By Liz Keill
St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Morristown was filled with the faithful, the curious and the skeptical on April 25 when noted scholar Elaine Pagels shared her views and interpretations of the Book of Revelation.
Pagels, who is professor of religion at Princeton University, integrated her talk with artwork and bits of music to bring home the impact of John of Patmos.
Retired Bishop John Shelby Spong introduced Pagels, noting she is “the best-read scholar of the Gnostic Gospels and the Gospel of Thomas. She brings depth, character and insight to her interpretation.” Her recent book is Revelations: Visions, Prophesy and Politics in the Book of Revelations. She has interpreted the book as a coded account of events occurring at the time.
“The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in the Bible,” Pagels said. “It’s just visions, dreams and nightmares.” This book, she said, has had enormous impact. She observed that even former President George W. Bush had his “visions” of invading Iraq.
“This book was hugely controversial from the start. It was revolutionary, and John was considered a heretic,” she said. “There was a battle about the book. It was very intense, with its vision of the New Jerusalem, encompassing all people and tongues, the Tree of Life and other cycles. In earlier manuscripts, Revelation came right after the Gospels, not at the end, where it is now. A beautiful vision of Jerusalem, it ends in glorious light. There are many end time stories, this is a Jewish one. How could God allow the destruction of his people?”
Pagels displayed an assortment of paintings to illustrate her points about John of Patmos. “In the Spirit, one day he saw a divine being. He thought it was Jesus, who had died 60 years earlier.” John was convinced, she said, that Jesus had foretold the future, the destruction of Jerusalem and the conquering Romans.
“There was the loudest explosion ever heard. People died in agony in John’s vision,” she said. “John hoped Jesus would come and would dominate the world. Jerusalem would be destroyed. Followers were inspired and energized.”
She illustrated how artists depicted the Throne of God, with a brilliant light and a slaughtered lamb. In another painting, four horsemen kill one-third of the inhabitants of earth. A red dragon stalks a pregnant woman, with the intent to devour her child.
A painting by William Blake illustrates Behemoth and Leviathan, with seven angels pouring wrath over the earth. In the city of Ephesus, the emperor was depicted as Augustus, naked and among the gods. Nero was defeating Armenia. Rome was about to fall. God will triumph. “That is the message of this book,” she said.
More recent drawings, too, are inspired by the Book of Revelation. One, she illustrated, showed Lincoln strangled by the Union snake in 1862. A World War II drawing by Dr. Seuss depicts FDR and Hitler, and was used by both sides of the battle. Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels, she said, was a Christian and believed that Christ would purify the world.
Music was integrated into the lecture as well: The Battle Hymn of the Republic by Julia Ward Howe, with phrases taken directly from the Book of Revelation, and a few bars of the haunting Quartet for the End of Time by Oliver Messianen, who was in a prison camp in 1941 and the music played by prisoners on broken instruments.
“I also discovered hope in this book,” Pagels said. She displayed a Throne Room of the Third Millennium, which is made of cardboard and aluminum foil. It is now on display at the Smithsonian.
Pagels recalled seeing Billy Graham at the Cow Palace in San Francisco when she was 14 years old. “I loved it,” she said. She joined an evangelical church. Her father was bitterly disappointed, she added, as “he had given it all up for Darwin.” Although she only remained with the church for a year, she kept asking herself, “What was so compelling? There’s something about the dimension of the experience that’s very powerful.”
When she pursued religious studies, she found there were many Gospels: Thomas, Mary, Philip. “There were lots of books on revelation and a universal vision of the human race. Why is this the only one that survived?” She said she could only think that the followers of Jesus, who could be arrested, tortured and killed, needed to limit the stories.
In Latin America, she said, the Book of Revelation is the most important book in the Bible, because of people who had lived so long with oppression. Pagels said the ancient dragon comes from Jewish mythology. She said at the back of most churches, you are faced with “the saved and the damned. Where will you spend eternity? John never says he’s a Christian. He didn’t worship the gods. He was under suspicion, but the book speaks to hope.”
Diocesan Bishop Mark Beckwith concluded the event by thanking Pagels, Spong and his wife Christine and St. Peter’s Rector Janet Broderick.
Next year’s Spong Lecture Series will feature Dr.James Cone of Union Theological Seminary in New York, who will be at St. Peter’s for an entire day exploring issues of race and prejudice and how those themes resonate in the Bible and in our time.
