse and worse, and seem to be rather pleased when there are major catastrophes in the world,
00:33:38.700
or major wars in the world, because this is a sign that we're near the end.
00:33:45.740
How has this impacted the founding of the state of Israel and the Christian support for Israel?
00:33:52.480
I mean, there's this discussion of what you call Christian Zionism in the book, and the
00:33:58.420
fact that Israel can count on American evangelicals as their really strongest base of support, the
00:34:05.860
logic of it is fairly perverse, given the expectations of premillennialists.
00:34:10.860
Perhaps you can describe what's happening there.
00:34:13.480
Yeah, this is one of the interesting things that I deal with in the book, because it's
00:34:17.480
something that people probably wouldn't expect, that American foreign policy has long been
00:34:26.460
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