With its terrifying eschatological vision and dense metaphors, the book is a terrifying one that is invoked as a prediction of how the world will end (although it is not about this). On the other hand, Revelation (no s) has enjoyed times of popularity, especially as the basis of speculative Christian fiction (the likes of the Left Behind series). Later, its inclusion was a matter of debate, with more than one church denomination refusing to include it in their editions of the Bible. When the Council of Nicea laid out consensus about what books of scripture would appear in the Bible in the fourth century, the book did not make the cut. John’s Apocalypse would eventually become a part of the biblical canon as the Book of Revelation…but not initially.
It has since served as part of longstanding predictions about what the future has in store, and provided fertile debate for biblical scholars. One of the least-understood books of Scripture…Īt some point late in the early first century BCE, John of Patmos wrote an apocalypse that has puzzled the church in more recent centuries.
