Re: 7 Signs Of The Apocalypse

Ow! You're just really, really cruel Just kidding. If it's really the end-time, it's "all man for himself," when it comes to getting that last big O in the sky.

Hello

Not dismissing it at all - just understanding how it was meant to be interpreted. This was common knowledge among those educated in the Church througout the centuries. When the bible became available in English, untrained persons began to interpret it as it read to them, without reference to the original language or the intent of the authors....

First - there are three editorial layers to what has become known as the book of revelation. John of Patmos appears to have contributed the first layer - the latters to the 7 churches and a few chapters following on, perhaps as early as in the reign of the Emperor Domitian.  In manuscript history, this "book" was still growing in the 4th century, being added to by other faith communities, adapting it to their purposes.

John was not writing to "predict the future" but to *describe and explain* the persecution and suffering of the christian communties in Asia minor from a "gods eye view", to tell them how their suffering fit into God's plan of history, the conflict between good and evil, and to insure them that ultimately God remained in charge and that evil would be judged.  The "processes" descibed in Revelation are not once and future events but cycles that occurr within the tension between good and evil, believer and persecutor. In that respect, one could say that Christians being persecuted in Northern Africa by Muslims could see in the Revelation a "gods eye view" of the place of their sufferig wtihin sacred history as well. So, the message is "timeless" but not "once and future"

The apocalyptic and prophetic "voice" always used what we translate as "future tense" of the verbs not to suggest that the events themselves were to take place in the future but to say that they are ordained - that they take place for a purpose within the divine scheme of things, and at God's command. The use of the tense of the verb is in the same way that we might tell a Child - you *will* use your table manners...

The book of Revelation was highly controversial in the early church. It did not gain wide acceptance until the 5th century. Meanwhile, the books that were most heavily used and loved by the earliest Christians did *not* make it into what we call the Bible, which was collated in the 5-6th centuries.
These books of early import included: The Book of Enoch (from which Jesus quotes), the Testament of the Patriarchs (from which Paul quotes), the Shepherd of Hermas (from which many of the early church bishops quote) and others. Thankfully many of these are available to be read in English translations.

Grow your own and never run out.