Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (8 page)

Yet apparently they had not reached clear agreement about dietary and sexual practices, for Paul says that “when Peter came
to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned by his own actions.”
⁶⁵
Paul explains that when Peter first arrived in Antioch, he had gone along with Paul’s practice of eating with Gentile converts. But after members of James’ group arrived from Jerusalem, Peter, either fearing or giving in to their criticism, stopped eating “unclean” food. At that point, Paul wrote, he challenged Peter in public, calling him a hypocrite, and insisted, contrary to what others taught, that “the gospel” does not require Gentiles—and apparently not Jews like Peter, either—to practice what observant Jews regarded as purity in matters of food or sex.
⁶⁶

But when Paul heard that James’ followers had scolded his converts in Galatia, telling them that their teacher didn’t understand—much less teach—the
true
gospel of Jesus, Paul attacked. Furious, he rebuked his former followers for turning on him:

When some protested that followers of James, Jesus’ own brother, and Peter, his closest disciple, had authorized “the gospel” they now accepted, Paul replied that it made no difference
who
contradicted what he had taught. He cursed whoever it was—even an angel from heaven! Paul twice repeats this solemn curse:

When forced to defend himself and his message, then, Paul does what other prophets and visionaries did: appeal to a higher authority that he said came to him “by revelation”—although not everyone accepted his claim.

Some forty years after that dispute, when John of Patmos met with groups of Jesus’ followers throughout Asia Minor, he was dismayed to discover considerable variation among them. John found some groups, perhaps predominantly Jewish, that adhered closely to Jewish tradition and welcomed him as a respected prophet. Having found such a group in the city of Philadelphia, John wrote that Jesus praised them and promised to “write on you the name of my God, and the name of … the new Jerusalem that comes down … from heaven, and my own new name.”
⁶⁹
But John also encountered groups of believers, many of them Gentiles, who apparently had accepted “Paul’s gospel”—and clashed with them. Those John encountered in the decade of the 90s belonged, of course, to the second generation of Paul’s converts, since it was about thirty years since “the great apostle” had preached there. Yet ever since Paul had worked in Ephesus and neighboring cities, groups devoted to his teaching had sprung up throughout the region, attracting an increasing number of Gentiles from the places we know today as Syria, Turkey, Africa, and Lebanon.
⁷⁰

As John saw it, Paul’s converts were not like the Gentiles whom Jews had called “those who show reverence for God” and who had long sought to join with them to worship their God.
Those old-fashioned Gentiles had known their place, keeping a respectful distance from those born Jews, since they realized that gaining full access to the Jewish community would require them to change their whole way of life. Men would have had to undergo surgery to become circumcised; both men and women would have had to adopt sexual, social, and dietary practices that would separate them from their former families and friends before they could qualify to join God’s holy people.

By contrast, some of Paul’s converts were saying that, having been “baptized into Jesus Christ,”
⁷¹
they were as good as those born Jews—maybe even better. John, who sees Israel’s privilege linked to the obligation to remain “holy,” is angry that they claim to belong to Israel while ignoring what the Torah requires. To justify such negligence, these “wouldbe Jews” invoke the authority of the famous—or, John may have felt, infamous—missionary Paul, self-professed “apostle to the Gentiles.”

Even worse, from John’s point of view, is that instead of respecting Israel’s priority, such newcomers speak of
themselves
—and Gentiles of every kind—
as if they themselves were Jews,
claiming both Israel’s name and her prerogatives. John seems to have such people in mind when he says that Jesus told him to tell his people in Philadelphia that “those who say they are Jews, and are not, but are lying,” are nothing but a “synagogue of Satan.”
⁷²
John adds that Jesus assures his true followers in Smyrna that he knows what slander such people sling at them: “I know the slander on the part of
those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan
.”
⁷³

But, some readers may ask, when John attacks the “synagogue of Satan,” isn’t he talking about
actual
Jews, that is, members of
local synagogues who are hostile to Christians? When he warns
“those who say they are Jews and are not,”
doesn’t he mean the
opposite
of what he says—that they actually
are
Jews, but Jews who don’t
deserve
to be called by that name? Many—perhaps most—scholars accepted this convoluted interpretation in the past, since only this reading could fit what most of them took for granted—namely, that John, although probably Jewish by birth, had become a
Christian
by the time he wrote this book.
⁷⁴
Many have also assumed what one well-informed scholar recently repeated: that “Judaism and Christianity would probably have been separated by this time,”
⁷⁵
that is, around 90
C.E.

Christian scholars have long taken for granted the commonplace—most often unspoken—assumption that “Judaism,” as a living, ongoing, and powerful tradition, effectively came to an end around 70
C.E.
, when the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed. Since Christians tend to assume that Judaism was only a preparation for Christianity, many used to date the beginning of what they called “the Christian Era” from the temple’s destruction. The influential scholar David Aune, who has written three enormously learned volumes of commentary on the Book of Revelation, is aware that John’s language and themes indicate that he is Jewish, yet he regards him as undeniably Christian. Aune tries to resolve the apparent contradiction by noting that John’s lifetime spanned this supposed transition. Thus he suggests that John was “a Jewish-Christian prophet who had moved from Judaism to Christianity at some point in his career.”
⁷⁶

Today, however, some scholars are questioning assumptions like these, which project onto John’s biography what many Christians would later envision as the divinely guided course of history,
which they picture “progressing” (as Aune says John himself “progressed”) from Judaism to Christianity. But once we step back from this interpretation to reflect that John was writing during the first century—before the invention of “Christianity,” so to speak—we can see that what he writes does not support this view. John not only sees himself as a Jew but regards being Jewish as an honor that those who fail to observe God’s covenant—especially non-Jews—do not deserve. For
if John knows the term “Christian,” he never mentions it, much less applies it to himself.
Instead, as we have seen, John, like Peter, James, and virtually all of Jesus’ earliest followers, for that matter, consistently sees himself
as a Jew who acknowledges Jesus as Israel’s messiah—
not someone who has converted to a new “religion.”

Roman magistrates may have been the first, in fact, to coin the term “Christian,” specifically for the purpose of identifying
Gentiles
who aroused suspicion of treason against Rome, as well as atheism, because after receiving baptism they abruptly stopped worshipping the traditional gods.
⁷⁷
One alert and cautious governor in Asia Minor, named Pliny, investigating charges that certain people in his region had stopped worshipping the gods, discovered something suspicious: these people had done so only
after
they joined the cult devoted to Jesus of Nazareth. Around the year 112, Pliny had ordered the arrest of some people whom he, like other magistrates, called “Christians” and reported to the emperor what he learned from interrogating them and torturing two women slaves. Pliny wrote to the emperor Trajan that the accused often met early in the morning to “pray to Jesus as a god” and that even when facing the death penalty, some had refused to pour a cup of wine to honor the gods or the emperor’s statue.
While admitting that “I do not know whether they were guilty of other criminal acts,” Pliny explained that he had sent them off to be executed, deciding that “because of their obstinacy alone,” they well deserved it—a decision that Trajan quickly approved.
⁷⁸

What aroused such magistrates’ suspicion, however, were acts that would come to their attention
only
in the case of people who previously
had
worshipped the gods. Since Roman rulers already regarded Jews as “atheists” so far as their gods were concerned, for the most part they followed the policy of treating Jews as legally tolerated “atheists.” Since magistrates did not expect them to perform pagan sacrifices, Jews who followed Jesus would have escaped their notice, unless, like Peter, they were known leaders or, like Paul, they proved to be public nuisances. In most cases, then, when Jesus’ followers aroused popular hostility and came to the magistrates’ attention, they were
Gentile converts.
Luke wrote in his Book of Acts that Jesus’ followers “were first called
Christians
at Antioch,”
⁷⁹
the capital city of Syria, suggesting that these were people who had joined the movement after hearing Paul preach among Gentiles there, probably around 50 to 65
C.E.
⁸⁰

But, we might ask, would John have spoken so bitterly—or say that Jesus had—about converts to Paul’s “gospel” that he could call some of them a “synagogue of Satan”? Many of John’s readers find this hard to imagine. In the first place, many Christians today think of Paul’s teaching simply as what Christianity is. Many also assume that because Paul and John are both Jesus’ followers, they surely would have agreed with each other. And many have accepted Luke’s account, which suggests that even though James and Peter found Paul’s message startlingly radical, they had, in
effect, agreed to disagree or, at least, to accept his preaching to non-Jews. Yet even when Luke spins the story as he does in the Book of Acts, he says that the apostolic council headed by Peter and James concluded that Gentile converts should observe at least
some
traditional guidelines—for example, they should eat only meat butchered in a traditionally Jewish way and “avoid fornication.”
⁸¹
Paul himself had set no such conditions, writing instead to his followers in Rome that Gentiles could be “grafted on” to God’s people simply by professing faith in Jesus and receiving baptism.
⁸²

Did Paul, then, actually encourage Gentile converts to think of themselves as Jews, as John suggests, or even
better than
Jews? Almost certainly not. On the contrary, his letters show that he often warned Gentiles not to “boast.”
⁸³
But the fact that he had to repeat this warning so often shows that he found many Gentiles who
did
boast that they were superior to Jews. Frustrated as he was with them, Paul may have realized that his own words had encouraged Gentiles to think of themselves as being, spiritually speaking, the
real
Jews. In his widely circulated Letter to the Romans, for example, Paul had written that

Much of what Paul wrote, in fact, could be read—and
has
been read ever since—to mean that God
disinherited the Jewish people in
favor of Gentile believers,
whom Paul calls the “spiritual Israel,” by contrast with those whom he calls “my kindred according to the flesh, who are Israelites,”
⁸⁵
who belong “to Israel according to the flesh.” In his Letter to the Romans, Paul writes that “not all who are from Israel
are
Israel; not all who are Abraham’s seed are his children,” since “
it is not the children of the flesh who are God’s children, but the children of the promise.
”
⁸⁶
Writing to Gentile believers in Galatia, Paul assures them that although they were not born Jews, now that “you belong to Christ,
you are Abraham’s seed,
heirs according to the promise”—children of Abraham “born according to the spirit … like Isaac.”
⁸⁷
Paul concludes this letter by blessing all those who belong to the “spiritual Israel,” which he calls “the Israel of God.”
⁸⁸

By the time John of Patmos traveled to Asia Minor, then, he found many followers of Paul who apparently assumed that even groups consisting largely of Gentile converts had now, in effect,
become
Israel. No wonder, then, that when John heard of such people who “say they are Jews, and are not, but are lying,” he found their claims outrageous. Although he does not deny their relationship to Jesus, he derisively suggests that they belong to “Satan’s synagogue” and longs for the day when Jesus shall return to set them straight. For John reassures those who really
are
Jews that Jesus has promised that when he comes back,