The Book of Revelation is an apocalypse . This does not necessarily mean ‘a book that describes the end of the world’ but rather ‘a revelation’, an opening of the divine scope of history to one prophetic human being. It belongs in a category with other books like the Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, some of the literature attributed to Enoch, the Shepherd of Hermas, and part of the Apocalypse of Adam, and Zostrianos (both found in the <a href="http://www.powells.com/partner/31957/s?isbn=978-9004088566">Nag Hammadi Library in English</a> and other translations of that mostly-Gnostic library.) It is important to realize that the Book of Revelation is not alone in all Antiquity and it is important to read it beside its older and younger neighbors. It is also important to set aside the attitude that "this is part of the Bible": all of the books mentioned above were regarded as sacred scripture by someone during the era of Christianity’s formation and neither Judaism nor Christianity had a set Bible which now non-Biblical books could be compared against.

All of these books are terribly weird, in their own ways – so look for common features. Who is receiving the revelation? What makes them the appropriate recipient and messenger of it, among all the great and holy figures of sacred history? Who gives the revelation? An angel? A great heavenly figure whose nature is not specified? Another great and holy figure from an earlier time? Is the book about a literal trip to heaven, as Paul said "in the body" (2Cor 12:3)? Or is it in the form of a vision? Who are the good guys and bad guys in the revelation? Given that some of them are a kind of revenge story, why would the readers of each book have a beef with the folk destined for punishment and perdition? When was each book written, for whom, and why would that book go over so well in its own time and place? How do these books borrow from each other?

Each of these books had a human author. (It’s possible, and very likely with most of the books mentioned, that the author was not the recipient of the journey or vision – but someone else.) Each of these books says something about the time they were written in – what its author and readers feared, what they wanted, whom they hated. Pretend you are reading a political tract from 1700's Europe or a rebellion against the Chinese emperor, where allegory or religious code often cloaked a political message – how does each of these works look, when read that way?

(The <a href="http://www.powells.com/partner/31957/s?isbn=978-0195288803">Oxford Annotated Bible</a>  is a good source for cracking the contemporary political language in the Biblical Book of Daniel and Book of Revelation: for the other books there isn’t a one stop shop, but a good translation should have an introduction and footnotes that will help unravel some of their political and historical contexts.)

-Kushana