Breaking the Code

Smyrna became a large and prosperous commercial center. The city was renowned for its loyalty to Rome and its ritual worship of the emperor. In 195 BC, almost three hundred years before the writing of Revelation, the people of Smyrna dedicated the world’s first temple to the goddess Roma. In AD 26, almost seventy years before John’s banishment, Smy

These seven angels are identified as “the seven angels who stand before God” (8:2), the seven who, according to Jewish tradition, formed an elite order of archangels. In Tobit, a Jewish text written during the intertestamental period, an angel reveals himself thus: “I am Raphael, one of the seven angels who stand ready and enter before the glory of

Pergamum was also a center for the worship of the emperors. The city was awarded the honor of building a temple to Augustus and the goddess Roma in 29 BC, making it the first among the seven cities addressed by Revelation to become the neokoros (the “temple warden”) of an imperial cult. The city was also renowned for its extensive Asclepion, a shri

Sardis, a busy commercial and industrial city at the junction of five roads about thirty miles south of Thyatira, had been the capital of the ancient region called Lydia. In the sixth century BC, it was one of the greatest cities of the world, where the fabulous King Croesus reigned amid his treasures. Even though the citadel of Sardis was situated

Also by this period, all seven cities addressed by Revelation had some combination of temples, altars, and shrines to various emperors and members of their family. Pressure to participate in the imperial cult would never have been greater.

Lest the reader fail to grasp the significance of the Hebrew name, John adds the Greek equivalent, Apollyon (9:11). John’s vision may represent a subversive satire of imperial ideology. Domitian claimed Apollo, one of whose symbols was the locust, as his patron deity; in John’s cosmos, however, “Apollo” is a creature of the abyss, the chief of a ho

The imagery that John uses to describe his visions may have been in part suggested by storms, earthquakes, and eclipses of the first century. If, as is likely, Revelation was written after AD 79, when the sudden eruption of Vesuvius completely engulfed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum with molten lava and destroyed ships in the Gulf of Naples,

Ephesus had become an epicenter of imperial cult in Asia Minor, with a local temple to “the Goddess Roma and the Divine Augustus” and a provincial temple to the emperor Domitian.

As the city had fallen in the past because of lack of vigilance, so now the Sardians are reminded to be watchful and to shake off their apathy. If, however, they “do not wake up,” Christ says, “I will come like a thief,” that is to say, he will come when he is not being expected. The language is strongly reminiscent of Jesus’ own words concerning h