The Christian church in the 1st century wrestled with a difficult problem. Jesus had promised the inauguration of a new age—the kingdom of God—but the Romans continued to rule; wars, injustice, oppression, and violence continued unabated, the evildoers continued to flourish, and the meek and poor continued to suffer. Indeed, the situation was worse, because now Christians suffered severe persecution for their faith. The primitive church solved this problem by redating the Endtime and changing the nature of apocalyptic hope with the notion of the Parousia. According to this belief, Christ had come the first time with a message for all humanity, a warning to evildoers and a promise to their victims. When he returns—“coming on the clouds in triumph and glory” (Matthew 24:30)—he will complete the messianic task, striking the final blow against evil.
Like The Book of Daniel, the Revelation to John (or Revelation) was composed during a period of persecution. Probably written during the last decade of the 1st century ad, it reflects the persecutions initiated by the emperor Nero (37–68)—seemingly portrayed as the Antichrist, the beast whose symbolic number is 666 (Revelation 13)—and continued under the emperor Domitian (81–96). After addressing letters to the seven churches of Asia Minor, the author of Revelation presents his vision of a series of judgments: seven seals opened, seven trumpets blown, seven bowls poured out. Identifying the fourth beast of Daniel as Rome, Revelation attacks the empire, referred to cryptically as Babylon and as the great harlot. Christ, the executor of God’s judgment, appears not as Jesus the man but as an omnipotent king riding a white horse with eyes like a flame of fire and a mouth like a sharp sword "with which to smite the nations" (Revelation 19).
Revelation completed Christianity’s assimilation of Jewish apocalypticism. Daniel’s Son of Man was replaced by Christ, many of the numerological formulas found in the earlier text were repeated, and the dualistic universe of good and evil was provided with a new and unforgettable set of characters. Moreover, the essence of the apocalypse in Revelation remained as it had been in Danieclass="underline" God’s direct aid was imminent and would cause the dramatic reversal of history that the believers’ desperate state demanded.
Although other apocalypses were written at roughly the same time (e.g., Revelations of Peter, Paul, Thomas), the Revelation to John was the only one to enter the Christian canon. A very popular text, intensely dramatic and emotional, it was meant for reading aloud (Revelation 1:3). It at once aroused the ardour of the apocalyptic hopeful and made it possible for the faithful to survive their apocalyptic disappointment.
Unfortunately for both the Christian movement and those around it, Revelation also conveys a profoundly paranoid and violent attitude toward the apocalyptic “other.” It warns against a great evil deceiver who will lead all but a tiny fraction astray (Matthew 24:4; II Thessalonians 2:9–12; Revelation 13) and foretells staggering violence against the enemies of the Lord (Revelation 19). The promise of this avenging violence was, at least for the author of Revelation, the reward for the “faith and patience of the saints.” In this vision of the Parousia (Revelation 13:10), Christ wears a radically different face, complementing (or, for some, contradicting) the meek and mild one of the first coming.
The authorship of Revelation was disputed from the 2nd century onward. The earliest, and clearly millennial, tradition presents Revelation as the final work of the youngest disciple, John, author of both the Fourth Gospel and two letters. Hostile ecclesiastical writers argued that Revelation could not have been written by the author who wrote the Gospel, because the language and conception of eschatology of the two works are profoundly different. Tellingly, in the Greek church, this millennial book was excluded from many Bibles from the 4th to the 12th century. The early church
During the first 100 years of Christian history, the church taught some form of millenarianism, or chiliasm (from the Greek word for “1,000”), the belief that the Parousia would bring about a 1,000-year kingdom of fellowship, justice, peace, and abundance here on earth. The coincidence of occasional episodes of millennial exultation and persecution (e.g., about ad 200) suggests the existence of a relationship between apocalyptic expectations and imperial persecutions. Certainly, Revelation viewed martyrdom and millennial promises as two aspects of the same eschatological resolution. But apocalyptic zeal waned because the End never came and the pressure of persecution was intermittent. Moreover, in the aftermath of apocalyptic outbreaks, more responsible and well-connected members of the church pursued a policy of accommodation, insisting that Christians were not hostile to Rome and downplaying both the apocalyptic and millennial dimensions of their tradition. Christian missionaries converted large numbers of Roman citizens, and worldly success and the failure of apocalyptic expectation reduced Christian antagonism toward the empire.
Although millenarian thought lost favour with the clerical elite, it remained popular and appealed to Montanists and other heretics. In characteristic apocalyptic fashion, Montanus, the founder of the movement, was fascinated with the idea of dividing past and future into units of prophetic calculation. In ad 156, according to the 4th-century Christian antiheretical writer Epiphanius, Montanus declared himself the prophet of a third testament, a new age of the Holy Spirit. Phrygia (now in Turkey) became the centre of this movement, whose leaders claimed divine inspiration for their visions and utterances and believed in the imminent descent of the heavenly Jerusalem to the small Phrygian town of Pepuza.
This concept of a third age, the new day of the spirit of God, is one of the most consistently repeated features of millenarian history, reappearing, for example, in Joachim of Fiore’s philosophy of history during the 12th century, in views of the Quakers (Society of Friends) in the 17th century, and in the apocalyptic speculations of the Seventh-day Adventists of the 19th and 20th centuries. In every case, it carries with it an implicit rejection of the contemporary church as an archaic and hierarchical organization that is about to be surpassed.
About ad 200, apocalyptic expectations seem to have reached unusual levels. Montanism spread outside Asia Minor and found converts throughout the Roman Empire, including Tertullian, a North African lawyer and theologian. Apocalyptic prophets, some including bishops, roused their flocks with visions of the imminent End and led them into the desert to meet Christ returning on the clouds. In response to these disastrous errors, a nonapocalyptic version of millennialism, the “sabbatical millennium,” emerged. This argument, recorded about ad 110 in the Epistle of Barnabas, held that because God had created the world in six days and rested on the seventh (Genesis 1) and because 1,000 years is a day in God’s sight (Psalm 89/90), the world must labour 6,000 years before the sabbatical millennium of peace, abundance, and joyful rest for the Lord’s weary would begin. It offered a quiescent alternative to the radical millennialism of the apocalyptic prophets, and it would become more plausible with the passing of each failed apocalyptic episode.
Hippolytus, responding to the irresponsible apocalypticism of his day, connected the sabbatical millennium to a chronology that explicitly dated the arrival of the messianic millennium. By dating Jesus’ Incarnation (God’s assumption of the flesh in the person of Jesus) to 5500 anno mundi (am; Latin: “in the year of the world”—i.e., from the Creation), he could argue in 5700 am (ad 200) that there were still some 300 years left before the Parousia. This tradition was valuable for the same reasons it was dangerous: it reaffirmed millennialism as dogma and offered a concrete date. For at least two centuries, its teachings offered a solution to the problem of apocalyptic millennialism.