Revelation and Empire

Over the centuries, readers have assumed that Revelation was written in, or predicting, a period of intense persecution. Irenaeus seems to say that Revelation was written in the reign of Domitian, and commentators have gone to lengths to show that Domitian fits the profile of the beast.

Scholars today widely accept the conclusion that Domitian, during whose principate the book is supposed to have been written, did not intensify persecution or expand the imperial cult, as had long been believed. Christians in Asia Minor were well-integrated into the host culture, if not wholly assimilated. What they faced was not overt persecution but subtler cultural pressure to conform.

Harold Thompson’s The Book of Revelation: Apocalypse and Empire is a main source for this reassessment of Domitian, but draws a different conclusion concerning John’s purposes. He distinguishes between “public knowledge” that is the common currency of a culture, and the “deviant knowledge” possessed by minority groups. Revelation is deviant knowledge in several respects. With regard to its source, “apocalypses provide knowledge through private, esoteric means apart from larger communal, institutional validation.” Further, “it is deviant in its assessment of the larger social order: apocalyptic knowledge devalues, rather than supports, the cognitive structures, identities, roles, and norms in the order of society. And it is deviant in its cosmology. In the public order, cosmicizing assures that ‘the way we do things’ reflects ‘the way that the world really is.’ . . . in the cosmicizing of apocalyptic, ironic reversals abound. Kings and emperors are disestablished by means of metaphorical links to satanic and evil forces, while the transcendent knowledge transmitted through apocalypses appears in the here and now to be disconfirmed” (181). By offering this alternative knowledge, Revelation draws boundaries where there had been none. In conditions where believers had become too comfortable and too accommodated, Revelation undermines the “public knowledge” in favor of its deviant revealed knowledge.

Adela Yarbro Collins (Crisis and Catharsis, 85) accepts the conclusion that Domitian did not persecution Christians, but still dates the book to Domitian’s reign. But she concludes that the book was not occasioned by “an objectively intense and extensive crisis.” Instead, studies in psycho-sociology have shown that “relative, not absolute or objective, deprivation is a common precondition of millenarian movements. . . . the crucial element is not so much whether one is actually oppressed as whether one feels oppressed.”

Other scholars have used the conceptual categories of post-colonial studies, and particularly the work of Homi Bhabha, to explain Revelation’s stance toward the Roman empire.

In Spectacles of Empire, Christopher Frilingos observes that “spectacle” was central to the Roman empires efforts to gain and retain power: “The Roman Empire was not maintained by raw strength alone: of equal or greater significance were the countless moments of interaction and negotiation in which the subjects of Rome, from the elite pagans of the Greek East to the seemingly marginalized Christians of John’s community, struggled to grasp for themselves the truth of their society and their place in it.” Spectacles – triumphs, games, parades – “provided a framework for the delineation of the real in Roman society and for the forging of identity” (11). Spectacle did not provide Rome with a one-directional tool for imposing its will on the empire. Spectacle itself was a destabilizing factor, one that allowed new forms of culture to surface (120).

Within this context, Frilingos makes use of Bhabha’s notion of “mimicry,” which Bhabha defines as “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite. . . . On the one hand, colonial mimicry is an expression of imperial intention: ‘the civilizing mission to transform the colonial culture by making it copy or ‘repeat’ the colonizer’s culture.’ At the same time, however, mimicry is a ‘menace,’ since it reveals the limits of the realization of imperialist intentions: the colonized are always ‘almost the same,’ but not quite’ . . . Mimicry is thus a ‘double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority’” (10).

Some have used postcolonial theory to describe Revelation as a “subaltern” within the Roman world, much as Thompson sees Revelation as “deviant knowledge.” Frilingos, however, argues that Revelation is “an expression of Roman culture, possessed of the same ambiguities and ambivalence” found in a variety of other cultural products. Revelation is not a straightforward book of resistance to Rome, but a site of negotiation that makes use of one of Rome’s tools – spectacle.

Stephen D. Moore’s Empire and Apocalypse also uses Homi Bhabha’s theory about parody turning to mimicry to explore how the New Testament, Revelation in particular, but ends more pessimistically by claiming that Revelation presents a “conception of the divine sphere as . . . empire writ large” (p. 121).

Moore writes, “More than any other early Christian text, Revelation is replete with the language of war, conquest, and empire – so much so, indeed, as to beggar description. Note in particular, however, that the promised reward for faithful Christian discipleship in Revelation is joint rulership of the Empire of empires soon destined to succeed Rome (3.21; 5.10; 20.4-6; 22.5), a messianic Empire established by means of mass-slaughter on a surreal scale . . . calculated to make the combined military campaigns of Julius Caesar, Augustus, and all their successors pale to insignificance by comparison. All this suggests that Revelation’s overt resistance to and expressed revulsion toward Roman imperial ideology is surreptitiously compromised and undercut by covert compliance and attraction.” Far from viewing the book as a source of resistance, Moore sees Revelation’s vision fulfilled in “Constantinian Christianity,” since Revelation “counters empire with empire” (119).