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The Apocalypse as an Annual Cycle of Prophecies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

M. D. Goulder
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The Apocalypse is not a random jumble of ‘prophecies’: it shows clear evidence of ordering. The problem, however, is to know on what principles the ordering has been done, and which principle has been dominant or primary, and which less influential. For example, the Seven Letters, Seals, Trumpets and Bowls seem at first sight to dominate the book; but then every commentator has some embarrassment in explaining the intrusions of chs 7 and 10–11, let alone the second half of the book. Even then, we need an explanation of the symbolism of the seals, trumpets and bowls, which is in no obvious sense given: so, on their own, the four Sevens are only a partial answer to the question.

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Articles
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New Testament Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , April 1981 , pp. 342 - 367
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

[1] Revelation (London: Pelican Commentary, 1979), pp. 52–4. I have slightly amended Sweet's table in the following matter.Google Scholar

[2] A. Vanhoye's computation of the ‘reminiscences’ in Hühn, E., Die alttestamentliche Citate und Reminiscencen im N.T. (Tübingen, 1900);Google Scholar in ‘L'utilisation du Livre d'Ezéchiel dans l'Apocalypse’, Biblica 43 (1962), 436–76.Google Scholar

[3] Farrer, A.M. tells us, in A Rebirth of Images (Westminster, 1949), p. 7, that he began by supposing ‘that St John believed Ezekiel, Zechariah and Daniel to express the form of things to come, that he laid the three prophecies side by side and went straight through’; but he abandoned this hypothesis when found the ‘wrong’ parts of these books so often in evidence. Vanhoye remarks that the order of appearance of the Ezekiel passages in Apoc. ‘reproduit, à peu de chose près, l'ordre du livre d'Exéchiel’ (p. 442).Google Scholar

[4] Feuillet, A., ‘Le premier cavalier de l'Apocalypse’, ZNW 57 (1966), 243–50,CrossRefGoogle Scholar takes the conquering rider on the white horse to be the Lamb (cf., 5. 5, 19. 11 ff.);Google Scholar he uses Ezek, . 5. 16 f., God's arrows of judgement, as the basis of his interpretation.Google Scholar

[5] So Swete, H. B., The Apocalypse of St John (London, 1907), p. 152.Google Scholar

[6] Visions in the course of worship are a feature even today of churches which see themselves as in the tradition of the Apocalypse. I visited the Church of the Cherubim and Seraphim, Giilott Rd, Birmingham, in Jan., 1979, and the order of service included an item, ‘Visions, if any’. Seven or eight visions were in fact seen and described to the congregation, all by authorised prophets and prophetesses; they included a hard winter, which was fulfilled, and a miners' strike, which could however be averted by intercession. They were all said to have taken place ‘during the prayer-time’, and were introduced by standard phrases, ‘There was shewed unto me… And I saw …’ None bore any relation to the scripture read, but given this difference of tradition, it was easy to visualize a situation in worship for St John. The worshippers were mainly West Indian and West African.

[7] Lk., 4. 17, I, Tim. 4. 13,Google Scholar Hegesippus ap. Euseb, H.E., 4. 23. 3.Google Scholar

[8] m Meg, 3. 4, t Meg. 4. 10,Google Scholar b Meg, 31b;Google Scholarcf., my The Evangelists' Calendar (London, 1978), pp. 56 f., 61 ff.Google Scholar

[9] The Evangelists' Calender, pp. 105–111.Google Scholar The evidence of the use of Ezekiel is particularly strong in the early period, cf., m Meg. 4. 10,Google ScholarBüchler, A., ‘The Reading of the Law and the Prophets in a Triennial Cycle II’, JQR 6 (Oct. 1893), 6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Büchler's triennial cycle is now discredited, cf., Theangelists' Calendar, pp. 56–66.Google Scholar

[10] 16 and 23 are written with the same structure: (a) a reproach (16.1–34, 23. 1–21), (b) the pronouncement of judgement (16. 35–63, 23. 22–49). 40 describes the measurement of the Temple buildings, gates, etc. in sequence, and there is no obvious half-way point. I have split it 1–27, 28–49, but nothing hangs on this division.

[11] The Jewish Year consists of twelve moons, each of almost exactly 29½ days astronomically, but in practice of either 29 or 30 days. This gives a year of 354 days, so that the Jewish calendar falls behind the solar year by 11½ days annually. This is made up by having a ‘leap-month’ every three years or so, seven years in a cycle of nineteen in modern times. In the Tannaitic period, decisions on both the new month and the leap-month were taken ad hoc, m RH 1, t Sanh. 2. 6. Reading cycles would have to cope with the additional month by either subdivision or repetition.

[12] Sermons on the Scriptures read are prescribed in b Meg, 32a, cf., Acts 15. 21; there is an instance in Lk. 4. 21 ff. John's visions are brief (similar in length to those described by the Cherubim and Seraphim prophets), but have proved capable of considerable amplification by preachers down Christian history. The expansions of Ezekiel should similarly be understood as having their locus in exposition by the prophet's disciples in worship.Google Scholar

[13] The only sections in my table with as many as fourteen verses are 1.1–20,11. 1–14,18. 9–24 and 22. 6elow). The average is just under eight verses. The question of theological unity is not decisive: the whole of 4–5 is a theological unity.

[14] Both verses, 7. 1 and 2, have the opening ‘I saw’. 7. 2 has ‘And I saw’, 7. 1, ‘After this I saw’ (perhaps with an initial ‘And’, see apparatus).

[15] If Ezek, . 43–8 are distributed over seven weeks, the name of the city will fall opposite the Laodicean Letter.Google Scholar

[16] Sweet, , p. 13.Google Scholar

[17] A Rebirth of Images, p. 22.Google Scholar

[18] Thus philip Carrington's The Primitive Christian Calendar (Cambridge, 1952) provides a 48-week cycle for Mark, but the Passion and Resurrection are read in high summer.Google Scholar

[19] I, Cor.11–14 and Act 20. 7Google Scholar presuppose evening worship, which is best taken as Saturday evening worship (‘on the first day of the week’, cf., I, Cor. 16. 2);Google Scholar see my Midrash amd Lection in Matthew (London, 1974), p. 177,Google Scholar against Rordorf, W., Sunday (ET London), pp. 202 ff. The same pattern should probably be assumed for the Johannine churches in the decade after Luke's writing.Google Scholar

[20] Cf., 9. 11, 16. 16. Many of the Ezekiel references follow the Hebrew rather than any Greek version known to us.Google Scholar

[21] Especially with extra-biblical eschatology, but probably also with the details of Temple worship.

[22] Eusebius, , H.E. 5. 23–5.Google Scholar

[23] The relation of the Apocalypse to the Jewish calender cannot be made without acknowledgement of the work of Farrer. In A Rebirth of Images (1949) Farrer saw the Apocalypse as a meditation on the Jewish calendar, covering two years from Dedication in Apoc. 1, but with subsidiary epicycles, and zodiacal symbolism as well. The book is intoxicating, and often extremely suggestive, but hardly right. Farrer's more sober The Revelation of St John the Divine (Oxford, 1964)Google Scholar reduces the cycle to a single year, leaving some of the Jewish festal matter but laying the stress on the zodiac. In neither book did he suggest that the Apocalypse was a sequence of visions inspired by the experience of a year of workship: John was ‘thinking with his pen’ (Revelation, p. 24).Google Scholar The association of Apoc. 1 with Dedication was an inference from the use of Zech. 4, a part of the prophetic lection at Dedication: but Farrer was fully aliveo the Resurrection overtones of the passage (Rebirth, p. 67, Revelation, p. 69).Google Scholar

[24] Mekilta ad Exod, . 12. 42, Frag. Targum Exod, 15. 18, Exod, R. 15. 1, 18. 12;Google Scholar Epist. Apost. 17, Jerome, , Comm. Matt. ad 25. 6Google Scholar (PL 26, col. 192); cf., J. Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (ET London, 1966), pp. 205 ff.,Google ScholarThe Evangelist's Calendar, pp. 293 ff. I Thess. 5. 1 suggest that other festivals may also have been considered (if καιρων = ‘festivals’); but Christ's return is always associated with the night (I Thess. 5. 2, Mk. 13. 33 ff., Matt. 24. 42–25. 13, LK. 17. 34, 21. 36), and the Church is expected to be awake when he comes, and one cannot keep vigil every night. Cf. Jerome, loc. cit., ‘Whence I think also the apostolic tradition has persisted that on the day of the paschal vigils it is not permitted to dismiss before midnight the people who are expecting the advent of Christ’.Google Scholar

[25] John could have been deliberately adapting the Zech. 4 Menorah image for no other reason than that God's temple is now the churches, cf., Farrer, Revelation, pp. 65 f.Google Scholar

[26] The Ordo of Apamea, cited by Dendy, D. R., The Use of Lights in Christian Worship (Alcuin Club Collection XLI, London, 1959), p. 138.Google Scholar

[27] Jerome wrote to Praesidius in 384 declining to write such a Laus (PL XXX. 188), cf., Augustine, De Civ. Dei 15. 22.Google Scholar Prudentius' hymn ‘at the lighting of the lamp’ with references to the resurrection, comes from 4th c. sapin, cf., Dendy, pp. 128 ff.Google Scholar

[28] The Shape of the Liturgy (Westminster, 1945), p. 23.Google Scholar

[29] P. 148.

]30] The Evangelists' Calendar, p. 276.Google Scholar

[31] A further point which may well have a Paschal interpretation is the seven stars which ‘are the angels of the seven churches’. These are usually taken to be the sun, moon and five planets then known; the seven churches then stand for the whold Church. Neither of these points is convincing. The sun and moon are regularly distinguished from the stars in the Bible, and in John (6. 12, 8. 12, 12. 1, etc.), nor are the planets called ‘the seven stars’ in any Jewish text, or in any Greek (or Latin) text before the Mandaean literature: cf., E. Lohmeyer, Die offenbarung des Johannes (HNT 16, 2e. Tübingen 1953), pp. 17 f.Google Scholar While it is true that the number seven stands for complection in the Apocalypse, we cannot extend this to suppose that the seven Asian churches represent the whole of Christendom: John knew there were churches at Antioch, Corinth and Rome. In fact 1. 16 has ‘seven stars’, not ‘the even stars’ as we should have expected it the planets were referred to. It is more likely that they stand for a particular well-known group of seven stars, and an obvious candidate would be the Pleiades. Seven of these are visible to the naked eye - 7 (Alkyone), 16, 17, 19, 20, 23, 27 Tauri - and they were known as the Seven Stars, being in the myth the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione (‘Septem Stellae’, Ovid, Fasti 4. 170). They were significant in everyday life, since they marked the end of the rainy season. They were familiar to Jewish tradition, being the subject of debate between R. Joshua and R. Eliezer in John's time (b R.H. 11b-12a). Their position in the heavens is between Aries and Taurus, and they thus rise in the spring over the period Nisanlyyar, when the seven Letters are being read. Cf., Pauly-Wissowa, RECAW Bd. 21 (Stuttgart 1952), 2491, 2505 f., 2515 f.,Google ScholarDalman, G., Arbeit und Sittle in Palästina (Göutersloh, 1928) 1, 284–6, 294, 496.Google Scholar

[32] Eusebius, H.E. v. 23. 1. The Paschal controversy developed about 190, but Polycrates testifies that the Quartodeciman rite had been in use in Asia all of his sixty-five years (24. 7), and it must go back to the foundation of the Asian churches.Google Scholar

[33] b Meg. 31a.

[34] Le Fête juive de la Pentecoôte (Paris, 1971), pp. 124–131.Google Scholar

[35] m Meg. 4. 10; it was R. Eliezer who opposed Ezek. 16. The number of prophetic readings probably varied between synagogues, and between churches. There are five ‘books’ – the Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings), Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Twelve (Minor Prophets) - of which the last four are of similar length. Perhaps many communities took them in turns: Luke gives us the impression that Isaiah was in use at Nazareth at the time of Jesus' sermon in Lk. 4. But in John's church at least the four Latter Prophets were read concurrently. The mention of so many passages in the Mishnah and Tosefta which are forbidden either reading or (more significantly) translation is one indication that the whole prophetic corpus was covered sooner or later.

[36] Pearl, C. and Brookes, R. S., A Guide to Jewish Knowledge (4e. London, 1965), p. 48.Google Scholar

[37] See Elbogen, I., Der jüdische Gottesdienst in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung (3e. Frankfurt, 1931), pp. 140–9.Google Scholar

[38] m RH 4, 5; shofar, which we should rather ‘horn’, is translated σáλπιγε often in LXX. The latter is the word used (for teru'ah) at Lev, . 23. 24.Google Scholar

[39] The reading is first prescribed in b Meg. 31a, where it is an alternative. However, R. Joshua, debating with R. Eliezer (c. 100), maintained that Sarah, Rachel and Hannah were remembered at New Year(b RH 11a); the remembering of Hannah is the haphtarah for New Year in b Meg., so the Talmudic use is likely to have been known in the first century.

[40] Cf., G. F. Moore, Judaism (Cambridge, 1927) II, pp. 54–63.Google Scholar

[41] m Meg. 3. 5; as the chapter describes the ritual of Atonement, it must have been the day's reading from the beginning.

[42] Sweet even writes, ‘The war is not military but moral and legal… (Satan's) defeat therefore is not military but forensic … It is Paul's doctrine of “justification by faith” in pictorial form’, p. 199.

[43] m Meg. 3. 5, b Meg. 31a.

[44] The killing of Rahab occurs in Ps. 89, for example, alongside cultic shouting and marching (.15); the psalm is often taken to have been in use at Tabernacles, cf., A. R. Johnson, Scral Kingship in Ancient Israel (Cardiff, 1955), pp. 22 ff.,Google ScholarEaton, J. H., Kingship and the Psalms (London, 1976), passim.Google Scholar

[45] Cf., II Macc. 2. 8.Google Scholar

[46] Farrer, A Rebirth, pp. 168 f., saw Apoc. 17–19 as John's reworking of Purim, with Babylon like Vashti deprived of her royalty, and the Church like Esther as the royal bride; Christ like Mordecai rides in triumph on a white horse, and his enemies like Haman are destroyed. Perhaps: but we should have to see ch. 19 (where most of the correspondences occur) as leading up to the coming down of the bride in 21. 2 at Adar III, since Purim falls on 14th Adar.Google Scholar

[47] The Law and the Prophests were read in an annual cycle in the first century, cf. above nn. 8, 9, 35, and references to the The Evangelists' Calendar. Perhaps a single prophetic cycle each year was common; but the overlapping of prophecies, e.g. Ezek. 7 and Hos. 10 at the Sixth Seal (see below), indicates that in John's church all the Latter Prophets at least at least were read every year. The Writings are a problem to which we have little access (cf., EC, ch. 7):Google Scholar Daniel, for example, is used everywhere by John. But then J. Mann has argued at enormous length that the (later) rabbinic sermons followed the sequence of the haphtarot, and that texts from the Writing were used as required, The Bible as Read and Preached in the Old Synagogue (Cincinnati, 1940) I (1960, ed. Sonne, I.) II. The Writings text used to open the subject up was called petihta, I. 14.Google Scholar

[48] Cf., EC, ch. 2.Google Scholar

[49] Cf., F. C. Burkitt, ‘The Early Syriac Lectionary System’, Proc. B. A: 10 (1923), pp. 301 ff.Google Scholar