A History of the End of the World Read Online Free

and Kennedy, Moshe Dayan and Anwar el-Sadat have all been proposed at various times as the human manifestation of the Beast.
    Speculation on the identity of the Antichrist, in fact, can be seen as a kind of Rorschach test for the anxieties of any given age. Henry Kissinger, for example, came under suspicion when he was shuttling between Washington, Moscow, and Beijing in the 1970s, and the Ayatollah Khomeini was first nominated only after Americans were taken hostage in Tehran during the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. Only a few years ago, Saddam Hussein was seen as a promising contender; significantly, the best-selling Left Behind series identifies Baghdad as the seat of its fictional Antichrist. Nowadays, of course, Osama bin Laden seems to have taken Saddam’s place as the satanic adversary whose coming is predicted in Revelation.
    A closely related enterprise is the effort to crack the code that the author of Revelation planted so intriguingly in his text—the identity of the “beast” whose name is symbolized by the number 666. As we shall see, there is a convincing answer to the question: 666 is an alphanumeric code that can be translated into the Greek, Latin, or Hebrew name of the human being whom the author of Revelation regards as a tool of Satan. But that hasn’t stopped the biblical code-breakers, amateurs and professionals alike, from wringing new and ever more exotic meanings out of the same bloodcurdling number.
    The imagery of Revelation, as we shall see, meant something quite specific—and quite different—to its author and his first readers and hearers. But the fact that we are able to understand what the “number of the beast” and the Great Whore of Babylon actually meant to a Christian visionary of Jewish birth in Asia Minor in the first century has never deterred subsequent generations from finding entirely different meanings for themselves. That’s the strange and powerful magic of Revelation: each new generation of readers is convinced that God planted a secret meaning in the text that was meant only and especially for them. And, remarkably, the failure of each previous generation to crack the Revelation code only encourages the next generation to try harder.
     
     
     
    As a work of prophecy, of course, Revelation is wholly and self-evidently wrong. “How long, O Lord, holy and true, until you judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” demands the biblical author, quoting the souls of the dead martyrs, and he answers his own question by attributing an unambiguous promise to Jesus Christ: “Behold, I am coming soon.” 39 Those words were first reduced to writing nearly two thousand years ago, but the readers of Revelation are still waiting for the day of revenge that is predicted with such clarity and confidence in the ancient text.
    The author of Revelation is not the only figure in Christian scriptures whose prediction of the end-times was mistaken. Jesus, according to some awkward sayings attributed to him in the Gospels, assures his followers that at least some of them will see the end of the world with their own eyes. The apostle Paul, in turn, offered the same assurance to his generation of Christians. Both Jesus and Paul were gone by the time the author of Revelation set down his vision of “things which must shortly come to pass.” 40 All of them turned out to be dead wrong, and the world is still here.
    The utter, obvious, and persistent failure of the world to “end on time,” as one contemporary Bible scholar wryly puts it, has compelled Christianity to reconsider how life ought to be lived in the here and now, no less in late antiquity than today. 41 Once a Christian emperor seated himself on the imperial throne of pagan Rome in the early fourth century, all the bitter rhetoric of Revelation, so clearly aimed at the power and glory of the Roman Empire, was suddenly an embarrassment that needed to be explained away. By late