Apocalypse in Social-Scientific Perspective

Apocalypse in Social-Scientific Perspective March 17, 2015

Commentators have used social scientific theories and models to try to explicate the social setting of biblical books and their authors. Bruce Malina has been a leading figure in applying these models to Revelation. We can get the general idea from his Social Science Commentary on Revelation, co-authored with John Pilch.

Social context gives us some hermeneutical guidelines for thinking about how to read an ancient text. The authors claim in the introduction that “the New Testament was written in what anthropologists call a ‘high-context’ society. People in high-context societies presume a broadly shared, well-understood (or ‘high’) knowledge of the context of anything referred to in conversation or in writing. . . . Thus writers in high-context societies usually produce sketchy and impressionistic documents, leaving much to the reader’s or hearer’s imagination. Often they encode information in widely known symbolic or stereotypical statements. In this way they require the reader to fill in large gaps in the ‘unwritten’ portion of the document – what is between the lines. They expect all readers to know the social context and therefore to understand the references in question” (19). We live in a “low-context” society where we cannot assume that readers share our view of the world and so write “highly specific and detailed documents that leave little for the reader to fill in or supply” (20).

Besides this feature of biblical texts, Malina and Pilch want to highlight the social situation of early Christians, which includes commonly accepted norms of behavior, values, and structures that are quite different from our own social world: “All first-century Mediterranean persons . . . lived in an honor-shame culture. All presumed collective personality; all understood patrons, brokers, and clients. All were aware of Mediterranean male and female roles. All had experience with kings, temples, priests, and sacrifices. All faced the power of rulers in the frequent presence of soldiers. All knew of the behavior proper to elites and non-elites. All knew the main political forms of interaction: war, victory, loss, enslavement, exile, and the like” (23).

The knowledge presumed by Revelation, Malina and Pilch argue, includes extensive knowledge of the heavens, knowledge of astronomy and astronomical symbolisms. “Everyone in ancient Mediterranean societies,” they write, “would have had concrete knowledge of what the sky above entailed, largely because information about the sky and its impact on people was shared by most members of that society. No writer would need to explain it” (19).

Thus, for instance, the Lamb in the sky would immediately suggest the constellation Aries. As they explain, “from time immemorial, Aries was always pictured in the most ancient representations of the sky as a male lamb with a ‘reverted’ head, that is, the head facing directly over its back to Taurus. . . . Only a being with a broken neck could have its head turned directly backwards as the celestial Aries does; and yet it remains standing in spite of a broken neck. Clearly, Aries was an obvious choice to be perceived in terms of the Jesus-group story according to which God’s Lamb was slaughtered yet continues to stand” (89).

The twenty-four elders around the throne in Revelation 4 would be associated with “the astral deities known as decans. The word decan . . . is a creation of the Hellenistic period to designate the astral deities who dominate every 10 degrees of the circle of the zodiac. . . . These deities are far more ancient than the Hellenistic period, deriving from Egypt in Pharaonic times. The deities were associated with constellations or single stars, rising about ten days apart along the pathway of the sun and covering some 10 degrees of one of the constellations of the zodiac.” The fact that there are 24 rather than 36 has some ancient precedent: Coffin lids from Hellenistic Egypt are painted with depictions of 24 decans, linked with the 24 hours of the day rather than the 360 degrees of the celestial sphere (83). Similarly, they argue, “‘bowls,’ ‘trumpets,’ ‘horsemen,’ and the like mean . . . the comets for which these were the ordinary names” (21).

Malina’s work is filled with intriguing, tantalizing suggestions. How far it illuminates the text of Revelation is unclear. We need a dose of Austin Farrer’s older “rebirth of images” approach, which would show that Revelation draws on common symbolisms in order to negate and incorporate them into a Christian framework. And we probably also need a dose of Milbankian skepticism about the coherence of the category of “social science.” Illuminating as these studies may be, they shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the fundamental point: Revelation is itself social science, and perhaps stands at odds with the theoretical frameworks through which it is read.


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