A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization by Jonathan Kirsch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Charter for Hatred

Jonathan Kirsch is a Jew. This is not incidental to an appreciation of his book. The author of the Apocalypse, like the John of the roughly contemporary gospel to whom the book is historically (and erroneously) attributed, was also a Jew. It probably takes a Jew to understand the real horror of phrases like “the synagogue of Satan.” And it takes a Jew to notice the psychological and sociological subtleties of the conflict between the Judaic traditions of hope and the then recently proclaimed Pauline mandate of faith. If nothing else, the Apocalypse is a case study of a mind caught between Jewish hope and Christian faith. The result is a sort of mindless disgust with the world, a religious nihilism which echoes in the pronouncements of today’s evangelical politicians.

For me the central historical issue of Christianity is the process by which the meek, Jewish Jesus of Mark, the first gospel, became the merciless Christian warrior-king of the Apocalypse, the last book of the New Testament. There may be as much as a century between the two; and the transition from a message of universal salvation to that of almost universal revenge and retribution is startling. What theologians call a ‘tension’ in Christian thought, and the rest of us simply see as a contradiction, is deeply set. Perhaps only fundamentalists take the detail of the Apocalypse seriously; but as Kirsch is keen to demonstrate, its central ideas have had profound and enduring cultural and political consequences.

Arguably the strangest aspect of the Apocalypse is the way it’s arcane symbolism is typically taken by its most ardent readers. On the one hand, the book belies any attempt at the biblical literalism of fundamentalists. It simply cannot be read literally with any coherent meaning. On the other hand, rather than undermining literalist beliefs, the book seems to provoke the most outlandish interpretations of its symbols by true believers so that every age since it was written has been identified as the subject of its ‘prophecies.’ Institutions as diverse as the Roman Empire, Islam, the Catholic Church, the French Revolution, the Soviet Union, and (more recently) the American Democratic Party have all been tagged as the Whore of Babylon which is to be destroyed as the Saviour rolls out from the heavens to carry out mass carnage and start his thousand year Reich (where did you think the Nazi idea of the Third Reich came from?).

Paradoxically the fundamental ambiguity of the Apocalypse may be its greatest attraction to believers. It can be made to mean anything they want it to mean. Equivocations about the blessedness of the meek, the virtue of restraining from retaliatory violence, and the merits of unconditional forgiveness of wrongs committed against one, all clearly stated in the gospels, have limits. At root they all straightforwardly require followers of Jesus to act in the interests of others rather than themselves. As we all know from experience, this demands an incredible effort and often results in at least as much physical distress as spiritual satisfaction. The Apocalypse gives the green light to violence on an unlimited scale. It justifies the resentment and hatred which all those do-gooding parables and weak-willed gospel-stories are bound to generate.

In this sense the Apocalypse is the most human, if also inhumane, of the Christian Scriptures. It is also the most Jewish of the books in the Christian canon. The apocalyptic mode is a standard of Jewish tradition. It pops up every time the Almighty seems to have abandoned Israel to the slings and arrows of natives, invaders, and unsympathetic governments for no discernible reason. Unlike the prophecies of an Isaiah, for example, which call upon Israel to repent its wicked ways, the apocalyptic parts of Daniel, Ezekiel, Baruch and Ezra, and the (non-canonical) book of Enoch are not so much concerned with repentance as they are with relief from oppression. Even the synoptic gospels contain an apocalyptic hint in their reference to the enigmatic Son of Man who will unite all the peoples of the world. This is probably the intellectual seed from which the Apocalypse itself grew.

But there is an important difference between Jewish apocalyptic and the Christian Apocalypse. Jews just want to be left alone and are satisfied with the prospect of communal survival. Christians want to rule the planet, indeed all of creation. Their clear expectation is global regime change. Jewish apocalyptic typically involves the demonstration of the unparalleled majesty of the Hebrew God, which non-Jews can observe and be moved by to improve their behaviour. The Apocalypse predicts annihilation not edification for those who are not faithful members of the Christian tribe. The subsequent history of Christianity provides testimony to the power of this message - not just in the relations between Christians and non-Christians, but also among the perennially numerous Christian factions separated from each other by their antithetical ‘faiths.’

Ultimately no one understands what the Apocalypse has to say about the future, except that there will be winners and losers in the spiritual game. Being on the right side is the only thing that is important. And the sure-fire way of being there is the expression of passionate hatred for those on the other side. Thomas Jefferson thought the author was a maniac; George Bernard Shaw was sure he had been a drug addict; Martin Luther didn’t think he wrote about anything Christian at all. And they weren’t even Jewish.

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