Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (19 page)
Read Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) Online
Authors: Thomas Cahill
The “Lion of Judah” who is worthy to read the scroll turns out to be a lamb that has been sacrificed. At this point, we are still able to interpret the symbolism with some confidence. The twenty-four elders may represent the
Twelve Tribes of Israel and the Twelve Apostles who followed Jesus. The four living creatures are borrowed from the
Book of Ezekiel, where they appear in a prophetic vision not unlike this one. They are, like the massed
angels, part of the heavenly court, all participants in the ineffable heavenly liturgy. The scroll is perhaps the deep truth of things or a narration of future events (or a mixture of both). The Lion-lamb is Christ, the Lion King who allowed himself to be sacrificed as a lamb.
The seven seals are broken and seven trumpets blown, each occurrence precipitating a new symbolic event. The breaking of the first four seals, for instance, brings forth in succession four horsemen who, riding horses of different colors, ravage the world. The first horse is white, and its rider, who holds a bow, is Conquest; the second is red, and its rider, who carries a gigantic sword, is Slaughter; the third is black, and its rider, who holds a pair of scales, is Famine; the fourth has the gray pallor of death, and its rider is Plague, with
Hades “hard at its heels.” I leave to the reader the unsettling pleasure of reading the full Revelation (or
Apocalypse, after its
Greek title, meaning a “laying bare” or “revelation of hidden things”).
One after another, cosmic disasters are hurled upon the earth.
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There appears but one respite: “I shall send my two witnesses to prophesy … the
two olive trees
and the two lamps
in attendance on the Lord of the World.”
These prophets, however, are not welcomed:
When they have completed their witness, the Beast that comes up from the Abyss
will make war on them and conquer them
and kill them. Their corpses will lie in the main street of the great city whose spiritual names are
Sodom and
Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified. For three and a half days will people from every race, tribe, tongue, and nation stare at their corpses and refuse them burial, and the people of the world will gloat and celebrate and exchange gifts, because these two prophets had so tormented the people of the world.
There is a bitterness in these words that seems to spring from personal experience. Are the visions mixing past, present, and future? Could John have known these “prophets,” and could he have been, like Peter following anonymously behind the arrested Jesus, mute witness to their mortal humiliation? Could the “prophets” be Peter and Paul, and could the “great city” be neither Jerusalem (where “their Lord was crucified”) nor Rome, but the corporate culture of
Roman administration, the frame of mind that makes such executions possible? And, if so, who is the “Beast that comes up from the Abyss”?
The visions all at once leave the ground and take off in a more phantasmagoric direction: “Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman, clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, and crowned with twelve stars,” who gives birth to a child, which a huge red
dragon tries to devour. But the child is “taken up to heaven,” where war breaks out between the forces of the Dragon and the
angels led by Michael, whose name means “Who is like God?” At this point, we are told directly that the Dragon, who falls with “his angels” from heaven to earth, is “the primeval serpent, known as the devil or
Satan, who has led the whole world astray.” The Dragon pursues the woman, who has hidden herself “in the wilderness” and continues to escape him with the help of heaven and earth. The Dragon, frustrated and enraged, resolves to “make war on her other children, those who keep the Commandments of God [the Jews] and treasure the witness of Jesus [the
Messianists].”
The Dragon, thus resolved, takes his stand at the edge of the sea, invoking fresh horrors:
Then I saw a beast rise from the sea: it had ten horns and seven heads, a coronet on each of its ten horns, and on each head a blasphemous title.… The Dragon handed over to it his own power and his throne and his immense authority. One of its heads seemed to have sustained a death blow, but this mortal wound had healed so that the whole world had marveled and followed the Beast. They worshiped the Dragon because he had given the Beast his authority;
and they worshiped the Beast, saying: “Who is like the Beast? Who can stand up to him?” The Beast was given a mouth to boast and blaspheme and was allowed free range for forty-two months;
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and it opened its mouth to blaspheme God, desecrating his Name, his home, and all who shelter there. It was allowed to make war against the saints and to conquer them, and was given sway over every race, people, tongue, and nation; and the people of the world will worship it, that is, everyone whose name has not been written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb that was slain.… This is why the saints must persevere in faithfulness.
Then I saw a second Beast, rising from the earth, having two horns like a lamb but shrieking like a dragon. This one exercised all the power of the first Beast, on its behalf making the world and its people worship the first Beast, whose mortal wound had healed. And it worked great wonders, even calling down fire from heaven onto the earth while people watched. Through the wonders which it was allowed to do on behalf of the first Beast, it was able to lead astray the people of the world and persuade them to put up a statue in honor of the Beast that had been wounded by the sword and still lived. It was allowed to breathe life
into this statue, so that the statue of the
Beast was able to speak, and to have anyone who refused to worship the statue of the Beast put to death. It compelled everyone—small and great, rich and poor, freedman and slave—to be marked on the right hand or on the forehead, so that no one could buy or sell without the mark of the Beast or the number of its name.
This calls for insight; but anyone with discernment may figure out the number of the Beast. It is the number of a man, the number Six Hundred Sixty-six.
In other words, despite the apparently esoteric nature of the narrative, the code behind it is meant to be easily cracked, as was the case with the symbolic stories and films created by Poles and Czechs during the Soviet oppression; and with this number we can work out the allegorical scheme as if it were a crossword puzzle. The writer, like all the ancients, knew nothing of Arabic numerals. In his world, letters were used as shorthand to represent numerical values, as is the case with the Roman numerals we are still familiar with. So we need only find a well-known historical figure (the writer implies clearly that this is “a man” known to everyone) whose name “adds up” to 666. The Hebrew alphabet contained no vowels. The name of the emperor under whom the Jesus Movement’s two greatest “prophets” were executed was Nero Caesar, in Greek
Neron Kaisar
, in unvoweled Hebrew
nrwn qsr
or, giving these consonants their conventional numerical value, 50 + 200 + 6 + 50 + 100 + 60 + 200, which equal 666. The Beast is the Roman empire—more precisely, all the cruelties of Roman political domination—personified by
Nero Caesar. The Devil-Dragon, unable to devour the Messiah, who has been “taken up,” and unsuccessful in his pursuit of the “mother,” that is, Israel, which gave birth to the Messiah, calls forth the Beast, the political power, to harass this mother and, if possible, destroy her and “her other children.”
Nero came to the imperial throne in 54 as a spoiled sixteen-year-old, a lyre player, athlete, and Hellenophile, who intended to raise Roman artistic and cultural standards. After some moves in the direction of justice, probably inspired by his tutor, the respected Stoic philosopher
Seneca, the young emperor turned increasingly arbitrary and self-indulgent. Bristling under the influence of his advisers, he at length had his mother murdered and “invited” his old tutor to commit suicide. (The customary invitation to suicide was a short note from the emperor,
“Amicitia nostra dissoluta est”
[“Our friendship is dissolved”]. This was your cue to run the warm water and open the veins.)
During Nero’s reign much of Rome was destroyed by fire, giving the emperor the opportunity to rebuild the city along the lines of his own quirky esthetic ideas, which included the never-completed Domus Aurea (or Golden House) for himself, which—with its artificial lake (where the
Colosseum now stands)—occupied an enormous chunk of central Rome and displaced the unsightly dwellings of the poor. The grandeur of it all, coupled with the economic toll that it exacted, encouraged the rumor that Nero had set the fire himself. No, retorted the emperor, it was, um, the Christians, who as everyone knows hate humanity. Thus did the Neronic persecutions begin as a spectacular strategy to point the finger elsewhere.
Tacitus, in a lighthearted vein, describes the scene, incidentally
leaving us the first recorded instance in pagan literature of the term
Christian:
Nero … punished the notoriously depraved Christians (as they were popularly called) with every refinement.… Their deaths were made farcical. Dressed in the skins of wild animals, they were torn to pieces by dogs, or crucified, or [making the punishment fit their supposed crime] turned into torches to be ignited after dark as substitutes for daylight. Nero provided his Gardens for the spectacle, where he exhibited these displays in the [Vatican]
Circus, during which he would mingle anonymously with the crowd or take his place in a chariot, disguised as a charioteer.
What fun. But Nero’s increasingly arbitrary behavior began to erode his support; and when at length the Senate, believing that Nero had fled abroad, declared for Galba, Nero’s short-lived successor, it also declared Nero a public enemy. Thus was Nero himself, Savior and Son of God, King of Kings and Lord of Lords—all the “blasphemous titles” of his station—forced to hide in the house of a former slave and there at the age of twenty-nine to commit suicide, dying with the fey exclamation “What an artist dies with me!”
Nero was the last emperor who could claim descent from Augustus; his death and its consequences precipitated a new round of civil wars, lasting two years. During this period a legend grew among the common people that Nero, whom they had rather liked for his
panem et circenses
—the “bread and circuses” by which he kept the plebeians distracted from more
basic grievances—had not died but, like Czar Nicholas of a later day, was only wounded and would return. It is this legend that John’s
Apocalypse refers to when it says that “one of [the
Beast’s] heads seemed to have sustained a death blow, but this mortal wound had healed so that the whole world had marveled and followed the Beast.” The wounded head is the Beast’s fifth, and
Nero was the fifth emperor in the line that began with Augustus. The Beast’s name may be Nero, but the Beast is also Rome, for, as we are told later, “the seven heads are the seven hills; the seven heads are also seven emperors.”
If the symbolism is elastic, so is the chronology. It ranges across the ages, borrowing allusions from the Jewish sacred books (especially Daniel) and treating readers to a veritable time machine of possibilities: sometimes we are in the past, sometimes the future, sometimes the present. Christ, the slaughtered lamb, is first seen in
heaven,
after which
the Savior is given birth by Israel; the four horsemen, creatures of the diabolic powers, are introduced
before
the Dragon and the Beast—all subverting normal chronology and expectable sequence. The author employs the “logic” of dream and nightmare to allow the reader to see into the deeper reality of the human situation.
A cosmic battle is raging between heaven, the realm of God, and earth, which is under the power that Jesus called “the Prince of this world.” He is
Satan, the devil, evil personified. It is he who animates the earthly “powers”—all those who on this earth claim authority over others. The Beast is both Nero and the Roman empire, not because John is confused in his symbolism, but because he wants us to see that all exercise of power is bestial and all domination is of the devil. John’s symbolic scheme is many-layered. If the Beast is the Dragon’s
deputy, the second
Beast is a sort of cheering section for the first, his diplomatic corps, his publicity department—all the toadies and time-servers necessary to the vast and subtle mechanisms of domination. The talking statue is the image that the Beast presents to the world, an image that encourages mass adoration (long before television or fanzines were thought of). But behind the image, behind the publicity department’s spin doctors and media consultants, behind the bureaucracy’s many ministers and ambassadors, behind the great statesman, behind the distinguished bank president, behind the all-powerful CEO, stands the ultimate power—the insatiable
Dragon, breathing his foul life into the whole complex edifice of human affairs and its structures of oppression. The Dragon, the enemy of God and therefore of all justice, has called forth the Beast, who calls forth the second Beast. They are a ghastly parody of the
Trinity: the Dragon as the ultimate power; the Beast, the anti-Christ, being given the Dragon’s power throughout the cosmos; and the second Beast, the anti-Spirit, “inspiring” humanity with its tricks. But, deprived of their distracting fireworks and the goodies bestowed selectively from their political pork barrels, they would be just repulsive beasts.
Does the
New Testament conceive of evil only in terms of political and economic institutions? Jesus certainly saw evil as infecting social and religious institutions as well. His hair-raising excoriation in Matthew 23 of the scribes and
Pharisees for their hypocrisy, vanity, and lack of sympathy for ordinary human beings must be understood as Jesus’s indictment of the socioreligious establishment of his time (and should probably be read faithfully at the dawn of each new day by today’s scribes and Pharisees, the members of the Christian clergy and religious orders). But evil also infects individuals physically (by
way of disease and all the ills that the four horsemen bring) and morally. When Jesus tells
Simon Peter at the
Last Supper that “
Satan will be allowed to sift you all like wheat,” he is thinking of the disciples’ coming cowardice and flight. These are, surely, not social or political but personal moral failures. But they are personal failures in a context of deadly political terror. How many people in any time, after all, will not break and run before the threat of torture and the pain of slow, excruciating execution? “But,” Jesus assures his friend the fisherman, “I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith not fail utterly; and, once you have recovered yourself, lend strength to your brothers”—once again, the social dimension of morality.