theophany of the holy God coming to final judgment.

understanding of Jesus Christ’s work of establishing God’s kingdom on earth.

apocalyptic tradition.

In the first place, John’s work is a prophetic apocalypse in that it communicates a disclosure of a transcendent perspective on this world.

The fact that John explicitly and carefully contextualizes his prophetic message in seven specific contexts makes it possible for us to resist a common generalization about Revelation:

but if we try to read it as prediction of how that judgment will occur we turn it into a confused muddle and miss its real point.

Asia were constantly confronted with powerful images of the Roman vision of the world.

‘Apocalypse’ is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.2

just a system of codes waiting to be translated into matter-of-fact references to people and events.