Quotes from Richard Bauckham

Hence perhaps the most important contrast between the forces of evil and the army of the Lamb is the contrast between deceit and truth.

While rejecting the apocalyptic militancy that called for literal holy war against Rome, John's message is not, 'Do not resist!' It is, 'Resist! – but by witness and martyrdom, not by violence.

They portray not just figure anyone could imagine or desire, but the Christ of the Gospels as he seemed most closely to connect with believers in that time and place.

While the Pharisees turned ordinary meals into a practice of ritual holiness, Jesus turned ordinary meals into a practice of the coming of God's kingdom.

Although most early Christian prophecy was oral, not written, John had plenty of models for a written prophecy, both in the prophetic books of the Hebrew scriptures and in the later Jewish apocalypses. In its literary forms what he writes is indebted to both kinds of model.

It is clear that John saw himself, not only as one of the Christian prophets, but also as standing in the tradition of Old Testament prophecy.

His task is to proclaim the fulfilment of what God had revealed to the prophets of the past. The whole book is saturated with allusions to Old Testament prophecy, though there are no formal quotations. As a prophet himself, John need not quote his predecessors, but he takes up and reinterprets their prophecies, much as the later writers in the Old Testament prophetic tradition themselves took up and reinterpreted earlier prophecies.

Truth is the reality we see when all the illusions and delusions of sin are dispelled by the word of God. To get past all the seductive images of the good life that contemporary society constructs for us with such consummate expertise, to see beyond them to the real truth of things, is liberation ... Truth is personal, and what liberates is the encounter with the reality of things in the person of Jesus who reflects his Father's divinity and models true humanity.

It seems that John not only writes in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, but understands himself to be writing at the climax of the tradition, when all the eschatological oracles of the prophets are about to be finally fulfilled, and so he interprets and gathers them up in his own prophetic revelation. What makes him a Christian prophet is that he does so in the light of the fulfilment already of Old Testament prophetic expectation in the victory of the Lamb, the Messiah Jesus.

Thereafter, the enduring form of God's presence with his people is as the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, present and active within believers.

The first is rarely noticed. John's work is highly unusual in the sheer prolific extent of its visual imagery. It is true that symbolic visions are typical of the genre. But in other apocalypses other forms of revelation are often as important or more important.

The range of different situations in these seven churches is sufficient for any Christian church in the late first century to find analogies to its own situation in one or more of the messages and therefore to find the whole book relevant to itself. Churches in later periods have been able to do the same, allowing for a necessary degree of adjustment to changing historical contexts.

The whole of Revelation could be regarded as a vision of the fulfilment of the first three petitions of the Lord's Prayer: 'Your name be hallowed, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven' (Matt. 6:9–10). John and his readers lived in a world in which God's name was not hallowed, his will was not done, and evil ruled through the oppression and exploitation of the Roman system of power.

Freedom in the Bible is a broad and complex notion ... It embraces freedoms FROM (exploitation, for example), freedoms OF (choice, for example), freedoms FOR (service to others, for example), freedoms TO (hope, for example).

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 LORD stood beside him" (i.e., Jacob;

A second important sense in which Revelation stands in the tradition of the Jewish apocalypses is that it shares the question which concerned so many of the latter: who is Lord over the world?

False worship, such as John portrays in the worship of the beast, is false precisely because its object is not the transcendent mystery, but only the mystification of something finite.

Moreover, it unmasks this dominant construction of the world as an ideology of the powerful which serves to maintain their power. In its place, Revelation offers a different way of perceiving the world which leads people to resist and to challenge the effects of the dominant ideology.

The alternative vision of the world which Revelation claims to be orientated to the truth is strongly theocentric

When the slaughtered Lamb is seen `in the midst of' the divine throne in heaven (5:6; cf. 7:17), the meaning is that Christ's sacrificial death belongs to the way God rules the world.

Testimony should be treated as reliable until proved otherwise. "First, trust the word of others, then doubt if there are good reasons for doing so.

But they are sufficiently few to make the reapplication of the images to comparable situations easy. Any society whom Babylon's cap fits must wear it. Any society which absolutizes its own economic prosperity at the expense of others comes under Babylon's condemnation.

Young scholars, learning their historical method from Gospel scholars, often treat it as self-evident that the more skeptical they are toward their sources, the more rigorous will be their historical method. It has to be said, over and over, that historical rigor does not consist in fundamental skepticism toward historical testimony but in fundamental trust along with testing by critical questioning…